This moon’s message comes a bit late thanks to Hurricane Ida and the migraine she caused, and I was instructed to do a less intense version of my ritual, and to draw ogham instead of channeling poetry. The message itself does somewhat explain why I was given lighter duty: rest is important for all healing.
I pulled three ogham feda*: Tinne, Beithe, and Nin. In the personal lists I’ve been developing, the kennings for these three are Tested Resolve, Beginning Healing, and Knotted Weaving.
Three birch discs, pyrographed with ogham (Tinne, Beithe, and Nin, from left to right), sitting on a brown knit bag, on top of a silver tablecloth.
Tinne is here to represent the near-past, and in that context I understand it to be the completion of a trial by fire. We’ve been dealing with things we weren’t sure we could handle – and yet we did handle them, if perhaps not as well as we might have liked. Still, that cycle is now behind us, and we need to focus on our current and future cycles.
Beithe is here to represent the developing present, the thing we should be working on right now. This is the fid* that really explains my instruction to rest: we should be focusing on healing. Having completed one cycle, we need to rest and rejuvenate to face whatever comes next. Beithe is a fid of healing, but also of beginnings, in my understanding. We need to start the next cycle as favorably as we can, to aim for positive outcomes.
Nin is here to represent the near-future, and in this context I understand it as a fid of communal goals, and of working together as a community. A symbol I associate with this fid is the hand-tied fishnet. It takes more than one pair of hands to make one in any reasonable length of time, and more than one pair of hands to both cast it into the water, and to pull it back in. Nin speaks to me of weaving, both literal fibercraft and metaphorical joinings. As we look to the future and our own healing, we need to both support and be supported by those in our communities. We are a community of Crows, but we belong to other communities, too: spiritual, and geographical, familial and professional. All and any strong community ties matter, and those webs will look different for each of us. As you work on self care, make sure to also put aside some time for community care, as well. Learn how to be a shelter for others, and learn where you can go to find sanctuary of your own.
Hopefully that gives you insight into your current situations, and with any luck I’ll be back with more poetry next month. The next Dark Moon is October 6th.
*: Fid and Feda are the singular and plural, respectively, of the Irish word for each individual ogham letter, meaning also tree, wood (or something wooden, like a walking stick or wand). See it here in the eDIL.