Full Moon – Apple Moon Crests (Time to Shed My Skin…)

I still haven’t made any apple butter.
 
Maybe this won’t surprise you, as we recently put a deposit on a rental house and are now in the process of moving house. I’m spending my days packing and purging rather than preserving, and my goal is to basically do a second 2014 Eat Down the Larder challenge – on my own, this time, rather than working alongside Erica and her other readers – in order to (a) divert funds to buying huge numbers of plastic storage totes (the better to avoid packing roaches into our new place as we leave the old one behind), and (b) cut down on what we have to move in the first place.
The work-work-work ethic of Apple Moon is being channelled predominantly into packing, these days. Bagging and crating the yarn, roving, and the fabric, sorting and boxing the Thealogy books, making candles while I still have a stove to work on (we’re picking a new-to-us set up in a few days – our Gods and Ancestors are definitely looking out for us here!), and trying to mend the clothes that need it so that, when they come out of their packing boxes, they’ll be ready to go right off the bat. I admit that the “pear” in my suggested “pear moon” is more like “pare” these days – as in “pare down”: Get rid of the excess, the duplicates, the stuff you’ve been putting to use because it wasn’t “broken enough” to just throw it away or pitch it into the recycling bin; cull your closet (again) ruthlessly (again) so that there’s less stuff to move and unpack on the other end of this process – I have two winter coats to send to The Well, along with an entire bag of extra clothes that hadn’t been culled yet when I made the last run (only two weeks ago!), plus a couple of big extra-large zip-lock bags full of goodies that I’ll take with us to Unholy Harvest for their leather-and-lace swap table. And that’s just in the past three days.
 
You guys, I can’t tell you how much I hate packing. How much the need to go out and buy plastic boxes with fitted lids is exacerbating that situation, especially when I consider how little (one shelf of a narrow bookcase fills one five-gallon bin with books; one shelf in the craft cabinet – yarn, fabric, roving, oils, you name it, each item bagged up in a plastic zip-lock just to be sure – fits into a ten-gallon bin) can fit into a given $4-$7 bin. But that’s not even the half of all the Things I’m feeling right now.
 
As of this morning, I’m no-longer a VERSeFest organizer. I’m no-longer “employed” even in a volunteer kind of way, and it’s making me nervous about what my resume will say if I don’t find work in the next week or four.
I feel like I’m on some sort of a precipice.
 
My 2015 We’Moon date book arrived a week or so ago, and the moon of my birthday (almost gone) is “Encountering the Shadow”. Five days later comes the moon called “Feral” – the wild wisdom that has no marketing strategy, no 9-5, and whose behaviour sounds a little like some of the elements of my Shadow that scare me most. The powerful and furious, fury-ous, protector-demandor, the Fearsome Queen, The untamed Ocean Heart that is sexual, sensual, and Wants without a plan. I can’t help but feeling that the two are related, that my Seven-Year that starts at 35 is rooted in these names, this wildness. My Scorpio “year at a glance” says that 2015 is a year to refine my voice and claim my ambitions.
I am terrified.
What if I mess it up?
And yet… I know where my voice wants to go (I think I do, I think I do), and it looks like my desires are being facilitated already – house and heart, a yard to garden, the money to invest in the CSAs that will fuel at least one of my projects.
Can I do it?
Will I do it?
 
My 34th year is winding down and I can see the changes coming, piling up at the end of this year-of-life like so much stuff to be purged, like so much stuff to look forward to. Another shedding of skin.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.