This new year has seen a flurry of activity, atmospheric and cosmic alike: storms that come and go with astonishing rapidity, just enough snow to renew the ice slick that covers the earth in its wake; a world illuminated by a fast-moving sun and a moon furious at work in a sky lit with sun dogs and light pillars by day, harvest moons from horned to full by night, and an eclipse to veil their glow in other, more distant lands.
Such is the medicine of the winter moon.
The colonial world makes much now of the moon’s supposed “Native” names in any given month. The only thing you need to know is that they are always, always wrong.
How could they be otherwise? There is no “Native American culture” or “Native American name” for anything. There are instead hundreds, even thousands of different nations and cultures and subregions and languages and dialects, each with its own unique understanding of the universe and its own very specific methods of denominating its parts.
So you can refer to last week’s full moon as the Wolf Moon if you choose, and there is very likely an Indigenous nation that understands the moon the marks what the outside world calls “January” in such a way. It’s not representative, and speaks for no one but itself.
For my own, this is the Spirit Moon, a time of awe-inducing power in an elemental time, from a land where, until recently, these days could be counted on to be filled with ice and the deepest of snows, light still short, ceding the hours to a long and forbidding dark. Wings’s people have their own ways of marking and understanding months and moons, one that doesn’t track that of my people but is integral to their own cosmologies (and is not discussed with the outside world). And of course, the moon itself defies all human attempt to catch and confine it within our limited understanding, no matter the recent decades of space travel that have worked to replicate colonial norms on the heavens.
And on a day to day basis, what we know is what we need to know: This winter moon, large and bright and impossibly cold over a frozen earth, wine-colored mountains and pale slate sky, keeps the tides on track and the ridgeline lit, allowing our world to move and breathe in its usual rhythms despite the icy winds and bitter temperatures. This old world is hardier than we, and despite the abuse humankind has inflicted upon it, it takes its healing where it finds it and continues to turn along its own sacred hoop..
And that is the magic of this season, too, the one that humans, wedded too long to comfort and convenience, no longer understand: This is the season of healing. The bears know they have long since gone to their yearly rest. The trees know, too, having long since shed their leaves and allowed their bare bones to purify and begin renewing themselves in the icy air.
And the Earth herself? She most certainly knows, welcoming the snows and blanketing herself ever deeper, holding onto the crystalline flakes like the finest and rarest of jewels — which, of course, they are, tiny hexagonal diamonds destined to become water, the First Medicine.
And through it all, the moon plays her part, one night heavy and the color of amber, the next high and distant like a solitary pearl. She, too, is a jewel beyond price, however much of her face she chooses to show, whatever the shape and shade of her robes. Hers is the medicine of the winter moon, and our world is better for it.
~ Aji
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