The Body Beneath
CHAPTER 124
the BODY BENEATH
The story for the full moon time:
November 27 – December 11
MOON DETAILS:
Full Moon
4°51′ Gemini
Nov. 27, 2023
4:16 AM EST
REFLECTION DATES:
August 17, 2017
February 5, 2022
June 18 – July 2, 2023
I was sitting on a bench in the woods, looking up at the last remaining leaves, fluttering in the wind, seemingly without a care in the world that soon, they’d be on the ground, in the ground, buried beneath a foot of snow.
Everything felt peaceful and easy. I didn’t want or need a thing. People make everything far too complicated. I laughed with my friend. Life can really be as simple as this. We nodded in silent agreement, basking in the wisdom of the trees.
Though just minutes earlier, I’d been joking about how hard it is to have a body. How when I reflect back on my twenties and how sick I was then (with Fibromyalgia, Sjögren's Syndrome, Epilepsy), I think that really, I just didn’t know what to do with this thing, this collection of cells and energy.
It’s almost like I didn’t know how to fit myself inside it, to let whatever force is moving through animate me with ease. Instead, the great flow of life seemed to stutter through my bones, uncertain how to function in its new home.
Over time, I learned to listen to my body, to observe how it felt in its environment and to adjust my behavior so life could flow with ease. I learned to be grateful every day. I learned to stop feeling like this thing was a prison and instead, embraced the pleasure it brings — the joy of delicious food, wine, the sun on my skin, the cooling effects of a tall glass of water on a hot summer day. If I were to make a list of everything I love about having a body, I would never stop writing. Maybe, that’s even why I am a writer.
To capture the beauty of all of this.
The gifts of this body, this life.
But I’d be remiss, I think, to focus on the pleasure and never mention the pain. There’s a tendency, especially in spiritual “teachings,” to constantly whittle life down to peace, love, and togetherness — everything one beautiful connected gift.
And it is. But, it’s also hard.
It’s hard having a body.
Taking care of this thing. Day in and day out.
Especially if part of you — let’s call it your soul —remembers how easy things were before you were born. How easy things will be again. How easy things could be still —right here, right now.
If it wasn’t for all the ways we complicate things.
People invent bombs and construct hierarchies and architect all sorts of systems that oppress and thwart the flow of life until the whole of society is like my body when I was younger — struggling to make space for life to flow with ease.
Sure, as individuals we can achieve a state of internal peace and joy. We can fan the internal flame and keep it burning even when we’re grieving, angry, you name it. We have the emotional capacity to feel and experience every human woe while simultaneously perceiving all the love that holds us — and our pain — in a perpetual state of oneness.
It’s true.
It’s all true.
But sometimes I think “zen” mode is just another prison.
You can’t detour around the tough stuff.
You can only keep going — one metaphorical foot in front of the other — and hold onto the memory of how things were before while doing your damnedest to remember every day that truly, that’s how things still are. Nothing’s actually changed.
If only we were brave enough — all of us — to let life flow, to allow our bodies here to become like our bodies there, to let the whole of earthly human existence be as simple as this.
☆
A low, dull bzzzz fills my ears.
I close my eyes, and the sound stops. But the message keeps coming — like an invisible force. It reaches through my body, raises my left hand, and revolves itself between the tips of my fingers.
It’s as though they’re holding two marbles, and the marbles are spinning in circles, one around the other, like those large silver balls my mom used to keep in an embroidered box. A gift to keep her hands strong.
Baoding balls. That’s what they’re called. A tool in Chinese medicine. You move them between your hands like so:
I used to play with them as a little girl. I practiced moving them faster and faster, but now, it’s like they’ve gotten smaller. They’ve shrunk themselves between my fingertips, and in my mind’s eye, I watch them spin and spin and spin until suddenly, two balls become one.
Like two atoms colliding or two black holes merging and — wait a minute, that bzzzz that first grabbed my attention? It really did sound a lot like this — the cosmic symphony before the final chirp:
In the video above, a number catches my eye: 170817. It’s the number that was assigned to the gravitational wave that rippled through space and time upon two neutron stars colliding elsewhere in the universe.
And that sound — the sound of the wave, the sound right before the final merge (heard around 3:48 in the video above) — that’s what I heard. And that number — 170817 — it was also given to an asteroid. I enter it into my planetary software only to see that on November 27, 2023, asteroid 170817 will be at exact same point in the sky as the asteroid Juno.
And Juno, for what it’s worth, is named after the Roman goddess of marriage. Marriage, as in, two bodies — two people, two stars — merging, becoming one.
Like so:
And this is how I imagine it was at the start of the world.
The world that we know, we see, we measure and touch.
Before the big bang, all of it existed as just one single, unfathomably small primordial speck. At least, that’s the most common theory.
But maybe, there was something else. A great big invisible something that collided with the speck, caused the universe to explode, expand, become a sea of stars.
☆
On the morning of November 17, 2023, I saw in my mind’s eye: My skin splitting at the crown of my head and peeling off my body only to reveal another body underneath. It was golden and glowing. It stepped out of its skin suit and left the skin behind, walked the surface of the earth just as it was — a glowing, golden, mostly amorphous body of light.
Wait, haven’t I seen this before? The image was distinctly familiar — my skin, peeling off my body to reveal something glowing.
I found the memory in my journal from twenty-one months earlier.
That’s how much time passed between the two visions.
However, the first time — on February 5, 2022 — was different. Back then, my skin was peeled away from my head, revealing a glowing head beneath, but the rest of me remained completely covered.
But this time, my skin was peeled away completely, and my glowing body — the body of my soul (I think) — was set free
FREE
to walk the earth in all its glory.
☆
All of this — the conversation in the woods, the message about two becoming one, and the vision of freeing the glowing body beneath — all happened before I looked back and saw that six months ago, for the Gemini new moon, I wrote a chapter titled The Twin Bodies of the Earth.
I had completely forgotten the message then:
“My physical body needed time to acclimate to the newly married condition of my soul — that other body. That light body. That something radiating in the invisible layers that, in its own right, experiences growth and change. It evolves.
And on this new moon, we are experiencing an evolution. We are experiencing something akin to marriage. A deepening commitment. A fortified unification between our earthly selves and our…elsewhere selves. It is as though these two bodies — once experienced as separate — are coming together to join forces, reunited in a powerful convergence at the core of your being.”
The story continued, like a spell:
“We invite our divinity to take up residency inside our body. We invite it to live through us. We invite our earthly expression to be not just of this earth but of a divine partnership with our ethereal counterpart — that other body to whom we are forever married.”
The spell was cast —
during the new moon time from June 18 to July 2, and now, here we are at the Gemini full moon. Its magic rippling from like a gravitational wave from November 27 to December 12.
It’s culminating now — the powerful convergence that started then.
Reflect back: what did you experience during the last two weeks of June?
☆
On November 27, 2023, a full moon rises at a point in the sky known as The Golden Gate.
People have long been drawn to this empty stretch of sky, positioned between two star clusters. They’ve been writing about it for at least 4,500 years, but for the first thirty-four years of my life, I’d never seen it myself. At least, not with these eyes, from within this body. However, knowledge of it seemed to still be a part of me.
I saw it in a dream in January 2021, and in the days that followed, it was like my mind was being flooded with information about this “gate.” My attention was drawn to the fact that some of the biggest explosions of light on earthly record (things like solar storms and atomic bombs) all coincided with planets passing through the gate.
I think now of the explosion above — the video of two neutron stars colliding, like those that merged, delivering gravitational wave 170817 to an observatory on August 17, 2017.
I enter the date into my software to see if there’s anything of note worth mentioning, and lo and behold, on that day, asteroid number 170817 was passing through The Golden Gate, crossing the exact degree of Gemini where this full moon is rising now.
Simultaneously, on that day, the sun was perfectly conjunct the north node of the moon, aka the destiny point.
What was happening for you on August 17, 2017? As waves rippled off the marriage of two neutron stars, as their song was heard on Earth.
☆
Perhaps none of this is connected. Perhaps it’s all a coincidence. Perhaps this is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo like two arms flailing, pointing to a bunch of things in an effort to distract you while the illusion of magic takes place. [Insert your skeptical argument here.]
Or maybe, there’s a reason why when I opened my computer to type — not knowing what I was going to say — I suddenly heard a sound and saw two orbs spinning around each other and merging. Perhaps there’s a reason this looks and sounds like the actual merger of two neutron stars in space. Perhaps the synchronous alignment of asteroids — then and now — means something.
Perhaps there is actual magic at work.
Something rippling from the great invisible something that started it all.
Something rippling from the golden glowing light inside you and me and everyone — hidden, but still there.
And perhaps it’s not a coincidence that on the evening of November 15, shortly before shedding my skin completely, I was sitting in a circle of women, and just before I was about to leave, one of them shared a story about a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton.
Apparently, one day, he was walking the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, when suddenly, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, he was struck by the realization that every single person is shining like the sun.
He saw what I saw — the body beneath — and how bright we all are and how wonderful the world would be if only we remembered.
For then, as Merton wrote, “there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.” Just the bright shining light of all that we already are, bursting through everything.
☆
To be continued…
LONG STORY SHORT
During this Gemini full moon time, which lasts from November 27 to December 12, you are emboldened by a profound recognition of your own divinity. The light inside you shines — for you and all the world to see. How will this appear? In your mind? Your heart? Or will there be something revolutionary. Something that we are all able to see for the first time as the invisible marriage between matter and light is revealed. Humming beneath the surface of everything. (To better understand the evolution of your own experience at this time, see the reflection dates above.)
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