THE ANCESTRY OF IDEAS :: NEW MOON TRANSMISSIONS

Welcome to November <3 I hope you had a great Halloween.

This month starts off with a new moon in the sign of Scorpio.

I’ve followed moon cycles for most of my life. When I was 12 or 13 I often sought out the occult section at the bookstore in the mall.

Back then they usually labeled that section New Age and in suburban Etobicoke it was not a big shelf: you would be lucky to get two rows of books.

But it was there that I retained a tidbit of information that would stay with me all my life: If you want to start something, begin while the moon is waxing. If you want to end something, get rid of it while the moon is waning.

Details like this always landed with me because they felt so familiar. I was raised by women who took folk spirituality and superstition seriously.
My mother taught me that if there are lot of bubbles in your cup of tea or glass of milk, it means money is coming your way.

She also believed that if you found a string on your shirt it meant a letter would arrive.

When a bird got into our home one day her eyes went dark and she said, “birds are an omen of death.” A week later her brother died.

My mother taught me it was bad luck to turn a calendar too early. She was believed it was ill-advised to open an umbrella indoors.

My grandmothers held similar views. When one of my aunts died we stood in the cemetery as it started to drizzle. “Happy is the corpse it rains on,” my grandmother said as a matter of fact.

These are the types of details that seeded some of the poems I included in Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea. Earlier this week I joined authors Laura Ellen Joyce, Noémie Cansier, and Zahra Jazmina for a group reading and discussion about the lines between ritual, magic, and writing.

Superstition was a common overlap we shared that day. While I am cautious about superstition – discernment and logic have to be present in our actions and beliefs, too – I can’t help but acknowledge how much my family’s beliefs have informed my views of daily life, and in turn my writing.

To see the world as fully alive is a benefit of magical thinking. That a found penny can become a good luck talisman is a captivating idea. That the sighting of an animal can be a form of divination makes for a curious way to walk through the world.

This is the kind of imaginative thinking that creativity thrives on. To see the world as something alive and interactive – which it is – rather than a series of random objects is key to finding poetry in the everyday. It is how we start to merge language with the supernatural.

As I’ve been nudging my new book out into the world in recent days, I’ve been thinking of my mother and grandmothers and thanking them as I go. Perhaps they are lingering over my shoulder with equal enthusiasm, watching my book make its way into the world.

~ Liz