Earth Week Friday and Waxing Gibbous Moon

This week I plan to post an agenda of activities for each day, to show my dedication and love for the earth.

Also, today the moon is a waxing gibbous, the not-quite-full moon: Waxing means getting larger, and gibbous means humped or protuberant. This phase of the moon has the high-energy that provides a push towards completion. In four days, at the full moon, we will turn again towards the yin time of inner activity, so I make an effort in these next few days to finish my tasks that require greater physical effort. The waxing gibbous moon is a time for reevaluation, refinements, and creativity.

Agenda today:

1. Journal queries

2. Creative visualization

3. Earth Week petition walk

4. Finish Braiding Sweetgrass

Agenda:

1. Journal queries:

Right about now in the moon cycle, things in my life might feel like they are aligning into a good order, and I will clearly see those things that are out of alignment. It's a good time to take a new look at my goals, reevaluate and refine them, and adjust my plans.

Do I still want to complete all the goals I listed at the new moon?

Which can appropriately be saved to complete in the waning (yin) phase, and which should I make an effort to finish now?

Which can be put off until next month?

What new habits will help me to nurture my ideas and projects? What creative shifts in thinking or acting can I take now?

2. Creative visualization:

At the gibbous moon, my last push for action, I call on the practice of visualization to help bring my goals to fruition. Today I choose my top three action goals to shine a light on:

1. Clerking our Meeting for Business

2. Sewing a Raven

3. Cleaning windows

Creative visualization is a technique that uses my imagination to create change. It has three steps:

• First, center and relax each part of my body; count from 10 to 1, then open a connection to Spirit. Feel a soft warmth begin to grow and spread through me, until I am radiating quiet energy.
• Second, create a clear, detailed picture in my mind, as though the objective has been reached. Paint a vivid mental image of exactly how the business meeting will progress, the raven will look, and the clean windows will shine, and put as much positive energy into the image as possible. 
• Lastly, affirm that this is what I want with a short positive phrase in the present tense; for example, "I am calm, listening well, and sensing the condition of the Meeting."

The thought-image is like a signal-flare that guides the physical thing or deed to manifest in my life (or it's just a good way to keep my intentions in my mind). I will carry the vision of the completed goal with me, and focus on it often during the day, in a gentle manner.

3. Earth Week petition walk:

Each day on my walk this week I will repeat this prayer of petition:

That the Earth be cared for, I pray. 

That we learn to live simply and lightly on the Earth, I pray. 

That we stop poisoning the soil and seas, I pray. 

That global warming is halted and reversed, I pray. 

That protection of the Earth becomes the political priority, I pray. 

Amen.

4. Finish Braiding Sweetgrass:

I've been reading this book for several weeks now, and I'm nearing the end, so this week I will give attention to the last chapters, and the questions and themes.

Today I finished the chapter called Collateral Damage:

"Collateral damage: shielding words to keep us from naming the consequences of a missile gone astray.  The words ask us to turn our faces away, as if man made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature."

The chapter is about salamanders, one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet. Subject to habitat loss as wetlands and forests disappear, amphibians are the collateral damage we blindly accept as the cost of development .... because amphibians breathe through their skin, they have little ability to filter out toxins.