New Moon in Libra: The Courage to Stay

From the Full Moon in Aries to the New Moon in Libra

This story came to me a few days before the full moon in Aries, as I prepared for a rite of passage: thirty-six hours of fasting and solitude in the forest, under the moon’s light.

I published nothing then. The story had been born, but it needed time to mature. Mars, the ruler of that full moon, was at 29° Cancer, living his initiation in the heart of his tribe. The story was ripening in the same way before it could go out into the world.

It comes from my inner masculine. In my natal chart, Mars at 29° Aquarius forms an exact square to Uranus at 29° Scorpio, a square between my 4th and 8th houses: the house of roots and family, and the house of death and what is inherited from loss.

The image of the warrior first appeared in 2021. It came almost like a family constellation lived through the body: a warrior returns to his village and finds it destroyed. For me, this is what this aspect looks like. I searched history for an event that could give it a body, and I found Blue Water Creek, in 1855, where a Sicangu Lakota camp was attacked by the U.S. Army.

From the meeting of an inner image and a historical tragedy, this work of fiction was born. It goes beyond my own story and touches the great images of loss, survival, and rebirth that run through the collective unconscious.

Today, under the new moon in Libra, its timing is exact.

We move from Aries to Libra, from the solitary warrior to the encounter with the Other, the Beloved. This lunation carries the complexity of daring to open a new cycle after having known devastation.

Venus, ruler of Libra, is retrograde in Scorpio, at the apex of a T-square in fixed signs. She squares Mars in Leo, while Pluto in Aquarius opposes Mars and also squares Venus.

This configuration takes us into the depths of the psyche and of heartbreak, where desire meets fear, where attachment carries the memory of loss, and where old wounds can replay themselves in our relationships.

Fixed signs carry the oldest trauma, the hardest to move and to heal.

Mars is the warrior. Pluto is what lies beyond our control: destruction, and the transformation that can follow. And Venus, retrograde, brings us back to one question: what becomes of our capacity to love once we have known loss?

This is why a story born under the full moon in Aries finds its place under the new moon in Libra.

It is not only about what we have lost.

It is about what in us can still stay curious enough to open to life, to encounter, and to love.

During my time in the forest, I was shown a tunnel carved by grief, rage, and the countless experiences we encounter as human beings. Each wound, each passage through darkness contributes to the shaping of this tunnel, drawing us ever closer to the sacred temple within our hearts. There, our hearts beat in rhythm with the heart of the Earth, connected to the vast field of energy that flows through all life and extends across the entire Universe.

Can we become grateful for everything we have endured, knowing that although it created an armor around our hearts, the armor is also this tunnel, a way back into the sacred space within, the state of grace we were always meant to return to…

Armor is both the wound and the doorway.

May you be filled with grace on this new moon.

Lucid Dreams by Timothy Tate Nevaquaya

The Courage to Stay

He was still looking forward to his daughter’s smile when the smell of smoke reached him.

He was returning from several days of hunting, his face darkened by the sun and fine lines etched at the corners of his eyes, a broad-shouldered man whose strong hands were used to working leather, carving wood, holding reins, and mending whatever could be mended.

Before he left, White Feather had wanted to go with him, and when he refused she had been furious, crossing her arms and turning her head away with an indignation that made him laugh. He had promised to bring her something, and he wondered now whether she was still angry with him.

Then the smell of smoke grew stronger, and he slowed his horse.

Smoke had always meant homecoming: the fires where people gathered, the children running between the tipis, the familiar voices rising in the evening, the meals shared. This smoke smelled different.

He raised his head. A thick black column rose behind the ridge, too high and too dense to be the camp’s cooking fires, and the wind carried to him the acrid smell of burning wood and scorched hides.

He urged his horse on.

There had to be an explanation. A fire might have spread, the grass might have been dry… perhaps the men had already brought the flames under control. He leaned over the horse’s neck, and as he drew closer the silence struck him as strange, for he should have heard the dogs, the children… someone should have seen him and run to announce his return.

Nothing.

When he reached the ridge, he pulled hard on the reins.

Below him, the camp was burning.

Where the tipis had stood there were only collapsed frames, charred hides, and hearths still smoldering, and the smoke crept along the ground among the familiar objects scattered in the ashes. He searched for his tipi, then for his mother’s, then for his own again, and he leapt from his horse, shouting his daughter’s name.

“White Feather!” he cried.

His voice was lost in the valley. He called for his wife and his sons, and he ran. They must have fled… they were somewhere… he only had to find them.

He searched until nightfall. He found the body of this elder son first, then the younger, and his wife lay near one of the passages where people had tried to escape.

His daughter… he found last.

It was not her face he recognized first but a small moccasin in the grass, its beads covered with dirt, and he stood looking at it for a long moment, because he knew every one of those beads and had watched his wife sew them. He bent to pick it up, and only then did his hands stop searching, for there was nothing left for them to do.

He sat down near the creek, where the water ran over the stones and hawks circled above him. He did not remember starting to weep, only his forehead against the earth, his hands clutching the grass, and the taste of dust in his mouth.

When he stood again the night had been cold, but he had felt nothing.

Now he had to find the survivors of his village, and he found a few of them three days later. His mother’s sister walked straight up to him and struck him once in the chest, as if to reproach him for being alive, and then she took his face in her hands and wept.

That first evening, the living counted the absent.

The next day he went hunting, because meat was needed, and after that he gathered the scattered horses, carried news from one family to another, and mended harnesses. He saw before anyone else what needed doing and took it on at once, finding in every task a necessity and, above all, an end, which grief refused to give him.

His aunt finally noticed.

“You’ve already fixed that,” she said.

“The strap was loose,” he said.

She watched his hands, still pulling at the leather.

“Was it loose yesterday too?” she asked.

He did not answer. He gave the strap one last tug.

A few weeks later he announced that he had to go west, to carry word to relatives who might still be searching for their missing. Everything he said was true, which spared him from asking himself why the prospect of leaving brought him the first real relief since Blue Water.

“Why you?” his aunt asked.

“I know the country,” he said.

“Others do too,” she said.

She did not ask him to stay, and he was grateful to her for it, because he needed to move.

He came back before winter and left again in spring. The reasons to leave arrived with such regularity that he stopped noticing he was waiting for them, and his hands knew so many things that they always gave him somewhere to go.

He never stayed long. He crossed plains and spent winters in camps where a man was gladly welcome if he could mend a saddle, find strayed horses, or bring in game when the hunting had been poor, and everywhere he made himself indispensable.

And everywhere, after a time, something called him elsewhere.

Several winters after Blue Water, he arrived at a camp where he thought he would stay until the next season.

Beside a tipi, a woman sat in the sun, sorting plants laid out on a hide in front of her. She wore a long dress of soft deerskin held at the waist by a braided belt, and a thick black braid, threaded with a few silver strands, fell to the middle of her back. Small beads decorated her worn moccasins. Her hands, with their slender, skilled fingers, patiently separated leaves from stems and gathered them into small bunches, and now and then she lifted one to her nose, breathed in its scent, and set it down with the others. At her feet lay a basket whose handle had come loose.

He stopped.

“Your basket is broken,” he said.

She raised to him a gentle face, marked with fine lines at the corners of the eyes.

“Yes, for some time now,” she said.

“I could mend it,” he said.

“That’s kind of you, but you’ve just arrived, and you must be hungry,” she said.

“It won’t take long,” he said.

She handed him the basket with a smile.

He sat down beside her and set to work while she went on sorting her plants, now and then telling him the name of one. They spoke little, but the silence was not heavy.

When he had finished, she took the basket and admired how solid it was.

“This should last a long time. Thank you,” she said.

He then noticed another worn strap.

“This one deserves replacing too,” he said.

She followed his gaze, then smiled.

“Perhaps tomorrow. Today you’ve already done a great deal,” she said.

She offered to share her meal, and he hesitated, for his horse needed tending, his belongings were not unpacked, and on arriving he had seen a fence that wanted mending. But she had already set a second bowl beside her own.

He stayed.

Little by little he learned that she knew the plants that calmed fevers, those that eased pain, and those that must never be gathered. People came to fetch her when a child was sick, when a woman was about to give birth, when a wound refused to heal, and she had the movements of those who know how to heal.

She laughed easily, often at herself, and she had her impatiences too: when someone asked her for the third time whether a preparation was ready, she answered that it would be ready sooner if people stopped interrupting. He liked hearing her laugh, though it had never occurred to him to tell her so.

One evening she came back after a long night at the side of a woman in labor, exhausted, and sat down by the fire without a word. He brought her water, then something to eat.

“Thank you,” she said.

He noticed her hands, reddened by the cold, and the small bits of plant still clinging to her sleeve.

“You should rest,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

But she did not move.

He stood a moment, looking for something more he could do, and then, without quite knowing why, he sat down beside her. They watched the fire, and after a while she closed her eyes.

He stayed until she fell asleep.

Another day, he noticed that the mended basket had lost its handle again.

“You broke it again,” he said.

She burst out laughing.

“I think it prefers to be carried with two hands,” she said.

He shook his head, but smiled in spite of himself.

He stayed the whole winter. Then he left.

His absences grew shorter, and when he returned she welcomed him as simply as if he had left the day before, asking him about the trails, the families he had met, the horses, and sometimes she had saved him a piece of dried meat or a few berries.

She never asked how long he meant to stay.

At the evening fire, an older man made a habit of shifting over, without a word, to make room for him, and he began by sleeping a little less far from the other tipis, then among them.

By the third year there was truly no reason left to leave.

Yet one evening, the medicine woman’s sister handed him a bowl without interrupting her quarrel with her daughter, as though his presence now went without saying, and he caught himself thinking of a journey south.

The thought brought him instant relief.

He went to check on his horse. His horse was fine, but another had a slight stiffness in a hind leg, and for two days that animal received the attention usually reserved for creatures whose survival is in doubt, until she found him still crouched beside its leg.

“It seems to be bothering him,” he said gravely.

She knelt beside him, and together they watched the horse set its hoof down calmly and go back to grazing. The horse was perfectly well.

She said nothing. Then she gave him a smile so tender that it almost annoyed him, and he would have preferred her to laugh at him.

One evening by the fire, she laid her hand on his forearm.

Nothing more.

His body stiffened under her fingers with such violence that she withdrew her hand at once, and neither of them spoke. Through the flames he saw another fire, another evening: his wife patiently working a knot out of their daughter’s hair, his younger son’s feet sticking out from under a blanket, his elder son holding back a laugh. The image was so complete that it seemed he had only to walk through the flames to join them.

He stood up.

“I should go and see to the horses,” he said.

She nodded gently.

“Go, if you need to,” she said.

He left, and she did not follow him.

The next day she spoke to him as usual, asking him to help carry water and then telling him about a child who had mistaken two plants and ended up with his hands covered in dye. She laughed as she told the story, and he was relieved to hear her laugh again.

But he began to avoid the moments when they might be alone together, and she noticed. She had spent enough nights beside the sick to know that there are pains one cannot touch without waking them, and she simply went on making a place for him by the fire.

When another man began to come and see her, he found himself one evening beside his horse, a blanket already in his hands, ready to leave again. The horse didn't react.

Then he laughed, at first almost without sound, then with the astonishment of a man who finally sees the trap he has been setting for himself for years.

He put the blanket down and went back to the fire. There was a place beside the old man, and he sat.

She was on the other side of the circle, listening to a story, and looked up at him. He smiled at her, and she returned his smile and then turned back to the one who was speaking.

That night, he did not leave.

It took a very long time.

They drew closer so slowly that neither could have said on what day friendship had evolved beyond friendship. He learned to recognize her silences: the silence of exhaustion, when she came back from a long night with a patient; the silence of concentration, when she prepared her plants; and the rarer one, which sometimes seized her in the middle of a conversation and made her seem to be looking at something very far away.

One evening she told him about a child she had not been able to save. She did not weep, but simply told him what had happened and then stayed silent for a long time, and he searched for words that might comfort her and found none.

So he took her hand.

She pressed it gently, and they stayed that way until the fire burned low.

He still traveled, only now sometimes someone else went in his place, and sometimes a broken thing waited until the next day. And sometimes, stranger still, he saw what needed doing, knew he could do it, and chose to remain seated.

Then he discovered that this woman’s love did not take him away from those he had lost. That love gave them back to him, little by little, not in the horror of their last morning but in the infinite ordinariness of the days before.

His wife hated getting up early and had a pale scar on her thumb. Their daughter was stubborn, their youngest son was always hungry, and the eldest, walking beside him, would secretly lengthen his stride so that their footsteps might fall together. Sometimes a memory crossed him with such clarity that he had to stop in the middle of what he was doing, and other times he simply smiled.

One day he spoke of White Feather to the medicine woman. He told her how the girl had wanted to go hunting with him, how she had been furious, arms crossed, and had refused to say goodbye, and he smiled as he remembered.

Then his face came undone.

She did not try to turn his grief aside. She simply laid her hand near his, and after a while he took it.

Years after they met, they sat among the others around the evening fire. An old man was telling a story everyone already knew, someone complained about the smoke, and beyond the tipis the horses stirred softly in the dark.

No one needed him, no horse was waiting to be found, and nothing needed fixing. Beside him, the medicine woman was laughing at something her sister had just said, and he looked at her face lit by the flames, at the small lines at the corners of her eyes, at the way she tipped her head back when she laughed.

He loved her.

The thought, so simple, suddenly tightened his chest.

There was someone to lose again.

Through the flames, a memory came back to him: his wife, sitting in front of their tipi, patiently working a knot out of White Feather’s hair, his younger son asleep against him, the elder walking at his side and lengthening his stride to match his own. He saw their faces with a clarity that took his breath away, not as they had died but as they had lived.

He lowered his head.

She went on listening to the old man’s story, and beside him her hand rested on the blanket.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he took it.

She turned her head slightly toward him, pressed his fingers gently, and returned her attention to the old man.

Then he wept.

No one stopped talking. The old man went on with his story, someone moved a branch that was smoking too much, and the horses stirred in the dark.

The fire slowly burned low.

He stayed there, his hand in hers.

Artist unknown