A New Moon Ritual for Planting Something in the Dark

A ritual is a small ceremony you give yourself. It has a beginning and an end. It asks nothing of you but the time it takes.

There is a moon in the sky tonight. You just can’t see her.

She hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s sitting between us and the sun with her lit side turned away, which is the only reason the sky looks empty. And while she is up there being invisible, she is lifting every ocean on this planet a little way towards herself and setting it down again — twice a day, across seventy per cent of the surface of the earth.

Exactly as she has done every day of your life and every day of your grandmother’s - even though right now, she is hidden in the dark.

We used to live by her

Before there were clocks, there was the moon, and she was the first calendar anybody had. She told you when to plant and when to gather, when it was safe to travel, when to expect your own blood.

She is still sitting inside the language, if you look. Month is moon. So is menstruation, and menses, and — this is the one that stops most women in their tracks — measure. Month, moon, menses, measure: all four from the same ancient root, which meant nothing more mystical than to measure. The first unit of time human beings ever agreed on was a woman’s cycle and the moon’s, because they run to near enough the same length and they were the only clocks anyone had.

Then came electricity, and the working week, and a culture built on the assumption that you can be identically productive on every day of every month. Which is not true of anybody, and is spectacularly untrue of a body that runs on a cycle.

So we stopped noticing the moon because we became less reliant on its unit of measure. Most women alive today could not tell you what the moon is doing tonight, and could not tell you what day of their own cycle it is either. Those two forgettings are the same forgetting, really.

Coming back to the moon asks you to believe nothing at all. It is just asking you to choose to notice something that was always there, and letting your life keep a rhythm that isn’t the working week.

The dark one

Tonight she is at the very start of her cycle. The dark point. The empty one.

Every tradition that has ever paid her any attention has treated this night as the night for beginnings, and you can feel exactly why standing outside in it. There is nothing to see. Nothing finished, nothing to admire, nothing being asked of you. Just a dark sky and the sense of something about to start.

What an intention actually is

It is not a goal, and it is not a resolution, and the difference matters far more than it sounds.

A goal is a thing you either hit or fail to hit. A resolution is usually a promise made in a spirit of quiet self-punishment — a list of the ways you’ve decided you aren’t enough, dressed up as a plan for January.

An intention is neither of those. An intention is a direction you turn towards. It is you telling yourself, and then telling the dark, what you are for this month.

You cannot fail an intention. You can only forget it — and even forgetting it turns out to be useful, which we’ll come back to at the end.

On manifesting, honestly

You will hear this called manifesting. The word has been monetised so thoroughly over the last decade that a lot of thoughtful women flinch at it now, and we understand why.

So here is what I think is actually going on, and none of it requires you to believe anything you’d rather not.

When you name a thing clearly — in your own handwriting, out loud, with your whole attention on it — you change what you notice. You start seeing the opening you would have walked straight past. You say yes to the thing you’d have declined out of pure habit. You spend your hours and your energy differently because you have acknowledged your intention.

In a hundred small ways you usually never consciously decide. That is most of a life.

And if you also believe you are sending something out, and that something answers — that the asking itself does work in the world — then you are in the company of very nearly every human being who has ever lived and believed in a religion or spirituality, and we are certainly not going to be the ones to talk you out of it.

Almost nobody in your life is ever going to sit you down and ask you what you want.

Tonight, we’re asking.

What you’ll need

Half an hour, and somewhere nobody will interrupt you. Tonight or tomorrow night — the window is generous, and if you’re a few days late she is not keeping score.

Paper and a pen. Real paper and real handwriting.

A candle, if you have one. Any candle at all.

A glass of water beside you.

If you have incense, dried herbs or a smudge stick, bring them. If you don’t, you don’t need them for the ritual to work.

Outside if you can, and after dark if you can. Not because it fails at a kitchen table — it doesn’t — but because standing under a real sky does something to a body that no room can do for it.

Arrive 1-2 min

Go outside first, even if it’s only for a minute. Even if it’s cloudy, even if it’s a courtyard, even if the streetlights have swallowed the whole sky.

Look up anyway and find roughly where she is. You won’t see her. That is what you came out for, but say hello or acknowledge her anyway.

If you have a smudge stick or herbs to burn, light it, let it catch, blow the flame out and let it smoulder. Move the smoke slowly around yourself, from your feet up to your head, then let it leave you into the sky. You are not chasing anything out of your space. You are drawing a line between the day you’ve just had and the half hour you’re about to have — and smoke is how human beings have drawn that line for roughly as long as there have been human beings.

No smudge stick, no incense? Wash your hands slowly under warm water instead and dry them properly.

Then choose your spot to sit, inside or outside, put your phone aside and light the candle.

Tend 5-15 min

Before you ask for anything, tell the truth to yourself about where you’re at in your life right now.

Five minutes. Write down where you actually are — not where you meant to be by now, and not the version you’d hand someone at a barbecue.

If you don’t know where to start, start here: What am I tired of? What am I carrying that nobody has noticed? What did I get through this month that I’ve given myself no credit for at all? What am I pretending is fine?

Write it messily. Don’t make it fair to anybody, no filter. Nobody is ever going to read this but you.

This part isn’t a warm-up — it’s the part that makes the rest of it work. An intention set by a woman who won’t admit how tired she is will always turn out to be an intention for somebody else’s life.

Speak 1-5 min

Now two short lists, and keep them short.

What I’m ready to put down

What is no longer welcome in the month ahead. A habit, a story you tell about yourself, a person who only rings when it’s bad, the going-over of a conversation from 2019 at two in the morning. Two or three things. No more.

What I’m ready to welcome

What you would like to come in. Be specific and be greedy — this page is private and there is no prize for modesty on it. Rest. Money. A friend who asks you a real question and can see your soul. Your own attention back on yourself.

Then turn the page over, because now you write the ones that matter most to you. But with a difference - write it in present tense.

Present tense, as though it has already begun.

Not “I want to” and not “I’m going to try”. Those are sentences belonging to a woman who hasn’t got it yet, and your body hears the difference even when your mind doesn’t. Write it as though it is already underway — not to lie to yourself, but to let your body find out what it feels like to be her. And then you need to use your imagination to feel in your heart how it would feel if you had it already.

Now write that same sentence again. And again. Keep writing it until something in your heart space answers — a lift, an ache or both at once, which is usually the sign you’ve found the true one that matters most. You will know. Your body almost always knows. We are simply never asked to notice.

And then read it out loud.

This is the part that gets skipped, don’t skip this part.

There is a reason we use one word for arranging letters into a word and for a charm said over something. Both senses of the word ‘spell’ come from a root that meant, simply, to speak — and a grimoire, a book of spells, is the same word as grammar. Our ancestors did not treat writing and magic as two separate technologies. They treated them as one, and they had a point: putting a thing into words is the closest any of us ever gets to making something out of nothing.

So say it. Once, out loud, to a lit candle and a dark sky.

Written down, it is a wish. Written down and then spoken, you are casting a small spell that is entirely real.

Close 1-2 min

Close your eyes and sit with it for a minute. Not thinking about it — feeling it, as though it has already happened. What does an ordinary Tuesday feel like in the body of the woman this is true for? Stay there as long as it’s pleasant.

Then drink the water. All of it. And watch as you blow the candle out. These actions are a small physical full stop, and your body understands full stops far better than your mind does.

Fold the page and put it somewhere you’ll meet it by accident — the back of your phone case, inside the book you’re reading, in your handbag. This one doesn’t get burnt. This is the opposite of the full moon; this one gets kept.

And then — last instruction, and the hardest one — let it go.

Not the intention. The gripping. You have named it, written it, and said it out loud to the dark. That was the whole job and it is done. You do not have to spend the next twenty-nine days checking on it like a pot that won’t boil.

Plant it and go to bed. Things grow in the dark. That is rather the point of the dark.

If nothing comes

Some months you will sit down with the pen and there will be nothing there at all. No want, no vision, no sentence. Just a blank page.

That is not a failure and it does not mean something is wrong with you. It almost always means one of two things: you are too tired to want anything tonight, or you have spent so many years arranging your life around what everybody else needs that the machinery for wanting has gone quiet from lack of use.

Both are extremely common. Neither is permanent.

If that is tonight, write this instead, and mean it:

“This month, I am finding out what I want.”

That is a real and valid intention.

Returning to it

Every new moon — roughly every twenty-nine days, about a fortnight after the full one. Put the next date in your calendar tonight while you’re thinking of it.

When you come back, read last month’s page before you write anything new. Sometimes you’ll find you did the thing. Sometimes you’ll have forgotten it existed entirely.

Both are information. A month you forgot it completely usually means the intention was too big, or it was somebody else’s idea of what you ought to want. Write a smaller, truer one. That is the whole method, and it works over years rather than weeks.

And if the entire month got away from you — you begin again. That is the name of this ritual, after all. There is no streak here, no chain to break, nothing to have fallen behind on. The moon does this twelve or thirteen times a year, every year, for the whole of your life. You cannot miss her. You can only join in the next time she comes round.

If you’re doing this with other women

It barely changes, and it is better. Everyone writes alone and in silence. Then each woman reads her one sentence out loud, and nobody responds — no advice, no “oh but you already are”, no fixing. The next woman simply goes.

Being heard without being managed is rarer than you’d think, and it is most of what a circle is for.

There is also something in hearing another woman say her want out loud that makes your own sound far less outlandish than it did in your head — which may be part of why women gathering has so reliably made other people nervous.

This is offered with love, not as medical advice. It is free, and it always will be — you don’t need to give us your email address to read it, and you don’t need to buy anything. If it helped, send it to a woman who needs it.

You are still you — held, heard, and whole. — Love Her Collective