LEO NEW MOON GUEST CONTRIBUTORS : DARREN UMNEY AND GABRIELLE RADIGUET
SAT 08 AUG 14:50 - Mooning Monthly partnered with a heavenly creative couple....
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FORTNIGHTLY EMAIL MESSAGE HERE
Welcome to MOON LIT, the international platform for lunar influenced new literature, this month partnered with a divine couple, author and academic Darren Umney and visual artist Gabrielle Radiguet. Darren and Gaby have been together for 37 years and generously offer readers of this month's MOON LIT a time laced lunar narrative of daily integration, observation, regenerative domesticity and enduring love. They invite us to briefly join in their creative partnership with heaven, earth, mind, body and soul to clarify and enliven the storyline in our own. I hope you enjoy their playful productivity as much as me.
And so to this weekend's Leo New Moon. Things have been a little challenging of late and this moon’s dominant aspect with Uranus continues to serve up a main dish of unexpected chaotic change with side order of rebellion. This is the week to defer any impulsive decisions especially when it comes to engaging in wilful conflicts with professional superiors.
In our personal relationships we should also subtly avoid engaging with any ongoing power struggles without going all passive aggressive. Not just with lovers - watch out for the mothers! Kindness will be key if such resources can be found.
To calm the general queasiness, flexibility and open heartedness remain order of the day (when would they ever not feature as everyone's plat du jour?) as we bend with the winds of change rather than snap in the storms that are likely to reach gale force in the next few days.
Change, like shit, is going to happen whether we like it or not. It is a universal constant - ask a physicist. How we greet its arrival in our world will determine our experience of it. To resist what is, is to willfully deny. It causes blockages and restrictions that impede evolutionary progress (another definition of change) in our inner and outer worlds. To allow and align is to 'go with the flow', to travel the path of least resistance and access the Love that animates all circumstance, however challenging that may appear to be. Let's choose allowance over denial for the next few days and reap the reward of a quieter life.
Under stress, a Mooner's trick of the trade is to always remember to feel gratitude for those aspects of the bigger picture which are not affected by the minutiae of our personal, largely self determined, set of challenges. Regardless of our self importance and fragility the trees continue to grow; the sun continues to shine somewhere...even on a cloudy day; and Love never leaves us despite our regular attempts to deny its presence. To RE-MEMBER is to bring the perception of chaotic, disparate, individual fragments into a unified harmonious whole; the illusion of separation is atoned allowing the liberty of Truth to emerge in its rightful place in our hearts as joy. It's a means of healing no end of maladies.
In moments of chaos or seemingly insurmountable change under this Leo New Moon let's resolve to walk in nature or simply gaze out the window and check on a tree. Chances are it's still doing its thing. Life goes on. Give thanks.
I am delighted that under this Leo New Moon readers of MOON LIT can share in the written work of Darren Umney. Darren is a celebrated author and academicwho says he writes in various ways for numerous reasons - technically, academically, poetically, quickly, lazily and with ellipses... He is an editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy, a research fellow at Queen Mary University London, and a researcher and curator at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. He is currently working on a children’s book with his wife Gabrielle.
His poetic offering in this edition is a MOON LIT journal of sorts, potentially both generic and specific, charting time as one might by periodically remembering to clock in to the eternal rhythms of life through daily prayer or meditation. At such moments, one 'clocks out' of the intense, personal narrative and consciously 'clocks in' to the wider narrative that allows the personal to emerge. Is objectivity possible as we mindfully observe ourselves and the world we create/inhabit? Does one align with Truth in these fleeting moments of recollection, breathe a sigh of relief or simply look on bemused? I am fairly convinced Darren's unifying, beautiful prose embodies all three. Enjoy.
and a time to every purpose under the heaven: story time The almond tree plays in the light, tracing the wind and the indigo sky across the drawn lilac curtain of night. Outside a dark road lined with coloured eggs and punctuated by rolling tin cans. Beyond these prefabricated houses there must have been other things: fields of wheat perhaps projecting their own patterns onto the hedgerows and tree trunks of that darkening day. lunch time One dark purple pool caught in a pale yellow ring, rapt in a silver cup. The short, crusted edges, crumbling ramparts, are ticked off one at a time. Looking up over the ruinous rim there is an eagle, talons neutered with an olive branch, colonising a crater. A scratchy black and white film of human endeavour framed in a sketchy memory of some kind of history, captured on a rented screen.
lapsed time A bright orb, frame by frame, is slowly passing through a viewfinder. The shutter clicks, a flash of black, and the acetate moves on a bit of an inch here and there. There’s not much to see here but there might later: be a line that could link us from one side of the day to the other, shifting slowly across the sky through the clouds and the stars, from one moment to the next, from one part to another.
sidereal time Moving in many directions, paths mapped, angles rent through the rows and the columns of the ephemerides. One day and another, one aspect of each other, one more transit and we’ll be there. I can see you were meant for me but can’t say why. I would say you will want to be but can’t see what. But the orbs are drawn out, lined up and reaching out, auspicious in their presence and suspicious by their absence. We are surely on the cusp of something momentous. bed time Under the same canopy, she was sat too, lit by the same deflected star and thinking the same reflective things. Triangulating through time and space, that remote love was a song shared, imagined, scared and dared. To think that between them they would work miracles through their mirrored images, their snatched thoughts, born in Cancer and lived in dreams.
Darren Umney 2021
Welcome once again through the ever open doors of our very own art gallery MOON LIT DISPLAY. Exhibiting drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture with a lunar bent, visual artists share their most recent creative output alongside our literary guests, ensuring our exhibits complement the contemporary, enquiring nature of the prose and poetry.
Under this Leo New Moon we are fortunate to be joined by Jersey born visual artist Gabrielle Radiguet. Now based in the UK she is primarily a painter but continues to explore an eclectic mix of endeavours in the name of creativity. Inspired by her primal awe and wonder of the natural world, she paints in a variety of media, experiments with cyanotype photographic prints and ceramics. She teaches, lectures and facilitates workshops. Her artwork is held in a wide variety of private and public collections across Europe, the USA and Australia. She is currently working on a children's book with her husband Darren.
You can view more of Gabrielle's work on her website: www.gabrielleradiguet.com
GABRIELLE RADIGUET
River Ouse I
ink on watercolour paper
4” x 6”
River Ouse II
ink on watercolour paper
4” x 6”
River Ouse III
ink on watercolour paper
4” x 6”
Gabrielle Radiguet 2021
Just so you know, MOON LIT seeks to present literature and artwork that celebrates and reveres, marvels, champions and cherishes, whilst never shirking the necessary excavation of life's rich shadows in search of the priceless shining diamonds within. Each edition is a poetic invitation to contemplate our reading of, and reaction to, circumstance, that we may more consciously direct our thoughts, words and actions toward positive benefit for All.
Throughout 2021 MOON LIT will offer a monthly meditative pause under the poetic guidance of our distinguished literary guests. It is hoped readers will find time in hectic schedules to unhurriedly savour their literary craft; to read and reread these new perspectives on the miraculous, beguiling life experience to which we all belong.
MOON LIT publishes at new moon alongside its full moon sister publication MOONING MONTHLY that offers loosely astrological lunar forecasts for the coming month. (Mooning Monthly 118 'SUMMER QUICKIE' still available here) Subscribe for free HERE at your leisure to ensure both emails hit your inbox when it matters.
And of course, do please share MOON LIT with friends and family of similar lunar sensitivities, in the hope that this illuminating endeavour brightens our currently challenging, darkened times with the light of beauty and Love.
With love 'til next time
Mark
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FORTNIGHTLY MOON BLOG HERE