JULY 2026

In discussing Moon energy, I’m excited to pull from a discussion that occurred during my last Reiki I class, all about the challenges and pitfalls of correctly interpreting energy and energetic information for clients.

There are a multitude of reasons why moonlight is associated with trickery and illusions, even more than the pitch blackness of a new moon. When we say “the light from the moon”, or moonlight, it’s technically a misattribution of source. The moon does not produce its own light, but reflects the light from the sun. Even with borrowed brilliance, it lights up our darkest nights and allows us to work in the subtler energies of the subconscious and intuition.

This magical subtlety is vital to the work of untangling ourselves. Sometimes, a gentle distance and refraction from the raw source of an issue is necessary to see the whole truth, or even part of it. Much like we don’t stare directly into the burning, churning lens of a projector in order to watch a movie (ouch), sometimes we need an intermediary between us and the truth, like a projection screen. We need to see our melodrama play out at a distance so that we can grasp the finer details and not get tangled up in the weeds of our intense emotions or blockages, or the delightful human trap of “my situation is singular and terribly special and no one but me has ever felt this way, so I must reinvent the wheel to escape”. Perspective isn’t curative, but it is vital to placing a given challenge into the greater context of ourselves.

The curious thing about this truth is the place that we naturally occupy as channels and energy workers, facilitating some kind of energy transfer between a client and Source energy: because more often than not, we are the screen.

We are the moon, reflecting a light (a truth) not our own so it reaches its intended target. With this position of intermediary comes the tricky task of translation, because information must move through us before it reaches the client. We are not exquisitely neutral items like mirrors or giant orbiting planetoids, and even those can be tricksy to use. We have our own experiences, our own senses, and perhaps even more confusingly, the Universe loves to speak in images and poetry pulled from our own stories.

Let me get into it properly!

As humans and as mystics, we have our own vocabulary of symbolism. Certain things have a subjective meaning for us because of events or lessons in our lives, negative or positive, and those meanings run far deeper than spiritual totems which we “generally” know the meaning of (unless we have a cultural connection to those totems, etc).

For example, bearded irises and bleeding hearts remind me of my mother. Both are deeply intertwined with the feeling of motherly love in my mind, due to the years I watched her devoutly tend her gardens in the unforgiving Oklahoman summers. Those are two of her favorite flowers, and just seeing them makes my heart bloom with strong, positive emotion. It also reminds me of home.

If someone walked up to me and informed me of a generally accepted (by whom?? From whom??) spiritual meaning of each of those flowers, I would nod and say “cool, man” and go on with my life.

Not only do interpretations of omens vary from culture to culture, what tends to matter most is our own relationship with a given thing. That introduces inherent bias in information-giving, but this isn’t a weakness as long as you are aware of it. In fact, it’s just another palate to paint a message with. Our own subjective catalogue of experience shouldn’t, and honestly cannot, be placed aside in pursuit of some sort of “sterile”, objective channeling that only focuses on the client.

In practice, if I were to see those specific flowers when working on a client, my first thought would be “mother” and “love”, and maybe “devotion” or “devotion in spite of the odds”, and that would be a good jumping-off point for whatever energies are coming up.

The challenge comes when the Universe doesn’t want to only speak in your dialect – now, suddenly, you’re dealing with both subjective and objective information on about three different levels. So, how to proceed?

Let’s get a little ridiculous, and say that I have a client who suffered terribly at the hands (leaves? Fronds?) of bearded irises and bleeding hearts. Maybe their crappy ex gave them a bouquet of them right before setting fire to their apartment and moving to Europe. It’s a bad memory, a bad time, but there’s something in the experience that the client hasn’t processed and those flowers are the most succinct trigger to evoke that energy. Bet, the Universe isn’t going to let that picturesque opportunity go to waste.

If I receive an image of these flowers and immediately begin waxing poetic about motherly love and devotion, it might be nice to hear, but it’s ultimately not relevant to the client’s situation. 

Here, I jumped right past objective information (there are flowers) and into my historic, subjective experience of a symbol (wow I love my mom), and in doing so, I missed the actual intended message (you’ve really gotta process that trauma with your ex, bro).

While it’s unlikely that a client and I would have such vastly different relationships with the same two flowers, this scenario illustrates that Source can use either “dialect” to communicate, and our challenge is less interpretation than translation, always with an abundance of caution.

How do we navigate this ever-shifting morass of meaning? When receiving information, it is always best to start at the surface, with a straight-forward description of what you are experiencing. Then, if that fails to evoke any kind of connection, you can descend into interpretation and subjective experience.

Good phrases are: “I know what this usually means for me” and “Does this hold any meaning for you?”. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Then there is simply information to be had. I will never forget whenever Aster was truly leveling up in his abilities and was learning to “just spit it out”: namely, describe the raw, often bizarre images he was receiving before attempting to do any sort of mystical (or personal) interpretation. 

With one client, he saw something that didn’t seem to have any connection to the subject at hand, or what she wanted to discuss that day. He tried to focus past it, but the image was “loud” and refused to depart. So, highly uncomfortable and lacking any sort of context or appropriateness, Aster described exactly what he saw: three bees clustered around a crown. 

Surprise, surprise, the client had recently researched their family crest from Europe: three bees clustered around a crown. They were both shocked beyond belief. There was stuff there to unpack, in her family history, and they never would have made that connection if Aster hadn’t been willing to take the leap of faith and spit it out.

I have been on every side of the equation – receiving energy, giving energy, receiving visions/information, communicating visions/information – and it astounds me to know the mix of cleverness and wildness with which the Universe splashes around in the puddles of our subconscious. She plucks secret berries, ripe with meaning, from our own stories and mashes them to make paint and draws more stories, weaving us together so that we may see each other clearly. This hallucinogenic vibe is only intensified by the fact that many of us have different means of sensing energies besides clairvoyance (clear sight, or visions), so the Universe will play us like an instrument in order to communicate a necessary message. 

The first challenge is knowing where the music, and the truth, is coming from. The second is how we hold it, and give it, to others. How can you be the best moon you can and reflect what must be seen … knowing that you, too, will be seen in the process?

As you no doubt know by now if you’re a reader of this newsletter, I’m an academic philosopher. Philosophy, in its search for truth, is heavily grounded in reason and logic. Not the most obvious bedfellow for witchcraft. 

It would be understandable to ask: How can you be devoted to both reason and spirituality? How can you be both a skeptic and a believer?

What room is there for logic when you’re chanting odes to the goddess under the moonlight?

Well, it’s precisely the wisdom of the moon that points to the answer. The moon is an illuminator, but also a trickster. She represents revelation of hidden truths, but also the power of illusions. Her changing phases move through different forms of wisdom. And in her light and dark sides she represents an important duality: the logical and intuitive forms of truth. 

Philosophy traditionally defines knowledge as justified true beliefs. Meaning, a piece of knowledge is a claim you believe to be true, that actually is true, and that has sufficient evidence or logical justification to back it up. This is the core basis for empiricism, the strategy of gaining knowledge by observing the natural world, which is the basis for the scientific method. Put simply, science and logic generate claims that can be definitively proven or disproven, based on evidence in the physical world. 

This kind of knowledge acquisition is extremely important and powerful, but it isn’t the only strategy for getting at wisdom, or truth. There are other kinds of knowing, and importantly, other kinds of questions that aren’t best answered by empiricism or science or even logic. It is here where spirituality can play a role.

If you are also from the U.S., or any other Christian normative nation, you may be used to religion making certain specific truth claims about the world. God is real, Jesus lived and died for our sins, sin and evil exist and have real impacts on the world, the soul exists, etc. You may be used to quite a bit of fighting over the particulars of these literal beliefs, such as fundamentalist Christians trying to outlaw the teaching of evolution because it contradicts their creationist beliefs. If you hold your spiritual beliefs in the same way you hold your empirical beliefs about the world around you, after all, it leads to quite a few contradictions. 

But I don’t believe that spirituality needs to make any claims about truths that can be determined empirically. I am perfectly happy to let science answer the questions that science is best suited to answer, which is quite a large domain. But there are other questions that science is not best suited to answer. 

In science, we see truth as knowledge making. In spirituality, we see truth as meaning making.

Humans are incredibly complex. We are not just sensing organisms taking in observations and facts from the world; we are conscious beings constructing a story to make meaning out of our experiences. Meaning is a foundational aspect of consciousness. It creates emotional coherence and constructs significance. It’s an active process that we take part in. It is not merely subjective, it is subjectivity.

Spirituality is a powerful meaning making technique. Throughout history, we have used ritual to mark out time and give it meaning. To mark out our connection to each other and give it meaning. To tell stories that make sense of the randomness of experience.

And that’s why it doesn’t matter if it’s literally true or not, at least not in the same way it matters whether a hydrogen atom has one electron. Though spirituality tells stories that seem like they make truth claims about the world – that, for example, the gods exist or a universal source of energy connects us all – the story itself and the meaning derived from it is what matters, not the specific truth claims. 

Because this is a different way of truth-finding, we shouldn’t treat it the same as other methods, like science. It should play a different role in our lives. It does all our ways of knowing a disservice when we treat them the same or hold them to the same standards. That means not appealing to spirituality to give answers it’s not suited to, and not looking to it for knowledge but for meaning.

We are blessed with physical senses to observe and interact with the physical world, and the work of our ancestors (notably starting with our pagan ancestors) built those senses into incredibly powerful empirical approaches like modern science to help us discover provable, definitive facts about the world. We should rely on them for what they are good at, and go to them for answers to questions they are most suited to answering.

Ultimately, we need the wisdom to know which questions are best answered by which strategies, and not try to answer empirical questions with spiritual strategies.

Your balance may be different. You may believe in some of these things more literally than we do, or care more about the distinction. But all of us need to find a balance. 

Going too far in either direction will deny us access to important tools to navigate life. Too far into spirituality and you lose touch with reality and might find yourself believing any stray illusion the world casts your way. You leave yourself open to ignorance, to psychosis, to manipulation from others. 

But go too far into empiricism and you risk losing the thread of meaning. You risk depression and isolation, and may lose sight of the importance of our connection to each other. You risk losing opportunities to experience the numinous.

Clearly, these are big questions, with much more nuance and complexity than we can address here. But I hope this can get us thinking about different methods of truth seeking and the importance of understanding our relationship to each. And I hope it goes some way to explaining how I can be a lover of reason who also burns offerings to the gods and, in the tradition of Socrates, believes both are essential to a life well examined and well lived.

While we haven’t touched on it much in the last few newsletters, there’s obviously quite a lot going on politically in the U.S. This essay by Connor O’Callaghan is a substantial and interesting look back at the Minnesota response to ICE actions last winter, showing us a hopeful example for what successful community organizing in response to fascism can look like. What can we learn from this response, and what elements can we start working on now to make our local communities more resilient and connect?

Honestly, not only is our girl Serena the first thing we think about when we think about the moon (yes, we are all nerdy 90s kids), but actually Sailor Moon isn’t a bad way to go about learning about the basic traits of the planets.