Moonlit Mirrors: Harvest Full Moon Reflections in Aries

The Full Moon in Aries (October 6, 2025) blazes with the energy of restoration and self-clarity. It illuminates what we’ve been carrying, perhaps too long or too far, and asks: What still serves my wholeness?

This moon is both mirror and fire: a mirror to see our many roles and responsibilities reflected back to us, and a flame that burns away the illusion that we must hold them all at once.

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🌾 The Harvest of Roles

I’m holding many roles: mother, daughter, wife, sister, aunt, student, training coordinator, member. I’m tending to my aging parents, my marriage, my work, and school, all while supporting our little family with love and intention.

Yet in this fullness, I see the shadow. I’ve been overidentifying with productivity. I fear not being “on top of it,” as though value depends on motion. What I truly want is to feel centered, not splintered.

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🔥 The Full Moon Spread

Where am I right now? — 5 of Wands
Overextended but aware. These are all the visions pulling their own way, demanding attention. I’m caught in inner competition, with so many roles and so much noise. I’m defending my right to show up fully, yet I wonder: Where can I lay down the need to succeed?

What is influencing me? — 4 of Swords
Fear of losing success or identity. This card whispers: Rest is sacred. To hear my inner truth, I must be still. My rituals are beginning to support me, helping me step away from striving and into presence.

What have I created since the last moon? — King of Swords
I’ve created clarity and structure, even if it came through struggle. This is a season of honoring insight and trusting my decisive self. I can lead from a place of integrity and stillness.

What is no longer serving me? — 9 of Pentacles
Perfectionism and overfunctioning. I no longer need to appear effortlessly balanced. Comfort without truth is not freedom. I release the need to maintain an image that costs me wholeness.

How can I let go and release this energy? — The Emperor
By reclaiming my boundaries.
Architect of your energy, this card says. Boundaries are not walls but sacred structures, scaffolding for what matters most. I lead myself back to steadiness by protecting my time and energy for love, not performance.

What can I learn during this cycle? — 6 of Pentacles
To honor myself even when I feel unsure. This moon teaches that loss and struggle are not shameful, but pathways to support, softness, and deeper connection.

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🌙 Moonlit Integration

This Aries Full Moon is not about doing more, but being more true. It calls us into conscious leadership: to hold only the plates that truly matter. School, work, family, and creative service all orbit the same truth: you are not stealing time from life by resting; you are planting the future.

Affirmation:
I release what fragments me.
I choose sacred structure and inner rest.
I lead from wholeness, not exhaustion.

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✨ Reflect + Release Practice

• Write down the roles you’re currently holding. Circle the ones that fill you, and underline the ones that drain you.

• Light a candle beside a bowl of water, the moon’s mirror, and speak aloud one truth you’re reclaiming.

• When ready, whisper gratitude for the boundaries that protect your peace.

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🌕 May this Harvest Moon remind you that centeredness is not balance; it is belonging to yourself.
🌾 Blessed Full Moon, friends.

Turning the Cards, Turning the Wheel: October 2025 Tarot Reflection

October arrives with shifting light, falling leaves, and the steady pull inward as the veil thins. This month’s cards weave a story of balance, fiery momentum, patient healing, and deep joy. Guided by Temperance, October calls for discernment, moderation, and integration in the midst of life’s turning cycles.

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October Themes

• Feelings I Seek: Centered • Productive • Organized • Relieved

• Looking Forward To: Autumn festivals • Sacred seasonal rituals • Samhain

• Intentions: Hold discernment closely • Honor endings as beginnings • Balance study, work, and rest • Celebrate ancestors • Choose joy in seasonal rhythms

• Need to Release: Overextension • Power in over-doing • Fear of missing out

• Priorities: Plan Samhain ritual • Tend health and balance • Stay grounded amidst obligations

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Month Ahead Spread

1. Energy This Month — Temperance (XIV)

Balance, healing, and integration. This is the month of moderation — small daily adjustments keep life steady.

2. Love — Eight of Wands

Movement, excitement, and joyful connection. Relationships bring news and quick shifts, reminding us to flow with spontaneity while avoiding overscheduling.

3. Money — Knight of Wands

Passionate pursuit of opportunities but with a caution against recklessness. Boldness is encouraged, but enthusiasm must be tempered with care.

4. Work — Five of Cups

A call to release disappointment and notice what remains. Though obligations may feel heavy, the card urges turning toward joy and meaning still present.

5. Health — Knight of Pentacles

Slow, consistent habits are the medicine of the month. Grounded routines, rest, and patience build sustainable well-being.

6. Spirit — Nine of Cups

Joy, gratitude, and fulfillment. As Samhain approaches, spirit is nourished by abundance and connection with the unseen. Wishes made now carry weight and blessing.

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Overall Story of October

This month is guided by Temperance, reminding us that balance is the foundation beneath all else. The fiery energy of the Eight of Wands and Knight of Wands brings momentum and opportunity, yet must be moderated by discernment. With two Knights present, pacing is essential: knowing when to move swiftly and when to slow down. The Five of Cups asks for release of sorrow and reframing of work’s demands, while the Knight of Pentacles offers steady healing through patience and consistency. The journey culminates in the Nine of Cups, a card of joy and fulfillment, promising that by Samhain’s end, the month closes with gratitude, abundance, and celebration.

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Closing Reflection

October teaches that endings are thresholds. Balance, steady care, and joyful release weave together, guiding us toward Samhain’s deep mystery. Turning the cards, turning the wheel, we are reminded: with discernment and gratitude, transformation becomes blessing.

XI (also VIII) Justice: Balance at the Turning of the Year

 

 

Justice, the eleventh card of the Major Arcana, is the Daughter of the Lords of Truth and the Ruler of the Balance. At Mabon, the Autumn Equinox, she stands most clearly before us, for this is the moment when day and night are equal, and the year pauses in perfect equilibrium before descending into winter.

The Symbols of Justice

Across tarot traditions, Justice appears as a seated figure with sword and scales in the Rider Waite Smith, as Adjustment in the Thoth deck, as goddess figures in feminist and Pagan-inspired decks, and as surreal visions in the Dalí tarot. Each portrayal shares her core essence: she is balance, clarity, and accountability.

• Sword: truth and discernment, able to cut through illusion.

• Scales: weighing action and consequence, cause and effect.

• Throne or Pillars: structure, order, and stability.

• Red, green, or blue robes: life force, harmony, and clarity.

In Thoth’s Adjustment, she is not static but poised in dance, wings extended, scales in balance. This teaches that justice is a living act of equilibration, not a fixed state.

The Sacred Number Eleven

Justice is most often numbered XI, paired with Strength at VIII in the Rider Waite Smith. Eleven is a master number of illumination, awakening, and higher perception. It contains the doubled energy of one, the force of will, refined and elevated toward truth.

In older decks, Justice was placed at VIII, linked to cycles, karma, and cause-and-effect. Whether as Eight or Eleven, her presence teaches accountability and right relationship.

Esoteric Correspondences

• Title: XI Justice, Daughter of the Lords of Truth, Ruler of the Balance

• Astrological Dignity: Libra, cardinal air. Ruled by Venus, with Saturn exalted

• Hebrew Letter: ל‎, Lamed, meaning “ox-goad” (work, discipline). Value: 30

• Sephirothic Path: Path 22 on the Tree of Life, joining Geburah (5, Severity/Strength, Mars) to Tiphareth (6, Beauty, Sun)

These correspondences deepen her themes:

• Libra brings balance, harmony, and the relational air element.

• Venus and Saturn bring the meeting of love and law, beauty and discipline, mercy and severity.

• Lamed, the ox-goad, shows that balance requires work and correction.

• Path 22 reminds us that Justice mediates between the rigor of Geburah and the harmony of Tiphareth, holding severity and beauty in tension until balance is restored.

Themes of Justice

• Truth and clarity

• Balance and equilibration

• Cause and effect, karma, timing

• Love (Venus) meeting law (Saturn)

• Impartiality and fairness

• Music and structure as “air in form”

• The dance of constant adjustment

Justice is not only about judgment after the fact. She is about ongoing course correction, pruning when necessary, and adapting continuously so that truth may be lived.

Justice in Readings

• Upright: truth, fairness, accountability, clarity, cause and effect.

• Reversed: dishonesty, denial, imbalance, injustice, refusal to see truth.

Justice does not punish. She reveals. She holds a mirror to our actions and invites us to align with what is true.

Justice at Mabon

At the Autumn Equinox, we experience Justice’s lesson in the turning of the year. Day and night are equal. Summer’s warmth yields to autumn’s coolness. The harvest is gathered and weighed. What we planted earlier in the year has ripened, for good or ill, and now we see the truth of our actions.

Justice at Mabon is the reckoning of the harvest. What do you celebrate? What do you regret? What must be cut away, like overgrowth in a garden, so that balance may be restored?

A Pagan Lens

Pagans may see Justice as Ma’at, weighing the heart against the feather, or as Themis, goddess of divine order. She is found in the cycles of balance between light and dark. At Mabon, she is the balance of the equinox itself. Her teaching is that balance is not rigid equality but harmony, where all things find their rightful place.

A Druidic Lens

For Druids, Justice is woven into the order of nature. She is the balance of sky, sea, and land. She is the oak’s strength and the stream’s clarity. She is sovereignty, which demands responsibility, reciprocity, and truth. Justice reminds Druids that right relationship with the land, ancestors, and community requires continuous adjustment, like the dance of the Thoth Adjustment card.

To live her way is to live truthfully, to align with rhythm, and to honor the reciprocity of all life.

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Summary: Seasonal Correspondences

• Mabon (Autumn Equinox): Justice’s strongest alignment, the balance of light and dark.

• Libra Season: her astrological home, cardinal air seeking harmony.

• Winter Solstice: another time of weighing and release, when we discern what cannot be carried into the new year.

Seasonal Meditation with Justice

Find a quiet space and imagine yourself at the edge of a field at sunset. Justice appears before you, holding her scales. On one side she asks you to place the fruits of your year: your successes, joys, and harvests. On the other, place what has been neglected, what weighs heavily, or what you are ready to release.

The scales shift and find balance. Justice does not judge but shows you the truth. She offers you her sword. With it you may cut away what no longer serves. See it fall to the ground and sink into the soil as compost, feeding the future.

When you open your eyes, breathe into the balance that remains. You carry her gift of truth and harmony into the turning year.

Grounded Truths: Integrating Spirit, Self, and Systems

 To study spirit, self, and systems is to enter a space where theology and therapy blur. It is to walk with questions more than answers, to see healing as sacred, and to honor how we are shaped by stories, relationships, and the forces that hold us together.

What Is Sacred?

Sacred is not confined to sanctuaries or textbooks. Sacred is the pulse of transformation, the soil of belonging, the trembling space between one heart and another.

• Change is sacred. Growth is not linear but unfolding, messy, mutual. Emotionally Focused Therapy teaches me that when vulnerability meets safety, love rewrites the nervous system.

• Justice is sacred. To practice trauma-informed care is to believe that survival is holy, and that every act of resistance and healing is a prayer.

• Curiosity is sacred. Therapy invites experimentation. Play, art, breath, and silence open doorways where logic cannot go.

• Connection is sacred. Systems theory reminds me that we are not isolated selves. We are threads woven into families, communities, ecosystems.

• Story is sacred. Narrative therapy honors the myth and meaning we carry, helping us retell ourselves with dignity and hope.

• Union is sacred. In mysticism and mindfulness, silence becomes language. Breath becomes communion.

• Belonging is sacred. Indigenous wisdom teaches that we are not above the earth but within it, held in reciprocity with land, lineage, and ceremony.

The Weaving

To be a healer is to be a weaver. I gather strands of psychology, theology, and lived experience. I hold spirit, self, and system together like threads in a loom.

• Spirit reminds me that healing is never only human effort. There is Mystery moving through us.

• Self reminds me that my own story, wounds, and resilience are part of the work. I am not outside the circle of healing.

• Systems remind me that pain is rarely just individual. It echoes across families, histories, cultures, and structures.

Integration is not a neat conclusion. It is a practice of listening — to clients, to ancestors, to silence, to the earth.

Toward Wholeness

The call is not to mastery but to presence. To lead without domination. To accompany without controlling. To embody safety without pretending to erase pain.

This is trauma-informed leadership. It does not seek to fix but to create conditions where growth, dignity, and truth can breathe. It is leadership that trusts Spirit to do what technique cannot.

Closing

Perhaps the sacred is simply this: the willingness to be changed by relationship. To see liberation as mutual. To honor survival as divine. To let stories, systems, and silence remind us that healing is possible, again and again.

🌱 Grounded Truths: My Theological Walk Through Systems and Spirit

 Theology, for me, never started in a sanctuary. It began in the earth—in the grounded stillness beneath my feet and the tangled roots of connection I could feel long before I had words to name them. It began during my early teenage years in Indiana, on the quiet wooded grounds of Camp Chesterfield, where mystery hovered between the stones and the spirit world felt both near and real.

It didn't emerge from a pulpit but from practices shaped by soil, memory, and the sacredness of presence. As the saying goes, 'Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.' My theology begins by listening to that web—to the past paths of ancestors, the teachings of trees, and the rare, fleeting echoes of unseen communion—and learning how to live in rhythm with its threads.

I now see that this theological rhythm—the seasonal, grounding cadence of returning to sacred truths—has mirrored the very systems that shape our lives. That connection came alive for me as I read Systems Theory in Action by Shelly Smith-Acuña. Her work bridges the clinical with the cosmic, offering a lens that helps name the interplay between self, spirit, and system.

🌿 Theology as Lived Pattern

My Druidic Pagan roots ground theology in land and lineage. In that space, theology is less about dogma and more about relationship—how we belong to each other, to the seasons, to story. Systems Theory in Action speaks to this implicitly: it insists that no person exists in isolation. Every belief, behavior, and breakthrough is shaped by the system around it—family, culture, context.

Smith-Acuña writes that “systems resist change” but can be disrupted through insight and intention. That insight mirrors the Pagan view of transformation: not as punishment or atonement, but as restoration. We don’t cast out imbalance—we reweave the pattern.

🔍 The Hermeneutic of Lived Experience

In Earth-Held Wisdom, my theology paper, I wrote: “Interpreting sacred meaning begins with identity.” Intersectionality—an essential lens from Grace Ji-Sun Kim—showed me that lived experiences filter our sacred understanding. Systems theory reinforced that we are shaped by multiple dynamics at once, all intersecting with our core sense of self.

Smith-Acuña’s acknowledgment of feedback loops and historical repetition helped me consider how both family and religious systems carry unresolved stories. Just as rituals can help heal these echoes, systems thinking gives language to the unseen dynamics we live within—and occasionally disrupt.

↺ Ritual as Recursive Healing

Systems theory is inherently recursive: it spirals through feedback, adaptation, and iteration. So does ritual. Whether preparing for a seasonal Sabbat, drawing tarot, or planting dill in the spring, ritual becomes a tool for transforming internal imbalance into external harmony. It's the sacred version of a system re-setting itself—intuitively, organically, over time.

Shelly Smith-Acuña emphasizes the power of pattern recognition. Paganism does too. From the Wheel of the Year to archetypal myth, Pagan spirituality thrives on recognizing patterns—and then choosing how to dance with them.

📟️ Ministry in the Web

In both systems theory and theology, the web is everything. Ministry is not top-down—it’s emergent. It happens at the dinner table, in the garden, at the bedside of a friend. When Smith-Acuña discusses how systems support healing, I think of Edain McCoy’s writings, where lighting a seasonal incense blend is as sacred as any church liturgy. It’s all connected—because we are.

🎐 Becoming as the Holiest Work

My theological walk is not a straight path. It moves through sensation, intuition, and mystical glimpses that catch me off guard. Systems theory teaches us to anticipate complexity. Acuña’s work gave me language to honor the messiness of transformation without pathologizing it. She reminds us that systems evolve. My theology does too.

In the end, both Smith-Acuña and the sacred texts I carry—like the Mabinogion, my journal, and the Higginbothams’ writings—teach me that becoming is the holiest work of all. Whether I’m navigating family legacies, ritual cycles, or the structure of a Pagan-Christian household, I’m not looking for the answer. I’m looking for the rhythm.

And as both system and spirit affirm: rhythm is everything.