Simone Butler's Blog, page 6
September 7, 2023
Virgo New Moon: Claim Your Turf
When staff at the Meadow Brook Medical Care Facility in Bellaire, MI arrived one recent July morning, they were astonished to find a dog curled up on the couch in the waiting room.…
August 23, 2023
Pisces Full Moon: Capture Your Dream
Esma Gljiva with her “Bosnian Barbie Dolls.”
About a month ago, during her summer vacation, eleven-year-old Esma Gljiva from Sarajevo, Bosnia, started creating folklore-style Barbies with Balkan costumes like headdresses and decorative aprons.…
August 11, 2023
Leo New Moon: Reclaiming Pleasure
Oakland-based Yeye Luisah Teish is a Yoruba priestess and a daughter of Oshun, the African Venus. When I first met Teish in the mid-80s at the Council of Feminine Fire in Ojai, California, she blew me away.…
July 27, 2023
Aquarius Full Moon: Who are Your People?
“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”…
July 11, 2023
Cancer New Moon: Ancestral Inspiration
Artwork by Gayle Porter Hoskins
Once upon a time in the 1830s, a young Englishman named Joseph and a young French woman named Elizabeth fell madly in love. But Elizabeth’s wealthy father, who was Joseph’s employer, refused to let them marry – and disowned his daughter when she eloped.…
June 28, 2023
Capricorn Full Moon: Proactive Grace
In her essential new book, Talking on Eggshells: Soft Skills for Hard Conversations, Sam Horn shares a story about a man whose mother had been in a rest home for three years.…
June 13, 2023
Gemini New Moon: Double Your Pleasure
Still besties – and twin souls!
Miami-based four-year-olds Zuri Copeland and Jia Sarnicola hit it off instantly when they met at school, and have been best friends ever since. The girls, who just turned ten, actually believe themselves to be twins – and they became instant celebrities when their story hit the media in 2017.…
May 30, 2023
Sagittarius Full Moon: Take the High Road
The daughter of a sharecropper, Anna Mae Bullock picked strawberries and cotton as a child. While her mom and dad fought, she wandered the land, playing with the wind and the animals.…
May 14, 2023
Taurus New Moon: Blooming Anew
In the preface to her book, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma, Sister Dang Nghiem recounts a revelatory experience she had a few years back.
After the Buddhist retreat she’d just taught was over, Nghiem was exhausted.…
May 2, 2023
Scorpio Full Moon Eclipse: Shedding Our Skins
Scorpio can be scary. It’s the shadows that lurk beneath the surface, the ferocity of feelings we dare not express, the stark reality of death. Yet it’s also the resilience and quiet power of the serpent, a creature which sheds its skin to allow for further growth and to remove parasites attached to their old skin.…
