CHORNOBYL VEGETABLE GARDEN AT FULL MOON watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

ART AT THE ALTAR

PISCES FULL MOON

My most recent written work has been exploring the theme of remaining human and humane in an age of dehumanising artifice. Which aspects of our human essence do we need to protect from the potentially erosive qualities of the digital realm and the algorithms that paint a false picture of the reality most of us encounter daily? Does such inquiry make a logical step toward a wider understanding of the nature of reality itself which, whether experienced through an analogue or digital prism, remains subject to the vicissitudes of human perception? How do we ‘know’ what we know? Can we ‘unknow’ what we think we know (the summation of human constructs, social and cultural conditioning) in order to find Truth (with a capital T)?

It’s a curious thing, but as I sit in my Surrey studio watching the afternoon light perform its slow glow smudge across this half-finished, undistinguished canvas, I am struck by how aggressively our modern world seeks to cure us of any capacity for mystery. We live under the tyranny of the explainable. Between the rigid, binary logic of our technology and the loud, transactional theatre of politics and commerce, we have become a species obsessed with optimization. We want everything faster, smoother, and devoid of friction.

Yet, as the English zoologist and surreal painter Desmond Morris pointed out in his 2013 book The Artistic Ape, when you strip away the bureaucratic plumbing of politics and the relentless shopping spree of commerce, humanity has historically been left with only three genuine, evolutionary obsessions: art, science, and religion. He suggested it is these three behaviours alone that separate us from all other species.

He defined art as ‘making the extraordinary out of the ordinary - to entertain the brain’, science as ‘making the simple out of the complicated - to understand our existence’, and religion as ‘making the believable out of the unbelievable - to reduce the fear of dying’.

In examining the place of religion in the human condition, we might at first glance consider Morris’s definition a bit dry, perhaps even slightly clinical. It suggests a comfort blanket woven from cosmic bedtime stories to keep the existential monsters at bay. But if you look closer, there is a far more beautiful, alchemical truth at play. Religion, in its most fundamental, transformative sense - from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind together’ - is the human psyche’s wholly admirable attempt to bridge the gap between our delicate, mortal meat suits and the infinite, terrifyingly immortal mystery of the cosmos. And historically, the methodology we have regularly employed to build that bridge has been art.

Before we had written scriptures, theology degrees, or cathedral gift shops, we had the oral tradition of storytelling and the visual idol. Consider our early ancestors, huddled in the damp draft of a cave or standing beneath the colossal, indifferent canopy of a prehistoric forest. The world was a chaotic, unpredictable theatre of thunder, predators, and sudden, inexplicable death. To survive (let alone prosper) humans needed to find order in the madness. We needed to make the unbelievable idea of an easier life believable.

And so, we told stories and we carved. We engraved spirals and rings into stone. We took a piece of mammoth ivory or a lump of river mud and fashioned the Venus of Willendorf (c 30,000 yrs) and the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel (c 40,000 yrs). These were not mere decorative items to match one’s cave soft furnishings; these representative effigies were vessels of the sacred. By capturing, even personifying, the terrifying, invisible forces of nature - fertility, wildness, death - and refining their essence into a physical, touchable object, humanity tamed the chaos. The disorder was turned into a ‘thing’ around which thought could gravitate and organise. The idol became a focus point for our collective hope and petitions, a tangible receptacle holding our spiritually led aspirations for survival in the face of physical adversity. In effect, extraneous desirable ‘stuff’ was born.

“All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.” - William Butler Yeats

There’s a strong argument to suggest that art did more than merely serve the fledgling course of religion; art potentially birthed it. The pagan artefact became a powerful and effective lightning rod mediating the unpredictable currents of the unexplainable and divine into the earth of daily reality.

This sacred, integrated impulse didn’t vanish with the arrival of modern civilization, even if we have swapped our limestone caverns for neo-Gothic cathedrals and white-walled public galleries. In 1996, I found myself playing with the provenance of this ancient relationship when creating work for The Twelve Saints of Manchester, a solo show held at the Manchester City Art Gallery.

At the time, I was working as the artist-in-residence at Chetham’s School of Music, a stone’s throw from the medieval heart of a city built on the relentless, gritty engines of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester is now a thriving hub of cosmopolitan modernity, all crystal towers and canal bars, but in places it still honours its grand Victorian architecture, damp cobblestones and politically never reneges on its fiercely proud, working-class roots. It is a city that has known the heights of economic triumph and the deep, grey valleys of industrial decline.

For the exhibition, I painted the portraits of 12 entities - Manchester’s ‘Saints’. They were not historical, canonized figures of orthodox Christianity, nor were they immaculate, gilded icons designed to foster emulation or obedience. Several of them bore an uncanny resemblance in name and appearance to characters performing on the contemporary Manchester scene. There was Noel - Patron Saint of Oracy; Dolly - Patron Saint of Fashion; Eric - Patron Saint of Self Defence with hints of messrs Gallagher, Parton and Cantona respectively.

Others resembled people I had encountered personally in my time in the city. These depictions, complete with attendant halos, were purposely polemical, verging on heretical, in one case showing the imposing figure of an anthropomorphised holy cow (Nandy - Patron Saint of Religion) wearing informal archbishop collar with both Islamic Crescent and Star of David badges on opposing suit lapels. There were a couple of official complaints but commendably the gallery remained supportive of the non-denominational validity of the work.

The notion was that this special breed of being were making their own, often unseen and innocuous, contributions to the quality of life in Manchester. The exhibition blurb suggested that the paintings “provide the opportunity for the viewer to experience some of their wonderfully magical, healing powers.” Under the watchful, unconditionally loving gaze of the Saints, viewers were invited to honour the champions in their midst, those Mancunians unerringly and selflessly determined to bring joy and peace to life in the city. The images were, in essence, of modern pagan idols, a pantheon of benevolence and seemed very in keeping with the huge cultural shifts happening in the city at the time.

A key intent in the work was to evoke that same ancient, animist feeling: the sense that an inanimate object, through the slow, concentrated focus of the artist’s hand, could become charged with a spiritual presence. Standing in the gallery, surrounded by those dignified silent sentinels, visitors weren’t being asked to subscribe to a specific dogma or fear an impending hellfire. They were being invited to pause, to step out of the frantic white noise of the city outside, and to feel the weight of their own awareness. It was a further invitation to recognize that our desire for sanctity - our need to feel part of an indivisible, perfect whole - is still very much alive, even in the middle of a rain-slicked northern metropolis.

Today, we live in a world that feels increasingly fragmented, scarred by war, ideological division, and the dehumanizing screens of the digital age. We are constantly encouraged to view ourselves as separate entities, trapped in our own tiny, polarized bubbles, screaming at ‘the other’ across an apparently yawning, culturally devised but ultimately non-existent, chasm.

But if we return to the shared lineage of art and religion, we find a powerful, healing antidote to our modern malaise. Both art and the true spiritual impulse require us to surrender the illusion of separation. When you stand in front of a painting that moves you to tears, or when you sit in silence beneath the branches of an ancient wood, the engrained boundaries of your ego temporarily dissolve. You are no longer a consumer, a voter, or a data point to be targeted by an algorithm. You are simply a witness to the profound, shared mystery of being alive.

If this cherished understanding - that there is ultimately no separation - holds true, then whatever we do to the ‘other’ is an act directed straight at the Self. To harm is to harm Self; to love is to love Self.

Humanity’s ongoing spiritual challenge is not about escaping this world or securing a golden ticket to a sterile, cloud-based afterlife. It is about actively cultivating a deep, empathetic reverence for the living planet and the diverse, beautifully flawed human family that inhabits it.

“Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it, take with you your all.” - Kahlil Gibran

By bringing the sacred back into our creative endeavors, we defy the cold, reductionist materialism that seeks to turn our lives into a series of monetized transactions. When we paint and sculpt, when we create spaces for shared reflection, we are building modern-day altars to our common humanity. We are offering a quiet, persistent prayer for peace and prosperity - not the prosperity of endless economic growth, which is currently driving our biosphere toward a cliff, but a prosperity of the spirit, rooted in community, fellowship, and love.

So, let us look to our past, to the cave walls and the cathedral arches, not to mimic their forms, but to remember the eternal creative values that inspired them. Let us continue to make our mark, to instill all that’s Good, True and Beautiful into our output in thought, word and deed, that we may manifest benefit to All. For in the end, it is through these small, defiant, and deeply humane acts of reverent creation that we will remember how to heal ourselves and our planet.

“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” - Mother Teresa

Mark Weighton is an artist and writer whose work explores the animist vision of the interconnected nature of existence.

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CLOUD BURST watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

ARTFUL LIVING

CAPRICORN FULL MOON

I have recently become preoccupied with the importance of celebrating basic human characteristics as a constructive flip side to the projected rise of AI in an evolving ‘post truth’ era. I have found myself writing more than once of the value in remaining human and humane while the world presented on back lit screens everywhere, reflects consciously dehumanising strategies and behaviour that are failing both people and planet.

In my art work too, an exploration of what it means to be human has found its way into the act of being human through drawing, painting, sculpture. My work, from little doodles to grand canvasses, becomes a statement of my presence. While they in no way justify my existence they provide evidence of that existence, a series of ephemeral, existential graffiti tags on the architecture and territory of my mortality. More pertinently perhaps, me cocking a leg and pissing, doglike, on the street corners and sign posts of my world in the hope that something of interest picks up the scent before rain inevitably washes my pungent, best laid potentials into the gutter. A tad fatalistic but you hopefully get the picture.

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,

A cloudburst doesn’t last all day.

All things must pass,

All things must pass away.” - George Harrison

I have cited AI as the ultimate lie, “a statistical echo of our past, masquerading as a participant in our future,” a cornerstone of the argument for democratically devised controls of AI technology and an immediate moratorium on the advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI). There are an awful lot of people in the techie ‘know’ pointing out the hazards of unfettered development, some of which pose an existential threat to our species.

But thankfully, my limited emotional spectrum and intellect rarely provides a direct pathway down that worrying rabbit hole. As I see it, my job as an artist is not to dwell on the depressing state of any particular nation but to challenge the perception that any human authored status quo should be blindly accepted if not for the benefit of all. My job, when operating at my best, becomes one of championing the Good, the True and the Beautiful without getting bogged down by the rest of the shit. It could be argued there’s a degree of denial involved in the process but I prefer to maintain that unless someone remembers and consciously expresses the inherent goodness in being alive there’s a chance the collective forgets that rightful inheritance altogether.

As the poet philosopher John Moriarty asks and answers in the introduction to his recently republished book Dreamtime:

“What are poets for in a destitute time?.... Poets must be healers - healers who, having healed themselves, heal us culturally, heal us, or help to heal us, in the visions and myths and rituals by which we live… Out of a healed past a healed present will grow. Out of a re-realized past a re-realized present will emerge.”

I concur. My job is to dream the beauty of the present by remembering the eternal creative values exercised in our past. Reductionism may simplify our planetary evolution to a fortuitous cosmic quirk but one should never underestimate the role played by human choice in the process of its unfolding. It is in the work of artists, the telling and retelling of our stories and our choices, that we devise the informed landscape of our present and future.

In his 2013 book The Artistic Ape, a “brisk ride through three million years of the visual arts”, the English zoologist, ethologist and surreal painter Desmond Morris found it necessary to provide his own definitions of the uniquely human activities that we do not share with other animals. He suggested that there were three main ways in which human behaviour differs from that of all other species - the pursuit of art, the pursuit of science and the pursuit of religion. He maintained that all other so-called ‘higher activities’ such as politics and commerce, are in reality no more than ways of organising human society to satisfy its basic needs and, in addition, pursue those three key goals.

He defined the pursuit of art, science and religion as follows:

Art is making the extraordinary out of the ordinary - to entertain the brain.

Science is making the simple out of the complicated - to understand our existence.

Religion is making the believable out of the unbelievable - to reduce the fear of dying.

The book set out to examine how humanity’s unusual evolutionary story encouraged art to develop from its modest beginnings to become one of the three great obsessions of human existence. From acknowledged grunts to the written word, from whistles to the complexity of the grand piano, from physical movements to the Royal Ballet, from marks made on cave walls to a pile of concrete slabs on a gallery floor, art has punctuated our narrative. It irrefutably represents who we were and projects what we might become.

If art is, as Desmond Morris suggests, the act of making the extraordinary out of the ordinary to entertain the brain, then what on earth are we doing delegating that divine folly to a silicon box of tricks?

I have always considered myself a bit of a creative magpie, frequently lining my studio nest with shiny references and ideas pilfered shamelessly from the history of art. But there is an unbridgeable chasm between a human artist stealing a bit of Renaissance composition or mimicking a Hockney colour scheme because it makes their heart beat faster, and an AI scraping the creative endeavour of billions of souls to generate an image of an astronaut riding a unicycle on Mars in the style of Rembrandt, simply because some bloke in marketing pressed ‘return’. One is an act of deep, appreciative love; the other is a data heist.

The true hazard of this unmitigated techie push toward an AGI future isn’t just that the machines might turn around and terminate us in a fit of sci-fi peak efficiency. The more pressing, immediate danger is that we are willingly whittling ourselves away, dulling our own senses, and opting for a life lived exclusively in the smooth, friction-free margins of a digital template. We are systematically trading our sensory awe and wonder for the convenience of a thumb-swipe.

Let us return briefly to the humble act of painting, or drawing, or indeed, making a mess. For over three decades, my studio has been a sanctuary for testing the limits of my own domestic and physical incompetence. A human painting is an incredibly inefficient thing. It requires a body to drag itself across a floor, dirty its fingers with pigment, and engage in a deeply vulnerable, often deeply humiliating physical dance with a stubborn piece of woven cloth and paint.

“Making a painting is so hard, it makes you crazy. Before even the vicissitudes of color, you have to negotiate tone, silhouette, line, space, zone, area, layer, scale, speed, and mass while interacting with a meta-surface of meaning, thought, text, sign, language, intention, concept, and history; you have to go your own way, to cut away from your heroes and influences, and still be utterly conscious and literate about the discourse. You have to simultaneously diagnose, predict and ignore the past, present and future, all at once; you have to remember and to forget at the same time. You have to both deny and embrace all your impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and your subjects, to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same time to cast a gimlet eye upon it.“ - Amy Sillman

In the frustrating moments when the ‘mistake’ happens and the neat, human-authored plan dissolves into the muddy pool of its own willfulness, true creativity occurs. It is an act of real-time negotiation with the laws of gravity and the fluid mechanics of paint. The artist must stop, look, take a deep breath, and adapt in presence of that very real unfolding moment.

An algorithm cannot make a mistake because it doesn’t have an ego to bruise or a cup of fairtrade coffee to accidentally dip its paintbrush into. It simply calculates the next most probable pixel. It is entirely devoid of jeopardy. When we remove jeopardy from human performance, whether it is a jazz musician experimenting with tune and timing, or a ballet dancer pushing their physical vessel to the absolute brink of balance, we remove the very frequency that makes our cells vibrate in sympathy and empathy. Instead, we are left with a perfectly rendered, entirely sterile digital vacuum.

If we choose to outsource our creativity to an artificial oracle, we aren’t just saving time; we risk abandoning our rightful creative inheritance. We are telling our ancestors, who blew charcoal dust over their hands onto the cold stone walls of Chauvet Cave to proclaim “I exist,” that their three-million-year-old evolutionary journey can be effectively summarized and replaced by a subscription-based software package.

And what of the precious planet we inhabit while our lives play out by facsimile on screen? The biosphere doesn’t give a personified toss about our digital metrics. It has no need. It is, however, directly affected by our choices.

When I was involved in creating an interactive sculpture installation for the UN COP26 Climate Change Conference a few years back - a structure built entirely from recycled plastic packaging waste - the objective wasn’t to present a pristine, optimized solution to global warming. It was to build something tangible, scarred, and charred, yet embodying a remote, stubborn optimism that all might not yet be lost to the climate inferno. The piece operated as a physical forum where real people could sit and rest, drink an actual coffee, look each other in the eye, and share the weight of our shared ecological narrative.

That is what art does when it functions as a cultural healer. It doesn’t lecture. It creates a space for positively inspired action that adds to the wellspring of collective consciousness from which we all may draw in hours of need.

When we engage in the slow, tactile pursuit of artistic or creative endeavour, we are forcing ourselves to stop, step out of the frantic white noise of modern political and commercial management, to recalibrate our sensibilities and listen to an entirely different frequency. We are choosing to actively participate in the creative flow of the biosphere rather than merely consuming it through a glass interface.

So, there’s a strong case to keep doodling on the backs of envelopes, even as we binge-watch. Let us continue to fling paint at canvas with an absolute disregard for the domestic cleanup that must follow. Let us play musical instruments badly in our bedrooms, dance like uncoordinated herons in our kitchens, and write poems that will never, ever be optimized for an online search engine.

We must do it because it is beautifully, magnificently useless to the machines, yet entirely essential to the survival of the human spirit. It is our existential graffiti tag on the architecture of our mortality. And when the evolutionary rain storms of time inevitably come to wash our dreams out to sea, at least we will have made our short lived authentic mark, our contribution - living, irrefutable proof that we are here, we are awake, and we are gloriously, unforgettably human.

“So come, my friends, be not afraid.

We are so lightly here.

It is in love that we are made;

In love we disappear.” - Leonard Cohen

Mark Weighton is an artist and writer whose work (in between hedgerow naps) explores the animist vision of the interconnected nature of existence.

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NOSTALGIUM watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

STAY HUMAN!

SAGITTARIUS FULL MOON

For over three decades, my art studio has served as a creative crucible for the exploration of life’s essential interconnected nature. It is a laboratory in which the elements of the artist’s hand and the unfolding of the natural world merge and alchemically bond. In between paintings, through my studio window, I watch a small patch of ancient Surrey woodland constantly evolve. Nothing is stationary there despite the occasional illusion of stillness. Everything is in motion. Everything relates to everything else, whether in space, through the mycorrhizal fungal networks communicating through the thin ribbons of mycelium in the soil or the consciousness that infuses and animates the intelligence coursing through every aspect of existence. There is no meaningful separation in any of it other than our own misguided perception that there is.

I love the pace of the woodland. I love its smell; its predators and prey; the symbiotic interdependence of its individuated constituents; its harmonious balance; its grace; its autonomous creativity. Most of all, I love its evident intelligence.

Under the illuminating focus of this week’s Sagittarius Full Moon the role humanity plays in that natural order of intelligence sits at something of an existential crossroads. In astrological tradition Sagittarius is the sign of the archer aiming for higher truth, as protector of the wild, a keen defender of nature’s untamed spirit. Under its lunar light, the shadowy target of our own creative intelligence is being cast in stark, industrially automated relief. The shadow that looms largest across our tiny neighbourhood in the cosmic landscape is cast by the greatest fiction in human history; the biggest lie of all those lies we have come to tell ourselves on a daily basis. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ultimate hubristic evolution, Artificial General Intelligence, (AGI) is as dark as a shadow gets.

There comes a moment in the growth of any tangled thicket - to use a woodland metaphor - where the brambles are so dense that they no longer provide shelter and begin to strangle the life out of the soil that feeds them. Nutrition from the canopy struggles to reach the earth. The warmth of the sun and reviving moisture from rain are also deflected by the foliage above. The ground beneath the thicket, dries, cracks and becomes barren until eventually even the brambles can no longer be supported and die back. Has humanity reached an equivalent moment? Are our recent ‘intelligently’ devised means of self-protection, the complex, impenetrable thickets of our own misperception, choking and destroying the naturally intelligent ecosystems on which we depend? Conflating ‘intelligence’ with the destruction of the very biosphere that birthed our species doesn’t strike me as being very intelligent at all.

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To remain human, to remain humane, and to protect the living planet that sustains us, we must start to have the courage to put down the digital tools that are rapidly becoming our masters. There is a strong case to, quite literally, dismantle the machine before the machine dismantles, or actively destroys, anything that does not align with its expanding, completely illusory sense of what is ‘real’.

Sagittarius demands honesty. It loathes the reductionist, meat suit mentality that views humans as mere data processors, a grossly oversimplified statistic in the means of production. Throughout the 21st century, we have been fed a diet of digital shadows, curated by algorithms that isolate us in darkened rooms, staring at glowing glass. What’s more, we’ve lapped it up. We’ve devoured the toxic concoction. We argue about the shape of the shadows - the latest AI-generated image, the deepfake speech, the automated essay - oblivious to the fact that the shadow presented is not the thing itself, a mere facsimile of something real once felt or experienced before the post-truth era took root, and mostly a waste of time and energy. We piss our heartfelt emotions up against a meaningless wall of our own uncaring design and wonder why we spend our non scrolling hours exhausted.

AI is the ultimate lie. It is a statistical echo of our past, masquerading as a participant in our future. As a defender of the simple realities of painting, artificial intelligence lacks the gravity of the brush or dripping paint finding its own path down a canvas. It has no understanding of the joy felt in the creative process of painting regardless of outcome: a mark made, a note sung, a movement danced. When we delegate our creativity, our judgment, and our human connections to a silicon oracle, we are not being augmented. We are being filed, before the possibility of being erased.

The Sagittarius Full Moon illuminates this deception. The energetic signature of this fire sign is meant to light the way toward wisdom, not to fuel the server farms that are currently consuming our planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Every query we send into the void of an AI model requires a staggering amount of water and electricity - resources stolen from the very environment we claim to cherish. To pursue AGI without conscious, democratically governed constraint is to pursue the vague possibility of spectres at the expense of the living.

Keeping it Real

I have written in previous articles of the “impersonal connection with generic creative activity,” running throughout my art practice: the idea that my creative output is merely a reflection of the evolutionary lineage of life itself - a means of personal alignment with the real deal. I will always champion the sanctity in the handmade - in the human focus required to thread a needle or the patience to wait for a watercolor wash to dry. These small acts are testimonies to our existence.

AGI seeks to automate and digitally commodify this testimony. It aims to bypass the struggle, the mental fog, the creative blocks and long periods of unhurried, quiet contemplation that lead to true insight. If we allow a machine to ‘think’ for us, we gradually begin to lose the capacity to feel. We become “unconscious” individuals as Jung warned - puppets to patterns we no longer control.

“Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.” - Carl Jung

The humanitarian crisis of AI is already here. It is not just the loss of jobs, but the loss of meaning. When the distinction between a human voice and a synthetic one dissolves, our unending union with the diversity of existence is severed with one surgical slice of a digital blade. We are training ourselves to be bad listeners and observers, far too readily accepting of the ‘one percent lie’ wrapped in a slick interface, or swift to abandon the empathetic instinct that helps us understand the needs of others.

A Call for an Immediate Moratorium on AI

I was fortunate to recently stumble into an unusually informed pub conversation on the marketplace development of AI with a tech sector business solutions advisor. His observations were stark on a number of fronts. Primarily he cited indicators that the current levels of financial investment (needed to attain the holy grail of AGI) couldn’t continue without evidence, or even a plan, of a return. According to their own (probably conservative) figures, the tech giant Open AI has to burn $660 billion of debt before it can turn a profit. Open AI is just one of the increasingly few huge tech companies that currently drive the chronically overvalued global market tech ‘bubble’. The increasing consolidation of those world markets in so few hands makes an economic crash more likely as a profitable economic model currently doesn’t exist.

In predicting that investment bubble will burst, my friend thankfully pronounced that humanity is, for the moment, safe from immediate extermination at the hands of its own AI creation, however he did outline the potential for ruinous hardship en route to economic melt down.

• A ‘race to the bottom’ by large companies: a competitive scenario where businesses progressively lower their standards - reducing wages, cutting corners on quality, disregarding safeguarding, environmental and ethical stewardship, or slashing prices - to gain a competitive advantage or attract investment. This destructive spiral often leads to poorer working conditions, lower-quality products, and reduced social welfare, prioritizing short-term profit over long-term sustainability.

• The upshot is likely to be mass white collar unemployment. White collar workers hold most debt (mortgages) so mass defaults on those loans could potentially trigger a house market and banking crash (circa 2008). Messy, with less likelihood, post 2008, of Governments being able to raise finance to prop up the lenders.

• The consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few technocrats with dubious agendas that run the AI companies, will make these individuals richer and therefore more powerful than most nation states. Increasingly Governments have failed to impose international levers to tax them so the money made leaves the economic systems directed toward the welfare of all for the bulging pockets of the few.

• Add to this the desperate race to the bottom of the tech giants themselves, laying off tens of thousands of workers to ‘prove’ the efficacy of AI to future investors, at the same time investing in each other’s portfolios in the vain hope of maintaining the unsustainable bubble across the sector. It’s a growing recipe for disaster.

The beast needs to be tamed and harnessed so that appropriate checks and balances can be applied to its development that are in the best interest of all people and planet - not merely to gain a competitive edge. It might sound drastic, but the hungry monster needs to be stopped in its tracks now and here’s why. The consumerist juggernaut fueling the AGI dream/nightmare cannot be sated. It has no concept of ‘enough’. Consumerism requires more to always be more and a key aspirational signature of info acquisition and storage. Its base drive is the fatiguing virus of human dissatisfaction. It will always want more because we always want more. More stuff, more info (however fallacious), more power, more resources.

Not until we face up to our own rampant dissatisfaction and reconnect with those life enhancing experiences that rarely cost us, or the planet, a bean, can we eventually have what we all want: peace and happiness. Until then we will continue to gorge on the most tasteless, illusory red herring of all time, miserable, unfulfilled with a side order of anxiety laden, digital guilt. Ironically, we will continue in our needless pursuit of the unreal when the true beauty of reality is always in plain sight, until finally, the only evidence left to discover of our post-post-apocalyptic society for future archaeologists (presumably from other solar systems) will be the non-biodegradable husks of our hubris. We do not need more intelligence; we need more presence.

“Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.” - David Byrne

The Sagittarius Full Moon can serve as a final, clarifying beacon, stripping away the digital smog to reveal a singular truth: there is no substitute for the visceral pulse of the living world. While AI functions as an elaborate mirror of our past, it is essentially cold, derivative, and mathematically predictable. By comparison the intelligence of the ancient Surrey woodland is a symphony of the present, effortlessly evolving to maintain its equilibrium in any given circumstance. The natural world is a spontaneous, carbon-based wisdom that does not require a server farm to exist, nor does it ask for our data in exchange for its beauty. Its inherent, enduring intelligence presides over every living cell in the ongoing conversation of existence.

The self defeating thorny thicket of our own making may be dense, yet the path out is found not through faster processing, but through deeper presence. The hand that holds the brush, the soil that nurtures the mycelium, and the heart that feels the weight of a moment are the true architects of reality. Artificial intelligence can simulate the shape of a leaf or the cadence of a poem, but it can never replicate the sacred spark within entropy, our inseparable part within the organic cycles of birth and decay - the glorious, uncalculated imperfections that constitute the unified perfection of existence.

We can continue to worship at the silicon altar and sleepwalk into a frictionless, hollow future, or we can reclaim our wakeful agency in the present. By choosing the tangible over the digital; the real over the unreal; the interconnected forest over the isolating algorithm, we can help honour and preserve the sanctity of the human spirit and all it touches. The real world is not a problem to be solved by AGI; it is a miracle to be inhabited. Humanity is this evolutionary miraculous moment’s lucky temporary resident, so let’s not waste it. Let’s shelve the glowing glass screen more regularly and step back into the light of the authentic, where intelligence is not programmed, but witnessed as divinely omnipresent.

“The marketing of life is complete when we find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see through a screen darkly.” - Toni Morrison

Mark Weighton is an artist and writer whose work explores the animist vision of the interconnected nature of existence.

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SEXISTENTIALISM watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

SIT DOWN AND LISTEN!

SCORPIO FULL MOON

Artists over the years have often been torn between spending time looking at and appreciating other artists’ work and time avoiding it. Some speak of the importance of art history in order to fully understand their part in the lineage of art practice and practitioners, while others find the influence of past and future artists an impediment or distraction from their own desire for creative integrity and originality.

“Comparison is the thief of joy” - attributed to Theodore Roosevelt

Being something of a creative magpie, I recognise my studio work is an uneasy composite of shiny influences and stolen references that occasionally borders on plagiarism, albeit carefully disguised. External ideas feed internal dialogues, often as a result of something read or seen that relates to my painting and sculpture.

I’m not unduly worried though, as it’s fairly evident that plagiarism has rarely stopped visual artists from achieving notable success. For example, it could be argued that the remarkable landscape paintings of the Group of 7, a collective of Canadian painters from the 1920s were of fundamental importance to the developing work of the renowned contemporary British painter Peter Doig who was raised in Canada from the age of 7 to 19. His monumental landscapes from the 1990s owe the Group of 7 everything, yet the sale of one of his paintings would likely have eclipsed the entire art related earnings of all Group 7 artists put together, even when inflation is taken into account. Peter Doig’s highest auction price is currently $39.9 million (£30 million) paid in 2021 for the 1990 painting Swamped.

Doig has never sought to deny the Group of 7 influence, perhaps even traded on it initially as he built an international audience. His comprehensive show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1998 blew me away, but it wasn’t until a decade later that I started to make the obvious connections with the Group of 7 and how much Doig had ‘borrowed’ from their oeuvre. Nonetheless, I am grateful to have found the Doig progenitors and the paintings of Tom Thomson in particular. Comparatively, Thomson’s 1916 painting Ragged Oaks sold at auction in 2021 for $1.5 million. Hardly a snip of course but for anyone who might be interested, my own work sells for significantly less and I am currently quite happy to consider offers for paintings under the $1 million mark. Bargain.

My magpie art practice hovers between acknowledging my modest place in the relatively recent cultural phenomenon of art being inseparable from the artist as personality (arguably fully birthed in the Italian renaissance 14th to 16th centuries) and my inherent, impersonal connection with generic creative activity: the evolutionary lineage of life itself. The shiny stuff lining my studio nest is the stuff nicked from my artistic forebears and peers; the nest in which that fluff collects is built of something more enduring.

“To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.” - E. O. Wilson

A creative night out

Occasionally I get invited to attend arts events and most recently the cultural editor of a national newspaper asked me to join him at a music concert in the Barbican Centre, London. I hadn’t previously heard of the artist but my friend kindly thought it might interest me. The Barbican is among my favourite London music venues for clarity of sound so accepting the invitation was a no-brainer. It turned out the artist, Oneohtrix Point Never (the working name of American music producer and composer Daniel Lopatin) is signed to Warp Records, a label I have been buying music from since I discovered the album Amber by Autechre in Piccadilly Records, Manchester in the early 90s.

As it transpired, the Electronica music genre doesn’t appear to have moved on appreciably from my ‘Madchester’ days and I could hear the prominent echoes of Autechre’s masterpiece throughout Lopatin’s performance. Even the associated visuals projected onto the stage backdrop were something of a throwback, themselves a digital facsimile of the genuinely innovative film projection backdrops of Sheffield bands Cabaret Voltaire and 23 Skidoo back in the day.

I enjoyed the gig without at any point being emotionally moved by proceedings, as I sometimes am during really great live performances. One can appear a curmudgeonly purist, wistfully lamenting the ongoing demise of analogue musical instruments played live in an auditorium, as compared to the now ubiquitous ‘producer’ standing behind a big table, ostensibly twiddling a series of desktop knobs to ‘live mix’ a soundtrack that has already been recorded. Perhaps a sense of jeopardy in the live performance has been lost but personally, I don’t have a problem with it. Ultimately, sound is sound to me. The authenticity of noise is irrefutably real regardless of the medium through which it is delivered.

In most gigs I find the visual aspects of the performance a distraction from the music so often choose to close my eyes and retreat into my own receptive world of sensory awe and wonder. This aurally inspired world is almost entirely abstract and nourishes my perception of musical artists ‘painting’ with sound. I am weightless, formless while listening, and the connections in space between my auditory, sensory experience and the carefully arranged vibrations of sound often lead to simultaneous ‘paintings’ emerging in my own consciousness as the music unfolds. On rare occasions, a music concert can feel like a creative provocation, an awakening into a hyper sensitive creative state where possibility appears infinite, and I never want the ecstatic sensations coursing up and down my spine to stop.

This concert did end, after two and a half hours. It had gone in a timeless flash. As the second composition of the final encore closed I realised I was in danger of missing my last train home. My companion very kindly accompanied me to the lobby, curtailing his own enjoyment of what were likely to be the ‘big hits’ at the end of the show. We made our goodbyes while the music continued in the auditorium. I wandered alone, slightly light headed, to the nearest tube and caught the last train out of Waterloo without concern. I crept into bed at around 1 in the morning.

I slept incredibly well, a deep untroubled sleep without dreams that I could recall, and woke rejuvenated, invigorated yet calm despite the late night out. My beloved turned to me on her pillow in an early morning daze and enquired how the concert had gone. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been moved. The music had been neither innovative in a genre that prides itself on innovation, nor emotive; the projected images had been distracting and largely forgettable; the artist didn’t really engage with the audience but…. overall the evening had been a pleasant one.

And yet, I mused, there appeared to be a delayed response to the previous night’s entertainment. The fall out, the living evidence of my bodily experience as I lay stock still in the bed beside her, was an unusually tangible sense of well-being, not consciously felt for some while. I felt wonderful, irrefutably alive to my embodied presence, physically, mentally and spiritually. There was a becalming flavour to the heightened awareness, perhaps in collusion with the tail end of a frenetic week that sunny Saturday morning, but I gradually attributed the unmistakably joyous state to something else.

It dawned on me that the concert had provided, for the first time in over a year, an opportunity to sit still for a period of two and a half hours and do nothing - nothing other than listen. The music had seemed largely incidental while nonetheless being a central focus for the intensity of my listening. On reflection, I felt as if in listening, in opening my physicality to that interplay of vibrating air, I had opened every cell of my body to a new frequency. It felt as if there had been a cleansing, that every part of my physical vessel and being had been permeated, oscillating in time and tune to every sound received. I should give Danny ONP his dues, under his diligent musical guidance some kind of realignment seemed to have happened, a healing in some measure.

The gentle, luxuriously bed bound post gig analysis reminded me once again of the immense value of sitting still and listening intently to sound; engaging sensorially with something tangibly real. The Saturday morning sense of well-being hung around for a while and inevitably passed (as all things must) but I resolved to listen without extraneous distraction more regularly in all subsequent health and happiness regimes.

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” - John Lubbock

Listening in the dark

This year, both the Pagan festival of Beltane and Scorpio Full Moon fall on the first day of May. In astrological circles, Scorpio is considered to have a darker, mysterious side cloaked in silent vigilance. While the northern hemisphere begins its ascent into the lush, sensory abundance of spring and early summer, this particular lunation acts as a psychological counterweight, hinting at the need to look beneath the flowering surface at the roots that sustain it. Scorpio isn’t great at dealing in pleasantries or the superficial; it is the sign of the hidden, the transformative, and the regenerative.

In the Scorpionic realm, listening is recalibrated from a passive intake of data into a profound act of feeling into the shadows. This moon invites us to move beyond the literal - the mere vibration of air against the eardrum - and attend to the subtext of the unsaid or unheard. It is a time to witness the often neglected shifts of emotion that move beneath words and actions, recognizing that our best communication regularly begins where language falters.

“God speaks to us every day, only we don’t know how to listen.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Practicing this wider understanding of listening during such a fertile lunar window probably requires some shedding of the ego’s defensive armor in order to find ways to be truly receptive, open to experience and available for learning. Heaven knows, to be open to each other, whether friend or foe in the challenging commonality of human experience, might be a good start.

In allowing ourselves to be receptive, to truly listen with our heart, soul and cellular structure, our skin and bones, our intuition and shared history over and above our intellect, we might yet reclaim the boundaried, barren battlefields of fear and suffering to cultivate new pastures of understanding where the fruit of joy can thrive for the benefit of All.

“Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it” - David Hockney

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HOCKNEY’S CARPET watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

WHO’S FOOLING WHO?

LIBRA FULL MOON

For over thirty years, my painting studio has been a sanctuary for exploring the interconnectedness of all things - a place where the boundaries between canvas, artist and biosphere regularly dissolve into puddles of intuitively daubed paint. It represents a landscape of sorts, a different perspective, removed from the one I would otherwise inhabit full of daily domestic routine and convention. Hanging out in the studio, occasionally committing to creative activity, allows a distinct, more detached state of mind to emerge. It sometimes approaches a truthfulness: simply me (whatever that is) and some materials being arranged in different ways into temporal outcomes. The landscape unfolds in me, through me and around me - an evolutionary microcosm as creative practice.

But of late, as I look out across the calming evolutionary macrocosm of the woodland beyond the studio windows, I find myself less able to detach myself from the nagging persistence of the current digital and political horizon. Any interconnectedness has felt less like a divine web and more like the tangled thicket of brambles at the end of my garden that my controlling nature can’t abide. Despite the thorns, I return time and again to mercilessly hack back the unruly mess in search of order but the enemy keeps growing and spreading…..welcome to the Libra Full Moon of March 2026.

In the astrological theatre, Libra is the arbiter of balance, the cosmic diplomat holding the scales. Usually, this lunation is an invitation to find harmony in our relationships and, from our peculiarly human perspective, we are unmistakably in relationship with everything: me here, that there; me and you; us and them. But this year, the scales seem out of whack; not just wobbling, they appear to have been repurposed as a catapult for the grotesque, the absurd and fallacious world of alternative facts. Stuff just isn’t making sense. We lurch from one falsehood to the next barely knowing who or what to trust.

“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.” - Stephen King

Ours is an era where lying in public office has moved from a regrettable scandal to a viable career strategy. It used to be that if a politician was caught deceiving the public they’d resign and find themselves in the ensuing years ‘spending more time with their family’ (usually a lie in itself). Now, a blatant deception is simply a narrative pivot around which narcissistic tendencies can blossom.

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” - Albert Einstein

The hallucinations on social media are even more distorted. Our feeds are governed by algorithms that willingly sacrifice truth on the altar of engagement. We are fed a diet of digital shadows, increasingly fabricated by AI, curated to keep us nodding or fuming and always scrolling, while the platforms themselves perpetuate the ultimate lie: that we are ‘connected’ when we are actually more isolated than ever, staring at glowing glass in darkened rooms.

Lost in the Digital Shadows

Which brings me neatly to the pertinent philosophical allegory of Plato’s Cave. For those who skipped that particular philosophy lecture, back in the ancient Greek day, goodtime-charlie Plato imagined prisoners since birth, chained in a subterranean cave, watching shadows cast on a wall by objects passing in front of a blazing fire situated behind them. To the prisoners, those shadows are the only perceptible ‘reality’. Despite the bleary image quality, the captive audience derives ‘meaning’ from the shadowy movements in the gloom, highlighting how humans often mistake sensory perceptions and illusions for true reality.

In the analogy a prisoner manages to escape, enduring an arduous ascent to the world outside the cave. Once his eyes adjust to the sunlight, he can see real objects and the true nature of the world. He is astounded by the beauty. He can’t wait to get back to enlighten and liberate his old cellmates, but the remaining prisoners cruelly mock the escapee on his return, believing the outer world to be an apparition, and refuse to leave the confines of the cave.

Could a parallel to the cave analogy be drawn with our smartphones as the fire, and content as the shadow? We argue passionately about the shape of the shadow, oblivious to the fact that the shadow isn’t the thing itself. Most of us seem resigned to chasing shadows of an experience rather than the actual experience. The digital realm has become a rabbit hole of seductive distraction down which we can lose connection with the real world that lives and breathes outside that limited, artificial lair.

“Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is terror-inducing, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.” - Martin Heidegger

But let’s go a Non-duality step further into the Neo-platonic philosophical premise that there is actually no ‘me’ or ‘other,’ merely a singular, flowing expression of unified consciousness that continually unfolds in each entirely new moment. The ‘human experience’ as we’ve constructed it, into our very man-made world, starts to look like a magnificent misinterpretation, a multi-faceted peak time broadcast of fake news.

In the fictitious world of duality we spin the yarn of separation, driven by easily identifiable polarities and the cultural constructs of life ‘success’. We adopt a gender by default, convince ourselves we are man or woman and shapeshift to those conventions, a collection of memories and opinions trapped in a reductionist meat-suit. Whereas, Non-dualism views the ‘person,’ the who we think we are, as just another shadow on the wall, focusing more specifically on the reality of what we are: an integral element in the multiplicity and diversity of existence, itself an indivisible and complete, perfect whole. It transpires that what we are is the light outside the cave.

So, if the world feels broken and out of kilter, with politicians and religious leaders taking the duplicitous, patriarchal lead; when even our sense of self appears to be a convenient fiction, what remains that is true?

Truth won’t be found in a tweet or a manifesto. It’s located in the unfolding of the moment - the is-ness of each progressive now. It’s in the weight of a brush in my hand, the dripping paint finding its own path down a canvas; the woodland daffodils unfurling to the sun in the cold spring air, the birdsong; the townsfolk on their way to work beyond the trees as another day dawns within the incontestable living fact of awareness itself. Truth can be found in the silence that endures when we tune out of the white noise of modern living and pause for a deeper breath.

Join Art Club

Every Easter for the past 9 years myself and a group of close friends gather together to make art in the creative collective we have come to know as Art Club. The studio becomes a hive of positive thought, word and action, a hub of love and imagination. Our long weekend together becomes a forum in which participants can pause for that deeper breath and hopefully find new inspiration.

Each year we set a new theme to work from, our aim being to reconnect with each other and our creative whims, producing an atmosphere of mutual support that will carry us through the 12 months until Art Club convenes again. The artwork produced is a welcome, joyous bi-product, no more than that.

Having previously declared that truth won’t be found in a manifesto, a clearly stated signal of personal intent can nonetheless point in the right direction. Here are the rules of engagement for Art Club 26:

“In an attempt to evoke an individual and collective life affirming love transfusion in a haemorrhaging hateful basket case of a world, participants in this year’s gathering are encouraged to bring any recently completed creative work (however small) that speaks to last year’s theme of ‘Resolution’. There will be an initial brief opportunity to show, tell and discuss this work before we swiftly embark on this year’s journey of positivity under the new theme of ALIENATION.

This year’s theme may initially appear a negative and contradictory starting point, but the organising committee felt that to dismiss the global rise of the right and its warring preoccupation with self interest during the last 12 months would be tantamount to denial. From the (quite literal) recent ruins of divisive human catastrophe, our collective has the opportunity to transform fear and hate in our own lives to love and trust. Our justifiable anger can be channelled into creative production symbolic of hope. From our position of privilege we can reaffirm our creative commitment to boldly oppose all efforts by those who seek to dehumanise and destroy, building instead increased faith in the power of fraternity, fellowship and community wherever we find ourselves.

As ever, this alchemical process may result in a painting, drawing, photograph, musical composition, script, film or poem but equal validity might also be given to a considered statement of intent through which subsequent behaviour and activity may be focused for the next 12 months.

Art Club is not just an annual forum for courageous creative endeavour, it is an enduring philosophy that supports participants to be agents of change and Love in a man made world desperately needing both. As we walk the Art Club talk, so we clear the minefields of misdirected human energy, in time enabling others to follow the same creative path to joy unimpeded.

May Art Club 26 herald the joyful reunification of humanity with its divine purpose for the benefit of All.

Bring it on.”

This week’s Libra Full Moon might influence attendees of Art Club 26 to rebalance the absolute Truth (that everything is One) with the relative truth (that we still have to put the bins out on Monday night). It might help us keep things real. It might even help us align our creativity with Plato’s philosophical triad (often referred to as ‘the transcendentals’) of “the Good, the True and the Beautiful”.

For practical reasons, Art Club tends to be quite an exclusive affair due to the limited space at our disposal but if you feel inclined to join the fraternal creative vibe this Easter, why not break out the paintbox or coloured pencils and express yourself, with love? Controversially, may I suggest you resist the temptation to post the resulting artworks anywhere on the digital realm? Neither you nor your creativity require external validation. Instead let’s ensure our efforts retain their essential goodness, truth and beauty in the here and now by treasuring them purely as moments of creative expression. Such undiluted connections with the real world are rare and in desperate short supply.

Despite the illusions of separation we contrive to create, we cannot break our unending union with everything in existence. Ancient spiritual traditions and modern science converge and concur. The untruths in this world are analogous ripples on the surface of a very deep, very still, metaphoric ocean. This Libra Full Moon, let the ripples ripple, let them be. Instead, take a deep breath and sink into the fathomless depths where the scales of justice are always balanced and where, even in periods of darkness, the story is always, fundamentally, one of love and light.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” - Isaac Newton

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ACTIVE PRAYER watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2026

A CALL TO PRAYER

VIRGO FULL MOON

As we approach this month’s Virgo Full Moon the unmistakable, damp, earthy scent of leaf mould pervades the northern hemisphere’s early spring air. Even in the city, everything dormant is swollen with potential. Bulbs break the surface of frozen soil and the annual solar cycle of plant life, upon which humanity depends, resumes. In the lunar calendar, this is often hailed as the Worm Moon, a name lacking celestial glamour but possessing a vital, earthy truth. It marks the moment when the soil begins to warm and soften, enabling our ecosystem’s very literal ground crew of worms, insects and microbes to rise and circulate last year’s organic detritus into aerated, fertile soil ready for new growth..

If I described last month’s Leo Moon as a lion’s roar of ego and heart, Virgo is traditionally depicted as Maiden of the Harvest, inviolate and complete, standing at the garden gate of spring with a sheaf of corn in one hand and, quite possibly, a garden centre gift token in the other. She is the archetype of the ‘divine vessel’, carrying the seeds from last year’s harvest in her arms and the seeds of the future in her womb. She is an attentive gardener, as meticulous and methodical as the moon herself, tending to every blade and bud so that her fertility finds timely full blossom with that of the cherry trees. She is pure Nature, readying herself to generously bestow great abundance on all.

This year, she finds her garden unusually crowded with the faithful, as the great Abrahamic traditions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism have aligned their respective clocks in a rare moment of harmonious common intent. In what feels less like a coincidence and more like a deliberate cosmic nudge, the religious observance of Ramadan and Lent both commenced on the very same day this February, fusing the Islamic and Christian calendars into a single, shared month of prayer, reflection and austerity.

Add to this the Jewish festival of Purim, which peaks right alongside this Virgo Moon, and we find ourselves in something of a global prayer vortex. Near enough half the world population, represented by the estimated 4.6 billion followers of Christian and Islamic faiths, commit to a month of concerted prayer, fasting and acts of charity. That’s a significant percentage of the collective consciousness in anyone’s Jungian Psychology textbook. Have our societal calendars tuned into the universe and its representatives (both moon and maiden) and heard the collective call to the healing power of prayer? Frankly, given the state of the garden in which lovely Virgo is attempting to flower this spring, it’s a call we might be well advised to answer.

While the Abrahamic faiths are busy syncing their watches, it would be remiss not to mention that the Eastern tradition of the Lunar New Year - the Year of the Fire Horse - kicked the stable door down and set off at a gallop at the very same time too. The fire horse represents intensity and a rapid pace of change hinting again at the need for an immediate period of mental, physical and spiritual preparation. If the Virgo Moon is the well prepared gardener, the Eastern lunar calendar represents the grand design of the entire estate we are blessed to inhabit, albeit currently under stormy looking skies.

The global confluence is clear: whether you’re sweeping the house to welcome good fortune or sweeping the soul to welcome the Divine, the moon heralds the clear out. In advance of emerging new growth, we’re all essentially charged with doing the same spring clean if we want to align positively with the greater reality upon which we depend.

“The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.” - Muhammad Iqbal

Perhaps we need an occasional reminder that the moon isn’t just a pretty night-light; it is the ancient pacemaker of human spirit and endeavour, the pre-digital clock of our hearts. The timing of Ramadan is dictated by the sighting of the new crescent moon, while the date of Easter (and thus the 40 days of Lent) remains annually tethered to the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox.

The astrological influence of a Virgo Full Moon is also said to guide toward purification, a further reflection of the intent to fast during both Ramadan and Lent at this time of year. Muslims and Christians alike use this lunar month to clarify their spiritual aspirations, to become better versions of themselves through conscious thought, word and action and in so doing manifest a better world for all.

Regardless of religious persuasion, the motivation for prayer is the same: to create a fertile hollow within the self in which something greater can be nurtured. In essence, a commitment to reflection on self and ‘other’ for the growth of both. Awkward questions can be asked and contemplated: What are you tending to? What are you neglecting? How are you providing service in the wider garden that sustains you?

“I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquillity comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.” - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Prayer as Radical Attention

But what is prayer - particularly from a secular perspective? For those in our number who find the word problematic, layered with centuries of cultural indoctrination or simply a bit on the heavy side, allow me to propose a broader, more inclusive definition: prayer is the act of focused, non-utilitarian attention.

In our modern ‘attention economy’, where our personal focus is a commodity to be manipulated and mined by silicon giants, prayer may in fact represent an act of radical rebellion. It is the moment we stop rushing around to sit still in silence. It is the moment we stop doing and start being in relation to the universal whole. It is the conscious alignment of the individual will with the animist interconnectedness of the biosphere. It is the moment we stop trying to extract from the world and start tending it. To pray is to acknowledge that we are not the masters of this incredibly beautiful, bountiful garden, but its most privileged tenants.

Prayer can be described as an increased level of attention paid to our thoughts, words and actions, a process of making the subconscious known to the conscious, in effect an exercise in benevolent self knowledge. It can simply be a state of heightened self awareness regardless of circumstance, whether sitting on a park bench, driving the car or doing the washing up, that engenders a sense of peace and belonging. Ultimately, it’s a time honoured, deeply personal language of love and connection, born of the self for the self and all existence.

“Prayer is an act of love; words are not needed. Even if sickness distracts from thoughts, all that is needed is the will to love.” - St Teresa of Avila

The beauty of this year’s interfaith overlap is that it highlights prayer, in all its forms, as one of the most endearing common imperatives of the human heart. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks so elegantly put it:

“Prayer changes the world because it changes us, opening our eyes to the radiance of God’s world, our ears to the still small voice of God’s word.”

Note: he didn’t say prayer changes the weather or the stock market - it changes us. It softens the rigid boundaries of the self that we so regularly reinforce. Similarly, Elisabeth Elliot, a stalwart of Christian reflection, surmised:

“Prayer lays hold of God’s plan and becomes the link between his will and its accomplishment on earth.”

In the Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) described prayer as the ‘mi’raj’ or the ‘ascent’ of the believer. It is a ladder we climb out of the basement of our own concerns and into a divine penthouse of illuminating perspective.

“O you who have believed, seek help through patience and prayer. Indeed, Allah is with the patient.” - Surah Al-Baqarah Ayat 153

Practical Prayer in Service

Above all, the prayerful Virgo Full Moon gardener is practical. Her preparations for growth are urgent, She can’t use vague thoughts and petitions; she needs prayer that translates into active service in the flowerbeds.

Both Ramadan and Lent enlist service as a direct route to a good and happy life. If prayer is the internal realignment, then service is the external expression. By synchronizing our self reflection during this period, we have a unique opportunity to affect the darker recesses of humanity’s collective shadow. Imagine the ripple effect if billions of people, regardless of their specific ‘brand’ of faith or none, spent this lunation focused on the same intent of service: doing everything in their power to bring the cessation of suffering and the restoration of the Earth. I reckon the state of the garden would change pretty quickly.

When we pray for the ‘benefit of All’, we are engaging in an active form of spiritual ecology and service. We are weeding out the resentment, the ‘othering’ prevalent in blame culture, and the misinformation that keeps us divided. In effect our prayers contribute toward the well of spiritual goodwill from which we all may draw to to water the seeds of our positive intent. Prayer is a personal and collective resource that can assist the maintenance work of the soul wherever that work may be needed.

Top Tips for Soul Gardening under a Virgo Moon

In an attempt to join with the common intents of 4.6 billion folks celebrating Ramadan and Lent, I offer a few top tips for soul diggers during this 2026 Prayer Vortex:

1. Fast (the weeding): create a silent space in your busy life by refusing to engage with the white noise of modern living. Even if you aren’t skipping lunch for Ramadan or chocolate for Lent, try a digital fast for an hour (or longer) each day. Give your sole attention back to the physical world.

2. Pray (the planting): drop a seed of intention into that silence - a wish for peace, a plea for healing, or a simple ‘thank you’. If you struggle for words, try the simplest prayer of all: ‘May I be an instrument for the benefit of All.’ Put it on repeat.

3. Give (the watering): celebrate the good fortune in your own life by charitably giving to another in need. Commit to small, anonymous daily acts of kindness. Virgo loves a ‘to do’ list, and these small repairs to the social fabric are powerful acts of fraternal healing. A smile freely offered to a stranger goes a long way toward a better day.

Ultimately, there is a profound, grounding geometry to the act of prayer. Whether prostrating on a rug, kneeling in a pew, or simply crouching to inspect an emerging snowdrop, the physical act of lowering oneself is the ultimate antidote to the vertical arrogance of the ego. To pray is, quite literally, to ‘earth’ ourselves - to complete a circuit between our high-minded ideals and the very dirt from which we evolved. In carrying this posture of humility in our daily lives during Ramadan and Lent this month, we join the billions of fellow human beings praying to be less like isolated towers of self-interest and more like lightning rods, conducting an increasingly grounded, collective compassion in every thought, word and deed. Can 4.6 billion people be wrong? May the unifying power of prayer bring peace to us All.

“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the earth, which is the highest form of prayer.” - Thich Nhat Hanh.

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TAKAMI RIVER CONFLUENCE watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2025

HEALING YOUR SHADOW BOXER

LEO FULL MOON

As the Leo Full Moon ascends to its throne in this weekend’s night sky, it alights with all the regal, theatricality of a handsome, celestial feline monarch. If the previous month’s lunations have been about quiet contemplation (albeit while sorting out the recycling bins) this one is all about the heart of the Lion - specifically, the heart’s capacity to roar, to bleed, and ultimately, to heal.

It’s a peculiar coincidence (though in the animist vision to which I subscribe, there are no coincidences, only patterns we have yet to observe) that this lunar peak aligns so closely with Holocaust Memorial Day. The theme for 2026, Bridging Generations, acts as a cosmic prompt, asking us to look not just at our own reflection in the mirror, but at the long, flickering shadows cast by those who walked before us.

Leo is the astrological sign of the Sun, the ego, and the ‘star quality’ we all secretly believe we possess when watching X-factor or singing in the shower. But a full moon in Leo is a more polarized, famished beast. It demands that we step out from behind our performative, decorative masks - the curated, juicy steak selves we regularly feed to social media - and hunt the slightly leaner cut of our Jungian Shadow.

Carl Jung, that delightful 20th century explorer of the psychic basement, reminded us that the shadow isn’t necessarily “evil”. It’s simply the “disowned” parts of ourselves - the bits we’ve stuffed into a psychological bin because they were too loud, too angry, or too inconvenient for polite society. Under the reflected illumination of a Leo Moon, these hidden traits start to pace their cage with a taste for fresh meat.

“The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors.” - C.G. Jung

Personally, my shadow usually manifests as a deep-seated, superficial urge to correct people’s grammar at parties or an inexplicable desire to buy more art supplies when the studio is already a fire hazard. But collectively? The shadow is a much heavier lift.

Bridging the Generational Gap

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme, Bridging Generations, provides a stark and necessary anchor for this potential lunar influence. When we talk about collective healing, we aren’t just talking about a group hug and some lavender oil. We are talking about the ‘Shadow Work’ of nations.

The Holocaust remains the ultimate expression of the collective shadow - a moment where humanity projected its darkest fears and insecurities onto ‘the other’ with industrialized precision. To bridge generations is to acknowledge that this trauma isn’t a museum piece; it’s a living thread. The responsibility of remembrance doesn’t expire with the survivors. It lives in the silent witnesses of the items they left behind and the stories we must carry forward.

If we don’t do the work to integrate these historical shadows, we risk becoming what Jung called “unconscious men” - puppets to culturally and socially enforced patterns of prejudice and ‘othering’ that we often erroneously claim to have outgrown.

“We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.” - Robert A Johnson

The Echo Chamber of Unresolved Grief

The Leo Moon is a royal master of the uncomfortable spotlight, and this year it illuminates a parallel that many would rather leave in the dark: the harrowing dissonance between the historical trauma of the Holocaust and the visceral, contemporary tragedy in Gaza.

From a Jungian perspective, we are witnessing a “double complex” crush. On one side, the Jewish collective psyche - rightfully scarred by centuries of persecution - often views modern threats through the terrifying prism of the Shoah. When a group is possessed by an archetype of survival, the ‘Never Again’ vow can, tragically, manifest as a defensive wall so high it obscures the humanity of those on the other side. Conversely, for Palestinians, the experience of displacement and siege has become a living Nakba, a generational geopolitical shadow where the roles of victim and perpetrator have been hauntingly, agonizingly reversed.

Healing in such polarized circumstances isn’t about equating tragedies - that’s a ledger no one wins - but about acknowledging that unintegrated trauma acts as a ghost that continues to haunt. It compels us to project our own inner monsters onto our neighbours, transforming them into a caricature of our past tormentors. Until both collectives can face their own shadows - recognizing that ‘the other’ is also a mirror of their own deepest fears - this Leo Moon’s roar will continue to be one of pain rather than the triumphant song of a heart made whole.

Art as Atonement: Neutral Ground for Healing?

In my own practice, I have often found that canvas and paper provide a blank space where the jagged edges of my life can meet without drawing blood. Art serves as a neutral ground in a visual alchemy that attempts to derive personal atonement from collective failure. By physically and emotionally engaging with the detritus of man-made catastrophe, I seek to metabolize the misunderstanding that fuels such cycles.

Each mark of pencil or brush is a conscious effort to pull the shadow into the light - not to erase pain or suffering, but to sit with its weight. That’s a grandiose claim but it’s a genuine attempt to author acts of creative reparation, through which the leaden heart of history transforms into something we might finally dare to integrate. When words and actions fail - and in the face of Gaza or the Holocaust, they often do - the healing, spiritual intent of Art remains, offering a baseline of human imperative that transcends the limitations of political rhetoric.

“A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.” - Madeleine L’Engle

How to Shadow-Box (Gently)

So, how do we navigate the shadowlands of Leo lunar influence without biting off someone’s head or contravening social norms; inadvertently starting our own war or acrimonious divorce? I offer a Weighton endorsed guide to gently heal your inner leonine shadow boxer:

• Do acknowledge your own whinges and ‘icks’: If you find yourself seething with resentment toward a colleague, peer, partner or a political figure…stop. Ask yourself: “What part of this person is actually a mirror of my own repressed roar?” Oooft.

• Don’t feed the trolls (inner or outer): Negativity is an ill-fitting costume. If you’re tempted to slag someone off or join a digital pile-on, take a quid/euro/dollar from your pocket and put it in your ‘Shadow Jar.’ Collect honestly and relentlessly then donate the proceeds this month to a charity that supports Holocaust education or humanitarian aid.

• Do light the darkness: On January 27th, at 8:00 PM, the UK lit candles for the “National Moment.” If you missed the event, this Leo Moon acts as an illuminating global reminder. Light a candle for the ancestors - not just the well documented saints, but the unsung international multitude who loved but nonetheless struggled and failed. You are the light that, once accepted, casts no shadow.

• Don’t confuse ‘Ego’ with ‘Heart’: Leo wants to be seen, but the healed Leo wants the truth to be seen. Let’s utilise this moon to express something authentic rather than anything that inherently seeks external validation.

We often think of healing as a private, clinical affair- something done in a quiet room with antiseptic dressings and a box of tear absorbing tissues. But as I’ve maintained across these columns, our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the unsterile collective. To harm the ‘other’ is to harm the Self. By extension: to remember the victims of genocide is to tend to the wounds of our shared human soul.

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” - The Tempest - Shakespeare

The Leo Full Moon invites us to lead with the heart, but a heart that has looked into the abyss of suffering and decided to love anyway. It’s about the courage to be vulnerable, the strength to be kind, and the wit to realize that we are all, in the end, just stardust having a human experience, doing our best and occasionally getting it very, very wrong.

So, one evening this week, turn off the news apps for a bit. Step outside. Breathe the air. Feel it expanding the lungs in your chest. Dwell on the beauty of that moment. Acknowledge the Spirit of life animating your blood, flesh and bone. Point yourself in the direction of that awesome, glowing silver orb in the sky and realize that you are the narrative it illuminates. You are the bridge that unites not divides. You are the shadow and the light. You are the healing for which our world so desperately calls.

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed” - Carl Jung

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BOURGANVILLE watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2025

NO OBJECTIONS TO 2026!

GEMINI FULL MOON

As we stumble through the bleary, post-celebratory haze of early January 2026, the universe has decided to greet us not with a cold shower of challenging resolutions, but with a massive, somewhat damp, celestial hug. This weekend the Moon reaches its full luminosity in its own sign of Cancer. In astrological terms, Lady Luna is ‘at home’ here, which all sounds very lovely until you remember that being at home often involves laundry, having to deal with partners and family, and the daily opportunity to cry over slightly burnt pieces of toast.

If the New Year is typically about the masculine drive to do - to gym, to hustle, to optimize - this Cancer Full Moon is the Great Mother leaning over the astral banister and shouting, “Slow down, put a jumper on, and for heaven’s sake, look both ways before you cross the road.”

Symbolically, water sign Cancer is represented by the crab: a creature that carries its home on its back, moves sideways to avoid direct confrontation, and possesses a terrifyingly hard shell to protect a ridiculously soft interior. It is the archetype of the sensitive soul and at full moon, as it opposes the Sun in pragmatic Capricorn (the old goat), we find our sensitive selves caught in a cosmic tug-of-war.

On one side of the zodiac, the Capricorn Sun is barking at us to check our spreadsheets and fix the leaky roof while, on the other, the Cancer Moon is whispering - or perhaps sobbing - that we really need to feel our feelings. Potentially it’s going to be a bit like trying to do one’s tax return (self assessments to be completed by the end of the month UK tax payers) while a tearful toddler clings to one’s leg, bemoaning the loss of an irreplaceable cuddly toy. In our all too crabby state of being, meaningful progress in any area of our lives is likely to move sideways at best.

For some time, I have argued in this column that our collective crises - be they ecological, political, or personal - stem from a foundational breakdown in our understanding of the interconnected nature of existence. We behave as though we are separate from the biosphere, separate from our neighbors, and most tragically, separate from our true Self and the inviolate home that presence provides. We continue to treat our bodies like over-stretched machine hardware and any distress regarding our accelerating malfunction like inconvenient glitches in the software of productivity.

In our insatiable, consumerist norm, we are conditioned to believe that happiness is a commodity to be acquired through relentless effort. We demand that reality conforms to our expectations, and when it doesn’t, we register an objection in the form of stress, anxiety, or resentment for what appears to be lacking. Instead of directing displeasure toward those who don’t recognize our needs, what would happen if we made no demand to be recognized? What if we offered no objection to the feeling of being overlooked?

“If you are not involved in the reaction, you are not involved in the problem.” - J. Krishnamurti

After all, the Cancer Full Moon is not interested in our demands or objections, our new year’s resolutions, our five-year plans or carefully curated digital personas. It exists (as do we) dispassionately in the truth of the present moment however messy or inconvenient that ‘now’ may appear to temporal human perceptions. It’s at home in its heavenly orbit irrespective of the habitual, reactive human responses its presence may trigger. It makes no judgement. In the universal scheme of things pertaining to this remote corner of a tiny galaxy amongst the 200 billion thought to exist, there is actually no judgement to make.

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences.” - Masanobu Fukuoka

The wisdom of Osono

We can find another paragon of non-judgement in the thoughts, words and actions of Osono, a 17th century elder of the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist tradition. After experiencing personal tragedy, she mastered the art of being at home in the universe, regardless of circumstance and became famous for her radical acceptance and humility, exemplified by her frequent use of the word ‘Yes’ (hai). She viewed even the nodding of a flower as a sign of the Buddha’s call, teaching that true faith is accepting the Buddha’s word without personal judgment or calculation. Her constant counsel to adherents, particularly those in dire straits, was as simple as it was devastating to the ego: ‘No objections; no demands.’

To the modern ear, this sounds like passivity, perhaps even a cop-out. But in the context of an animist vision where everything is understood as interconnected, Osono’s mantra is an act of supreme spiritual courage. To have no demands is to stop trying to manipulate the flow of existence to suit our narrow preferences. To have no objections is to accept the totality of the present moment - the grief, the joy, the rain, and the sunshine - as the very stuff of our liberation.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

When we object to our circumstances, we create a schism between ourselves and reality. We say to the universe, “You’ve made a mistake.” This resistance nurtures the root of our suffering. Under the light of the Cancer Moon, which illuminates our deepest needs for safety and belonging, we are challenged to see if we can find that safety not by changing our environment, but by ceasing our protest against it.

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad.” - Eckhart Tolle

Cancer is a star sign that understands the value of the retreat. It is the crab that pulls into its shell not to hide, but to moult and grow. I salute those that champion the idea that ‘rest is radical’ and periodically retreat from the frey. In a society that promotes exhaustion as a badge of honor, choosing to do nothing is an act of resistance.

Is this Cancer Moon inviting us to stop being a manager of life and start being a full participant? As the great Masanobu Fukuoka, father of the ‘do nothing’ farming movement often suggested, the best way to grow a garden - or a life - is to stop meddling so much. In our constant striving to improve circumstances, we regularly forget how to inhabit them. Fukuoka believed there was a validity to simply being present, being a vital contributor to life’s all encompassing benevolent embrace, one that we are usually too busy to feel.

In a world that equates busyness with godliness, why not claim doing nothing as a form of holy subversion? Under this full moon, let’s instigate a National Pottering Day from the comfort of our own sofas. It’s the quintessential Cancerian activity. It has no goal. There is nothing to be done. It is the art of moving things from one shelf to another, for unapologetically looking out of the window for as long as feels right, lingering over the winter breeze on one’s skin or randomly smelling a lemon. It is ‘no demands’ in action.

3 Radical Resolutions for the first week of 2026

As we navigate the demands and objections of the coming days, I offer three top tips to practically apply Osono’s wisdom in our lives:

1: The 24-Hour No-Objection Challenge: Initially for one day, try to meet every event - a traffic jam, a spilled coffee, a difficult email - with a silent ‘no objection’. Notice the energy you save when you stop arguing with reality. See if you can extend it for a week.

2: Cease the Demands: Observe how often you demand that your partner, your job, or your body be different than they are. For the following fortnight, try to love them exactly as they are presented to you.

3: The Art of Napping: If the emotional intensity of the moment becomes too much, slink away from the throng. A midwinter hedgerow nap or a quiet moment in a darkened room is not laziness; merely an intelligent realignment with all that is. Do it all year.

As we move into 2026, a year that will no doubt provide its own share of interesting times, Osono’s mantra might yet prove an invaluable prompt toward grateful acceptance of happiness and fulfilment. Irrefutably, life will provide the circumstances; perhaps our only job is to provide a resounding ‘yes’ in response. I trust there are no objections.

“Peace comes when you stop expecting and start accepting.”- Traditional Buddhist Teaching

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OSAKA PARTY watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2025

OH MUMMA - GIVE ME STRENGTH!

GEMINI FULL MOON

The annual Gemini Full Moon is always a favourite of mine. It is usually accompanied by tinsel and lights, the yearning tones of George Michael bemoaning his luck last Christmas and Maria Carey’s piercing pitch sending dogs around the planet into paroxysms of aural pain. It’s nonetheless a traditionally social time of year. I faithfully meet up with old mates from school that I haven’t seen since this time last year on our annual curry outing under the Gemini Moon’s garrulous gaze. We are regularly surrounded by groups doing the same. Each year, our gatherings, laced with goodwill and booze, allow us to catch up with loved ones and take inebriated stock of what’s happened since last we came together.

And how have things worked out? Are we happier now than we were? What kind of (inevitable) shit has hit the fan and how well did we cope with it? Just as importantly, where were the moments of joyful pleasure and what state of mind allowed those heady days to arise and even hang around awhile?

Have we taken time to explore the sometimes cavernous gulf that lies between what we think we desire and what actually seems to be manifesting in our lives. Do we actually need what we think we need? Do we truly want what we say we want? Are we content or satisfied with what has unfolded or do we feel cheated by the experience? Quite often what we think we want: liberty, love, abundance is contradicted by our default mind set and behaviour: control, anger and fear of lack. Guess which message of manifesting desire will be broadcast loudest from our internal transmitters across the universal airwaves this Christmas?

Bizarrely, we humans dwell so intently on the negative experiences we encounter and create, often granting them far greater weight of importance than the positive. Perhaps this is because the positive, in its everyday forms, is less dramatic and challenging to our preferred, sometimes compulsively negative, way of processing reality. A beautiful sunrise gets trumped by the bitchy comment from a workmate, providing countless days of animosity and dreams of justified vengeance. Beauty gets beasted and we end up feeling terrible. The extreme but pervading outlook of ‘life’s shit and then you die’ does not leave much room for experiencing each day as a living, unfolding miracle in every moment.

Is it possible to contextualise polarised judgements of good and bad into a more inclusive perspective that marries our personal concerns, pain and pleasure with a wider world to which we contribute through each and every thought, word and action? As we often suggest in this column, the path of love is a wide one, upon which there is plenty of room to balance the extremes of our conditioned, illusory sense of self with what is true.

The trick to staying upright and traveling in a forward direction on the love track seems to rest in aligning with and accepting circumstances as they arise, then dealing with them in as positive and grateful a manner as can be mustered. This can be a consciously adopted attitude shift that may help even the really difficult stuff lose some of its sting. Life moves expansively forward with or without our consent so there’s a strong case for immersing ourselves in that flow in order to benefit fully from its mutually motivated beneficence.

In astrological terms, this Gemini Full Moon carries an additional, strong Venus planetary influence which is said to evoke feminine principles. In the next couple of weeks it may therefore serve us well to pay special attention to the important women in our lives. Honour their femininity. Shower them with gifts and praise. Let them know just how important they are in your life. Flowers wouldn’t go amiss.

Primarily that would be the Mums of course. Whether living or dead, they represent our notions of nurture, throughout our childhood and then in our subsequent roles as friends, lovers and sometimes parents ourselves. The next fortnight could be a beneficial period in which to attend to this relationship with Mother. If you’re lucky enough to still have one around, give her a call or make a visit. If Ma’s no longer with us, evoke her presence in contemplation of that relationship and examine whether there are still wounds to heal before only ever remembering her (and her overbearing control mechanisms) with love.

If there are wounds to heal with a living mama then this is the Christmas to give it a go. Let’s see if our compulsive, reactive responses can be kept in check....even under provocation. Our mothers, those shining beacons of womanhood, are essentially the physical portal for our own living presence. They’re why we’re here. Let’s be grateful. Let’s forgive them if there’s stuff to forgive in the relationship undertaken. They were/are only trying to do their best based on what they themselves have been conditioned to think was good parenting. Let’s love those mothers and enjoy their divine imperfections. It frees up so much emotional space.

“We are born of love; Love is our mother.” - Rumi

And while we’re at it, why not extend that love to the big Mumma herself, Lady Gaia? Need I point out that our relationship with Mother Earth needs some serious attention. Currently, we may as well be sticking red hot pins into her ever receptive, generously supportive body while pouring the poisonous detritus of our lives over the open wounds.

“Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.” - Evo Morales

Modern consumerist society is the epitome of an insatiable, abusive, over-indulged toddler, still suckling greedily whilst biting the nipple that feeds. We need to actively wean ourselves off our unsustainable dependencies and let our great matriarch recover and heal. With concerted will, it wouldn’t take long for the glowing paragon of her femininity to regenerate and continue to nurture us all with abundant benevolence for many generations and millennia to come.

By necessity, this weaning involves reassessing our own priorities and financial imperatives. Do the cultural, political and economic systems in which we currently invest our time, energy and cash, support our beautiful Mother Earth’s capacity to sustain and nurture us all? If not (and they clearly don’t) then those systems need a meaningful reorientation. What part can we play in their recalibration?

Systemic change won’t happen without punter pressure. Our hard earned buck deserves to be consciously placed and wisely invested in those institutions (banks and pension funds in particular) with a clear mandate for positive environmental change. Let’s explore the possibilities and act before it’s too late. Let’s not accept the constantly enforced plutocratic story line that the consumerist, capitalist calamity is the only ‘safe’, trustworthy economic and political narrative in town. Let’s challenge the rhetoric of privilege inwardly and externally by doing what we can to help now, at home, at work and in our local communities. Let’s put our money where our hearts lie in devising new routes to sustainable prosperity for All. Sadly, I’m afraid this does not equate with using Amazon for anything.

As always at Full Moon, our instinctive emotional reactions and habitual patterns of behaviour will be hitting their peak. Under this Gemini Moon, once one has expressed one’s seething exasperation at the corporate take over of modern democracy, we may become more keenly aware of how to balance our individual needs and aspirations with those of others and the planetary biosphere, of which we are all a vital, interdependent part.

As the festive season approaches, may I offer my top 5 gift wrapped tips to replacing any perceived sense of lack in our lives with a more holistic appreciation of the unlimited, sustainable abundance that accompanies us in every moment.

1: Make a date with mummy. Find a window in the coming days to devote your attention to her: how she’s feeling, what she needs and wants and how you might help realise those aspirations. If it’s not possible in person, do it online or by phone. Make her feel valued and nurtured herself.

2: Make a date with Mummy Earth. Get out in the open air. Breathe her in. See, smell, taste, touch and hear her. Don’t rush her by being in a rush yourself. Devote an open ended moment to her in which you can be located and spoken to. Be still in her presence and fall in Love for eternity. Return to your day to day activities when you have truly felt her in your heart and been filled. Make this a regular date.

3: Celebrate the divine feminine. Macho folks beware. The divine feminine is around and within you. Make sure you honour it in a manner meaningful to you. I like to paint one finger nail a flamboyant colour in acknowledgement of a softer, subtler expression of beauty in an often harsh, male dominated world. Sunflower yellow is the current nail varnish hue of choice. Camp defiance? Who gives a monkey’s toss what people think? Hats off to all gender and non gender specific souls claiming the divine feminine in themselves.

“She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans.... But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.” - Hildegard von Bingen

4: Honour the important women in your life. Treat them as you would the Goddess they represent.

A prayer of gratitude to memorise and recite on the way to work:

Sisters of the world I love and salute you for the crap you gracefully endure. I honour your balancing, redemptive, intuitive allowance. Thank you.

5: If you’re fortunate enough to have some, make your money work ethically for you and others by investing in the world you want to see. It’s a very practical way of making your dreams come true. This is the week to hold your current bank to account. Even if you’re still banking with the bank you first joined as a teenager, now is the time to question if that choice is still appropriate. You don’t have to look very far to uncover which of the major banks continue to invest in carbon burning PetroChemical multinationals and hold massive amounts of debt over poverty stricken, nation states in the developing world. Changing your account might not change the immediate trajectory of global corporate greed but it should make you feel better or, at the very least, slightly smug.

We hope this mother of all messages spurs readers to constructive loving action in whatever shape feels most appropriate to both person and moment. Do please share its well intentioned divine feminine disposition with friends of a similarly sacred complexion - it’s another way in which the path of Love may be kept well maintained for clear, safe and enlightened passage.

“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.”- Thich Nhat Hanh

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HIROSHIMA NIGHTS watercolour 16 x 12 cm Mark Weighton 2025

REMEMBER NOVEMBER

TAURUS FULL MOON

A venerable spiritual teacher of mine, Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, never tired of declaring, “We live in interesting times.’ He was a warm inquisitive fellow steeped in the teachings of his beloved Toledano tradition of Kabbalah. He championed the very practical ‘test to see if it works’ approach to self knowledge advocated by this contemplative school of Jewish philosophy, a practice fully embodied in his youthful enthusiasm for life well into his eighties and quite probably beyond his death in 2020.

Once he had gently recited the invocation and lit candles to welcome the presence of Spirit, Halevi would invariably start the weekly group meetings in his modest North London home with a brief outline of the week’s geopolitical events to contextualise them within a well informed ‘bigger picture’. “We live in interesting times. Any questions or observations?” became his signature sign off before opening the meeting to input from those gathered expectantly in his treasure trove of a front room, containing a lifetime’s collection of artworks, books, charts, religious symbols and artefacts, alchemical and astrological ephemera.

Those magical Thursday evenings were my first formal introduction to a School of the Soul, something I had read about in books but thought merely myth or allegory. Here however, on a weekly basis just off the Kilburn High Road, I was privileged to join an invited group of similarly minded spiritual seekers, from a broad spectrum of different faiths, in sharing a spiritual teacher’s knowledge and wisdom. Similar esoteric study groups of the Perennial Philosophy - the unifying principles of Spirit underlying all spiritual practice - have featured in a multitude of cultural settings for millennia.

“Our task is to realise, in each of our lives, the God Consciousness that lies at the root of our being and pervades the universe.” - Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi

Through attending the school over a period of 20 years, flesh was added to the bones of my limited reading, study and practice. Under my humble maggid’s guidance, mysticism became an open door to tangible experience for which I remain deeply grateful to this day.

Halevi was a great historian, writing at length on humanity’s evolution and development in relation to Kabbalistic principles and cycles. He lived through the Second World War, frequently recalling the bombing of London during the blitz and the social cohesion it bequeathed London in the face of tragedy. He was amongst the millions worldwide left aghast by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan that ultimately signalled the beginning of the end to a harrowing period of global war and genocide. He noted with great respect that the millions of lives lost in the 20th century paved the way for a shift in collective world ideology from the dominant, simple aspirations of totalitarian rule toward wider acceptance of more complex democratic principles and law.

I have just returned from a trip to Hiroshima, made with the full intention to pay my respects to the 140,000 souls that perished as a result of the uranium bomb detonated by the United States over the city at 8.45am on 6 August 1945. Nearly 70,000 innocent civilians were thought to have been killed instantly as the bomb’s fireball took 10 seconds to reach a ground temperature of 4000°C immolating around 70 per cent of all buildings in the city. An eventual death toll is harder to estimate but likely to be significantly higher due to the increased rates of cancer and chronic disease among survivors.

“Nagasaki and Hiroshima remind us to put peace first every day; to work on conflict prevention and resolution, reconciliation, and dialogue; and to tackle the roots of conflict and violence.” - Antonio Guterres

Today, Hiroshima is an attractive, busy, modern city acutely aware of its unfortunate place in human history. To further the cause of peace it wears its catastrophic past with honour. The only building to partially survive the epicentre of the bomb was the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the Genbaku Dome or Atomic Bomb Dome. The dome’s miraculous survival was due to its modern construction with a steel frame, strong materials, and earthquake-resistant features, which allowed it to withstand the blast force while nearby wooden structures were entirely incinerated. The Dome ruin has been continually preserved by the local prefecture, gaining recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site and remains a central feature of the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park commemorating the event, its victims and survivors.

The park also houses the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, opened in 1955 to ensure the horrors of the bomb are never forgotten while simultaneously making the strongest case for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Walking round the Museum’s permanent display is a distressing but moving experience as one exhibit after another testifies to the death and destruction unleashed by the bomb 80 years ago.

The museum and area surrounding the epicentre of the blast is visited by tens of thousands daily, predominantly Japanese citizens and vast numbers of school children, paying their own respects to the cost met by their fellow nationals on the path toward world peace.

At this time of year in many cultures across the globe, events and festivals have evolved to celebrate and honour the dead, among them the renowned Mexican Day of the Dead, Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve), All Saints Day and Samhain. Our forebears are easily forgotten in the busy excitement of day to day living. They’re not here of course so can’t remind us in person of the central role they have played in our very existence - we quite literally owe them our lives. They are the giants upon whose shoulders we stand and deserve no less than our perpetual gratitude. This month’s festivals of the dead give entire nations a traditional excuse for torchlit celebrations while the veils between the realms of the living and the dead are said to be at their thinnest. This week’s Taurus Moon provides a cosmological reminder to gratefully acknowledge our ancestors’ enduring genealogical presence in our own lives.

Japan is full of shrines, as many as 150,000 of them, evidencing the historic amalgamation of Shinto and Buddhist religious practice across the nation. Whether at the corner of a bustling commercial city street; on a shelf in a sushi restaurant; on a tiny plot next to an immense supermarket car park or in a remote, forested mountain village, the shrine plays a key role in reminding the population of their spiritual heritage. Each location provides a sacred forum in which to give thanks or petition the overlighting shrine entity for health and happiness (the Japanese Buddhist pantheon was said to have contained over 3000 deities).

Like Halevi’s Toledano School of Kabbalah, the Japanese shrine embodies a very practical approach to spiritual exploration. I was informed whilst visiting a nationally significant site at the confluence of three rivers that a shrine only retains relevance by being visited. If it is not attended, like all living things, it must decay and pass. A shrine is therefore seen as a very pragmatic vehicle for the singularly human desire to connect and commune with the unifying essence of Spirit.

“It would appear to me that Shinto originated from the feelings of love and respect towards their ancestors by their descendants.” - Hirata Kanichi

In this current period of world history when major global economic powers continue to escalate their testing and production of nuclear warheads, perhaps there’s a case for those of us committed to non violence to fashion our own ancestral shrines in the name of peace. Why not take time to pick out a few photographs or objects that remind you of friends, relations or individuals with whom you have an affinity, particularly those that have died in the past twelve months? Arrange said images and objects on a small table, mantlepiece or shelf with a candle or two, an incense stick and some fresh cut flowers, foliage or something grown in the earth.

Throughout this lunar month, take time morning and night to light the candles on your ‘family’ shrine and gratefully remember the ancestors, dead or alive, for the treasured gift of life they have bequeathed you. As you remember them with love and affection, resolve to use their gift of life in the best way you can for the benefit of All, that you too may eventually be a well remembered ancestor. Such genuinely held, grateful intentions focus on serving Halevi’s ‘bigger picture’ rather than our own immediate selfish desires, and carry an almost immediate return in power, purpose and joy.

In front of your shrine, remember your surviving family and friends, those that still share your path in fraternity, bringing Love into your life as an embodied, tangible experience. In quiet contemplation, if someone in particular comes to mind that you haven’t seen in a while, follow it up and make contact. If you’ve got an outstanding Taurus Moon beef with anyone, make attempts to resolve the differences, or forgive and move on unencumbered.

This week take time to remember those killed in historic or recent violent conflict the world over and their devastated families. Remember those whose lives, homes and livelihoods have been lost to short sighted human misapprehension and enmity. Remember them all as brothers and sisters in the common family of humankind and offer a pledge to do what you can do to bring peace to all on this beautiful, precious planet in their memory. We live in interesting times indeed.

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.”- Chinese proverb

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WEEPING WOMAN IN GAZA oil on canvas 30 x 21cm Mark Weighton (after Picasso) 2025

ENOUGH ALREADY!

ARIES FULL MOON

Back in the Pagan day, the Hunter’s Moon was considered the last under which to trap, kill and preserve game in preparation for the long winter months ahead. Indigenous cultures rarely took more than they needed from nature, understanding the sacred bond between their survival and the long term survival of those creatures upon which they preyed. Nonetheless, a well stocked cold store of nutritious supplies at this time of year was a welcome insurance policy upon which the health of many tribal cultures depended.

“If you talk to the animals, they will talk with you, and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them, and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.” – Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Canada.

The sentiments of taking ‘enough’ are hard to find in the aisles of your average supermarket these days and the pressure on our time and energy to immediately provide for ourselves and our families as well as hold down a steady job are proving increasingly challenging to our well being. We consider ourselves ‘time-poor’ and therefore rely heavily on opening hours at the cathedrals of commerce to meet immediate needs.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have evolved into a new breed of hunter gatherers, largely chasing the elusive quarry of personal finance. In our daily pursuit of wages, consumer bargains, pension plans, lifestyle choices, career paths and relationships, we appear to be engaging with a different, potentially self imposed, type of existential stress from our ancestors. In our insatiable desire for more, how often do we question whether we already live with enough?

The year round strain of modern living may appear superficial compared to the historic anxieties of hunger, cold and disease surrounding the onset of winter, but stress is stress regardless, applying similar human tensions across millennia, the varying levels of which our nervous systems still struggle to differentiate between.

We should rightly champion the many great benefits of the modern era, however modern society has managed to perpetuate the stresses of day to day existence unabated. Let’s not forget that despite our indisputable capacity to provide a sustainable, equitable, poverty free life for everyone on the planet, we still haven’t been able to organise the utopia without bombing the shit out of each other. Warfare, and the suffering it barbarically imposes, still blights our modern landscape with millions of people in 2025 still needlessly facing those sadly enduring winter threats of hunger, cold and disease as a hate inspired consequence.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” - Dwight D Eisenhower

Tension isn’t necessarily an entirely bad thing of course. We need a certain amount of stress to elicit action. Astrologically, the suggestion of heightened emotional tension during the days surrounding a full moon offers a monthly opportunity to shake things up to improve current circumstances - to push boundaries for bright new tomorrows unburdened by the past if you like. Even if you’re not shaking things up on a conscious level, the likelihood is you’re gonna piss someone off under a full moon consequently sending circumstances down a different path. The more self aware amongst us seek to play these life percentages to our own benefit; the wise play the odds for the benefit of All.

Under this Aries moon, (to which the positive traits of focussed, inspirational leadership are often attributed) inspired affirmative action might be the order of the next fortnight. On a geopolitical level let’s hope so. In the same period those positive Aries traits are likely to be countered by the negative aspects of the star sign: power hungry, obstinate, wilful intransigence. Sadly, those with a holistic, beneficent perspective of planetary well being could find themselves targeted for retribution by those with a darker agenda.

I had that Aries opposition in mind when I initially wrote this piece, fearing the worst for those aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla heading for Gaza planning to deliver much needed food and medical supplies to the displaced, starving Palestinians suffering genocide in their homeland. Saint Greta of Thunberg had recently been sending deeply concerning messages from the deck of her current Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) boat, Alma, as Israeli military drones dropped explosive devices on the collection of more than 50 unarmed civilian craft from 45 countries under cover of darkness.

The initial FFC boat set sail for Gaza on 1st June this year with the intention of breaking the 18 year blockade of the Gaza Strip, in response to the famine and humanitarian crisis there. The first vessel, Madleen, left Italian waters in Sicily loaded with baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, medical kits and crutches. Within days it was intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters, attacked with chemical spray, boarded and seized, preventing it from reaching the Gaza coast. Israeli soldiers transported the 12 people onboard, including Thunberg and French MEP Rima Hassan, to detention in Israel from where they were eventually deported.

Undeterred, the FFC amplified their attempts to bring supplies to Gaza while highlighting the ongoing genocide by launching the current, larger aid flotilla under the defiant banner Thousand Madleens to Gaza. Once more with Thunberg and a wider collection of other peace activists and elected political representatives on board, an array of small boats set course for Gaza in mid September and eventually got to within a day’s sail of their target. Overnight on Wednesday 1st October the flotilla was intercepted and attacked with powerful water cannon from approximately 20 Israeli naval craft in international waters, despite having gained the nominal protection of one naval vessel from both Spain and Italy.

Current reports are limited but before phones and communications were destroyed by the military, footage of the flotilla seizure and arrest of those aboard was posted to media outlets. As I write this almost all of the boats have been reported intercepted or stopped according to FFC tracking data. Many of the arrested crew, including Thunberg, remain in prison detention in Israel. Organisers maintain that any remaining ships in the flotilla will continue the voyage undeterred but will no doubt expect the same reception.

The outcome remains perilously uncertain. Global outcry is gaining momentum and the issue remains a potential international diplomacy flashpoint as the two year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel is marked on October 7th. For those of us with a steadfast commitment to non violence the flotilla represents a rare beacon of hope in the campaign to stop the bloodshed of innocent civilians in Gaza. The flotilla may be in the process of being ‘sunk’ but the peaceful intent to highlight the atrocities served against humanity in Gaza endures.

In the past week there have been spontaneous civil protests across Europe with major demonstrations on the streets of Italy, in Bari, Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Pisa and Rome. Italian trade unions have already called for a national general strike in support of Palestine this week. Reports are surfacing of dock workers in the major seaport of Genoa refusing to let Israeli boats and supply ships leave port.

Let’s hope that everyone involved is safe and unharmed. May the Flotilla’s valiant efforts spur additional political efforts toward peace, freedom and autonomy for the beleaguered people and land of Palestine.

In these monthly articles, I try not to focus too heavily on negative aspects of world events to avoid the sense of helplessness often evoked by regular media coverage. It’s not always easy. The trend towards right wing rhetoric and authoritarian rule in many major nations appears to be gaining momentum and shouldn’t be ignored. Trump and his cronies running the US Department of War, seem more intent in stirring division than uniting people in America, resulting in an ensuing ‘chaos’ that arguably permits them to exert greater military control over the populace to maintain ‘order’. However, are we not in danger of rising unhelpfully to the constant flow of their toxic bait by using the same hateful invective? Our negative emotional reaction to their antagonism is exactly what they need to incite divisive chaos. It’s simplistic playground politics but it works.

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals. In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.” - Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist 1934 - 2025 RIP

I prefer instead to write about those aspects of our lives that remain within our control (our thoughts, words and deeds) to positive effect. This does not mean I’m encouraging a state of denial - far from it. I merely seek to focus attention more specifically onto areas of life where direct involvement can lead to healing rather than harm. In developing an empowered sense of belief in our own capacity to determine a better world in our immediate surroundings through caring behaviour, we very quickly find ourselves actively contributing to a wider benefit for All. It’s an ultimate win/win.

Although we may feel overwhelmed by the building tide of economic demands and social pressures under this Aries moon, the case for devoting precious time to soul matters has never been more important. By concentrating on the stuff we love, that makes our hearts sing and life worth living, we balance our burdens with a soulful antidote to the malaise of stress. We gain internal strength rather than leach precious vitality to external agendas set by others.

Nothing matters more than the Soul. It is the beloved, still small voice beneath the inane busy chatter of the mind and man made world. It is the bedrock of our being, the foundation of our fundamentals. It is the connection we feel to All that is, was and ever will be in the same eternal moment. It is our Divine Self, our existential truth and best mate. It is the relationship on which we can always rely, from which we never separate - even in death - and which we ignore to our detriment.

The Soul gives unconditionally if we are open to receive, and guides should we have ears to listen. It is the same divine spark that animates every human, creature and living form. It is our nature, our unified being, our vulnerability and invincibility in One, and coincidentally, all that truly exists.

It has been called Love by many and I adore the word. In greeting every person that we meet firmly in the knowledge of our irrefutable Soul/Love connection, the man made world becomes a more humane, equitable, respectful and peaceful place in which to dwell. Namaste…as they say.

So why not seek to change the world for the better under this Hunter’s Moon, by pursuing the Soul as our quarry; our prize for the chase into self knowledge? Its lair is not far away. It rests right here, within the earthy burrows of our being, the indwelling essence from which we emerge in flesh and blood. Why not search it out, if not already familiar with its full acquaintance? It will not run. On the contrary. Once located and engaged it will faithfully abide by our side through thick and thin, unshakeable, fearless and comforting where once it appeared mysterious, elusive and untamed.

“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

The Soul is our heritage, legacy and reward; a birthright and refuge beyond the relentless cycles of birth and death. It is the bounty for which we vainly scour and grope on a daily basis, hungry hunters all, searching forever outward, always in the wrong places.

Alternatively, we can choose to be quiet and still, start the search within, intent on listening for our own loving presence rising from the heart, purring like a lost pet, full of inherent wisdom waiting to be housed and cherished. It is drawn to the lure of our living breath, the call of our aching desire to seek. Love is not illusive, it wants to be caught, to be ours always... until we finally realise we dwell within it, inviolate, inseparate and at peace, no kill ever having been necessary.

This hunt is simple, following a constantly accessible path should you hear the call:

1. Sit in a quiet space with your back straight and eyes closed.

2. Concentrate solely on your breath to the exclusion of all thought.

3. Don’t worry when thoughts pop up - it’s natural - but with even a minimum of practice (just a few minutes a day) the cluttered thinking eventually calms down and occasionally stops.

4. There, in the prolonged awareness of the silent space between thoughts, a new inner dialogue begins - that of the Soul.

Don’t take my word for it. Relax, take aim, allow who you think you are to dissolve and introduce yourself to what you truly are. It will always be enough.

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” - Chinese proverb

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HARVESTING OUR HUMANITY

PISCES FULL MOON

As the cooler temperatures at dawn and dusk call time on summer in the Northern Hemisphere, those tending to the land upon which we all depend, know the final harvests of the year must happen soon. This week’s Full Corn Moon, often in Pisces - the last astrological house of the zodiac - signifies the end of an annual cycle in so many ways.

This is pinnacle harvest season, where we reap what we have sown as seeds of intent earlier in the year. We can observe our metaphorical chickens come home to roost; witness the fruits of our labour and the proof in our various puddings. Both physical and allegorical corn is ripe for picking. It's therefore a pertinent moment in our personal yearly cycles to take stock of and store the good stuff we’ve accrued whilst simultaneously getting rid of anything that might be bruised or rotten to avoid spoiling an entire season's yield.

To a greater or lesser extent we're all bruised or damaged goods of course, and the coming month provides a timely window in which to consign our heartache and disappointments to the returns depot of the past. The wounds of emotional pain are evident around and within us, cruelly inflicted by the patriarchal, cultural malaise that continues to violently impose its greedy default ideology on both planet and people. War; sexual violence and abuse of women and children; poverty; disease; famine; environmental degradation, climate crisis; cruelty to animals; can send many of us into spirals of emotional despair, often triggering and reopening experiential scars of our own.

Water sign Pisces is as emotionally charged as an astrological sign can get, so under this Pisces Corn Moon the tears of pain, anger and frustration are likely to overflow. With resolute courage, this then is a recommended period in which to contemplate the human catastrophe of suffering - the cage of perception that we continue to lock from the inside - in order to challenge it on both a personal and collective basis.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Our current landscape is of our own making; the proof is indeed in our very own pudding. There is no one or nothing else to blame, blame itself actually an irrelevance. If we can circumnavigate the pitfalls of hateful judgement, even in the most challenging of circumstances, we are well set to generate the determined capacity to react in a positive manner to whatever we encounter. Such conscious responses foster a sense of self empowerment and choice where otherwise there might appear to be none.

And, if the signs of positive change aren't currently evident in our own lives and those immediately around us, it could be that we haven't yet found the opportunity or the courage to plant the seeds from which they might germinate. There is never a better moment than now to prepare the soil of our hearts and minds in expectation of bountiful future crops.

This week, it's well worth reminding ourselves of any seeds of positive intent that we did consciously plant in the fertile soil of spring this year. What were our new year resolutions? How have those plans worked out? What has been learnt in the process? How many of the questions and challenges we set ourselves remain pertinent, unanswered or simply forgotten nine months later?

Answers may be found by reflecting on who is actually served by our habitualised, normalised behaviour, although there is often very little 'normal' about it. Is it really us? Is our behaviour a considered reflection of what we truly want; of who and what we are? Quite often it isn't. Mostly we've been duped to think our actions are what we need to be happy. The economic wealth generated by the models of behaviour we employ rarely alleviate the suffering of those in real need. Worse, our societally conditioned decision making regularly leads to others being put squarely in harm's way and it's really not a good global look for the 21st Century.

How many of us are prepared, however, to change the self serving 'lifestyles' to which we've become accustomed in order to contribute to a wider benefit for all? How many of us care enough to give up anything that we mistakenly believe has been hard won when it’s more regularly bestowed by privileged good fortune or the lottery of one’s birthplace?

“To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.” - John Burroughs

Is it possible for us to become a generation of 'have-nots' by celebrated choice? A population that values clean air, clean food and clean thinking over the clatter, chatter and confusion of insatiable consumerist 'norms'. We are all products of our social and economic environments. We are the chickens that have come home to roost and the coop in which we sit preening our good luck is overflowing with festering piles of our own shit.

So where do we start to pick up the pieces of our evident self loathing (self hatred being the foundation upon which we demean and hate others) and reassemble them into an altogether more positive, immediate vision for our planet and population? How do we begin to clear up the shit and turn it into nutritious, organic compost in which to plant the seeds of a healthy sustainable future?

The argument goes that in challenging and changing the paradigm of our social and economic circumstances we can change our collective outlook and behaviour, but where in education or mainstream media coverage are credibly supported alternatives? Where are the legitimised, workable role models for future equitable prosperity? International, global economies have little vested interest in what happens in localities and communities so by necessity we must create those models ourselves....and now. Buy local, buy organic, buy second hand. Repair, recycle, reuse. It's a start.

In the re-membering of our unified origin and humanity's inherent interdependence is the beginning of the end for the discriminatory lines of division separating us from our collective planetary birthright of paradise on Earth. It can be the dawn of a great healing. Recognition (or not) that our conditioned, unthinking behaviour cannot be divorced from the consequences of planetary blight for others will be the signature of our times. Chaos theory might have fallen from recent science headlines but its mathematical assertions of universal interconnectedness holds true - karma by any other name.

“Instant-karma : A circumstance where the actions of a person backfire by causing an immediate unforeseen and unintended effect that may be deemed just deserts for those actions.” - www.yourdictionary.com

Our ultimate potential as a species and an integral part of Earth's biosphere lies together in harmonious diversity, respecting and nurturing self and each other. Until we understand that we are our neighbour; that there is no more rational nor sensible action in life than to treat that neighbour as we would want to be treated ourselves, we will continue to roost in and choke on the fresh harvest of our own unprocessed crap. It really is time to stop shitting on our own doorstep, because ours is truly the threshold to everyone else's home.

“The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.” - Coretta Scott King

Just as importantly, we can harness the emotional charge of this Pisces Corn Moon to connect with the simple joys in life that cost no one: life's perpetual win wins. A kind word or a smile; an act of generosity towards those in genuine need; a trusting volunteered hand in the neighbourhood; a listening ear or comforting presence; a move towards contrition or more importantly forgiveness; a personal commitment to cause no harm in thought, word or deed; afternoon naps; growing some late in the year veggies; evening walks in nature; open, intimate conversations from the heart; a home cooked meal from hand picked organic produce; an early night with a good friend; creative activities whether written, drawn, painted, sculpted, sung or danced; all steeped in the existential marinade of Love.

These aspects of our lives, vital to our well being, are not pipe dreams forged in the manufactured fog of consumerism that threatens the essential, life supporting biodiversity across Planet Earth. They are not idols at whose altar we would debase or sacrifice our happiness. They are not yardsticks of success with which we can beat ourselves. No. They are inherent aspects of being both human and humane, instantly observable as beneficial to all and worthy of defending. They are no less than the paradise we would wish for ourselves and should therefore wish for everyone else. Let's nurture our most progressive, happiest dreams toward that singularly beneficial harvest.

“What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” - Meister Eckhart

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SWEET TALK

AQUARIUS FULL MOON

In the northern hemisphere, the first days of August are historically tied to festivals expressing gratitude for an abundant, problem free harvest. The Pagan observance of Lughnasadh (pronounced Loo-nah-sah) falls midway between Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox; also known as Lammas (Loaf Mass Day) when bread was baked from the first cut of wheat and ceremonially delivered to the local church - still a symbolic feature in traditional Christian harvest festivals across the UK to this day. It could well have been the proto-Great British Bake Off and an excellent example of early Christian church appropriation of pagan ritual. On your marks, get set ye Pagans, bake!

The festivities would normally have been marked at the full moon which for those with an astrological bent is housed this weekend in the sign of Aquarius. The full moon was, and remains, an objective marker in the skies each month of the celestial rhythm to which all things dance. As astrological observance has developed over millennia, full moons have come to be interpreted as periods in which we harvest the fruit nurtured from the seeds of intent sown at new moons. It can be rewarding to observe the fortnightly transitions between setting new moon dreams in motion and their progress toward manifestation under subsequent full moons. This cosmic tidal rhythm sets the tempo with which these columns are written and shared each month.

This week’s Aquarius New Moon carries a shed load of planetary influence: Uranus, Mars, Pluto and Saturn all playing their part with a smattering of retrogrades, not least that of the quicksilver communicator Mercury. In very generalised terms the astrological focus seems to be on our individual voices and how what we’re thinking, saying, then doing serves the collective. Equally as important, how do collective behaviour and cultural norms serve us as individuals trying to express ourselves?

"The mind is everything. What you think, you become." - Gautama Buddha

With Mercury retrograde opposite Pluto we’d do well to watch out for emotional baggage surfacing for release in group and intimate settings (that’s a good thing but not always a comfortable ride). Even more likely are instances of wounds in communication, be that inflicted wounds - intentional or otherwise - or unhealed wounds from the past wanting to make themselves heard whatever the circumstance.

All of which suggests we should be choosing our words very carefully over the next fortnight. It’s likely we'll manage to upset people without quite knowing how or why, potentially undermining relationships that represent the societal power structures in our lives: partners, parents, work, bosses, government, law and how those structures are maintained. This is not the week to push the buttons of anyone in authority or changes in our previously unquestioned status might be forcefully imposed upon us.

To continue with the harvest metaphors, we are more likely than usual to reap what we have sown under this Aquarius Full Moon. Our words may come back to haunt us as the law of cause and effect provides an instant reflection of our thoughts and verbal output. If we take a negative approach in thought and word the outcomes will be negative. Similarly, a positive thought and comment will usually lead to positive outcomes - mostly everyone feeling a bit better about themselves.

So perhaps this is the week to take every opportunity to spread a few kind words wherever you find yourself. In the unrelenting discipline of only speaking positively, essentially finding the good in all circumstances however challenging, one trains the mind to follow suit. This is not a denial of the crappy stuff, merely a reinterpretation of its influence on our life experience. Positive words encourage positive thoughts encourage positive actions begetting more positive thoughts, words and actions. It's one of those exponentially expansive, cyclical win/wins that I love and, under this Aquarius Full Moon, could go some way to countering any potential communication/relationship difficulties.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” - Marcus Aurelius

As always at full moon, our emotions and instinctive behaviours (conditioned responses) tend to feel exacerbated. A conscious effort to recalibrate any prevalent negative default settings to full on, full moon positive might help us align with the ever benevolent, ever expanding nature of existence in joy and abundance. Accordingly, we offer a couple of positively phrased do's and don'ts that might help sweet talk the testing aspects of this Aquarius Full Moon into a boundless, bumper harvest.

DO get positive. Upon waking each day for the next fortnight, consciously train your mind to exercise positive thoughts and words. Share them, in person or by text to anyone that is with you or that intuitively comes to mind. "What a beautiful day.......I love the incessant rain, it allows plants to grow and keeps us hydrated." Repeat the thought until firmly believed.

DON'T contribute to or endorse other people's negative narratives. If you suspect an iffy whinge is in the offing, find a way to diplomatically walk away. Negativity will eventually start to feel like an ill-fitting outfit - so why not strip off the pessimistic corsetry and slip into something a little more comfortable?

DO mind your language. Words are a powerful tool. Make sure they are used only to good effect. If you're in danger of commencing a verbal downer STOP! keep your mouth shut until confident of picking up your positive thread.

DON'T swear. Most of us are liberal with our effing and blinding (this column being a regular case in point). However, it is a good exercise once in a while to consciously cut out all profanities as an act of mindfulness.

DO keep a swear/negativity box. For the next fortnight, charge yourself a quid every time you cuss or find yourself returning to patterns of habitual skepticism.

DON'T cheat. Donate the proceeds to a worthwhile cause.

DO switch off the news apps and outlets. It's a relentless stream of negativity that most of us would function better without.

DON'T kid yourself that you're keeping up to date with current events. It's somebody else's editorial decision about what's important in life that has little to do with you at all. Nothing is more important than you. You are the narrative. You are the story and it's a daily miracle. Be your own editor. Switch that other shit off. (That was a quid well spent btw…)

“Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.” - Epictetus

DO end each day by sitting quietly and recalling the day's activities with gratitude, regardless of the challenges that may have been faced.

DON'T underestimate the power of positive thinking

DO remain consistent in your intent by already assuming the abundant harvest is heading your way once your imagination has clearly pictured what it is that you want to manifest. A good farmer doesn't keep unearthing the seeds he’s sown to check if they’re germinating - that would be the quickest way of stopping growth in its tracks. Nurture the soil of your soul, then have faith in the process you have initiated.

DON'T doubt, or undermine the creative dynamism of your wishes by digging up poisonous unworthiness, life’s not fair or victim mentality guff. They are the mental equivalent of glyphosate, killing the roots of everything good you seek to cultivate.

DO encourage and nurture yourself and others through positive thought, word and subsequent action. It is a simple definition of Love and makes the world a better place to be.

DON'T say don't......

“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.” - Mahatma Gandhi

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UNBROKEN

CAPRICORN FULL MOON 10 JULY

For the past 35 years I have been fortunate enough to live and work as a professional artist. I take pride in locating myself within the longstanding tradition of painting, the lineage of which can be traced back to the earliest examples of cave painting created over 60,000 years ago.

In its contemporary iteration painting is now being explored in a hugely diverse range of media, with luminaries such as David Hockney claiming the astonishing artworks created on his iPad are as credible as anything he has made in the more traditional analogue media of paint, ink, canvas and paper. Through his ongoing high profile experimentation, Hockney has made a huge contribution to digital art being embraced as a dynamic and integral part of the canon. Nice one Dave.

“I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.” - David Hockney

The media in my own work may occasionally change but the personal imperative to keep working remains constant. There is always something on the go, another idea or sketchbook scribble to develop in a more concerted manner. I don’t remember ever experiencing a creative impasse or ‘block’. Work has always flowed, even if the outcomes have fallen frustratingly short of my expectations. It has always seemed to me that the natural world consistently displays its creative drive, and as an integral component of existence, why should we humans be any different? There is a natural order in creativity which we choose to ignore or fail to develop at our own detriment.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” - Pablo Picasso

The exhibition UNBROKEN currently on display at South Hill Gallery in the UK is a collection of my most recent paintings and drawings, curated to mark my 60th birthday. The work highlights my enduring preoccupation with humanity’s broken understanding of the interconnected nature of existence, an inextricable web of relationship upon which our lives depend.

Despite our rich cultural heritage - our unlimited wealth of limited understanding - we have contrived, in a relatively short period of history, to divorce ourselves from the living environment which that colourful heritage describes. There is a modern world existential disconnect that bypasses the traditional wisdom of cause and effect. We see the damage we have caused to the environment and each other, and carry on regardless. Our actions exacerbate the breakdown. The schism between common sense and cultural norms widens. As the waters rise, as the ice melts, as the plastic slicked oceans boil and acidify; as we enter the planet’s sixth epoch of mass extinction, what's the fecking point of making art?

In short, in times of war, famine and human induced catastrophe, art isn’t just a commodified luxury; it earns its corn as a vital means of expression, survival and even resistance. It allows individuals and communities to process trauma, document their experiences and communicate messages of hope or protest when other political or social frameworks have failed or been exhausted.

More contentiously, it might be said that art’s validity lies in consistently speaking to our greater reality: the poetic essence and archetypes at play in the everyday that establish sacred mystery in the mundane. In his book The Vision of the Fool, the artist philosopher Cecil Collins suggests, “The purpose of art is to worship and praise life through wonder.” It is not the job of art to explain life - it expresses life; is an extension of life, creating new pathways by which the unknowable spirit of existence can be “contacted, experienced and realised” while paradoxically remaining a mystery.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” - C G Jung

The path of the artist often starts in glorious isolation and my experience was no different. Through life affirming, solitary acts of creation from early childhood that fueled an intrinsic belief in the value and uniqueness of my vision, I built a confidence, bordering on self importance, that provided the necessary personal momentum to dedicate countless hours to my craft, to constantly explore uncharted creative territories and to trust an emerging inner voice against the vagaries of external doubt.

“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” - Frida Kahlo

The creative process has become synonymous with deep introspection, and I still prize uninterrupted days alone in the studio where my identity and perception of self are inextricably woven into the fabric of my work. It is not merely an exercise in egotistic willfulness, it is the process of self examination that pushes the creative practice beyond the ego into a tangible sense of connection with the eternal creative flow of existence. To a degree my art practice is a means to this quasi spiritual end but without developing that early foundational confidence and faith, the courage to manifest my internal world into tangible form might well have faltered.

However, the dynamics of that cosy, ivory tower echo chamber of self belief shift dramatically when the artwork moves from my private studio to the public exhibition space. Here, one’s carefully nurtured self worth is tested. The act of exhibiting invites external judgement, a forum in which the artist’s private dialogue with their work becomes a public conversation. The sacred preserve of personal outcomes is instantly opened to diverse interpretation, critique and commercial valuation, often challenging the faith in one’s uncontested initial self perception.

This exposure can be as exhilarating as it is intimidating; as validating of one’s self worth as confrontational of a reality that one’s output is not universally received as might have been imagined or desired.

“Listening to the siren song of more, we are deaf to the still small voice waiting in our soul to whisper, ‘You’re enough’.” - Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

Personally, I prefer to take the edge off the jeopardy by recalibrating the exhibition experience in terms of ‘sharing’. It’s something of a semantic shimmy, but for me, a slight blurring of the harsh artist/audience duality into a participatory dialogue can encourage more creative outcomes than the binary like/dislike judgements commonly at play. Creativity begetting creativity perhaps - a consciously nurtured, less polarised win/win for all concerned… but primarily for me. ‘Sharing’ rather than simply presenting outcomes, helps prevent me from being adversely swayed or distracted by any critique that may arise, perhaps even evoking a protective layer around my most intimate inner dialogue - the source of the whole process. The exhibiting artist should evoke vulnerability by necessity, but never to the point of losing one’s personal imperative entirely to the seductions of external validation.

Ultimately, the tension between self-importance and the act of exhibiting is a crucible for artistic growth. Let’s face it, without the belief that one’s creative output is worth sharing, very little would be. And while a healthy ego is a vital tool of the artist, the exhibition process also requires a degree of humility and openness to external perspectives once an audience is engaged. It has taught me that my work, once released, takes on a creative life of its own, independent of my initial intentions and self conceptions. Navigating this dynamic has allowed me to evolve, refining my vision not just in isolation, but in dialogue with the world, transforming that youthful, initial self importance into a more resilient and nuanced understanding of my place within the broader artistic landscape. I can report that it feels good to be part of a cultural lineage.

Whether or not we consider ourselves artists, by creatively exploring how we can reconnect our personal responses to our wider self (the reality of our origins) art offers an unlimited variety of potential routes out of the mess our species alone has manifested. Through art’s time honoured application of symbol and mythology, new stories of redemption can be told, bridges can be built, devastation repaired, health recovered, division reunited. Art heals.

Despite the illusions of separation we contrive to create in the modern world, we cannot break our unending connection to everything. After 60 years of unrelenting social and economic privilege, I still, on occasion, feel completely battered. But the wounds received and inflicted are not the only story. There is one to be told of atonement and exaltation in which joy drives the narrative and where love is expressed in every moment of awareness. In this true story, the inviolable, eternal connection between all things remains unbroken.

UNBROKEN - recent paintings by Mark Weighton can be viewed at South Hill Gallery until 7 September 2025. The work can also be viewed online at www.markweighton.com

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SAGITTARIUS FULL MOON 11 JUNE

In an age of science and reason, the study of astrology gets a bit of a bad rap, and not without some justification. Despite comprehensive astrological traditions dating back over 4,000 years there is a cultural tendency in modern western society to dismiss it all as unsubstantiated, anti-science nonsense.

But it could be argued that if the language of astrological study has been around as long as it has, often with very similar interpretations between the geographically distant ancient cultures that devised it, then there might be something to it.

Any philosophical system that encourages humanity to look at itself in relation to the bigger picture (and let’s face it, our star-filled universe is about as big a picture as we’re currently able to scientifically digest) is to my mind offering humanity a great service. What mysteries might unfold in the barely charted heavens that reflect our own mysterious, corporeal existence. I mean, we’re all stardust in one form or other are we not?

“As above, so below.” - attributed to Hermes Tresmigistus, The Emerald Tablet

And what has science and ‘reason’ delivered us in just the last 100 years? Sadly, the rather unreasonable headline of atomic weapons and regular episodes of genocide, so any belief system that fosters greater personal and collective understanding might provide a welcome alternative to humanity’s current, tragically destructive rationale. It should be noted that science has observed that, generally, life does not seek to destroy itself. Unfortunately that appears to be the sole preserve of human thought and behaviour. Just sayin’.

Scientists, rationalists and astrologists all concur irrefutably that there is a full moon this week. In astrological terms it reaches its fullest while passing through the zodiac sign of Sagittarius. Astrologists take a good look at the positions of other stars and planets in this neck of the Galaxy when the moon is at its peak, then interpret the various influences attributed to those alignments. It’s not an exact science by any means but nonetheless displays intriguing methodology in projecting possible celestial influence on our mental, emotional and physical make up. For those with an interest in exploring their responses to circumstance in thought, word and deed, it can be seen as a helpful tool.

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune––often the surfeit of our own behavior––we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on, an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” - Shakespeare, King Lear

According to the astrological charts, this month there is some notable positioning of Mars, the dwarf planet Eris and a small ringed solar system body named Chiron. The names given to these celestial bodies relate to classical mythology authored in pre christian societies, usually the names of gods from the pagan pantheon with particular skills and patterns of behaviour. Mars was the god of war, while as an astrological influence it is said to be the planet of drive, motivation and action - but also anger and impulse. In mythology, Eris is the goddess of discord and strife. The astrological thinking goes that when aligned as they will be this week, Mars and Eris in tandem make for a potentially explosive, emotionally raw period leading up to and just after the full moon. Get the picture? Even if it doesn’t happen that way, it’s good to be forewarned just in case, right?

“There's some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens look with an aspect more favourable.” - Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

And then there’s Chiron to be thrown into the astral mix. A planet with an eccentric orbit around the sun somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, was only discovered in 1977 - culturally more punk rock than pre-christian - yet its name transports us to early Greek mythology which, like all good stories, allow us to reflect on our own role in the grand design.

Chiron’s story, that of the wounded healer, is an endearing one yet starts with the Titan Chronos’s lusty infatuation with the sea nymph Philyra. His interest wasn’t reciprocated and she turned herself into a horse to escape him. Chronos undeterred, simply transformed himself into a stallion and pursued her anyway.

The result of their inevitable congress was Chiron who, due to all the shapeshifting that went into his conception, was born as an immortal hybrid: half man, half horse - known in classical mythology as a centaur.

When Philyra birthed her son she was overwhelmed with grief and shame. She prayed to be changed into something else so she wouldn’t have to live with what had happened, or with what she had brought into the world. The Gods acquiesced, immediately transforming her into a linden tree (φιλύρα, philyra, appropriately being the ancient greek word for linden).

Chiron was therefore a misfit abandoned orphan, born of divine force and maternal rejection; enough baggage alone to spawn a proper psychopath you’d think, but unlike most centaurs, who were a wild unruly bunch fond of carousing and overt violence, he eventually proved to be intelligent, wise and gentle. Fortunately, he was found as an infant and raised by Apollo, god of music, healing and prophecy, under whose guidance Chiron mastered medicine, ethics, hunting, astronomy and music, specialising in the lyre.

Apollo encouraged his twin sister Artemis, goddess of the wild and the hunt, to contribute to Chiron’s education, teaching him the arts of archery and self-sufficiency. Through the loving attentions of his foster dad, Chiron transcended his bestial centaur nature to become a wise healer, gentle and civilized, regularly sought out in his cave on Mount Pelion to teach would be heroes and demigods how to live with wisdom and honour.

The list of his students reads like a pantheon itself, among them: Achilles, whom Chiron raised and tutored from boyhood; Asclepius, who would later become the god of healing; Jason, leader of the Argonauts; Actaeon, who met an unfortunate end after seeing Artemis bathe; and Heracles, the all conquering hero whose future actions eventually had tragic consequences for Chiron himself.

The story variously goes that Heracles was either fighting off a bunch of murderous Centaurs or just messing about with some arrows tipped with deadly poison made from the blood of the Hydra, when he accidentally dropped an arrow on Chiron’s hoof. It was merely a nick but the damage was done, the poison worked with agonising speed. Being immortal, Chiron was condemned to an eternity of excruciating pain because of his student’s clumsiness. Even with all his healing knowledge, Chiron couldn’t cure himself, trapped instead in endless suffering. Ironic? He probably should have been a bit pissed.

But no. Chiron being Chiron found a noble cause with which to barter his immortality for the selfless resolution of an honourable death. He offered to surrender his immortality in exchange for the liberty of another - that of Prometheus, the Titan who had been chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains for eternity by Zeus. His crime? He benevolently gave fire (and by extension knowledge and progress) to humanity, a heinous act Zeus punished with inimitable cruelty. Every day, an eagle descended to devour Prometheus’s liver. Every night it regenerated starting the perpetual, excruciating cycle anew.

Zeus, seeing nobility in Chiron’s gesture, accepted his offer. By relinquishing his immortality, Chiron’s agony ended and he was finally able to die. Prometheus in turn was released from the agony of his own punishment.

To honour his sacrifice, Zeus placed Chiron in the sky, as the constellation….(wait for it)....Sagittarius. Depicted as the centaur archer whose aim was true, Chiron’s legacy was never about power or warfare. His story is an allegory of wisdom, self control, compassion, self sacrifice and ultimate healing that even the Gods admired.

It’s just a story of course, but perhaps one that carries a tad more pertinence under a Sagittarius Full Moon. Just as we have all evolved from our common heritage of stardust, we have all experienced our own narratives concerning the common landscape of human suffering. Are we all not wounded in one way or another? Many of us might go as far as to describe ourselves as damaged goods.

Having just celebrated my 60th birthday I can personally report I feel battered but to date, nonetheless, remain unbroken. I am even using Unbroken as the title of an exhibition of my recent paintings that opens later in the month. The show celebrates the role my artwork has played in my own healing, something I fortunately became aware of in my early twenties. My well being seems inextricably linked to my creative process. In short, if I’m not working creatively, in one medium or another, I suffer. This too is just a story which, for all I know, may through repetition simply have become a self fulfilling prophecy. What’s important for me is that the storyline rings true, informing my behaviour in thought, word and action in a way that helps negotiate “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, toward positive outcomes.

Our stories might not be as epically challenging as Chiron’s, but there’s probably a similar wounded healer in all of us. We intuitively know what modes of behaviour are good for us but regularly fail to follow that inner guidance, causing further suffering. We often hold the keys to our own unique medicine cabinet only to forget to open the lock, let alone swallow the appropriate pill.

Therein lies the ironic twist in our own ongoing narratives. We are our own best healer and yet at certain crucial points in our lives we no longer have the conscious capacity to help ourselves. In these moments of truth we can do little else but surrender to an evolutionary will greater than our own, hoping in some way to align with the bigger picture for the benefit of All.

Under this Sagittarius Full Moon, as planet Chiron exerts whatever astral influence it may or may not have from its eccentric orbit around our sun across the infinite depths of space, let’s remember the story of its centaur namesake, selflessly giving his all in the cause of liberty for others.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

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SCORPIO FULL MOON 12 MAY

Belated happy Beltane wishes in advance of the coming week’s Scorpio Full Moon. Astrological tradition generally casts the Scorpio moon as a time of intrigue, covert operations and clandestine encounters - ultimately linked to the great cycles of death and rebirth. No wonder it sometimes gets unfairly depicted as the lunar year’s least favourable full moon.

On the collective level the hidden transformations at work may refer to geo-political manoeuvring and secret negotiations. And, as luck would have it at the time of writing, the cardinals of the Catholic Church are just emerging from behind the locked doors of their confidential conclave appointing the new Pope. (Even in advance of the announcement it was always fairly safe to assume that the new incumbent was going to be a bloke.) Welcome to your powerful seat at the table of human malaise Pope Leo. May you guide those with ears to listen toward love, peace and equanimity. Amen.

In our personal lives Scorpio clandestine encounters are often portrayed as potentially kinkier than those in the Vatican, so this weekend might be a good window in which to suggest a spot of erotic exploration with a good friend or two. Whatever floats your boat.

More regularly, if handled carefully, Scorpio’s secretive darkside lends itself to greater emotional sensitivity, attentiveness and honest communication with oneself. So in truth, this might not be the weekend to hurriedly frequent the sordid shadows of transient pleasure, but instead privately shine an unflustered, revealing spotlight on the totally naked self. There’s never a bad time to engage in conscious introspection but this weekend might represent a keen opportunity to patiently explore the hidden inner depths that usually conceal keys to our future well being and growth.

Lest we forget, during this month five years ago most human activity was constrained by Lockdown. In re-examining the post COVID, new ‘normal’ that has emerged in that time we have a lens through which we can examine our current state of being. How did COVID affect us? What did we learn about ourselves, others and the kind of world we want to inhabit? What have we buried beneath the experiences of the last five years and what needs to be unearthed for a brighter tomorrow?

After living together in isolated but overtly intimate lockdown bubbles, what was there left to hide or disguise? Life shared at close quarters, made it doubly difficult to avoid the testing behavioural traits of ourselves and others. Have we learned to accept these foibles a little more generously than we did pre-COVID or are we as intolerant as ever?

Five years on, it might be suggested that global society has indeed gone through something of a transformation. Despite the sadness surrounding so many deaths at the hands of humanity’s multiple stupidity, there was an occasional sense that we were participating in an enforced mass awakening of human behaviour for the benefit of All. And did we wake up? Are we now finally ‘woke’ to the causal nature of our thoughts, words and actions?

It might serve us well to recall some of the behaviour to which we woke : the squandering of valuable time with those we love in pursuit of professional aspiration and material gain? The chemical charms of regular salon hair colouring and nail extensions; the coercions of fashion and bullying 'beauty' products upheld in the high temple of Hollywood? The unnecessary, hurried and stressful nature of most car travel; the beauty of nature as it rediscovered its confidence in our pedestrianised presence? The putrid pestilence of plastic ......even if it kept our crisps crispier? The complete lunacy of avariciously abusing the ever generous biosphere for excessive consumption; the billions of tonnes of avoidable waste; the deadly viral evidence of continuing misguided human activity? The value of family and community; the true love of self and other? The excesses of air travel; the comfort of cleaner air? The lengths to which we had been complicit in living lives containing the seeds of our own misery; the paper thin illusions we had come to accept in lieu of happiness? The need for appropriate investment and remuneration for the essential professions and infrastructure upon which we rely in such desperate times; the interconnected nature of all things, all people, dependent on each other to survive and prosper? The inevitability of change and our inherent ability to align with it? The miracle of sensual perception; the delights of regular, low stress exercise; the simple charm of a healthy body and well maintained immune system? The joys of peace and quiet? The elasticity of time?

For me, the woke list grew as the period in which I was faced with myself lengthened. Those, with whom I spoke, that embraced the opportunity to engage in an intimate, inner dialogue seemed amongst those most likely not to want the cultural dial to be set back to ‘normal’ after lockdown. It wasn’t the most politically palatable line of thinking but, personally speaking, I didn’t want that normal anymore. Strangely, I came to like the lockdown normal. I was fortunate. I liked staying home and the people that were stuck with me. I had a garden. I liked that when I was allowed outside I could walk most places. I loved what I saw in the interaction between people, and between people and the natural world. I enjoyed growing stuff, particularly fresh food. Folks here, just south of London in the UK, started planting seeds, shrubs and flowers on every available earthy kerbside. Every day on countless corners, sticks sprouted from the verge topped with skewered seed packets in a bizarrely immediate, printed floral prophecy of the delicate blooms to come. People were acting positively to make life more enjoyable for each other even if it took a little time and patience to achieve. Love was observed and exchanged at a two metre distance, but it was love nonetheless. People stopped to chat, even to strangers. No one seemed to be in too much of a hurry.

Five years ago, were we getting a taste of a societal paradise for the claiming, albeit in unfortunate circumstances, one freeing itself of religious dogma or governmental engineering? Did human consciousness suddenly catch up with the bricks and mortar of modern living: ready to take up residence with compassionate, ethical, sustainable governance of our material 'cathedrals' and infrastructure - whether at home, in workplaces or Parliament? Heaven forbid, people were for once sharing the stuff they'd amassed, not merely from an honourable sense of duty, but for the love of giving. Amidst the tragedy, I really believed something lovely was going on.

Where are we five years on? Certainly not in the more equitable world that I believed was just around the corner. The disparities between the haves and have nots are exacerbated. The billionaires keep gaining and hoarding further billions while, according to Oxfam, nearly half of the world’s population scrape by on less than $5.50 a day. Nation states have found themselves at loggerheads or, worse, at war. The financial and security implications have hit the most vulnerable hardest again. Overseas aid programs have been decimated in a rush to assuage the trending politics of the populist right wing. People are starving when there is more than enough food to go round. Divisions seem to have widened rather than healed. We may have developed effective vaccines to treat the COVID virus but we now face a mental health epidemic. In the six years between 2016 and 2022 prescriptions for antidepressants in the UK increased by 35%. Have we learnt nothing about caring for ourselves and our neighbours? Are we not simply setting ourselves up for more separation, yet more of the self-destructive norm?

“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” - Gautama Buddha

Thankfully, human influence has yet to disrupt the lunar calendar, an abiding heavenly rhythm evidenced in the wax and wane between new and full moons. In these uncertain times, there’s a strong case for tuning into this and other enduring, endearing tempos: the seasons; the natural cycles of death and rebirth; seeds sown, germinated, flowered, fruited and harvested; the clock of our hearts, the ephemeral tides of our blood and bone - an affirming intimate discourse with life itself.

During lockdown I did not miss the morning alarm: my call to competition and the fear of lack. My time was my own and charted by moonlight. I had everything I needed. There was peace. Too infrequently I consciously recall that memory into my busy, fractured todays by remembering to pause, then stop in silence. This simple action quickly reconnects me with the peace I feared lost to the daily noise; restorative gratitude for the abundant natural riches still available to me at no cost, returns.

As the mass media outlets never tired of declaring, those COVID months were unprecedented days. Surely, what has happened since is equally unprecedented and deserving of commensurate, concerted challenge, but how? In a post COVID world, perhaps our most effective course of action is to set renewed personal precedents in thought, word and deed to awaken our deepest longings to revive a life lived in loving peace. Here’s how:

DO make time for meditation/contemplation/prayer - call it what you will. This is a vital inner dialogue and key to the exercise of our intuition and creativity.

DON'T miss the opportunity under this emotionally sensitive Scorpio Full Moon to sit still and listen to messages of your heart and the rhythms of your body as it breathes. Concentrate fully on nothing else for as long as feels comfortable. Start of the day, end of the day; thirty seconds of conscious awareness at any time during the day - it all contributes to a rising awareness of what and who you are - a walking, sentient miracle fueled by Love.

DO make time to consider relationships that crawl out of the woodwork. A Scorpio Full Moon is liable to drag past lovers (and haters) back into the frame so be wary of engagements that hint at previous lessons not fully learnt. Let love and understanding be the order of the day, not the seductive but tired menu of titillating what ifs and maybes.

DON'T confuse cordial consideration with intimate involvement just because you can. Greet, even meet, but send learnt lessons on their way with loving best wishes.

DO make time for the natural world. Notice her. Cherish her. Talk to her. Plant her. Nurture her. Eat her fecund bounty with gratitude. Share her. She's too good to miss in May.

DON'T hurt her.

DO make time for a purge. Full moons are a great time to have a cleanse or a clear up. Direct the light of this Scorpio Full Moon into those dark, secretive corners of the mind that continue to hold your personal growth to ransom.

DON'T underestimate the power held in every thought, word and action to create the reality you experience...but it begins in the thoughts. Mindfulness therefore holds a key to the self-empowerment that ultimately makes the world a better place to be. Think big; think beautiful, for the benefit of All. You can now listen to a selection of my recorded mindfulness exercises on Spotify.

DO make time to divulge and divest. Open, honest communication may initially induce a sense of vulnerability but it leads to a position of internal equilibrium and strength. When met with candid honesty, the world and more importantly ourselves, desist in perpetuating the illusions of who we think we are. We present as we are. In acknowledging our feelings and the resultant behaviour, we weaken the restrictive power of the past to affect our present and future.

DON'T hang about. This is actually urgent business, there's a lot at stake. Although in the eternal scheme of things there’s really no rush, the quicker we change so will the world that reflects us. Let's move together, through our deepest hidden anxieties towards Love, peace and equanimity for the benefit of All.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society…You are part of society; to affect the whole, the part must transform itself” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

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LIBERATION DAYS

LIBRA FULL MOON 13 APRIL

With the momentary solar balance of the Vernal Equinox now behind us, we can return full attention to our wonky, asymmetrical lives and gambol unreservedly, like newly pastured lambs on wobbly legs, toward spring in full bloom and the aching promise of summer beyond.

Baaaaa.....

Nonetheless, a bit of calming equinoctial influence might be helpfully retained in the symbolic balanced scales of this weekend's Libra Full Moon. Should we wish to access the opportunity, astrological tradition suggests this is a great time of year to contemplate our personal intent towards others and our immediate natural surroundings. As spring rolls into summer, the next three months are the most fertile for enacting positive intentions into heartfelt realities whilst healing old wounds en route. It’s a time for planting seeds and weeding out thorns, both literally and metaphorically, in hope of a bountiful harvest later in the year.

“The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.” - Paramahansa Yogananda

The Libra Full Moon is always a verdant window through which we can swing into spring: Easter bunnies, chocolate eggs, green shoots, blossom and all. Easter, like many major religious festivals, has its roots in Pagan observations of the natural world from back in the pre-selfie day. The title Easter is said to derive, unsurprisingly, from the name of Eostre, a northern European, pre-Christian goddess who appeared as a rabbit or hare. What's up with that Doc?

Or possibly the name stems in part from the Sumerian goddess Ishtar, hung naked on a stake by her enemies, subsequently resurrected and ascended from the darkness of the underworld (or winter as might be interpreted). The stories of mythical virgin born sons (sun), on crosses (equinox points of solar equilibrium) overcoming the powers of darkness at this time of year are legion. Horus; Mithras; Sol Invictus; Dionysus and the rest. Take your pick and give 'em a wiki.

More contentiously, I am reliably informed that the Cybele Cult was originally founded and practiced on Rome's Vatican Hill long before Christianity was a twinkle in a virgin's eye. Cybele's lover Attis, born of another virgin, died and was reborn annually at the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. This spring proclaiming Pagan festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday rising to its crescendo three days later in a big old party celebrating his annual resurrection. Sound familiar?

To this day, Easter is a movable feast. Despite the Catholic Church's official line on astrology as heretical, Easter Sunday is always marked as the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. Who knew?

For those looking for a less religiously dogmatic but nonetheless considered response to the maelstrom of current world events, welcome purpose might be found in consciously developing the capacity to filter truths, half truths and allegories from the barefaced lies. To some degree we are all involved in our own little mythologies, games of self delusion and denial. We tell ourselves the stories we want to believe which rarely accord or align with the objective neutrality of circumstance. It's an overused (particularly by my treasured neighbour, Lenny) but still pertinent adage: Life is what it is.

However, our perception of life is ours and no one else's. It's a personal narrative we have the power to dictate, through every thought, word and action. And yet, too often, we plump for a story line that others would happily write for us as they attempt to drain and use our inherent power and energies for their own personal gain. We should perhaps be wary of giving up the rights to self determination cheaply.....if at all. Complicit acceptance of a distorting web of deceit serves no one, particularly if woven by those in power, sitting at its centre. The resulting bleeding hearts, bodies and battered planet surrounding us, are in discomforting plain view.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” - George Orwell

Is it possible to ignore the messages we're constantly fed by self righteous politicians, broadcasters, social media, press and the seductions of Hollywood as perceived societal norms, in favour of listening intuitively only for the Truth? It can be heard in spring birdsong and the gently warming breeze in the trees; children laughing in parks and gardens after a winter indoors; the sounds (if not always the words) of fraternity, community and domesticity; of life evolving in every living cell and fibre, intelligently at its own pace with scant regard for the little, and too often destructive, ideas of man. Time for a recalibrating weekend walk in the woods perhaps?

This planet remains a paradise of living diversity, sadly compromised by human actions and perception, experienced too often as an unimaginative, mono-cultured hell. There’s a strong argument to do what we can under this Libra Full Moon to find creative balance in our own lives, that we may contribute in some small way to the greater life that benefits All. Clarifying our own thoughts and motivations in mindful silence can be a wonderful starting point. The time-honored practice of lighting a candle last thing at night, before evoking feelings of gratitude for the indefatigable benevolence and beauty of life is well documented. Why not give it a go?

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” - The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare

For ultimately, undeniably, we're in the mess we have made, together. If by our collective endeavour - through our thoughts, words and deeds - we can tip the balance of humanity's scales from negative to positive, from destructive to creative, we will have made a difference to the wider picture. One might even consider it a meaningful purpose. It's a simple method yet the tangible means through which we can change our immediate world for the better.

Such straightforward methodology has notable opposition in the marbled lobbies of the rich and powerful. Neoliberal ideology has swept any sense of collective responsibility under the bulging carpet of capitalism, an economic system founded on the spate of colonial looting launched a mere six centuries past. It sought to turn shared resources into exclusive property, transforming natural wealth, labour and money into commodities that can be accumulated.

The basic premise for those with access to power (or a personal army to enforce law of ownership by violence) was to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few while condemning the masses to a culture of serfdom that pertains to this day. In his book, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, the author George Monbiot describes neoliberalism as the most recent face of the capitalist doctrine: “Justified as a means of creating an enterprise society, it has instead delivered a new age of rent, as powerful people monopolise crucial assets, from water to housing to social media.”

Monbiot maintains that Capitalism’s chief detractor over the last 150 years has been democracy, a set of politically constructed checks and balances aimed at countering the worst aspects of fascism, rising to prominence in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeated Nazi invasions during World War II. Is it any surprise then that the current guise of the Capitalist project seeks to dismember government and destroy democratic hope. “As hope evaporates, the far right sweeps into the political void, enabling capital to invest once more in its earliest solution [fascism]. Neoliberalism, in other words, paves the road to fascism and serfdom.”

Where are the political voices standing up for human well being and the living planet? Environmentalists are cast as terrorists, socialists as malevolent fundamentalists. Currently they too seem to have been swept under that same bulging carpet, cowed by the right wing rhetoric typified in Margaret Thatcher’s famously neoliberal assertion that “there is no alternative.” If the political classes aren’t to be trusted to prevent HiHHiHi BHiH further lurches toward a geopolitical landscape of dictatorship and suspicion, then those of us condemned to merely survive this ‘new age of rent’ must seek every opportunity to speak up for the values of democracy that provide a credible, equitable alternative. True days of liberation depend upon it.

“People have to liberate themselves, because liberation is not a single act. It’s a question of eternal vigilance. Otherwise, you’ll just become enslaved by someone else.” - Norman Finkelstein

Should you wish to explore further positive, practical ways of contributing your voice to a more balanced planetary recovery plan, you could do worse than take a look at the inspiring work being facilitated internationally by Global Citizen - a campaigning activist organisation seeking justice and equity for all peoples and the ecosystems upon which we depend. It might provide a liberating step in the right direction.

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CERTAINTY THE DICTATOR

VIRGO FULL MOON 14 MARCH

We live in extraordinary times. In just a few thousand earth years humanity has manipulated natural resources to fashion an unnatural world that simultaneously carries the capacity to nurture and destroy. As a species, in an even shorter period of time, we have learnt how to prevent fatal disease whilst developing weapons of mass destruction. We have come to understand the fundamentals of the delicate ecological biosphere which birthed us and upon which we depend, yet continue to disregard its well being as our behaviour plunges the planet headfirst into its sixth mass extinction, currently on course to include us.

To coin an overused analogy, humanity has reached a crossroads at which the signposted directions of travel couldn’t be more polarised. Do we take stock collectively and devise a plan for the benefit of all or divide into factional warring tribes, competitively vying for ideological and material supremacy in a suicidal reading of reality as survival of the fittest?

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” - Charles Darwin

The current chaotic circus of transatlantic political manoeuvring reflects the diverging evolutionary pathways ahead of us, and shows no sign of slowing in momentum. The dramatic scenes and inflammatory language emanating from the White House (amongst other geopolitical hotspots) have taken centre stage while, almost in the wings, the people of Ukraine continue to endure the daily tragedy of death and destruction courtesy of Putin’s war. Three years and counting since the invasion, the war could stop tomorrow if he saw fit to withdraw Russian troops and return occupied territory but, rather predictably, has no intention of doing so.

Unfortunately, the headline grabbing desperate plight of Ukraine is not in isolation. The less regularly publicised horror of war and its associated blights of disease, famine, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence are also a tragic daily reality in Somalia, Mali, Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Sudan and South Sudan, Syria, Myanmar and Gaza. Sadly this list is by no means exhaustive.

Last week, in the midst of the media borne, man-made misery, I took my accumulating state of denial to the cinema hoping for distraction. The movie Conclave proved a stunning visual feast, a very complete film in many ways, justifying its recent successes on this year’s awards circuit.

Early in the piece the central protagonist, Cardinal Lawrence, makes a controversial statement before fellow senior representatives in the Catholic hierarchy, by way of initiating the selection process of a new pope:

“….let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end……. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” - Cardinal Lawrence from Conclave by Robert Harris

Even in my cinema seat, engrossed in a land of pure make believe, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to gain respite from the human madness outside the theatre. The passage spoke instantly to my personal outlook as well as the collective patriarchal systems in which the majority of us operate, beautifully illustrated by the film’s rendition of a Catholic Church conclave. In addition to Lawrence’s statement, delivered to what we are led to believe is an entirely male audience, the film portrays certainty as the great enemy of democracy, as the vernacular of would be dictators. World events in recent days have emphatically shown certainty to be the deadly enemy of respect.

Political leaders are now deemed weak or hypocritical without a line in unassailable soundbites marinated in rectitude and conviction, served with a side of uncontested social media rants. Our post truth era cares nothing for considered content, only for who shouts quickest and loudest. Transatlantic politics has become a spaghetti western, the final gunfight at the not O.K. Corral, starring maverick gunslingers, shooting indiscriminately from the hip with little concern for their sweeping aim or whether their targets have means of self defence. Outside the saloon in this insular, one street town is a self perpetuating tumbleweed desert of fear and loathing which serves only those that create and enforce its existence. When all that can be plundered has been taken, those with controlling interests move on dispassionately to new territories, extracting what they can for personal gain leaving a monoculture of ghosted wastelands in their wake.

We, the people, have bought into the sorrier dictates of Hollywood, a cloud cuckooland of screen fables, a misrepresentative world of chiselled jaws and ‘perfect’ bodies, where monochrome moral narratives of good versus evil and happy ever afters unfavourably undermine the infinitesimally multicoloured nature of our own daily lives. The indoctrinating yardsticks with which we have come to gauge happiness and success are woefully inaccurate and need radical recalibration. The last thing we need to add to our distorted planetary narrative are legions of bombastic binary ‘heroes’ dictating over-simplified, often violent solutions to issues that cause more problems than they solve…. and I’m fairly certain of that.

Meaningful conversation, on an individual and collective level, would be far more helpful to our predicament, but we have long since ditched convo for tweets and texts, preferring the controlling mechanisms that digitally distanced responses provide. When we lose interest in digital dialogue because we’ve found something of more immediate interest in our ongoing life scroll, no one bats an eyelid. At any other time in history it might have been considered rude. No longer. The rules of human engagement have changed.

Nonetheless, in the skies above our fractious state of human affairs, this week’s rising full moon might help lift us from the worst of our foreboding. It’s dubbed the Worm Moon in Native American tradition, in direct observation of wormy activity in the warming topsoil of northern climes during early spring.

Astrologically speaking, this Virgo Moon (usually the last full moon before the Spring Equinox) is traditionally cast as a harbinger of fertility and well being. The time honoured suggestion is that it provides opportunities to follow nature's lead: to cleanse and regenerate in preparation for the glorious season of growth just around the corner. Both Islamic and Christian traditions weave this wisdom into their own religious observance, this week’s full moon reaching its peak during Ramadan and Lent, both ritual festivals of self reflection, fasting and prayer.

This might therefore be a lunar month in which to bring extra awareness to everything our minds and bodies are ingesting. From food and drink to thoughts, emotions, words and behaviour. In alignment with its DNA, the body designs and constructs a vehicle based on the quality of the ingredients it absorbs. The more conscious we can be about the input, the more intentional the outcome.

If you want a body coursing with fear - read and watch the current news bulletins on the hour, every hour. If you want to lower your body's natural resistance to disease and infection - start smoking and eat loads of sugary shit. If you want your body to operate in a physically aggressive manner - take up boxing (or watch it on telly), play violent video games, swear like a trooper in traffic jams and listen to the latest pronouncements of J D Vance.

However, If you want your body to feel calm and peaceful - make time to sit around doing very little other than mindfully observing your breath until any unsettling thoughts slow down and eventually dissolve. If you want your body to reflect health and vitality - eat and drink clean, fresh produce, then go for a walk and tune into what's actually happening around you in the natural world. It sounds simple in principle but turning a nice idea into a practical reality often presents a major challenge. Perhaps the focused, willful energy available to the lunar sensitive under this Virgo Full Moon might provide a little assistance.

With repetition, the influences to which we expose ourselves become the filters through which we experience our life. Unless consciously challenged, those filters become our habitualised, intransigent 'realities' with no apparent alternative. Under this Virgo Full Moon we should perhaps encourage ourselves to exercise choice in our daily decision making as never before. Whether at the supermarket; in conversation; surfing online; reading a book; watching a film or going for a run; we can aspire to an awareness of the thoughts in our minds, the sensations in our bodies. In bringing informed decision making based on these observations to bear on our experience, we intentionally create circumstances in which both mind and body can prosper. As we prosper, so others around us prosper - even if it's only because they don't hear us moaning so often.

It takes patience and determined concentration to become consciously responsive rather than compulsively reactive to life circumstances. It takes courage to embrace life without certainty, to find compassionate understanding for differing perspectives before electing to live, undeterred, with faith in the mysterious healing qualities of peace.

“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds” - Philippians 4:7 (ESV)

And where better to explore that mysterious world of peace than in our own mindful introspection? I’ve been commending the value of meditation/mindfulness for over thirty years, most recently sharing mindfulness techniques alongside my art teaching in UK schools and colleges. This year, in support of the international initiative Mindful March, Cranleigh School has dedicated a Spotify page to hosting a series of my mindfulness podcasts. Simply search Spotify for Cranleigh Mindfulness and you’ll find a growing list of simple guided meditations that can be listened to whenever you like. The first episode Mindful Breathing is a great place to start, introducing basic mindfulness techniques while stressing how easy it is to practice. I hope those that listen find the sessions informative and helpful.

Mindfulness empowers practitioners to focus their awareness wherever and whenever they want. It can allow us to explore the great mystery of consciousness without the burden of expectation, to embrace doubt as a prerequisite of learning and growth. Importantly, it counters the dictator’s certainty that life’s circumstances can and should be controlled, instead providing evidence that our best bet for happiness comes through an alignment with natural occurrence rather than waging a war against it.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”- Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida

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SILENCE IS MY FRIEND

LEO FULL MOON 12 FEBRUARY

This week’s full moon marks the end of festivities surrounding the Lunar New Year. Predominantly celebrated throughout Asia the festival is more regularly known as the Chinese New Year which evolved from the 3500 year old Chinese lunisolar calendar.

Traditionally, the calendar defines the month containing the winter solstice as the eleventh of the year, meaning that the Chinese New Year usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice. It is considered the advent of Spring and is therefore also known as the Spring Festival. The partying lasts for a fortnight, culminating at the following full moon.

Lunar New Year observance attributes one of twelve zodiac animals to the entire year in a repeating twelve year cycle. Each year is said to take on the dominant characteristics of its animal. 2025 is the year of the snake and specifically the wood snake which comes around every 60 years. As someone born in the year of the snake in 1965 (the last occurrence of a wood snake year) and celebrating my 60th birthday this year, I’m apparently as wooden and snakelike as they come.

And what are those inherent wood snake characteristics? There’s variance and nuance but Jonathan Lee, professor of American and Asian studies specialising in Chinese folklore at San Francisco State University suggests this year is expected to exhibit traits of positive transformation as people shed symbolic skins and grow into new beginnings - providing they’re ready to move on. “It’s shedding the ego, letting go of the past, letting go of anger, letting go of love lost,” Lee says. “This is the year where that kind of growth - personal and macro, internal and external - is very much possible.” He added that the snake is an auspicious sign for inner work, with particular focus on releasing unrealistic expectations of loved ones or simply getting rid of restrictive bad habits.

“The snake which cannot shed its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind” - Friedrich Nietzche

More specifically, the wood element in wood snake apparently holds profound meaning across the three major organised Chinese religions. Confucianism says it symbolises the development of a more polished, complete person. The Buddhist tradition suggests it’s about letting emotional stuff go as a precursor to growth, while Daoism typifies wood as a sign of returning to one’s natural state or true nature (something on which I focused in my last article).

The snake also tends to be associated with love. Lee tells the Chinese folktale of an immortal white snake who, disguised as a young woman, falls in love with a man. Upon discovering her true reptilian identity he falls down dead much to her dismay. She attempts to steal fruit from the tree of immortality in order to revive him but is caught red handed by a disapproving Emperor whose job it was to guard the tree. In desperation she explained her motive: that her love for the dead man extended over many thousands of years and incarnations because he had saved her life in the past. The Emperor was so moved by this love story of “cosmic connection lifetime after lifetime,” that he gave her the fruit of immortality to save her beloved. Lee adds, “For people that grow up in this kind of cultural landscape with these types of stories and folklore, the snake is a primary representation of love.” As a snake, I’m obviously happy to hear this.

So perhaps a snakey theme to explore in 2025 might be that of challenging ourselves to move out of our comfort zone and readily undertake new challenges as they present themselves. Could this be the year to consciously find excuses to say ‘Yes’ to challenging opportunities rather than reasons to say ‘No’. Naturally, all in the serpentine cause of growth toward our true self and always pursued with love.

“Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.” - Gautama Buddha

I had the great privilege last week of operating way outside my comfort zone in front of 700 teenagers at Cranleigh School in the UK. In recognition of Children’s Mental Health Week, I was asked to address the entire senior school on the practice of Mindfulness.

One of the few bugbears in my life is that mindfulness and meditation are often depicted as difficult, solemn affairs that require dedication and discipline. This has never been my experience and having practiced various methods for over forty years I now feel more confident in passing on a slightly different message - one that I hope is more palatable to young minds but also to those people who, without being presented a new perspective on this invaluable tool for well being, might never give it a go.

The following paragraphs are the transcript of my short presentation that culminated in three minutes of beautifully observed mindfulness from everyone present. I can’t adequately express my relief and gratitude that the Cranleigh students were open to moving outside their own comfort zones alongside me to sit in silence, attention fully focused on their breath for that short period at the start of their working day. The immediate positive feedback I have received, from both students and staff, has been richly rewarding. Apparently Period 1 that day was a very chilled affair.

“Good morning Cranleigh!

I’m here to talk very briefly about Mindfulness because this is Children’s Mental Health week.

When you leave here in just a few minutes, I’d like you to have two sentences lodged in your fabulous, some say dangerous, young minds.

First sentence: Silence is my friend.

That’s a sentence no self respecting teenager wants to hear but bear with me before you stuff those EarPods back in your ears. This is headline news. Silence is actually good for you. A 2023 survey involving loads and loads of mice proves it apparently. Some neuroscience researchers at the prestigious John Hopkins University put a load of rodents in sound proof spaces and exposed them to various stimulating sounds, including total silence, for two hours a day.

Turns out that the sounds, which ranged from Mozart concertos to baby mice squealing, stimulated the first stages of potential brain cell growth - called Neurogenesis. However, after just one week, the only new cells that had become full blown neurons (the vital constituent of brain function) were those in the mice that had experienced periods of total silence. What does this tell us? Potentially, periods of silence in between stimulating stuff can actually encourage brain growth and regeneration.

SO there you have it.

Sentence one - Silence is my friend.

Everyone got that?

Sentence two: Mindfulness is easy.

OK, self disclosure up front.

I’ve been practicing mindfulness for forty years or so and it works for me. But I’m not here to sell it to you, I merely want to present a little bit of evidence about the potential benefits of the practice so that you can make your own informed choices about its relevance and use as you develop into fabulous, dangerous adults.

So what is Mindfulness?

Very simply it’s the process of developing awareness of what’s going on in the mind. Science still doesn’t really know what ‘the mind’ or ‘consciousness’ are, but for the sake of this talk, let’s just say that your mind is made up of thoughts…whatever they are and wherever they hang out.

Mindfulness practice is easy. Most exercises start and end with the process of focusing your attention on your breath and nothing else. Sounds simple but unfortunately all sorts of distracting thoughts have a habit of getting in the way. Mindful practice involves maintaining concentration on the breath so that the whirlwind of thoughts spinning round our minds have the opportunity to slow down and, with a bit of practice, occasionally stop.

Imagine that. A space in your mind with no thought. Just full concentration on the breath. Just you, your mind (whatever it is) focused entirely where you want it to be. Mindfulness enables you to focus your full attention on whatever you want, whenever you want to. At work, in conversations and relationships, on the performance stage or sports field, even just relaxing - as a life enhancer it’s probably a no brainer.

Scientific studies back this up. Mindfulness has been shown to improve concentration, reduce anxiety and encourage better sleep patterns. Only this week a Cranleigh teacher stopped me in the lunch queue to thank me for introducing them to a simple breathing exercise that has revolutionised their ability to switch off their mind and get to sleep at night. This stuff works.

And get this. The benefits of Mindfulness have been so successfully trialled in inner city New York schools that from last September it has become mandatory to teach the practice in ALL schools in Manhattan and surrounding boroughs. The trials were conclusive. 10 minutes mindfulness at the start of each school day reduced violence, anxiety and disruptive student behaviour. Concentration, academic grades, student resilience and positive social behaviours increased.

Now, we are all privileged enough to realise we are not an inner city college with related social issues, but nonetheless, it’s my conviction that a little caring mindfulness would also go a long way to making Cranleigh a kinder place for everyone to inhabit.

So where does the silence bit fit in? Well, mindfulness works best in silence. It allows us to listen more closely to our inner thoughts, to become more aware of where our valuable attention is directed or wasted.

So let’s travel way outside our comfort zones together. Although it sounds unfeasible, the plan here and now is to share with you a short mindfulness exercise that proves just how simple mindfulness can be.

A little recap.

Remember Sentence one: Silence is my friend.

Remember Sentence two: Mindfulness is easy.

Everyone ready? Let’s create a little window of silence. I invite you all to sit comfortably with a straight back, your hands in your lap and your eyes closed.

Now that you’re relaxed but still in a state of alert awareness, do your best to focus your attention solely on your breath.

(Pause)

Mindfulness really is as simple as that. Find your own natural rhythm of breath. There’s no right or wrong way to breathe - believe it or not you’ve been breathing since the day you were born so you’re all naturals.

When distracting thoughts interrupt your concentration, as they surely will, don’t give yourself a hard time about it, just acknowledge the thought, let it pass and immediately return your focus to your breath. Let’s try for thirty seconds in silence. If it helps to maintain concentration you can count 5 to yourself on your inbreath and five on the outbreath.

(Pause)

Brilliant. Stay with it. Keep your eyes closed. The vast majority of you are actually, at this moment, retraining your mind to do what you want it to do so that you are no longer subjected to the negative thought spirals the mind sometimes creates.

(Pause)

Let’s keep going with your eyes shut. Check your back is straight and continue to focus on your breath. When your thoughts begin to slow down, see if you can locate a space in between those thoughts, however fleeting. This space of no thought is where calm and peace resides. Each of you individually have created that calming space here and now, for yourself. It’s your space. It’s a safe space, a healthy space. It can be a happy space. But above all, it’s a peaceful space, and you can return to this space at any time you wish just by focusing on your breath.

(Pause)

In your own time return your attention from your breath to the room in which you sit and open your eyes.

Now that you know that silence is your friend and Mindfulness is easy you don’t need me to guide you through the process, you can explore the experience on your own. Generally speaking, a couple of minutes in the morning and evening can make a huge difference in your life.

So remember those two sentences:

Silence is my friend.

Mindfulness is easy.

Thank you for your silence and patience. This has been fun. I hope you have found it informative and helpful.”

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GET REAL IN 2025

CANCER FULL MOON 13 JANUARY

In many northern cultural traditions, the first moon after the winter solstice marks the pressing need to prepare for the remaining harsh barren months before the onset of spring. It’s sometimes known as the Wolf Moon, after the howling canines still hunting in packs to sustain themselves on any prey not sensibly hunkered down in burrows or nests. This is a time of year when nature shuts up shop to conserve its energies. Sap retracts into root systems below the earth’s frozen surface, flora and fauna everywhere seek the warm protection of an interior world while the exterior appears to ossify and die. Life, quite literally, goes to ground.

While enjoying the cosseting benefits of life in the modern world, a winter hibernation is still never a bad thing to emulate. Periods of quiet introspection offer great opportunities to digest the past in order to clarify conscious future actions. Self reflection as a counterpoint to the cold, dark world outside our triple glazed windows can yield great dividends in the form of carefully imagined plans to implement as soon as favourable circumstances emerge. We too can productively go to ground, to dream, to gently repair our mind and bodies in the warm privilege of our modern caves, to fully recharge ourselves in preparation for the challenges and celebrations that lie ahead.

The first full moon of 2025 remains a poignant cosmological reminder at the start of a new calendar year to spend valuable time refining intentions for change and improvements in our lives. For many this might mean a firm commitment to new year resolutions regarding habitual behaviour, but few of us have the discipline to maintain the latest sensational dietary or exercise regimes. The often unrealistic expectations held in imposing these unusually specific challenges, sooner or later set us up for failure.

Whilst this should not discourage us from challenging habitual learnt behaviours, there is a strong case to move away from the very specific, personally focused aspect of such intentions, toward thought, word and action where there is evidence of wider benefit and more likelihood of sustainable success.

Perhaps everything we have been conditioned to believe since childhood should be tested to see if it still rings true from our maturing perspective at the start of another new year. The great thing about truth is that it holds true universally, at all times. If something is true, it has to be true everywhere or it's not true at all. There is no prerequisite belief, dogma, faction, subset or separation for its perception or experience.

“Objective truths don’t come from any seated authority, nor from any single research paper. Objective truths, established by repeated experiments that give consistent results, are not later found to be false. No need to revisit the question of whether Earth is round; whether the Sun is hot; whether humans and chimps share more than 98 percent identical DNA; or whether the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen.” - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Corroborated by relatively recent science, an objective truth we can all share is that life exists and it’s impossible to disconnect or separate from it - even in death. This is not merely the informed preserve of remote, abstract quantum theory, it can be directly observed in our daily lives. There is individuation but no separation, everything relating to everything else on an essential and usually completely practical level.

Who and what are we, if not this great living truth itself? Do our measly, grossly reductionist, materialist opinions of ourselves energize that grander vision of self or the ongoing nightmare that rewards a privileged few at the expense of pretty much everyone and everything else?

Perhaps at the start of 2025 there is a heightened sense that we've been living something of a lie through previous years, a separatist delusion succinctly described by Albert Einstein in a written response to a rabbi seeking advice in explaining the tragic death of his daughter, a “sinless, beautiful sixteen-year-old girl,” to her older sister:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.”

This delusion or False Self, the cozy image of ourselves as individual and autonomous, runs scared from the truth that it is a cultural construct, largely an accident of birth and does not really exist. When our body is all we think we are, is it any wonder we develop a fear of it dying. It's all we know and have.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” - Marcus Aurelius

This False Self is terrified of death because it generally struggles to locate any long term life affirming alternative, consequently focusing entirely on the short term instead. This self has no substance, no permanence, no inherent vitality, only various forms of immediate gratification to grant it validity.

Put another way, its opposite - the True Self - that which is 'the whole of nature in its beauty', is confident in its eternal presence; regularly enjoys life affirming experience; knows it does not die, therefore holds little fear of loss or the 'ending' death appears to provide. The liberation of which our beloved Albert speaks, stems from his own scientific observation of the constant dance of rebirth in the natural world and cosmos he venerated.

In all of nature, one form has to die and decay for another to take over, so this pattern should be obvious and clear, although it is largely not - until you really observe or actually study the patterns of everything. Again, we [humanity] appear to be in gross denial. - Richard Rohr

What if the seismic shifts that we have witnessed in years past point to the need for certain misperceptions to be reborn in new ideas and experience, closely aligned to truth, that can evolve into a more sustainable, harmonious, intelligently symbiotic 'whole of nature' on Earth. Sadly, this is not likely to be commensurate with human activity continuing to heat Earth’s atmosphere at unprecedented rates, contributing to 2024’s unfortunate accolade of being the hottest year on the planet since records began.

Are these huge planetary shifts a call for recognition from our True Self, the energetic spark that connects us to everything in existence? Some refer to that common spark as the Divine, the Sacred or Spirit: that which nurtures everything in existence toward inexorable change. Our willful ignorance of this immeasurable animating breath, inherent to all things, allows us to commit sacrilegious acts - war, genocide, murder, torture, physical and sexual abuse, imposed poverty, starvation, environmental degradation to name but a few human curses - blithely divorced from the understanding that, in truth, we commit these atrocities against no one but ourselves.

We should gratefully point out, that the True Self, of which we are all part, is never in peril. It may come as a relief that ultimately existence is safe from human interference, securely held in the unified energetic field of all that is and ever will be. Phew. However, under this Wolf Moon, the False Self, that diminished, separated, peculiarly human view of ourselves and our conduct, could do with being called into serious question.

How do we actually want to see ourselves? As units of labour, victimised pawns in the consumerist, commodified paradigm, continually fighting for little victories, often perpetuating the misery of others? Or, conversely, as a walking miracle - the embodiment of Life itself, actively involved in an eternal, naturally expansive cycle of perpetual win-wins? A lie or the Truth? A choice or an imperative?

At the start of a new year, it might serve us well to reflect on how our thoughts, words and actions can contribute to impending transformations, whether we like that dynamic or not. How we perceive and react to shifts in circumstance, with fear or with love for example, will dictate the magnitude of the potential catastrophe or blessing they represent.

It may sound disconcerting, but there's a suggestion here that those of us with the courage to do so, should consciously face our worst fears and through them experience a death or two before we die. The chances are that we’ll have to face those fears prior to our deathbed anyway, if not on it. To intentionally hasten the demise of the False Self, however uncomfortable the process, is to allow rebirth of the True Self (Albert's 'foundation for inner security') for as long as the eternal divine continues to enliven our temporary form. Reborn in this way, we are released to live a joyful, liberated life that contributes purposefully to the process of intelligent evolution rather than impeding its progress.

The challenges we have faced during 2024 may have initiated some of those deaths before death. They will certainly have touched a few nerves. Whilst difficult to welcome with open arms, many wisdom traditions suggest that these trials occur to be accepted and assimilated, not fought against. The suffering they provide is the common path, long traversed by those varied traditions as a direct route to enlightened awareness and worthy of exploration.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. - T. S. Eliot

As tends to be the case for the lunar sensitive amongst us, instinctive emotional reactions and habitual patterns of behaviour will be hitting their peak this week. Yet, under this year opening Wolf Moon we are presented with an opportunity to move closer to the truth of who and what we are.

So let’s keep things real by providing a little cosmic context to help reletavise the magnitude of our own life experience within reasoned perspective: our sense of self accumulates around a physical body that walks upon a relatively tiny planet (an accumulation of stardust) in an average to small galaxy containing over 100 million stars such as our sun which exploded into existence 4.5 billion years ago. Our average sized but awesome galaxy (13.6 billion years old give or take) is one of an estimated 2 TRILLION galaxies with similar densities of stars in the observable universe - and our means of observation are still fairly limited. By anyone’s accounting, that’s a lorra lorra planets orbiting a lorra lorra stars in a lorra lorra galaxies.

Such context is not meant to diminish the value of our life experience on Earth in any way. It merely seeks to differentiate between personal truths and objective truths. In the cosmic scheme of things the relevance of the belief systems that give rise to humanity’s self destructive tendencies, is beyond minimal. Human ‘stuff’ just isn’t really that important - other than to humans. It sounds harsh but most of us in the modern world are living a lie about who and what we are, that tends to make us sick and unhappy. We firmly believe and fiercely defend our own inherited rhetoric, yet it’s nothing but an indoctrinated, culturally conditioned, severely restricting limitation on any positively reimagined future for people and planet.

From a perspective of what is true, we are better placed to find solutions to the problems we have created for ourselves in our personal and collective lives for the benefit of All. A secure foundation of common truth allows individuals and societies to find hope and enjoyment where previously it was thought impossible. The quirk of cosmic fate that gave us life simultaneously birthed the possibility of joy, wonder and peace. Given the liberty of choice, why resolve to live this fleeting experience in any other way?

“What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” - Carl Sagan

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