Full Moon Practice | Emergence
![]Carved pumpkin lanterns light an autumn garden path towards a stone cottage, with candles and family photographs visible through the open doorway.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/63e6a8_3924c7b5c406420da3e01608fe7fdb60~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_552,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/63e6a8_3924c7b5c406420da3e01608fe7fdb60~mv2.png)
Prefer to listen to this as a podcast? You’ll find it on Spotify and Apple Podcast
Welcome to the Wild Wisdom Monthly Practice.
Each full moon you will receive a practice to help keep you on track with the lunar cycle and your new moon practice. These practices are crafted to keep you spiritually nourished, and to help you continue to expand your spiritual growth.
Our practice is Emergence.
Our Prayer is:
I honour the power within me
As I allow new growth to take root
I am the love that is deep within.
Ancestral traditions remind us that we are part of nature.
They teach that all we have comes from Mother Earth — our food, our homes, the tools of our daily lives — and that we welcome the mystery through reverence and ceremony.
What we respect and revere, we protect and sustain. What we love, we care for and defend.
When I reflect on the richness of ancestral traditions, I am in awe of their timelessness — the knowledge, beauty and vitality they hold, and how they bridge what has been with what is emerging.
Those I have known and loved who are no longer in this life continue to inspire and guide me through my stories, teaching and writing.
In some parts of the world, people are preparing for a time of ancestral reverence, including the Gaelic festival of Samhain and the Mexican festival, Day of the Dead. Wherever we are, this is an opportunity to deepen our reverence for our own lineages.
In many traditions of ancestor reverence, care flows both ways. The living tend the relationship through offerings, remembrance and ceremony, and the ancestors are welcomed as sources of protection, guidance and wisdom.
By including our descendants, we extend this care into the future. We honour our
ancestors and our own lives through what we choose to carry forward.
The Story Is Still Becoming
At the New Moon, we discovered our ancestral book, with a page bearing our name. Beyond it were blank pages for those who will follow. Through this lunar month, we are writing on our page, exploring what is emerging in our lives and what helps it flourish.
Remember, we are the dream of our ancestors. Our descendants are our dream.
We have inherited gifts, stories, beliefs and ways of living. Some nourish us. Some need questioning. Some need adapting to the way we live now.
This is part of Emergence: recognising our freedom to change how the story unfolds, then doing something with that freedom.
The Practice
Let’s make our ancestor altars a celebration. Keep your ancestor tablet and bring pictures, flowers and memorabilia that remind you of departed loved ones. Include something you treasure and would love to pass on to your descendants.
Your altar can honour blood ancestors, beloved dead, teachers, leaders, gods or goddesses. Your reverence may reach towards an ancient tree, a river, the beings of a place, or Mother Earth herself.
I love to add roses because they were favourites of my grandmother. I also include fennel seeds for my grandfather, who took such delight in harvesting the wild fennel growing in the laneway behind their house. I will add something to represent their love of animals, which was such an important part of my childhood and helped shape my work with wildlife.
In Mexico, during Day of the Dead, vivid orange cempasúchil marigold petals are strewn to create pathways welcoming the beloved dead. Their colour and fragrance are traditionally understood to guide them home to the ofrenda and their family.
Design a pathway leading towards your altar — from a direction that feels right —
expressing something of the lands your forebears came from. You might use small stones, sand, or strewn grass and herbs. Include something of your own place and region.
Along it, place photographs, drawings or objects that express the lives and stories connecting you with your ancestors. Where names and stories have been lost, let your imagination help you express the connection.
In some traditions, vital energy connects the generations within the greater balance of life. Our pathway can represent and honour this energetic and spiritual flow between ancestors, ourselves and descendants.
Make a place for your own life on the altar, where those who have come before meet us and can glimpse what is emerging.
The Emerging Pathway
Take time for communion through contemplation, prayer, meditation or an inner journey. What might your ancestors have hoped would become possible through you? Where do you recognise their gifts in your life?
Choose one thing you know you have inherited. It might be a saying, a skill, a belief or a way of caring. What is precious within it? What would you like to nurture or give a different expression to?
Reflect this on your altar. Move an object. Reshape a thread you have knotted. Bring in another colour or flower. Make something that expresses your choice.
My grandmother always said, “Things have a funny way of working themselves out.” I am writing this on an apricot-coloured piece of card (Nan’s favourite colour) and placing it beside my candles. These words have seen me through thick and thin, and every time I say them I feel her standing right beside me.
Then extend the pathway a little beyond your altar, representing the descendants and the future that wants to emerge.
Name something you will do in daily life to nurture what you have chosen. Leave the pathway open for possibilities.
Our Page in the Continuing Story
Think of someone living generations from now, in your family or the wider family of life. What would you love them to discover? What foundations can you help create? What do you know, at this stage of your life, that you want them to know?
Add to your page in the ancestral book — just a little note to your descendants. Perhaps a familiar saying, something experience has taught you, or knowledge you cherish. You might tell them what you are working to change and what you hope might grow from it.
Writing in a notebook or on paper gives physical expression to our entry in the imaginative ancestral book. The imagined pages beyond yours remain blank for the descendants and their own discoveries.
Read your words aloud during the Full Moon or waning gibbous Moon, then place your paper beside the three candles from our New Moon practice.
Continue to light your candles and say your words each morning or evening through the rest of this lunar cycle.
With love
