The Artemisia

Our monthly full moon journal exploring tea, plants, seasonal ritual, and the quiet practice of paying closer attention to the living world.

On the night of August 27th, an unusually deep partial lunar eclipse will cross North America. Here in Omaha, the eclipse will reach its deepest point at 11:12pm—only six minutes before the Moon reaches exact fullness. At which point, nearly its entire face will slip into Earth’s dark inner shadow, leaving only a narrow rim of ordinary moonlight. It is a rare and beautiful thing to behold, and a profound one to sit with, if we are willing to pause and consider it.

In The Artemisia, we practice an old art: a kind of plantcraft that reads the whole of the living world—the sky above and the earth below—and holds them as a single conversation.

As above, so below.

To learn this art is to learn how to respond to the world, to live within it, to learn by it, and to heal from it. It is also to learn how to keep, or tend to it in wisdom and love.

Each month we practice by reading the full moon in its seasonal context. The moon reveals the character of each month, so when it waxes full, we stop and read the season by that moonlight. Each moon is unique, which means that even though the same moon returns each year, it does so a little altered: a different date, a different place in the sky, a different season expressing itself below.

This August moon offers an extraordinary example. During a lunar eclipse, the sunlight that still reaches the shadowed moon must first graze through the outer ring of Earth’s atmosphere. Blue light scatters away, while longer red and orange light continues through—the same phenomenon that makes our sunrises and sunsets glow orange and red. That light falls on the moon and is what we will see reflected back to us during the eclipse.

NASA describes it as though all the world’s sunrises and sunsets were projected on to the moon at once.

If that isn’t living poetry, I don’t know what is.

The eclipse has a kind of echo in the garden, too. Late summer is a season working in two directions at once. Above ground, the garden continues its great, outward-facing work of ripening: flower becomes seed, green fruit gathers sweetness, grain fills on the stalk. Below the surface, however, a second movement has also begun. Many perennial plants are already drawing carbohydrates back towards their crowns and roots, storing what will carry them through winter and fuel their rise in spring. The season is simultaneously offering and keeping.

This year, the Moon performs something like this dual turn in a single night. At almost the precise moment its light reaches fullness, Earth’s shadow falls across it. The Moon reaches the culmination of its outward shining and, within minutes, is almost entirely taken into shadow.

What the garden takes weeks to accomplish, the eclipse reveals in an hour: fullness followed immediately by a movement toward darkness, depth, and what lies beneath the surface.

Which leads me back to the sturgeon.

I was surprised, researching the familiar name Sturgeon Moon, by how quickly a seemingly simple moon name becomes complicated. While modern almanacs often present us with a standardized list of monthly names drawn from Indigenous sources, Indigenous lunar systems were never a single universal calendar. Their names arose from particular peoples living in particular places, observing what the plants, animals, weather, and waters were doing around them. The Ojibwe lunar calendar documented at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, for example, follows thirteen moons whose names correspond to events occurring in the living world in that specific region. What became clear is that Indigenous lunar calendars were—and remain—deeply local.

Fig. 2  ·  The lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens), keeping to the dark, watery depths.

As for the sturgeon itself, the Anishinaabe offer us remarkable insight as we consider the August Moon. They call the sturgeon Nmé, the Grandfather Fish, and he carries the memory of deep time: in part because sturgeon live so long, well past a century; in part because they keep to the dark, watery depths; and most of all because they are living fossils, with a lineage reaching back to the age of the dinosaurs. Rather poetically, the females carry hundreds of thousands of eggs, or roe, like tiny pearls—the next generation held in the dark, waiting for its time to rise.

There is one more layer still: this particular Sturgeon Moon rises full in Pisces.

Astrologically, Pisces is a mutable water sign—fluid, receptive, difficult to contain, concerned with what lies beneath the obvious surface of things. This year the layers gather around one another: the ancient fish in the dark water; the eclipse drawing the moon into Earth’s shadow; the late-summer garden quietly storing what it will need later, below.

Everything keeps pointing in the same direction:
downward, inward, toward the deep reserve.

Traditional Chinese Medicine gives us apt language for thinking about this kind of depth. It calls our deepest reserve jing—or Essence. In that system, jing is stored by the Kidneys and includes the constitutional inheritance with which we enter the world. It is bound to growth, reproduction, maturation, and the long arc of aging—less the energy of a single afternoon than the deeper vitality carried across a life.

We are not meant to spend it carelessly.

Yet while jing is not simply a vessel we can empty and refill at will, Chinese medicine understands that the deeper reserves of life can be protected and nourished through the way we live: through food, rest, breath, moderation, and the care we give the body over time.

I keep thinking about the earth in this way—not as a literal extension of Chinese medicine, but as an image that helps me understand. What rises above depends upon what is held below.

The fruit on the branch, the grain on the stalk, the flower going to seed: all of it rests upon stored vitality we cannot immediately see. The soil itself is an inheritance, built slowly from the lives and seasons that came before this one. Roots gather from it. Plants store within themselves. Then, when the time is right, what has been gathered becomes growth again.

Like the earth, like the sturgeon, we too flourish from stores we cannot see.

The moons carry this same lesson in their names.

Among Ojibwe communities around the Apostle Islands, one of the late-summer moons is Manoominike-giizis, the Ricing Moon: the season when manoomin, the “food that grows on water,” is gathered. The name is inseparable from place. It tells you not merely what month it is, but what the world is doing there.

That distinction matters.

The gathering itself teaches the same thing. Two people work a canoe through the rice beds—one poling, one bending the laden stalks over the hull with a pair of light cedar sticks and knocking the grain loose. Much of it falls into the canoe. Much of it also falls into the water, where it will seed the beds again. The harvest is designed so that taking and leaving happen in the same motion.

Fig. 4 · Goldenrod (Solidago) in bloom—a familiar signal of late summer across the plains.

Everywhere, people have learned time through deep observation of their own ground: plants flowering, birds leaving, grain ripening, rivers freezing, berries appearing. The calendar is still something you can read around you, if you know the ground.

If I were to name the August moon where I live, I would call it the Goldenrod Moon. This is when the roadsides and fields across the plains begin to turn gold, and I know from their flowering that summer has entered its final turn. This plant tells me what the calendar cannot: where I am, and what time it is here.

If you step outside beneath the eclipsed moon on August 27th and read the ground where you stand, what will you call this moon? And what would its name tell you about where you are in your own season?

Fig. 3  ·  The Moon, XVIII. Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, 1909, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.

I have my own way of asking that question each month. For each full moon, I sit with a single card from the tarot and let its picture help me name where I stand right now. This is not about reading fortunes. A tarot card is an image that holds a whole mood and a way of looking. This month the card almost chooses itself: The Moon, XVIII, traditionally associated with Pisces (the Fish), under a full moon and lunar eclipse. The August sky and the card align.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith version of the Moon card, the moon hangs above a dark landscape, a path travels between two towers toward hills we cannot yet see, and a crayfish climbs slowly from the dark water towards land. This month, I cannot help seeing the sturgeon in its place. Something ancient beneath the water. Something we cannot see clearly from the surface. Something that has survived by knowing how to inhabit the deep.

Perhaps the card invites us to consider how to move through a night when the light is uncertain: go by feel rather than by sight; let what has been under the surface rise; and do not mistake the dark for danger.

A note for expecting mothers: Eterne and Nyx should be set aside during pregnancy. Ceres was formulated with pregnancy in mind; because herbal needs vary by individual and trimester, we recommend checking with your midwife or prenatal clinician before use.

May this eclipsed moon do its quiet work within you: help you gather what is ripe, tend what lies beneath it, set down what is finished, and trust the reserves from which new life will come.

What ripens above depends upon what is held below.

Come sit beneath her copper light with us, and sip tea.

In peace, may you be well.
Andrea