The New Moon in Mutable Earth on the 11th of September at 04:27 am BST in sextile to Mars and trioctile to Pluto
There. Heaven!
Casting my eye over the land, it speaks of home – the natural forest climbing up a mountainous spine, surrounding an open glade, its tall grass swaying in a gentle riverine breeze.
Dropping a beat, a knowingness rises through me. This is home.
Breathing in, I lower myself into a kneel. Lengthening my breath with the wind moving through the pass, my thoughts settle to stillness. Pressing my palm flat against the crust, my entire essence is suffused with a singularity – “Will you have me?”
Attention sharpened, the mellifluous air filled evanescently, warmth rises to meet my hand, spreading from its centre, and with it an image: weathered walls settled on this land, a languid column of wood smoke rising out from red bricked chimney, cathedral windows hung like pictures, showcasing the viridian waters at the end of a rainbow wildflower meadow.
Gratitude flows through me, as my heart surges with joy.
“Thank you”
Keeping my hand on the ground, I am conscious I am touching her skin. Realising I’ve not asked her if I can touch her, I form that question in my mind. Immediately I see an image of a hand holding mine through a field of joy. Closing my eyes, I extend my attention beyond my hand, feeling into the earth. Beneath I sense the fleshing loam, dark and yielding, roots threading through it like sinew. Deeper the moisture runs, cool and constant, blood carrying life sideways and downward through channels older than any map I carry. Deeper again, far below where my hand can reach yet close enough to sense, the heat waits, patient and enormous, the aliveness at the centre of the creature I am kneeling on. Strata upon strata, one continuous body, and I have just asked it to let me build against its ribs.
Another question forms – “is it okay if my fingers enter?”
An image of an embrace forms in my eye, which I take as consent. My fingers work down through the loam and close around something coiled and cool. A worm, already living in the exact line my hand has been tracing, the line the trench would follow if I dug here as planned. To build is to unhome her. I lift her clear, cupped rather than gripped, and ask her where she would rather be.
A tunnel running west, cool and moist, opening into a wider dark where a hundred more like her curl through the loam. I carry her there myself, my hand low along the ground, and set her down at the mouth of that tunnel, watching until she has gone from sight. Only then do I return to where I knelt, my palm empty, faintly marked by the shape of her.
I had drawn my lines the night before, confident, the pipes running south down the gentle fall of land toward the long view of the valley. I return my hand to that spot, wanting it still, the light, the outlook, the ease of loose ground. The soil answers with coldness, tightening under my palm. A root brushes my wrist as the wind stirs the low juniper beside me, and through that touch a current of protest, sharp and certain: Here runs the water that feeds the spring below. Cut through us and you cut your own supply before your foundations are laid.
My heart sinks as I had pictured the house standing here, convenient as it seemed on my draft sketches for both accessibility and aspect. “Please let me build here”, I say to the land.
Will against will, my body shudders as if I’ve jammed the breaks. The juniper stirs again and I place my other hand against its trunk.
“What do you know of this land that I have missed?”
The whole hillside a single vessel, the spring at the bottom, the channel running up through where my hand now rests, every root along this line holding its walls together, rib to heart. Take this water and the hillside slumps, the channel scoured wide by the very heat you mean to draw down through it, topsoil sliding loose once root and moisture are severed from it. The image sits in my palm, unmoving, until my stubbornness has looked at every part of it.
I sit back on my heels and let the wanting go. My shoulders drop.
“Show me, then”
My hand moves along the contour, walking west, until it finds ground opening differently, looser, warmer, moisture running deep and straight rather than sideways. I close my eyes and a hum rises up through my palm, a low continuous note, hot rock close enough beneath the surface that the whole slope seems to ring faintly, a struck bell still settling.
Here.
The rightness of it settles into my chest, a held chord resolving.
A beetle crosses the back of my hand and I hold still, feeling its small deliberate weight. Granite running solid and continuous beneath, its grain unbroken by any fault that might shift beneath a foundation. Build here and the bones of the mountain will hold you steady.
I sink my attention down along the line the pipes will follow, past the skin of grass, through the flesh of loam, tracing a path beside the water rather than through it, following the granite’s own grain.
Metre upon metre I offer back to the ground for correction, and each correction arrives the same way, warmth or coolness, ease or resistance, until the whole channel lies mapped, further west than I had envisioned, past the mouth of the tunnel where I set the worm down to where the ground softens, bending it a little wider to keep the whole nursery beneath undisturbed ground.
The light softening to a violet dusk, leaving an amber stillness in the throat of the glade, I have walked the whole slope this way, palm to soil, ear to the mountain’s long slow murmur, asking and being answered by worm and root and beetle and stone, until two maps, the one I had designed and the one the land had been keeping all along, lie down together and agree on a single line.
Knees stiff from bending, I stand at last, my hand still warm from her touch. “Thank you”, I say, to the worm settled now in her wider dark, to the juniper still dancing faintly in the last of the breeze, to the beetle already retired to its bed, and to the glade itself. Tomorrow, I build this garden for us, for together, we have agreed a home may stand.
Completed on the 1st of August 2026 at 08:19 am BST
