The Quiet Moon: Pathways to an Ancient Way of Being

Product Information

The Celtic people were skilled astronomers who mapped the stars to create constellations and understand planetary movements. They used the stars for navigation during night travels, and many Celtic myths and legends featured characters closely connected to celestial bodies. The ancient Celts lived by and worshipped the moon. While modern, digital life is often at odds with nature – rubbing against it rather than working in harmony with it – is there something to be said for embracing this ancient way of being and reconnecting to the moon’s natural calendar?* In each chapter, we join Parr on his walks in his part of West Dorset. It is partly a history book and partly a natural history book and interwoven with these two main threads is a dusting of folklore, travel, memoir and musings on modern life. At times it feels like a confessional as he opens up about personal matters and other things that have been troubling his mind. As he immerses himself in research about the Celts way of life he realises that there is no clear definition of them and he fills in the gaps in a way that makes sense to him. Another one of our favorite Celtic full moon names is Harvest moon. It is one of the names of the October full moon.

The size of the font increases again, and now swans (white) appear, and then a gap in the poem, a pause, white space, creating a sense of quiet suspense as we listen again in anticipation, before the poem shifts into another time. Hadfield plays with white space, indenting lines and adding space between lines instead of conventional punctuation to suggest pauses as well as shifts in sound: March’s full moon name is the Seed Moon, Wind Moon, Storm Moon, or Worm Moon. It’s the season of Ostara, celebrating the start of spring and new beginnings.

Navigation menu

The full moon names were associated with specific natural events, cultural practices, and spiritual beliefs prevalent during different months of the year. From the Quiet Moon reflecting rest and reflection to the Grain Moon signifying feasts and festivals, these names provide insights into the Celts’ seasonal activities, rituals, and societal values. The moon names served as both symbolic expressions and practical guides for the Celts’ daily lives and communal interactions. Reflecting on listening in her essay ‘The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise’ (2000), Oswald describes it as

Nature approaches her peak during a summer of short nights and bright days – a time when the ancient Celts claimed their wives and celebrated Lughnasadh. With the descent into winter comes the sadness of December’s Cold Moon. Trees stand bare and creatures shiver their way to shelter as the Dark Days creep in once more and the cycle restarts.

Out Of Stock!

The May full moon is known as the Flower Moon. As spring blossoms more fully in May, now is a good time to look at tending to your own life, including relationships, your career and your self care. Take action to make sure the seeds you planted continue to grow and thrive. This is the season of Imbolc, a time to set intentions for the coming year and focus on personal growth.

The Celtic people not only observed the cycles of the moon but also used them for navigation and timekeeping. They were skilled astronomers and mapped the stars to create constellations and understand the movement of the planets.

Join our email club...

Star sound carried across vast distances, amplified by the poet’s imagining ear, to the intimacy of a whisper, “a faint thing”, a candle’s gentle sputter, “too faint to read by”. Moving between eye and ear, light and sound, the poem explores what it means to perceive stars, shifting scale and register, oscillating between far away and intimate. ‘A Star Here and a Star There’ is the first of the concluding sequence of poems in Oswald’s third collection Woods etc. (2005) that explore the further reaches of our skies, from moon to the deep silence of space, including ‘Moon Hymn’, ‘Various Portents’, ‘Excursion to the Planet Mercury’, and ‘Sonnet’, the final poem in the collection, which describes “Spacecraft Voyager 1 boldly gone / into Deep Silence”. One man who has found that following a lunar cycle helps him deal with modern life and all the crap that it throws at him is Kevin Parr. He has slowly come to the conclusion that this less regimented way of marking time helps him become more in tune with the natural rhythms of nature and as a bonus, it has helped him no end with his mental health. The August full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Grain Moon or the Dispute Moon. August was the time of the first harvest of the year, the Celtic and to celebrate the occasion with feasts and festivals. It was also a time to resolve disputes between neighbors. This tradition of summertime legalese continued well into the 19th Century in different parts of Britain, where August 1st (aka Lughnasadh & Lammas) was a traditional time to collect rent and pay workers. Today the August Full Moon is a time to celebrate all your work and progress during the year, knowing that you are also prepared for the months ahead. a way of forcing a poem open to what lies bodily beyond it. Because the eye is an instrument tuned to surfaces, but the ear tells you about volume, depth, content – like tapping a large iron shape to find if it’s full or not. The ear hears into, not just what surrounds it. And the whole challenge of poetry is to keep language open, so that what we don’t know yet can pass through it. Coleridge invites us to listen and to think, and think again, about the music of quiet, and the words we use to describe it. Peaceful. Calm. Still. Hush. Dim. Secret. That word “secret” in the very first line of the poem would have suggested quiet to Coleridge’s first readers, since “secret” carried the sense, no longer current, of reticence, of quiet and closeness (keeping something close, keeping it secret). A secret is unsounded. Silent. The frost “performs a secret ministry”. We do not hear the icy patterns forming on the windowpane. Nor do we hear the poem’s first rhyme, between “ministry” and “cry”, it is an eye rhyme, silent.