The Full Moon Yearbook

I have loved the moon for as long as I can remember. I would watch it shift and change outside my window at night, talk to it when I was out with my dog after dark, pray to it when I felt lost. I remember one night on a long road trip with my brother, camping somewhere in eastern Canada in a tent with a skylight, waking up with a start to see the eyeball of the full moon staring straight down at me. Years later, I would wake my lover at all hours of the night when there was a lunar eclipse and drive to the beach to watch it turn red. In 2016, I wrote a book on a set of Tantric moon phase goddesses called the Nityas who changed my relationship with the moon as well as with myself. I have been a moon lover-a lunatic-for a long time.The moon holds its own special magic, and there has been mythology and meaning to the moon in pretty much every culture in every era throughout the world. A common prayer in Irish folklore when one first noticed the moon was "God bless the Moon and God bless me, I see the moon and the moon sees me." There's something about the moon that makes us feel as if we are in a relationship with it, as if it looks back at us, following our gaze through the car window even as we zip along the highway.My ancestors are from England and Ireland, where ancient religions knew to follow the moon and the seasons carefully and celebrate the changes of the Wheel of the Year. I was born as a fourth-generation Canadian in Ontario, on Mississauga, Anishnabeg, and Haudenosaunee land (among others), near the Great Lakes, with its wet snow in the winter and the persistent, insistent mosquitoes in the summer. I now live in Edmonton, Alberta, a northern prairie city where the sun sets at 4:00 pm in the winter and the air gets so cold sometimes it literally sparkles. As I write this, I am on Plains Cree land on Treaty 6 territory, an area known as Amiskwaciy Waskahikan. My work with the moon isn't just about the moon, it's also about the seasons, the weather, the

Julie Peters is a writer, yoga and meditation teacher, Tarot reader, and wellness counselor based in Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty 6 Territory (Amiskwacîwâskahikan). She is a staff writer at Spirituality and Health Magazine and is the author of Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses: Meditations on Desire, Relationships, and the Art of Being Broken and the Canada Book Award-winning Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault. She offers wellness courses, yoga classes, tarot readings, and body-based counseling online via juliepeters.ca. Follow her on Instagram @juliepeterswellness.