Review­ing my jour­nal from 2011 in late Novem­ber, I was struck by the pat­terns that I could see emerg­ing in my behav­ior and inter­ac­tions with The Uni­verse. My main tool for jour­nalling is a web­site called 750words.com. Each time I add an entry, it cre­ates sta­tis­ti­cal data based on lin­guis­tic analy­sis. Using this, the web­site can tell me what themes I’m focus­ing on. Out of curios­ity, I began to chart the focus of my activ­i­ties over cer­tain dates of the month. It then occurred to me (and I’m not sure why this didn’t occur sooner) to over­lay this with what I know about the phases of the moon and …eh hem, my cycle, which has always synced closely with the moon (if you’re inter­ested in track­ing that, ladies, I highly rec­om­mend mon.thly.info).

It was sort of an Aha! moment for me. I was con­sis­tently and suc­cess­fully start­ing projects dur­ing cer­tain weeks, end­ing projects dur­ring oth­ers. When I was strug­gling with work and life, based on the entries in my jour­nal, I found I was work­ing against the tides, so to speak. So this is my exper­i­ment in plan­ning and pres­ence. I’ve called it Fort­night Focus.

Plan­ning

Rather than plot­ting my goals and plan­ning events ran­domly on my monthly cal­en­dar, Jan­u­ary 1 — Jan­u­ary 31, I will do my plan­ning and goal set­ting using the moon as my delin­eator. While the moon is wax­ing from New to Full I will try to plan begin­nings, cul­ti­vat­ing and grow­ing. While the moon wanes from Full to New, I’ll work on culling, let­ting go and fin­ish­ing things up.

I’ve decided to also plan my meals, cook­ing and shop­ping accord­ingly as well — again, as an exper­i­ment. While the moon waxes, I will grad­u­ally increase the rich­ness of my foods, cul­mi­nat­ing with a spe­cial Full Moon din­ner. While the moon wanes, I’ll work on cook­ing lighter and lighter — with the goal of a monthly Dark Moon juice/water fast¹.

Finan­cial plan­ning and pur­chases are also included in my Fort­night Focus. It’s the same kind of idea. Acqui­si­tions will be made dur­ing the wax­ing moon. Eval­u­a­tions and trim­ming excess will be made dur­ing the wan­ing phase. My hope for this facet will be that I’ll save money by plan­ning to only pur­chase dur­ing the wax­ing moon. I’ll have to exer­cise finan­cial restraint dur­ing the fort­night lead­ing up to the New Moon.

Pres­ence

I strug­gle with hol­i­days. Many stan­dard hol­i­days in the US seem inap­pro­pri­ate for my fam­ily for one rea­son or another (reli­gious or eth­i­cal) and I’ve been stum­bling the past few years with my half-celebrations of them. I adopt other hol­i­days to help bal­ance out our year, includ­ing the major pagan sab­bats. I wanted to cre­ate a more reg­u­lar kind of fam­ily rit­ual time (since we do not go to church or par­tic­i­pate in a com­mu­nity that resem­bles church). A spe­cial Full Moon meal rit­ual that I can involve my chil­dren in (if they would like to be involved) seems appro­pri­ate. I’ve decided to focus our spe­cial night around the themes of the month the moon occurs in along with dif­fer­ent tra­di­tional names used for each moon. For exam­ple, the Jan­u­ary full moon is known as the Wolf Moon, the Cold Moon, the Quiet Moon, etc.

Dur­ing the Dark Moon, I have designed a pri­vate med­i­ta­tive rit­ual for myself.

While I’m recon­nect­ing my body to the moon phases through plan­ning, I’m tak­ing care to recon­nect my soul to the moon through pres­ence. This involves, for me, a more rig­or­ous study and imple­men­ta­tion of my par­tic­u­lar spir­i­tual path. What that will look like for you is entirely up to you.

I’ve designed plan­ning pages to be used in a binder. There are 4 pages that roughly approx­i­mate a month (a lunar month, I mean). So you would do your plan­ning in advance by fill­ing out the dates between the next New & Full moon and then the Full & New moon.

The Fornight begin­ning with the Full moon and wan­ing phase includes two sheets. On the first sheet is a space to write your Full moon rit­ual, menu and then a space for reflec­tion after the Full moon event. On the sec­ond page you would plan your goals the wan­ing fort­night and list what you’re culling and cul­ti­vat­ing, appro­pri­ately. There is a space for reflec­tion on that page as well, to make notes while you are in the midst of that fort­night. Obvi­ously this would be filled out dur­ing the pre­vi­ous wax­ing moon.

The Fort­night begin­ning with the New moon and the wax­ing phase is sim­i­lar with a few dif­fer­ences. The rit­ual space is renamed “med­i­ta­tion” and since I am not plan­ning a meal dur­ing the New Moon, I’ve decided to take inven­tory of my pantry instead (per­haps even my metaphor­i­cal pantry).

Obvi­ously my plan­ning sys­tem is not for every­one, but I’m shar­ing my jour­nal sheets here in the spirit that there might be other moon chil­dren like myself who are feel­ing out of phase. If you’re inter­ested in work­ing through the work­sheets with me, you can cir­cle me on google + and we can con­nect there to sup­port each other.

Down­load the Full Moon Focus pages here.

Down­load the New Moon Focus pages here.

Please save the work­sheets on your com­puter, because I will update them as I find nec­es­sary. If you have sug­ges­tions to mod­ify the pages, please know I’m open to hear­ing that. I will be shar­ing my expe­ri­ences with this sys­tem on my blog. If you have any ques­tions, ideas or thoughts, feel free to email me.