nature's zodiac

This morning there was an exquisite bite in the air, and the moon was bright above some hanging icicles. The mountainside skydrop was pink and baby blue. And in the east it was a pale yellow. I felt an instant call towards wild appreciation. An invitaiton to abandon all muddledness in favor of such beauty; majestic, vivid and awakening.

The moon was just beginning to fade. It was as lovely as it could be. I felt a steady surge of wild affirmation rise in me. What beauty!

Experiencing a Leo Moon during Sagittarius season, especially on a frigid winter morning in Vermont, caused a notable upsurge of yessness within me.

It reminded me of a Siberian town I discovered in a documentary, where temperatures frequently plummet below freezing. Oymyakon, a village in the Yakutia region of Siberia, holds the title of the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with winter temperatures often dipping below -60°F. The residents of Oymyakon, despite the severe climate, exhibit remarkable resilience and maintain close-knit lives well adapted to the extreme cold. They love hard work, and they are joyous. That was the most memorable part of the documentary for me; their joy.

I went back inside to see what the philosophers write about the metaphysics of joy, yesness—represented in the zodiac by the fire elements of Leo, Sagittarius, and Aries.

Spinoza defines joy as an increase in a being’s power to act and think. He sees joy not just as a superficial mood but as a felt signature of aligning with what increases one’s real capacities and participating more fully in nature’s power.

Nietzsche reimagines philosophy as a “gay science” where the highest stance is an affirmative “yes to life. This stance of radical affirmation links exuberance and creative power with a metaphysical project: replacing life-denying values with life-enhancing ones.

Bergson’s notion of élan vital describes life as a creative impulse that surges through evolution without a fixed plan, always pushing toward greater freedom and novelty. Joy arises when consciousness immerses itself in his creative flow, resonating with life’s own expansive movement.

These ideas validated the immediate sensation I experienced on the deck. What I beheld in this glorious scenery felt like an access to a more adequate, living knowledge of reality. It inspired within me a forward-leaning engagement, a firsthand taste of dynamic overflow. The aliveness, far from overwhelming, seemed to restore a sense of real time in my physiology.

If, as cosmologist Arthur M. Young says, “Light isn’t seen; it is seeing.” Could real time be not so much experienced as experiencing?

I was experiencing the rise, the seeing, the expanse, and the ‘singing’ of a most fresh and frigid dawn under a waning Leo moon. All of this on what could easily be dubbed just another Monday.

Fitting that our day’s plan is to get our Christmas tree!

Happy Nature Pondering! (brrrrrr!)