Existential Cross Quarter Corridor
The fire is coming in hot with a Full Moon in Leo, Imbolc & The Turn of the Year.
The world is shifting underfoot. In our bones, we remember the ways forward. How can we keep our hearts tender in the face of this nightmare? How can we protect our dreams?
We are standing at the edge of a rare overlap of fires, cosmically and literally, an existential crisis point.
THE HUNGER MOON
A Full Moon in Leo, bright, unflinching, rises opposite the Sun in Aquarius as our hearts face the horizon line, our pulse meets the pattern underlying our worlds, asks what are we hungering for? This lunation illuminates the tension between the individual and the collective, this conflict, the sloughing off of our final skins.
With all we are faced with, we can no longer be who we were, and we shouldn’t expect to be. We are rubbing against the truth of this reality and there is no turning back. Who am I when I am fully seen? And how does my light serve the world, not just myself? Leo calls us to inhabit our aliveness, to honor the heart and courage that pulses through our beings. This is our awakening. Yet, Aquarius reminds us that no flame exists alone, that brilliance is only sacred when it laced the wider web of connectivity. How can we allow this energy to shake up what is stagnant within us? What keeps up from ourselves?
Together, they ask: how can my gifts, my passion, my heat, my rage, be an offering? How can I add the creative fire of my one heart to ignite the hearth of the commons? Instead of swallowing my rage, my passion how can I channel it into inspired action in the worlds around me?
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Imbolc falls roughly halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, around February 1–2. It is one of the old cross-quarter days of the year, a point to honor time and marks the subtle shifts of the seasons rather than their extremes. Unlike the exuberance of spring or the abundance of summer, Imbolc is subterranean and liminal. Asking us to take notice as Life stirs beneath frozen ground; as the first sap unseen rising in trees, the milk beginning to flow in ewes before lambing season. Care becomes an act of faith before the verdant new growth is visible. It is a time of preparation, tending, and patient awakening. Not a time of great actions but the quickening lets us know what is near.
The festival has deep roots in Celtic and Gaelic traditions, where communities would honor the return of light and the slow increase of warmth after the long, cold nights of winter. Fires were kindled in homes and sacred spaces not as celebration alone, but as markers of protection, guidance, and cultivation of life in the dark months. In these earliest weeks of the year, survival was intertwined with care, attentiveness, and ritualized attention to what would grow. We see this playing out across the landscape, from Minnesota to Maine.
Central to Imbolc is the goddess Brigid, a figure of fire, fertility, and creativity, whose presence bridges domestic care and sacred inspiration. She is a multidimensional goddess: healer, poet, smith, her domain both the hearth and the forge. Her flame is both literal and symbolic, representing warmth, insight, inspiration, and the courage to bring one’s gifts into the world.
While a goddess, Brigid’s role in Imbolc is deeply human, she crosses thresholds, between the tangible and intangible, the seen and the unseen. She embodies the important work of care required to birth new life and new ways of being, literal, creative, and spiritual, into existence. To honor her is to notice what is stirring beneath the surface and to feed it gently with attention, courage, and love, allowing the next phase of life to unfold naturally. In the quiet work of tending the hearth (home), the forge (alchemical process of fire), and the well (our waters and wombs), we remember that transformation is a practice, not an event, and that small acts of care ripple outward into the world. She stands as an archetype and reminder to guard our visions, voice, and hope like a sacred flame.
AN INTERSECTION OF TIME
As the Year of the Snake winds to a close, we are still in the discomfort of what it means to be a being thats undergoing transformation as skin loosens, old identities and strategies that served as survival, that once kept us alive are suffocating us, and we have no choice but to let them be stripped away. Shedding is rarely painless requiring our honesty, our humility, and our courage: courage not only to survive, at the edge of birthing. You are a changed being.
Soon after, on February 17th, the Fire Horse arrives baring a cycle of momentum, risk, and embodied action. Fire Horse does not move cautiously, it moves truthfully. It demands alignment between instinct and integrity. What is false cannot ride; only what is alive, what is authentic, can hold its pace. The courage cultivated now and throughout the last year of the shedding, the tending, the conscious practice of presence is what will allow us to saddle this new energy with clarity and grace.
This full moon is the last lunation before eclipse season. Eclipse season arrives simultaneously with the Fire Horse on February 17th. Eclipses rearrange the architecture of our lives, revealing what must go, shaking out the cobwebs of what cannot stay hidden. This Full Moon offers a pause, a respite of sorts, a moment of reflection to take stock of our gratitude, of who we’re becoming, of what work is still required of us, to discern what can no longer still around, to cry, to feel into the rage that lives in our bones and dream…to envision ourselves, our light full unburden, to ask ourselves with honesty, what is ready to be released so that my light can burn for others as well as myself?
This full moon is in Leo. Leo is the sun, the heart, not in a performative or polished or armored way, but the raw center inside that fuels, knowing what a task and force love is. It also knows what it can no longer carry and what it wants to offer so freely.
In a world that teaches us to value productivity over presence, stillness can feel like resistance. Taking time to rest, reflect, and nurture ourselves is a radical act of self-care in a culture that constantly demands more from us.
bell hooks
The Sun itself is in Aquarius. Aquarius is the field, the social mind, the network of human hearts and hands. It asks: how will what I bring my courage, my creativity, my vision intersect with what others need? The answer is not perfection, often nor in grand gestures. It is small, deliberate offerings: attention, warmth, and steady presence. This is where individual brilliance knits itself into collective transformation. Like the many hands at work, providing shelter, safety, meals, protection out of pure love for humanity. How can we sustain this work? Caring for ourselves and caring for others.
Imbolc has always been about this subterranean work. The ground of being stirring underneath the snow. Life choosing itself again and Brigid does not demand transformation. She teaches the tending and care that allows it to grow. Becoming is not an event, her reminder to us, it that is a practice.
Here in this threshold, this corridor, we can see multiple realities coexisting. We can taste the potent medicine of duality. The work of existing in what is while tending to the dreams of a new world coming into being. The future can seem daunting, but our sovereignty comes in the fact we get to decide the shape of the new world.
The Snake year taught us shedding: sometimes cleanly, often painfully. It taught us to endure, adapt, survive. As it completes its spiral, it asks one final offering: the version of ourselves that learned to persist but forgot to trust movement.
The Fire Horse will not wait for hesitation. It carries speed, heat, instinct, and risk but only truth can ride. What you bring into that year must be alive, not armored. How do we feel the fear yet continue our journeys? How can we alchemize the spark of urgency channeled into stamina, a sustained glow like the sun, to fuel this year ahead?
This Full Moon illuminates what is ready to be released so courage can be felt again. Not courage as dominance nor courage as certainty, but courage as presence to show up, and the willingness to stand with what is true, even as the ground shifts beneath us.
A SMALL RITUAL
Light a candle in the snow. Allow the flame to thaw the ice and snow. Place your hands over your heart, or against the earth. Name silently, scream it out, or just aloud, one habit, fear, or pattern you are ready to release. Let it rise through your belly, through given voice with your breath, infused with your heart, out of your mouth your hands, into the moonlight. It becomes the felt sense how your heart and passion can create change when you give yourself over to ideas, dreams, and desires.
Then, name one way your heart’s fire can touch the world: an act of generosity, attention, service, or creation, imagining a world of abundance and safety for all. No vows, no forcing. Just warmth applied where life is stirring, culminating before growth. This is how individual light becomes collective illumination. Dream…
For ice relinquishing its claim on the Earth. For pressure easing enough to allow lift. For tending the small flame that will one day need to burn through what is no longer needed. If something cracks in you, it does not mean you are breaking, you are breaking open so more light can pour through. This is a turning point. Realities are splitting open, we wait with fortitude, persistent, for the season to change. How do we feel the fear and move anyways?
Tonight, let yourself ask:
+ After all this time, what am I still carrying out of habit rather than devotion?
+ Where has protection hardened into constraint?
+ How can I use my gifts, my ancestral technology of imagination to serve the whole, not just the self?
+ How will I care for what is already stirring so that my light may feed the world?
The clarity will arrive when it is time, at this point you only need the honesty and warmth enough to kindle your fire, to keep it alive, and allow it to light the candles of others. Here in this corridor we can trust the sun will return, the wheel will shift. Underfoot, the thaw is already beginning.
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently
David Graeber
CURRENTLY READING
How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World by Rob Hopkins
This book serves as an invitation to remember the future as a living field we are already in relationship with. Moving beyond prediction or strategy, Rob Hopkins asks what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to feel forward when imagination is treated as a sacred and ancient technology, a form of devotion to life yet to come. A reminder time is not linear and we can work with it to our own advantage to shed cynicism and the misanthropy of these current systems. Through storytelling, memory, and collective dreaming, he reminds us that hope is not naive but practiced, tended like a small flame in dark seasons. To fall in love with the future is to act in service of it now, to let our vision soften fear, regaining sovereignty and to align our present choices with the worlds asking to be born.
In solidarity, love and gratitude. Alyson xx
P.S. I’ll be participating in this year’s Herbal Academy Virtual Herbal Conferences, February 15-20, 2026. I’ll be joining a panel on Alternative Plant Therapies, sharing my work with flower essences as a form of care for moments of transition, grief, shedding, and reorientation. Flower essences meet us not by force, but by resonance, supporting the subtle shifts that precede visible change the same way sap rises before buds appear.
This gathering brings together a wide constellation of herbalists and plant practitioners, each offering a different way of listening to the living world. It is a space where knowledge is not only transmitted, but tended where learning unfolds like a slow warming, rather than a demand for mastery.
The conference is free and virtual, an invitation to enter gently, from wherever you are, and to remember that healing and transformation are practices of attention, patience, and care. If you feel drawn to the earth medicines, the ones that work at the threshold helping us loosen old skins and nurture what is ready to emerge I would love to meet you there.