The Strawberry Moon ~ Journal Prompts for the First Full Moon of Summer

There is a particular quality to the light in late June.It lingers. The days are long past their longest point, the summer solstice falls on June 21st this year, but the warmth still feels unhurried, unrushed, as though summer has just arrived and has not yet begun counting the days until it leaves. The earth is in full production. Things are ripening. The green has deepened from the tentative brightness of spring into something more substantial, more settled.And on Monday, June 29th, the Strawberry Moon rises.The Strawberry Moon is the first full moon of summer, following soon after the June 21st solstice. The name comes from a number of North American native tribes. Among them the Algonquin, Ojibwe, Dakota, Lakota, Chippewa, and Sioux. Who used it to mark the moment when wild strawberries reach peak ripeness and are ready to be gathered. The name is not about what the moon looks like. It is about what the land is doing when the moon rises.Because the June full moon stays low on the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere, its light passes through a thicker layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to glow with a golden or reddish tint. So it does, in fact, look a little like a strawberry, deep, warm, close to the earth. But the name came first from the harvest, from the act of going out into the fields and finding what was ready.That is the energy of this moon: ripeness. The recognition of what is ready. The act of gathering. What the Strawberry Moon CarriesThe Flower Moon on May 1st was about opening. The Blue Moon on May 31st was about what fell between the categories, the second look, the liminal pocket in the calendar.The Strawberry Moon is something different again. It arrives three days before the month’s end, in the full heat of early summer, and it carries the energy of culmination. Not the culmination of ending, that belongs to autumn, but the culmination of ripening. The moment when the thing that was planted, and grew, and developed in the long season of growth, becomes what it was always becoming.In the wild, ripeness is not a moment you can miss and recover from. The berry that is not gathered at the right moment is eaten by someone else, or falls, or ferments on the vine. Ripeness demands presence. It demands that you are paying attention and willing to act when the moment comes.This is not a moon for hesitation. It is a moon for recognizing what is ready and reaching for it.Alternative European names for this moon include the Honey Moon and the Mead Moon. June was traditionally the month of marriage, and the term “honeymoon” may be tied to this name. In Anglo-Saxon traditions, it was the Honey Moon or Mead Moon, marking the time to mow the meadows, while throughout much of Europe “Rose Moon” is the preferred name, indicating the full blossoming of roses in regions where strawberries aren’t as widespread. In China it is the Lotus Moon.Honey. Roses. Lotus. Strawberries. The names from every culture converge on the same quality: sweetness that has been earned by the long work of the growing season. The reward that arrives not by chance but because something was tended, and the tending paid off. Before You Write ~ Setting the SpaceSummer evenings carry their own quality of light, and the Strawberry Moon rises into it slowly, golden, from the southeastern horizon. If you can, take your journal outside. Let the long evening settle around you before you begin.The June full moon will hang close to...