The Body is the Soul Made Visible (Perhaps a Notebook is Too)

I didn’t expect to fall into Jungian scrapbooking, but I guess crazier things have happened under Full Moons.

The recent Full Moon was in the cardinal fire sign of Aries, which has an initiating, energizing, sometimes feisty quality associated with the beginning of spring. Here in Wisconsin, it arrived in Libra season, when the leaves are starting to turn and the days are growing shorter.

I think of transits like these as “micro transits,” during which small, everyday events occur that we tend to overlook due to the noise and anxiety of louder transits. Recently I took 30 minutes to look at the dates of the Aries Moons since the New Moon in April and then looked in my journal to see what happened around those dates. If you are interested in doing the same, I put a table at the bottom of this post that lists these dates if you’d like to do your own journaling. Mars rules Aries, so I included its location in the table so you can note how it colored each Aries Moon.

Aries falls in my fifth house, associated with creativity, play, sports, fun, and children. Barbara Hannah said, “Jung was always very anxious that one should not forget to play in daily life,” so I keep that in mind when considering the fifth house. During last week’s Full Moon I found myself at a Brewers game during Peanuts night where Lucy bobbleheads were handed out. At home I stumbled across a stash of vintage Peanuts books in my closet and have been enjoying reading a few pages every morning. That’s the pile you see in the photo above, with the Woodman notebook holding down the middle. There’s a lot of wisdom in Peanuts and it seems they were written for adults all along. I love what Emma Thompson recently said about Charlie Brown:

Charlie Brown is the avatar of humility…And there’s something terribly important within the masculine for me about Charlie Brown—that he’s a beautiful person and he’s a humble person, and he’s not very successful, and he feels like a bit of a loser. And yet there he is, central to this great philosophy. And central to this group of people, these young people.

Thompson’s words reminded me of Marion Woodman, who said that we become more whole by tending to the neglected parts of ourselves. Which brings me to what I made under this Full Moon.

Play turned out to leave a paper trail. During a couple of rainy days right before the Full Moon I filled 48 pages of a kraft Field Notes pocket notebook with my favorite Marion Woodman quotes. It was a good workout for my sensation function! I created a template, chose the quotes with care, and printed 48 slips. I trimmed the slips to the correct size with a Fiskars paper cutter and affixed them into the notebook with a tape runner.

I had never owned a tape runner or paper cutter before this project. While using the Fiskars, I thought of my kindergarten teacher and how she scolded me for my aversion to using scissors. 50+ years later, here I was, cutting in straight lines and enjoying it.

It took far longer than it does to write a blog post, and I’m not quite ready to admit how many hours it took. The notebook is only for an audience of one. But the time flew.

This winter I plan to make pocket wisdom notebooks for James Hollis, James Hillman, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés quotes

I keep the notebook in my purse and pull it out instead of my phone when I’m waiting in line or have downtime when I’m out and about. Woodman said in The Pregnant Virgin that “the body is the soul made visible.” Perhaps a notebook is too.

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In depth,

Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com

2026 Aries Moon dates from the New Moon to the Full Moon: