​I admire my father’s smile it was equal parts cool, brave, humble, it was dimensional. He reminded us to “be cool,” bravely step out there live, meet that person’s eyes and be authentic in your interaction. His smile was pure people could see his light before knowing his name it was felt. A brush with greatness.
Comforting heart like the fluffiest comforter, a soft place to fall and send all that you carry release from it all do they ever ask if the order is too tall?
Mother a word that by nature encase what kind of shape will we each take it to mean? The lineage of what ours was to us the passing on and the new passage creating always with heavy roots informing.
Harsh tones clank and squeak before we can hear an image of what the colors look like mixed against the gently perceived flow. Sand blows the colors mix chalk pastels that slap your scheme against the illusion of control.
The knowledge of our elders is one of our most sacred gifts. This knowledge is communicated through time shared, stories told, movements, feelings, energetic exchange, may we be listening.
Light like the breeze free through the see clear and received. Hear and being heard easy communication.
There are so many forms of love we are swept, sometimes the sweepers, sometimes we’re kept and sometimes the keepers, some hold so tight it never can grow but sometimes the light is too bright there are burns. But the one that creates space within you them its generative, nourished easy to sit with beside and not resist is the sweetest of all gentle love.
                                                                                                                                                                                                     ~Danielle H.

1. Cozy comfort crafted controlled, contorted, causing collapse.
2. Breathing deep, care and comfort in the space to create more space and fill it.
3. Safe space signifies success-simply being.
4. Learning always, everyday language, laughing, switching styles simply. Limitless and light, always
5. Hug hard, hold me tight, tight fierce, squeezing deeply, igniting the embers of my heart
6. Nurture in nature—never neglect, nervously needing, napping and night lights. Always needed, naturally.
7. Winter death changes coming and going—all ashes to ashes and dust to deploy.
8. Unknown ancestors always asking—give homage to honesty under light. They’ll lead the way.
9. Simple flow getting in tune with needs and enjoying the comfort and ease.
10. Be careful with yourself, brilliantly beautiful—you know the way. Learned lessons, light inside, in the DNA, need space—significantly satisfied singing myself to sleep.

                                                                                                                                                                                               ~Vashti T-W.

​10 Words to form a life
Work harder. Achieve. Stay in control. Take care of yourself. This has been a successful method of ensuring my safety. I will not need to rely on the concept of family which may or may not be there for me. That loss is inevitable and people eventually leave you. Living this way with reservations always, leads to a permanent loneliness.
However with more deep breaths and acceptance of the love that does currently exist in my life. I am able to realize that what is present is actually more of this for me: more love, more belonging, close friends and a cherished family. I am fulfilled and comforted and held. My cozy house with central heat, my successful life, has brought security and safety. This has been the symbol of success that I needed. And what it symbolizes is the actual love and acceptance and belonging that truly fulfills me.
                                                                                                                                                                                              ~Lori K.

10 Words Become 10 Ideas/ Feelings
Mom confuses me. She claims such deep love, and yet I feel, not only unloved but unseen. Life is tricky, and full, and joyous. Sometimes it can be so pleasing to be human. Although, I often feel vacant. Animals always seem to have more substance.
I like to feel good. I want to feel good. I really love people. And they scare me a little. I’m never sure I can trust them. I suppose many have harmed me. Wouldn’t it be nice if life was just easy? Love helps, unconditional love heals.
                                                                                                                                                                                             ~Tawa R.

Sunshine hits my face every day, every morning. Like a dawn breaks the sky in the morning, same way the consciousness breaks the dawn in your mind. Make sure it’s not cloudy so the sun can shine all over it.
Doom, the doomsday*, that’s what’s on my tongue*. What I want to say is, feel the moment, feel everything you can because you don’t know how much more you can feel before you move on, and all you do is try* not to feel what is, but to feel what isn’t. And that’s madness, it doesn’t work that way. If you’re sad, you feel the sadness even if you don’t want to ‘cause that’s what makes it go away, move along, then you create more space to allow anything else to come your way and there might be other things queued to feel, before there is open space to just be and allow what you want in there. In another words what is more desirable to you to feel.
Beautiful is the life we live in, wonderful is the river you bathe in, spiritual is the chair you sit in, it falls in together in to 1 light Its all the same, no reason to judge basically if you just could see everything like that
Home is the plane you’re in. It really is a feeling, but it is also a location, of time and space, Whatever you make of home that’s what it is. Make your feelings your home, whatever you’re feeling inside of you at any moment, is where you want to be, that’s what you came here to do. So who or what is deciding what I want to feel, what feelings I want to come my way? That is decided even before you were born, it was created by you, your soul if you wish, by whatever that asked to be created, it is that way for a reason and you can decide to just follow your heart, which is connected to this path of desires and feelings that ultimately wants to happen throughout your life time, and just go with it. Or you may do whatever you want. But ultimate if is the depth of feelings and purpose that you’re after, you follow the heart, there is no need to consciously come up with specifics, or even rough ideas to do anything, it all comes your way. That feels scary, so like I don’t create anything on my own? Yes and no. you did create it all just not the small you that you’re referring to. You can create as your small self on this plain if that’s what you want, but you know, it’s not what you want, you opened up for something bigger than yourself, so that means you sit back and follow your heart. But it feels like I don’t have a say, like I am NOT, I’m just in for a ride, I’m not holding the rains. That is not true, it means that you’re actually taking your higher rains in your hands and becoming your higher self. It’s your small self fearing that, and it’s because you spent most of you life operating from it, which now feels like that’s who you are, but it isn’t. You just practice to be your real you and the more you do it the more it’s gonna feel like you. Thank you.
Unheard off is the cry of weeping trees, or the scent of fallen leaves not what humans do, that’s all expected, that’s why they are what they are. Don’t worry about what other people are doing, you’re of nature, you answer to the nature, not humans.
You constantly feel or thing like there is a place to get you with your life, once you are there, everything is good and set, you’re fine with everything. But the promise land isn’t a place or destination, rather it is a state of mind. So how do you get there, I still feel like something is holding me down where I am in my mind, like if I just get somewhere good, somewhere where, where I can continuously do productive things to bring myself up as opposed to bringing myself deeper down, I just would feel better about life and myself. There is such a place indeed, but it’s already there within the reach, you just reach for it. How, what do I do? You accept the consequences no matter what they are. Like you created them on purpose to feel them. 
Venture out, into the heaven into the space, no need to be confined within your mind and body just go out and have fun.
A classic example of tolerating pain is miss-perception that that’s what is needed to become strong, but the opposite is true, become so sensitive that you don’t let any spectacle of pain to go unnoticed, unfelt, so it has to come again stronger.
Generally within oneself is all the answer that needs to be there, there is no more reason to look anywhere else once acknowledged this truth.
It is inevitable that some things naturally fall off, sometimes it might feel like all or many are, tho let them, don’t intervene necessarily, no need to hold on to what’s not needed. 
Dracula is the world trying to come out, why you ask? No reason it just does. The WHY and the reason isn’t always as important as you think it is
There could be a lot to say about the masculine portion of ones growing up, it essentially is needed for a specific reason and that is to learn how to operate on the go, on the action, if this masculinity is not going for it in life and it doesn’t serve as an idol or something to live up to then one is left wandering about, to seek the heights possible. If one has already reached the heights of maturing that were observed and doesn’t feel like they are fulfilling, one must define their own heights and levels based on one's basic ability to learn grow.
                                                                                                                                                                                                  ~Kristián C.

This blog post is the wonderous result of the class Solar Moon Press co-hosted with Healing Sun Energetics. It was a magical experience from which came much healing and many beautiful word creations. 

By Tawa Ranes

Solar Moon Press was recently speaking with a writer’s group about what we are trying to do as a publishing company, and ways for writers to get involved. In that particular moment we were talking about the kinds of voices that Solar Moon Press would like to help to ‘be heard.’ The question came up as to whether Solar Moon Press was open to trans voices. It felt like a very interesting question. Interesting because it made it very apparent that forums, outlets for storytelling, and the avenues by which marginalized voices can find their way to the public, have become increasingly ‘specialized.’ You could also read here; separatist and divided. I learned a new word when trying to define (in my own mind) what I mean by this. The word is fissiparous. An adjective, meaning: inclined to cause or undergo division into separate parts or groups. It appear we are becoming even more fissiparous in contemporary publishing. I don’t ignore the fact that historically we have always been so; yet it seems to have a slightly different flavor in its modern cultural iteration.

It could be that the question came up in response to my very own fear, that I had vocalized in the group, of getting pigeonholed as a publishing company, as a “me too” publisher of only female voices. The fear came up in response to having just released our first book as a publishing company. It is a “me too” piece of literature. One that felt very raw and vulnerable to put into the public domain. One that also felt very necessary, and important to honor, as the first voice we offer to the public. Especially as a publishing cooperative claiming to represent those voices that are still being silenced as a regular cultural practice.

As the author of the book, there was a deep urgency inside of me to tell the stories, that the book includes, in a very public way. I believe this is because of the deep healing that I know to be possible when we expose our tender spots and allow them to be ‘aired out’. So to speak. I also believe that, as an author, it was the first story I needed to tell. Because so much of what I do and how I engage with the world has to do with healing, eventually most of what I want to share with you all will also have to do with healing, and be very solution/ evolution oriented.

The problem with jumping right into all that feel good/ move forward stuff, is that it doesn’t honor the very real, lived and survived, shadows of the human experience. This might very well be why so many attempts to heal, as individuals and as a society, fail. In my experience, you can’t gloss over the shit, the muck, the horror of it all, while at the same time fully understanding what happened, how it affected us, and ultimately healing from it. Exposing it to the light, airing it out, and telling the story are critical steps in the healing process. In fact, they are the steps that draw out the poison that we carry within from experienced trauma. This may seem obvious, but we can’t heal if the poison is still inside of us. That is why, when treating poison wounds, you have to first draw the poison out.

As a writer, I know that drawing the poison out and using it as the ink to write my, and other’s stories, have had miraculous healing benefits. As a publisher, I know that I must bravely stand with those who are engaged in (and maybe engulfed by) the healing process. Those evolutionary pioneers who recognize and honor that we must speak the uncomfortable truth (our uncomfortable truth) if we are to ever move beyond it. Solar Moon Press encourages and supports those who choose to make beautiful, sometimes angry, and always impactful literature, from the festering inkwell within.

If you have words that needs to be heard, want to be healed, and are forward moving (toward revolution, resolution, solution, and evolution), then Solar Moon Press is likely an avenue you will want to walk down, a website you will want to peruse, a vocal stream you will want to dip your feet into. It matters not the lens you look through. We all perceive and receive life through our own lens, and that lens reflects our experiences on planet Earth. Our lens will likely reflect the color of our skin, the gender fluidity or rigidity within, our relationship with our kin, our beliefs around sin, and how those experiences have shaped and molded us. It will also likely tell us whether the experience has been painful or peaceful. We want to hear what you have to say. We can’t wait to see it through your unique lens and hear it in your voice.

As we have said before: “Come to us as you are: sweet, powerful, sensitive, grumpy, sensual, creative, and irate.” We will not put up a gate. We think it’s so important for you to create, and in doing so, clean the slate. But not before allowing yourself to feel irate and express the need to get it straight. No glossing over or gas-lighting, just straight up reality biting. So whether the story you have to tell is “me too,” he too or they too, whether it’s in your face ‘I’m tired of being treated this way because of my race (sex or class),’ or if it feels an urgency to no longer be defined by traditional concepts of gender and sexuality; please share with us your reality. And if you are battling the raging waters of the toxic masculinity within, are tired of being lumped in with that din, yet aren’t being offered a place to begin, to unravel the cultural patterns that hail from our kin; yes, that too is a sin.


Tawa Ranes is a Transformative Release Therapist living in Colorado (USA). She is fascinated with healing and the ways in which healing manifest in the human experience. Deeply enriched by her study-abroad experience in Spain as a teenager, Tawa’s life long love affair with culture and literature naturally led to advanced studies in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Literary Theory. She is in awe of the communicative and connective potential inherent in words and language, and loves to use them as an entryway into deeper understanding and communion with other. She writes in a candid voice with deeply philosophical undertones. Tawa is a leap before you look extraordinaire and the creative founding spirit behind Solar Moon Press.

by Angela Meyers

I woke up this morning thinking I would write the Anatomy of Sadness. Then I opened my laptop and read a Mark Twain quote. It altered me…dissolved my self pity and called on my warrior heart. I want to hear that call everyday.

The question haunting me this morning: When will I meet someone who really sees me? I have this feeling, only I can fill these shoes. I am a little confused, but I am not disappointed.

Prologue

Permission: this poem is a safe place
To explore the Anatomy of Sadness
I try to remember that I am a circus performer
I am about to dive into a tiny pool, in a big tent, surrounded by a great, grand world
My audience is none but myself
After I jump, and I climb out of my tiny pool,
I will take a bow, only to myself
 
It is an extraordinary thing to do
To fall so far with so little a safety net
Many climb to their own platforms,
and just smoke cigarettes and drink up there, nursing addictions, never braving the lonely fall  
 
For many that jump, the shock of the experience takes their life-breath away
They either never come out of it or they come out smuggling fear in their heart
Many never try again
 
But if I know myself at all
I will keep climbing and jumping, until the whole circus fades away
And I am standing bowing in honor to the experience of my life

 The Anatomy of Sadness, A Single Story
 For me,
It has dark edges
A wildness
A brutality that startles me awake in the night
In the morning
It is merciless with its endless interpretations
 
Imagination can turn it into a sort of high-speed tumbling into oblivion
Like a rocket man at the edge of the atmosphere
Falling off a proverbial cliff into no-gravity
It disorients the navigation system
 
For me,
it is an uprooting
It reminds me of trying to save my mother from herself
It reminds me of the girl I thought I was
It reminds me of the girl I never was
 
It reminds me of hitting the bottom only to realize I am still floating
No gravity, yet carrying all the heaviness of the world on my shoulders
 
Learning to love myself, from watching myself love others
 I looked at you, and I am sure that I saw you
And saw brilliance where so many, even you, suspected plainness
Your words were alchemy
They felt like a fire in my belly
They felt like an old friend warming up my soul
Your beauty took me by surprise, delighted me 
The way you fit so tenderly in my arms
It was as simple as gravity
It was a reverence
It was an honoring
It was like coming home
It did not belong to any interpretation in this world
Yet it was so fragile
So overwhelmed and drowned out by karma
 
Learning to love myself, from watching myself diminish others
 When it happens
There is a judgment that startles me as I watch it leave my body
An idea born in my mind that feels like betrayal 
My brain cuts the other down by categorizing the expression of their heart
The way I do to myself all day, yet never shudder
But when I watch it pass to another, I am startled by its ugliness
I have this imagining that they feel it
So each time it happens, I say a prayer that they are immune or that they are protected from it
For I suspect angels may offer that protection, even from ourselves
At the very least, I hopefully imagine that they are unaffected due to lack of interest
Then I try to remember that I have a choice
That maybe my heart knows that love, hate, judgment, beauty, ugliness is only filtered through this human experience
We must choose every day what to let in, knowing karma will require us to transmit it back into the world 

Angela Meyers lives in northern Colorado and works as a Physician’s Assistant. She enjoys the creative process of writing, and has a beautiful way of using metaphor and descriptive voice.

by Tiffany Higgins

Make enemy of no woman. This is what I hear. I doubt that it’s a new message, rather one that has been whispering in my ear for …years. I can honestly say that I’ve just turned the corner. In this time where the collective feminine is growing louder I accept that Trump Supporters, Plaid wearers, Coffee drinkers, Child Bearers, Single Screamers, Sign Holders, Hate Mongers, Abortion Lovers cannot be -The Other.

There can be NO Other. The new Club has to include Every Woman. It is a beautiful Club, an easy one to belong to when I’m across the table from a dear friend espousing our wonder at how well tea tree works as an antiseptic.
My left eye starts to twitch when I hear a Her say, “that’s just the way he is.”
Or “it’s just a kiss, Tiffany”… the perfunctory “kiss” on the neck….my private space, as opposed to a handshake when arriving at work. I wonder if tea tree works for this too.
And still I hear, make enemy of no woman.

It’s a zesty club, not unlike a family, where there are a bunch of misfits trying really hard to love each other. That’s what’s most important, that we try really hard to love each other.

We each have our spikes and thorns, sharp tongues, or no tongues. In our own way we are each venturing into the caverns of unexplored places within. Yes, yes, yes, sometimes those places are isle three of the grocery store where nestled there is a new and improved brand of earl grey lavender tea promising to soothe the soul ….only like lavender can. Then there are pockets of women following an impulse to awaken sexually. Explore the greater erotic Intelligence and creative life force energy, our inheritance to birth life into the world, human and so many other forms. This, an arena full of light and so much shadow billowing with shame. Both are zesty and pleasure-full. The soul soothing, nourishing, earl grey tea with lavender and my vulva’s connection to aliveness. Can I grow my capacity to be with all that this means? It’s so messy this “make enemy of no woman”.

Belonging…. to a greater whole both internally and externally.… This is where the dance of Belonging to this Club begins.
Some suggest that we must belong to ourselves first. The path to sovereignty lies in this relationship as primal, vital and critical. I don’t disagree. It is all of these elements and more.
I also believe that each woman has her own access point to excavating, re-mantling her own wholeness, untamed, influenced but not bound by this human experience. It doesn’t always come through our own hearts first or lips, neither the ones below nor above. Sometimes we need a gentle hand, holding our bums in support, as often a toddler needs a little boost.

What we need is acceptance, a real and strong-enough container to work our inner material out loud. All of the material, not just the material that fits into a new construct, even a deeply held, Best version, sacred construct. Ultimately any construct will create The Other. That Woman, She who is too _________________ Conservative, Fat, Flat, Fucked up, Unconscious to be worthy of The Club. Therein lies the sneaky and often seductive stronghold to a paradigm that we all know, hierarchy, power, a binary version that requires ‘less than’, ‘not enough’, ‘whore’, ‘bitch’, "goodie too shoes”.

It’s like any fire…it feels magical while sitting where the heat from the flames can bathe our skin, warm our bones, and the soft breeze at our backs encourages the smoke in the other direction. However, toss some gasoline in it and it is That Woman who wears the white t-shirt that shows the outline of her nipples or That Woman who defers to the man of the house. It’s so messy.

Make enemy of no woman. Can I grow my capacity to be with all that this means?
Otherwise, I’m complicit in sustaining a ‘Less than’ albeit shinier version of wholeness that makes a worthy member of The Club. Tricky.

It is a subtle form of rehabbing the current patriarchal culture by the very means that has nourished it. Power over…One up…Better than. I understand our deep desire to have an impact, change the course of and empower the feminine. Belong. To ourselves. To The Club of the Feminine -the collective conscious. I just don't think it will ever (nor can anything) be sustainable while there is The Other. When it is leveraged against, with or by another people or even concept. You see, for me love doesn't need a stepping stone or any form of power paradigm...no matter how seductive. And righting oppression IS VERY seductive.
It’s so messy.
Make enemy of no woman.
Can I grow my capacity to be with all that this means?
​
​
Tiffany Higgins, M.S., has 20 years experience in working with people as a facilitator, life coach, teacher, and experiential educator. She has designed and led experiential team building, leadership and trauma recovery programs for thousands of people.