The Moon is not a master. The Moon is the original technology of animation. Its power is undeniable and recognized by all. The domestic dog and the wild wolf share a primal hunger. In the unison of their howl are the instincts, the nature that cannot be silenced nor mastered. The beasts wander, led by appetite. They hunt to feed. They are desperate to subdue the aching longing and loneliness of the night that stretches across centuries. Their howl is a mixture of alarm, desire, exhilaration. It is a plea. It is the audible power of conviction. And if not a wolf, then see a coyote and the mortal danger of border crossing.

The Moon knows we can only know so much about oceanic consciousness and sublunar alliances. We meet the Moon bewildered, ignorant, and Faith is tested by fear, and desire runs wild. All these intelligences converge toward the Moon illuminating a path toward purpose, a single point of focus that opens a vista of awareness and possibility that is divine and flesh in its fulfillment. Night restores the day, death replenishes life.

The Moon is the nexus of convergence in the tarot as well. It focalizes all the primordial waters, rivers, and oceans across the cards' cartography.

It is the origin of time, the center of space, where all the threads of life entwine. It is under moonlight that we learn to cope with chaos, disorientation, and uncertainty. The Moon confronts the reader's wildness within, the tension it has with domestication, pulled taut across class, gender, race. Domesticity entails discipline, servitude, respect, well-mannered politeness, but by night its dog has gotten loose. Domestication is a saddling, a corseting, a leashing; it does not convert wildness, but contains and coerces, or kills. But it does not conquer the wild. There are always wild souls who survive.

The Moon is the call to subversion, one we answer reveling in "the sheer animality of precariousness and survival." The white supremacist imperial power is a common enemy to any natural, living being. The whole of life emerges from the Moon's collective seas. The Moon's solidarity is forged across species, collaborating instinctively on a new narrative, new self, new world. The analogies, parallels, and comparisons of the human with the animal communicate clearly to the reader the internal state, thoughts, or feelings of the querent. See a horse gallantly galloping across the frame and you know that something about masculinity, beauty, and power is prescient.

The animal establishes a visceral response that is only accessible when we are so associated with the nonhuman. From this imagistic, metaphoric language that associates the human and the nonhuman emerges the reclamation of an ability to engage the natural world as a positive metaphor. For those who have spent their historical life being compared to an animal as a strategy of racist dehumanization, this is no small reclamation. So rather than being estranged from one's humanity for being animal-like, we can positively imagine or clarify our animal relations. They become teachers we respect for their lessons in our primal aliveness, power, instinct. In our treatment, conception, and consideration of the nonhuman, our own humanity takes distinction.

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All answer the Moon's call to come home. All share the cry of craving for some sacred return, all famished for freedom. All intelligence remembers its origin. We know where we come from. Deep inside are our wild, free instincts toward fulfillment. The liveliness of the wild is invigorating.

Though they may be repressed and faded in the darkness of the subconscious, the Moon always summons something from the deep. I's always weaving a golden web from all the disparate desires for you to realize.

Whether overhead or in your hand, the Moon wants you to let yourself off a leash so you may take a path of trust and respect. The Moon lets desire just be, lets it walk free for the first time. We've held out for far too long; now it's about being uncollared. Freedom is the night's taking.

In the willingness to go somewhere we've never been, we necessarily embrace the darkness. The first step to illumination always begins in the eclipse of ignorance, in the blackness of possibility. Perhaps we wouldn't take the path without the Moon's soulful romance. It contains both our desire for a limitless, empty frontier and our fears of borderlessness. The Moon longs for a remembered unknown, a love light reflected in physical form. The seas we are willing to cross for this freedom, how far these currents can take us, the depth of these feelings, only the Moon knows, only the Moon can access.

The Moon is a return to that new place. Excited with all sensory stimuli, the Moon may overwhelm. With every layer washed away, we may feel raw, exposed, out in the open. And still we can't help but imagine all the creation that may come from that free, wild space. The wild offers itself to the lunar imagination. The Moon finds you in a very volatile time. When you are released, unleashed, or unbound back into the wild, it is initially exhilarating. But when it gets dark and cold at night, do you long for the comfort of the cage?

The night is immersive. We are ravenous in its discovery, gracious in our curiosity. We hear the dogs, we keep going. The Moon keeps calling. The Moon doesn't demand that we be good, or repent for hundreds of desert miles; only that we let our love be uninhibited and wild in its passion. The Moon makes all the more evident our unconscious driving obsession, the primary longing, the primal quest. When queer Black femmes indulge those deepest drives of art, eroticism, self-definition, she is monstrously threatening to sexist cultures everywhere. She must intuitively understand how she is surrounded politically by threatening wolves everywhere. But she walks under the warmth of moonlight. However lonely we believe ourselves to be, the Moon finds us, pulls on us to head home again. So begins a journey back to the galactic center.

"In personal journeys, we seek the center. Our concepts of immortality, enlightenment, and the individual's spiritual journey have been born from this omphalic beginning, this pole-centered heaven where all things moved around the sacred point of stillness. This was the first great impact that the constellations, the fixed stars, and the night sky had on the human mind: a primary philosophy that is so unconscious in the collective that it is generally unnamed and unrecognized, yet so strong it has formed the very foundation of our minds."

As we walk on and on to our resurrection, may we be reminded of the play possible only when we take off our armor, under the covering of green sanctuaries. May our paths cross at an oasis after many dry steps in different directions. And of our meeting, some hybrid being becomes; transformations through which, within late capitalism, all subject citizens are formed by "the horizontal coexistence of a number of symbolic systems." o So our compound meetings exist across environment, nonhuman animal, animal, text, sign, augur. The Moon governs these mutual mergings.

The Moon takes the reader to the sublunar, subconscious, and subcultural circuits where new social relations are envisioned and activated. It is the collision of identities that give representation to deviant discourse and identity.

The Moon synthesizes dualities, contradictions, and perspectives across disparate worlds to construct a space that defies the borders of bodies, geographies, and possibilities. The Moon's dwelling is in the liminal, refusing to acquiesce or assimilate. Moonwalkers know freedom is a road that must be continuously paved anew. There must be made new topographies of cultural integrity.

The crucible of visionary perception is confusion, from which we recover the marvel and wonder of one who recognizes their small body within the vast unknown. We find the limitations and boundaries of conscious, rational knowing in the Moon, with relief. Disorientation is the obscuring grace of long-awaited change. What comfort to know the Moon knows more than man. When we need to stay with the mystery, we pull this card, we question the nature of our reality. The Moon stirs what is deeply felt, teaching the reader to discern between anxiety and intuition. Moonlight is obscuring. Shadows are cast in darkness. The fear that naturally arises can then be a potential ally for new knowing. Darkness and shadow may then be known as forces providing time for rest, inspiration, stillness.

Strength's solar work of embracing feminine instincts is balanced by the lunar test of intuition. You can try to climb to the top of the mountain, but you can't get to the bottom of the Moon's ocean. The Moon ushers you into the deepest domain of the feminine, the celestial body unafraid of complete darkness, to thus access complete renewal.

The arcanum invites dream work, meditation, therapy, astrology, or other manners of psychic, cosmic exploration. The Moon is a perfect champion for the tarot, for it teaches us the language of symbol, myth, and metaphor. The Moon teaches the reader to shapeshift, becoming nepantleras who aren't "constrained by one culture or world but experience multiple realities. Ensuring that our acts do not mirror or replicate the oppression and dominant power structures we seek to dismantle, las nepantleras upset our cultures' foundations and disturb the concepts structuring their realities. Las nepantleras nurture psychological, social, and spiritual metamorphosis."•

Through the Moon's portal we truly explore liminality, often pursuing and experiencing soul retrieval at the psychic, social, bodily sites of past trauma. Images, memories, feelings surface that cannot be avoided. At this stage we overcome regression or avoidance, instead allowing our inner child to be found, held, seen, and comforted. We learn to leave in a manner that makes it safe to return.

Time is cyclical; linearity is an illusion. The soul grows in spirals, not straight lines. This shift in orientation is succeeded by the transition into the nocturnal. Every transaction with the forces of terror and hope is inscribed in the dark. The Moon summons us toward a new world, and like the early Americans crafting the nation's literary identity, a dark, abiding presence moves through the heart with fear and longing. Shadow work has many meanings, but if it does not lead to the most sordid histories of humanity and how and where the reader has arisen in this, then it is futile.

The Moon is the shadow worker looming over each and every one of us.

A haunting darkness looms over the landscape, something to consistently negotiate, avert, or make the antithesis of a hyperindividualized freedom.

Colonizers failed to make a "new world" because they brought the same old story with them; no matter the name change, the world is still in thrall to poverty, prison, social ostracism, debt, and death. Shadows were imported from European culture and then romanticized. There are no new worlds, there is only the one we have, being continuously remade and rediscovered, being altered and changed permanently, continuously. By moonlight the repressed have returned. The old reality caresses, grips, and shapes the new in the subtle and unseen that lives within each of us. The Moon makes wide the body of our historical canvas.

Everyone wants the new, so no one considers the old. But the new is raw, half-savage to the patriarchs; it's never respected, only feared. There is no new world, no release into a sort of historylessness, no blank black page for whiteness to impress upon. There is the Moon drawing the tide, washing over the shores of history, forgetting and remembering again, only gaining and shedding its light. It's the same world, but it calls us to begin again, and so it is as important to know what we are rushing from as it is to know what we are hastening toward. Whatever ways we build illusions become para-mount, through which we only come to clarity in retrospect, in historical study and appreciation. We encounter the dark till it becomes casual. We live daily in the darkness of ongoing historical oppression, and yet we are still walking, still being summoned by a force of freedom within and above.

Courage feathers the faith of fulfillment.

For some the journey to fulfillment is about profit; for others it is about license and release from limitation; but for some it's about faith. In the Moon there may be a marked absence of hope, realism, materialism, or promise. Before we arrive at the newness of our potential or our embodied freedom, we begin troubled, frightened, haunted. Oppression precedes the desire for freedom. It is living in turmoil, dissatisfaction, and constraint that precipitates a resolve toward wilderness, to take freedom's temptation as apprehension blows away. Regardless of the motivation, each trip taken is considered to be worth the risk, pressing toward a future, a free state with endurance. The departure is marked by images of thresholds, crossroads, an opening in an underground place.

The typology of diabolism so desperately sought to be left behind becomes reproduced as a measure of prevention through inoculation. The Moon is the plane where the psyche imagines, engages, confronts their demons, desires, and dreams. The Moon makes it possible to embrace, with varying risk, human fears and anxiety around failure, powerlessness, boundarylessness, being outcast. The Moon presents an unbridled nature couched for attack, summoning Americans' fear of

"the absence of so-called civilization; their fear of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom— the thing they coveted most of all. "Darkness is terror's conceit, which becomes racialized in America. The Black population becomes the playground for hegemonic and countercultural imagination. The subjective nature of ascribing worth and significance to color cannot be questioned at this time. The founding masters of America made slaves function as a surrogate for meditations on freedom that conceptualize Blackness as the simultaneous not-free and not-me, which makes conscious the necessity for establishing difference. Exploitation then becomes rationalized because what is being restrained is not a person with humanity but a darkness simulated by otherness, alarm, desire. That shadow is put to work. Freedom and enslavement, civilization, domesticity, and savage wildness become mutually accountable; one is made to support the other. Domestication becomes enslavement by the white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy. It is repression, desecration, and dominion. The terror of a limitless nature, natal loneliness, aggression, death are reflected in the American empire's founders' meditations and treatment of the enslaved. Again, white supremacy exists on a continuum of anti-Blackness. That terror has been colonized by every American since.

It is the Moon that shows us this shadow of the consciousness concerned with freedom, or the consciousness that considers itself free. It is the conditioned tendencies of our self-reflexive capacity. The Moon makes our references for difference completely clear: it is whatever frightens us.

While our desire for that difference detects our equivalency. In the line of demarcation, the Moon's shadows hover in implication.

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The Moon is nature and the Moon is symbol. It is both the subject and the system. It is the opportunity and the search for the self, the sublime. It is about becoming, transacting. It conjures fear to be imaginatively conquered, to quiet the howl of deep insecurities. Internal conflicts are projected against this all-encompassing darkness. Historically, this fear was transferred to the conveniently bound, violently silenced Black bodies, but is it possible we could now enter the dark to become purged of that internalized racism that condones structural oppression? This is the power of darkness, the anarchy of the other. It gives expression to the metaphysical, moral, and historical problems and dichotomies of human freedom.

It lures, perhaps because it is so elusive. Night comes and curtails control.

What is the Moon to the native but the power, the guide, the mode of shamanic trance and shapeshifting, and of readily traversed alternative planes of consciousness. It is the Moon that makes tarot readers, writers, witches, the shadow workers. The ones who relearn how to be the free self out in the wild. The ones who recognize the chaos of the night as a shared power yet to be potentiated. Those humble enough to respect and realize nothing is known for certain. These are the instincts of evolution. There is no turning back.