I never really liked September because it meant that the original Angel Boy went back to school and all the fun we had during the summer would end. It’s no secret that I was never the mom who couldn’t wait to get rid of her kid.

In fact, during all of his school years, I’d ask him if he wanted to take a day off and NOT go to school, and instead have an adventure with me, whether that meant a train ride to San Diego, a ferry ride to Coronado, or simply to hang out and go to the beach.

Sometimes he’d say yes and we’d go out for lunch and play at the park, but as the years progressed, more often than not he’d say he didn’t want to miss a spelling test or some other assignment that he’d been looking forward to…and I lost my little buddy.

Little by little, he fledged out of the nest until one day, I realized that we hadn’t had any adventures at all, at least not during the school year, and summers became full of skateboarding with friends or having me drive or pick up a group of them from the beach.

I’m not complaining, because this is as it should be, but I do miss those days when we’d hang out all day and never stop chatting and laughing.

Now we still chat and laugh and hike together and have even camped as a family, but there’s always a certain quiet sadness that’s totally overcome by my pride in the man and dad he’s become.

There are full moon energies that fully explain my current pensiveness, maybe also because I just made his favorite lunch (tuna melt) before he took off to fly back home.

The house feels the lack of his presence and once again, it’s preternaturally quiet. It’s a good time to remind myself how much there is to be grateful for.

Culturally and spiritually, this full harvest moon is a symbol of gratitude, completion, celebration, and transition into the darker half of the year. Any full moon shadow work can take advantage of the peak illumination of the full moon to bring hidden fears, suppressed emotions, and unconscious patterns into the light so we can heal and release them.