New Moon Ritual: November 2025
The dream this month was all about hurricanes.
I grew up in Florida, and I’ve been through my fair share of hurricanes. Both glancing blows and direct hits. I was living in Miami when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. My memories from the night of the storm are being huddled in the hallway bathroom, my dad physically bracing the sliding glass door (which was taped up because we weren’t able to board it) to keep it in the frame, and a tornado that went down our street. My aunt’s house was destroyed, their roof ripped right off and everything inside ruined by rain. They lived with us for a couple of weeks. We were without power for a while, and I accompanied my dad to the FEMA stations to pick up food and orange juice. On the way, I remember passing fishing boats and other small vessels that were scattered around the streets, having been swept up in the storm surge and dragged inland.
In 2005 I was attending college in northern Florida when Hurricane Wilma formed in the Caribbean and rapidly intensified to a major Category 5 storm. After hitting the Yucatán Peninsula it made a sharp eastward turn, and I drove the five hours back south with a friend to help my parents board up the house. I remember stepping out onto the back patio with my dad and brother the night the storm was passing through and having a moment of vertigo while looking at the ground under a nearby Pongame tree. The ground seemed to be rippling. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing was the roots of the tree moving under the soil as the tree slowly rotated in place, the large canopy acting as a sail in the storm winds. I pointed it out to my dad and the three of us quickly grabbed rope from the garage, rushed out into the yard, and tied the tree off to another one further away from the house. That way, if the tree fell, hopefully it would fall away from our roof.
What both of these storm experiences have in common is that the eye of the storm passed either directly over, or very near to where I lived. For those not familiar with hurricanes, the eye of the storm is the calm, clear center. Surrounding the eye is what is known as the “eyewall”, which contains the strongest winds. When the eye of the storm passes over you it can be a bit eerie. There is generally no cloud cover, so if its daytime the sun starts shining again. The wind and rain lessens. You can get similar experiences in what is called a “moat”, which is a clear ring that can form just outside the eyewall which might become a new eyewall as the old one weakens.
The important thing about these spaces - the eyewall and moat - is that they are deceptive. When these spaces pass the winds and rain can return quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes, to continue their devastation.
Why this mini meteorology lesson? Some folks may be familiar with the concept of “Tower Time”, which I first heard from Byron Ballard. Other folks have written about it, including John Beckett who also categorized it with other paradigm shifts that many of us feel in our spirits and bones. One of those is referred to as “The Storm”. Beckett has an excellent Patheos article from 2019 that dives into these in more detail.
My friend and someone I truly respect as a teacher, Irene Glasse, often talks about how Spirit speaks to us in a sensory language that we’ll understand. It pulls from our memories, the media we consume, the dreams we have to weave together a lexicon that speaks to us in recollection, metaphor, and sense memory. That’s probably why when everyone else seems to envision Tower Time as an earthquake and raining fire, I’ve always seen it as a powerful storm. My lived experience and sense memory of destruction is not fissures and flame, but howling wind and floods and torrential rain.
Which brings us back to this dream ritual and the message it comes with. When I dream of hurricanes in this sense, I’m being told a story of Tower Time. A story of collapse, chaos, confusion, danger, and forces well beyond our control. To paraphrase Captain Barbossa, you best start believing in Tower Time, you’re in it. But amidst all of this destruction, the greatest threat to us in this moment is the eye of the storm.
The deceptive calm.
The warmth and sunlight that makes us think the worst part is past and we can go back outside, go back to the world we used to know.
Only for those howling winds and stinging rains to come raging back from the other side.
Listen, I get it. Everything right now is exhausting. I, too, wish all of this was over and we could go back to what passed for normal. But the reality of it is we’re far from through with this storm. In Beckett’s article I linked above he pegged the beginning of “The Storm” to 2016 and the spread of the toxic mix of incompetence, cruelty, and nationalism that began to sweep politics in the West. I tend to agree with this assessment.
And, yes, we’ve had some wins recently. A Canadian government unafraid to say on the global stage that the United States is no longer a reliable partner and the world must move on from a US-centric hegemony. A “blue wave” election in November 2025. Long overdue justice for those victimized by Epstein and those who traveled in his circle of pedophiles.
These are wins. We should enjoy these victories. We should catch our breath in a moment that feels calmer and more rational.
But beware the false security of the eye of the hurricane.
