Teach Your Daughters to Love the Moon is a mother’s manifesto about how to raise daughters who burn, flow, hunt, sow, bare, howl, and shine. Now more than ever, we need to raise strong women who are in touch with nature and themselves.
Teach your daughters to burn. Teach them to fly their flaming chariots across the sky, even in daytime when the sun can see.
Teach them to turn their faces toward the light even when it is dark, and that the darkness can help them see the stars and allow them to appreciate the smallest specks of light.
Teach them that if they dare to glow the ocean will reflect their light, sending ripples in all directions.
Teach your daughters to flow. Teach them to allow for phases, for cycles, for the way everything waxes and wanes.
Teach them to sway toward the moon’s pull like the tides, to follow the oceans and currents, to move with the rhythms of the earth and the stars so they can take part in the dance of creativity.
Teach them to love the ebb and flow, to know that sometimes they will be more or less full, but that they will never be stagnant. Every phase is passing and there will always be more growth.
Teach your daughters to hunt. Teach them to learn to listen to the wild inside and around them, and to find their own sustenance so they can survive.
Teach them that even if they are small, they can eclipse much greater forces, for life is all about perspective and sometimes everything will align.
Teach them to embrace their dark side, to know that part of being whole is embracing the fault lines, the craters, and deep seas.
Teach your daughters to sow. Teach them they are always on time, always right where they should be, because time is measured by the way they grow. Teach them that there is a time for planting seeds and a time for letting go. That they can feel that time and reap the harvest.
Teach them that they can be harder than rock and break to pieces in catastrophe and still pull themselves back together into something brighter and more beautiful than before.
Teach them that night is necessary, that dreams and rest and destruction are the things new life is made of.
Teach your daughters to bare. Teach them to be unafraid of moonlight on their skin and comfortable with shadows, comfortable with shades of gray and reflection.
Teach them that they don’t have to be perfectly round or smooth to be beautiful, that even pockmarked and stretched, people will stare in awe, and they will be sublime.
Teach them to love the wax and wane of Luna’s body, the way it grows full and round and the way it becomes a sliver, at just the right times, so that they can also love the wax and wane of their own bodies.
Teach your daughters to howl. Teach them to call their kin and gather beneath the moon’s light, to know that they are more powerful together than they can ever be alone, and that the gravity of a group can support so much more beauty than a rock floating alone.
Teach them to look up, that there are worlds outside themselves, outside their houses and cities and countries. That no matter how small they feel, their actions send ripples across space.
Teach them to search the sky for answers and allow the moon to light the answers within. To know that everything they need is within themselves, precisely because they are part of the whole.
Teach your daughters to shine. Teach them that the world needs their light, their pull, their words, their movement, for life is fuller and brighter with their influence.
Teach your daughters to love the moon because you have shown them how.
Want more on the moon? Check out these other creative works about the moon. Want to work on syncing your goals and energy to the moon? Check out this planner and journal.