Under the White Pines
On ancestry, memory, and what holds us.
🌑 NEW MOON IN LIBRA | OCTOBER 10, 2026
TThe New Moon arrives in Libra on October 10 at 8:50 AM Pacific. Libra holds the scales, and in its season I find myself paying attention to relationship in the widest sense: who and what holds us up, and what we lean on when we need to rest.
This past week, the answer came to me from the trees.
Pilgrimage up Bald Mt. with The Self-Illumined Heart Retreat
It was a brilliant fall day when I found myself resting at the base of a large white pine and ended up staying for hours. The bed of soft copper needles beneath me, the autumn light filtering through the branches, the sweet smell of pine, the warmth of the tree trunk against my back. Linear time fell away. The tree seemed to set the pace.
As the afternoon went on, the pine carried me elsewhere: to the family cemetery in Benton, Maine, where my mother’s people are buried. For as long as I can remember, a circle of tall white pines stood around those graves, giving shade and keeping quiet company with my ancestors. The trees are gone now, cut down last summer. Lying under this pine, I could still feel them.
Then I was small again, in the backyard of my childhood home, playing under the white pines there. Sap on my hands, a fort amongst the needles, building worlds and adventures with my Smurf figurines.
Three sets of trees, decades and miles apart, and my body remembered them as one. I have spent my life in relationship with white pines without ever naming it. They stood over my grandmothers’ graves and over my childhood play, and on that afternoon one of them held me while I rested.
Outside my childhood home with the white pine,1977
Libra teaches balance through relationship, and we usually read that as the balance between ourselves and other people.
Resting against that sentinel pine, I understood my relationships to include the land, the trees, and the ancestors whose bones rest among their roots. Some of my oldest companions have needles.
I carried that circle of trees and ancestors home with me, and into the practice of 40 Days of Ancestral Gold, where we are chanting the eleventh mantra of the Sri Sukta – an ancient prayer for peace, harmony, and abundance to take root and dwell in our lineage. Each day we return to the practice, and each day the ancestors come a little closer, the way the white pines did: quietly, and all at once.
Perhaps this is exactly the invitation of this New Moon.
Coming home to yourself, and allowing that relationship to shape every other one. We often look for peace in the world around us. We hope for the right conversation, the understanding partner, the circumstances that finally allow us to exhale. This New Moon invites us to lean back into what holds us, whether that’s land, lineage, or a single tree, and to carry that steadiness into our relationships.
🌑 PRACTICE FOR THE NEW MOON:
Before your next conversation that matters, pause wherever you are and feel what is holding you up: your feet on the floor, your body in the chair.
Let yourself be supported for a moment.
Breathe in for four counts and out for six.
Chant Om Shanti three times, letting each repetition settle a little lower in your body.
Then enter the conversation from that rooted place.
🔥 THIS NEW MOON ASKS:
Where in my life am I longing for greater relational harmony?
What practice helps me return to peace when I feel pulled away from my center?
With you in the dark,
Stephanie Chee Barea
Sacred Sound Teacher | Mantra Practitioner | Spiritual Guide
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