What the heck is moon water? And the business case for making it.

The most ridiculous thing on my calendar, and the one I don’t skip.

The full moon is three days away, on July 29th. If this resonates, you have three days to find a jar.

We’ve all had these types of days. The ones where you’re running on empty, where sitting alone in the car for five minutes feels like heaven, where nothing can restore you, and at some point you stop looking for a plan and start looking for a rescue. My “salvation” arrived at 8pm on a Friday, through Instagram, in the form of an astrologer holding a mason jar full of water up to the sky. This is the story of how I discovered moon water. It’s also my argument for why a woman who lives in spreadsheets by day is better at her job because she makes moon water every twenty nine days at night.

I found the moon water ritual through exhaustion: the specific kind of exhaustion of a 41-year-old running a company, packing lunches for my six-year-old, and hitting publish on a newsletter at midnight.

Q1 had just come to a close, and it was the fifth Friday in a row that I got home at 4pm and beached myself on the bed like a sea lion. I couldn’t move a muscle until hunger finally won and I thought: maybe I should eat dinner.

So I did what a lot of us do on a night like that. I opened Instagram.

I was looking for a quick fix, and the algorithm knows our weaknesses. So it served me an astrologer making moon water. She was promising that the water releases the attachments and obstacles that hinder our growth. Which, at 8pm on that Friday, sounded exactly like what I needed released. What sold me wasn’t just the hope. It was how simple it looked. A jar. Water. The moon.

My personal moon water set up

The ritual

Here’s my ritual. On the night of the full moon, I fill a jar with water. I write my intention on a hand-torn slip of paper, fold it, and set the jar on top of it. My crystals go next to the jar. I read the intention out loud, hold the crystals for a moment, and put them down. I leave the water and crystals out to “charge” from the energy from the moon.

Before the sun is fully up, I collect it. I drink some of the water and read my intention again. The jar sits by my desk for a few days and I sip from it when I need to. Whatever’s left at the end goes to the plants. The crystals come back inside and go where I can see them.

The first note was a prayer for rest: help me feel rested and energized enough to show up big. This is admittedly a lot of weight to put on something I learned from an influencer, but I no longer believe a ritual has to be handed down ceremoniously to be legitimate.

The influencer had her jar posed against a handful of crystals, and I thought: I can do that too. We already had crystals in the house. My son started collecting rocks at three, the way many three-year-olds do, and somewhere along the way he got entranced by the prettier ones. The pretty rocks turned out to be crystals. His collection grew, and then it started coming with us to Mexico City, where the best ones come from shops run by brujas, (Spanish for witches). On our last trip, he picked out his own. He’s six now, and the best pieces are his.

This last full moon found us on vacation in the desert in Mexico. My son clutched his crystals with both hands, turned around so (he thought) I couldn’t hear, and whispered to the universe: “To my crystals, I want to become a chess master.”

I heard it anyway.

He took the job seriously. I had told him sunlight couldn’t touch the crystals, so the next morning, before we were even awake, he had already brought everything inside. The crystals and the moon water, rescued from the light.

I wish I could say that he treats them with great care now. They’re scattered across the house. I find them mostly in the bathtub. But that means he sees them most days, and that’s the point. They aren’t magic rocks. They’re daily reminders of our intentions.

Back to my intention. The support I need most today isn’t for my work or my child. It’s right here on this page: Spreadsheets and Shamans. Help me feel energized to show up big, that’s what my paper says these days. And I’ll take all the support the universe can offer. Putting my writing into the world is new to me, and like so many other beginners, I am frequently humbled. Earlier this month I posted a snippet on LinkedIn and it got three likes. Three. Would you judge me if I told you I refreshed the page forty times? As if the number might move if I asked it enough. The number never budged, but I did. After twenty-four hours of silence I realized that I was still alive after my fear of seeming irrelevant came true. I was free. A few days later, I had another piece ready to go, and I drank the last of the moon water at my desk, reread my note, and posted.

The Evidence

I research everything I put my time and energy behind, so of course I went digging for the evidence on moon water.

On the water itself, I can’t find anything. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, and no study has found it changes what’s in the jar. On the moon and what it does to our bodies, the evidence is thinner than the shaman in me would like it to be. The studies observing lunar influences on our sleep, our moods, our cycles mostly come back empty.

But then I think about the turtles. Last December, on a beach in Costa Rica, I watched sea turtles hatch and make their run to the sea, timed to the moon. They wouldn’t be here without the moon. Neither would our seasons, which stay stable only because the moon holds our planet’s tilt in place. The moon isn’t a nice-to-have. It runs the whole show. When it comes to the power of the moon, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence.

Proof does exist on the ritual, though. A hundred years ago an anthropologist named Malinowski noticed that Pacific fishermen held no ceremonies before fishing in the calm inner lagoon, but they performed elaborate rituals before sailing past the reef into the open ocean, where boats didn’t always come home. Same men, different odds. Rituals aren’t for the parts of life we can predict. We build them for the parts we can’t.

The uncertainty I face is a far different weight than death by drowning. I’m most worried about whether the school nurse will call today, which, admittedly, is a 10/10 on my anxiety radar. But all anxiety is valid in the eyes of the beholder.

I’m now several months into my moon water ritual, and here is why I continue: The intentions I fold under the jar. The crystals around the bathtub that I sometimes step on at 6am. The sip at my desk before pressing publish. When I drift, and I always do, these pull me back on track.

A full moon comes back roughly every twenty-nine days. It’s on a rhythm that doesn’t care about my calendar. I set intentions every January and lose many by March. The moon doesn’t let me forget. Every twenty-nine days it’s back, reminding me to revisit my intentions.

I run a company. I own its P&L, which means I’m the one responsible for whether we made money this month or lost it. The moon has yet to improve my numbers, but the ritual does keep me from losing track of my own intentions. One of those intentions is to keep my energy high throughout the year, which in my book is critical for the success of the business. The ritual gives me a standing appointment with my intentions, set by something I don’t control and can’t move. This might seem woo-woo to some, but it works for me.

I own a P&L. I drink moon water. And the moon, of all things, is the one keeping me on track.

The Practice

Start with the paper, not the jar. If you don’t know what to write, go back to January. What were you hoping to accomplish this year?

Write the thing. Fold it up, fill a jar with water, and set the jar on top of the paper somewhere the moon might get to it.

Get the jar before the sun’s up and drink some. Keep the paper where you’ll see it, not in a drawer. Mine sits by my desk until the next full moon comes around.

Wednesday the 29th is the full moon. It’s full enough Tuesday night too, so either one works.

Crystals optional. Kids welcome.

Moon Water Recipe from The Spell Book for New Witches by Ambrosia Hawthorn

The Shelf

If you got this far and still aren’t buying the moon water ritual, read Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual. His argument is that people who left religion didn’t stop needing ritual, they just stopped having any, and that ordinary things become sacred when you do them on purpose and keep doing them.

The Invitation

The full moon is just around the corner. What’s going under your jar on the 29th? Put it in the comments. My intention is to keep writing, even when the algorithm punishes me. My son’s will say something about chess.

Made it this far? Tap the ❤️ so I know it landed. And forward this to someone who needs a new ritual to keep them on track.