Your weekly dose of moonlight, mystery, and mildly organised chaos.

🌙 This Week on the Dark Moon Rocks Morning Show...

Another week has rolled past on the canal, and life aboard Dark Moon Rocks has settled back into its familiar rhythm of radio, music, animals, strange skies and the occasional unexpected adventure.

Merlin has fully recovered from his unexpected swimming lesson and, in true cat fashion, has apparently decided the entire incident never happened. There will be no discussion, no embarrassment and certainly no acceptance of responsibility. We have all agreed to move on.

Late summer is beginning to creep into the landscape now. The grasses along the towpath are dry and crunchy, the light is changing, and every so often there is that little shift in the air that reminds you autumn isn't quite as far away as you'd like to think.

This week also brought an ancient magical sky dance.

So naturally, Merlin, Sabre and I went for a walk.

We ended up sitting together on the lock as the light began to change…. there is a lot about not looking up…let us not go into that here.

I filmed the eclipse reflected in the canal water and it was beautiful.

The light became strangely eerie for a while — muted and unfamiliar, as though someone had quietly changed the settings on the world. The sky a velvety blue colour with added violet. As the sun sank towards the horizon, our little eclipse gathering expanded.

A grey squirrel appeared, cat eyed it with premeditated interest. Then a couple of pigeons, cat nearly smiled. Then a yellow wagtail…they ignored each other with intent.

So there we were: one woman, one dog, one ginger-and-white cat, a squirrel, two pigeons and a wagtail, sitting beside the canal while the sky did something extraordinary.

Nobody organised it. Nobody needed a ticket. And nobody tried to sell us an eclipse souvenir pair of glasses.

Sometimes the best moments are simply the ones where you happen to be in the right place long enough to notice them.

So this week we're back aboard the boat, back beside the water, and back into the rhythm of radio shows, music, meditations, experiments and whatever else wanders into the Dark Moon along the way.

Welcome to the Dark Moon Rocks Weekend Newsletter — with more things to make you think, wonder, and hopefully smile.

Pull up a chair, pour yourself something hot, and come and join us.

The Moon is up. The kettle is on. The radio is waiting.

Check out my website

Join me in the Laboratory of Chaos…

Behind the peaceful exterior of a green boat sitting quietly on the canal, the machinery continues to whirr. Mostly metaphorically, thankfully, because actual unexplained whirring on a boat usually means something expensive but …. The Radio Has Learned New Tricks

Dark Moon Rocks Radio has had a proper bit of housekeeping this week. The server has been backed up, updated, and — after some fairly determined wrestling with the open source host — the scheduling system is finally behaving itself.

Scheduled programmes now appear when they are actually scheduled to appear, which sounds like a very low bar until you've spent several hours shouting "BUT IT'S THREE O'CLOCK!" at a computer.

I've also added On Demand, so you don't necessarily have to arrive at exactly the right moment anymore. You can wander in, rummage around and listen to something when it suits you.

This feels suspiciously like progress.

The meditation programming is expanding, and the Dark Mirror Meditations are now properly entering production. Tune in to the Radio between 9-10pm and find Meditation Hour

Rather than recording enormous finished pieces in one go, I'm recording them in sections and building a library of music underneath them. This means I can create longer meditation hours for the radio, individual meditations for listening elsewhere, and eventually collections that can be downloaded.

The first journeys are already beginning to take shape, including Reclaiming Your Voice.

Apparently I have accidentally started building an entire meditation library.

As you do.

I've also been taking advantage of Suno to create a growing library of original instrumental music for meditations, stories, podcasts and radio backgrounds. But I am having so much fun using my poetry and voice it is inspiring me to create lots more songs.

At the same time, the first Seeds of the Dark Moon album has made its way onto YouTube.

This means the strange little songs that started life as thoughts scribbled down, spoken into microphones and subsequently fed through the Dark Moon machinery are beginning to live together as actual collections.

There is now enough audio lurking around here that I probably need a librarian.

The livestream experiment continues.

TikTok and YouTube are now working considerably better, the sound has improved, the microphone is behaving, and I'm gradually getting more comfortable with appearing on camera without wondering why the woman staring back at me appears to have been illuminated by an interrogation lamp.

Next target: Facebook Live. I already have more people following me over there, so being able to switch on the cameras and broadcast the morning show across several places at once makes a lot of sense.

Whether the internet connection aboard the boat agrees remains an entirely separate matter.

And finally, I'm investigating whether AI agents can take over some of the marketing work that makes my brain quietly crawl under a table.

The idea isn't to have robots rampaging around the internet shouting BUY MY THINGS at innocent civilians.

It's much more useful than that.

I'm beginning to build an asset catalogue — the songs, podcasts, books, meditations, radio shows, clips, articles and other assorted creations already sitting around Dark Moon Rocks. Eventually an AI system could understand what exists, help decide what is worth promoting, repurpose things I've already made and keep some consistency across the various platforms.

In other words, I would like to make the things.

I would like the robots to remember to tell people the things exist.

Which brings us neatly back to the great and mysterious ongoing quest known as...

Operation First £10.

Still £10. Still first. Still operating. We'll get there… I want to make my first £10 online… it is a little goal but I am starting small.

Check Out My Substack HERE

Well, the sky wasn't exactly subtle this week. The big event was the solar eclipse on the 12th August, a New Moon eclipse in Leo. We got a very deep partial eclipse here in Britain and we certainly noticed it on the canal.

There was a lot happening around the eclipse as well. The Sun and Moon weren't sitting out there by themselves. Mercury and Jupiter were also in Leo, while Mercury was making aspects to Pluto and Neptune. Venus was interacting with Uranus. So symbolically there was a lot going on around ideas, communication, things becoming visible and potentially seeing something from a completely different angle.

And then Pallas Athena stationed retrograde in Aries.

Pallas is an asteroid named after the goddess of wisdom and strategy. In astrology she's associated with intelligence, strategy, problem solving and especially pattern recognition. I rather like Pallas because she's not really about charging into battle waving a sword around. She's the one standing at the back saying, hang on a minute, haven't we done this three times already and didn't it go horribly wrong every time?

Which makes Pallas retrograde in Aries particularly interesting. Aries wants movement. It wants to start something, act on instinct and get going. But Pallas turning backwards asks us to look at how we're doing things before simply doing more of them.

Maybe there's a decision that needs reconsidering. Maybe a pattern is becoming obvious now that couldn't be seen while we were actually living through it. Or maybe the thing we've been desperately trying to solve isn't really the problem at all.

I think that's the bit I find most interesting. More effort isn't always the answer. We have this idea that if something isn't working we should try harder, push more, do more, keep hammering at it. But if the same sequence keeps producing the same result, perhaps the useful question isn't "how do I try harder?" Perhaps it's "why does this keep happening?"

All of this happened in that strange post-eclipse atmosphere, including a long void-of-course Moon. Traditionally that's the bit where the Moon has finished making its major aspects before moving into the next sign. I like the symbolism of that because it feels like an in-between place. Something has happened, but we don't necessarily know what it means yet.

And perhaps that's where we are after an eclipse anyway. The light comes back but understanding doesn't necessarily arrive with it.

There were several planets already retrograde as well, so there was plenty of looking backwards, reviewing and reconsidering going on in the wider astrology. It doesn't mean we have to stop our lives and refuse to make a decision until the planets give us written permission. I don't use astrology like that. But I do think it can give us an interesting mirror to hold up against what is already happening.

So perhaps the message from this strange eclipse week is simply to notice. Notice what keeps coming back. Notice what suddenly irritates you. Notice the thing you can now see that you couldn't see before. Notice where you're putting enormous amounts of effort into something that stubbornly refuses to change.

Watch the pattern before you make the move.

Sometimes we don't need another answer quite yet. Sometimes we need to finally recognise the question.

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If you've enjoyed the radio, the podcasts, the music or any of the assorted strange things I create aboard Dark Moon Rocks, there's a whole other cupboard of things waiting over in my Ko-fi shop.

You'll find my books and ebooks there, exploring shadow work, spirituality, witchcraft, personal transformation and some of the stranger corners I tend to wander into.

You can also book a personal reading with me. If you've reached one of those crossroads where you could use another perspective, the Dark Moon Oracle is open and readings are available to book now.

And if you're creating something of your own, I also offer a graphic design service. Podcast covers, social graphics, book graphics, promotional artwork and other bits of visual magic can all be commissioned through the shop.

Every purchase also directly supports Dark Moon Rocks — the independent radio station, podcasts, music and everything else being created from this slightly improbable floating studio on the English waterways.

So have a wander. You don't have to buy anything. Window shopping in the Dark Moon is completely permitted.

Visit the Dark Moon Rocks Ko-fi shop

contact me…

Thank you for reading, listening, watching, wandering into the strange bits and generally supporting this growing Dark Moon experiment.

You are appreciated.

Kate Silveness

And Merlin would like it officially recorded that he has not fallen into any canals this week. So far. 😼