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

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

So here we are at the end of August, and summer is definitely beginning to turn on the canal.

We've had rain. Lovely rain. We even had what appeared to be a thunderstorm without very much thunder — mostly just great flashes of lightning across the sky. The weather has been incredibly changeable and the skies have been awesome to watch.

Sabre is thoroughly miserable in the rain. He doesn't enjoy getting wet at all and regards the entire business as deeply unnecessary. Merlin, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care. He'll wander back into the boat soaking wet, curl up on me and then calmly wash himself.

I am apparently his towel.

This happens on a fairly regular basis. He gets dry. Eventually I get dry. Nobody seems particularly concerned about my opinion on the arrangement.

But I'm enjoying the cooler weather. I didn't particularly like those extreme temperatures. A narrowboat in serious summer heat is basically a long green floating oven, so knocking a few degrees off is very welcome.

Today we've got blue skies and big fluffy clouds drifting overhead. A couple of them are looking slightly darker than I'd like, so we may get more rain later. That's fine. The hedgerows need it, the canal needs it and, despite Sabre's objections, I think we probably do too.

The situation on the canal has changed as well. The locks have reopened and boats are beginning to move up and down again. The water levels are much better, although we're still allowed to stay where we are for the moment, so there isn't an enormous rush to go anywhere.

And walks down to the lock have become part of my daily rhythm.

Something slightly unexpected has grown out of those walks too. Apparently, somewhere along the way, I've started doing my own Taoism.

I've called it Canal Tao — the Taoism of the Canal.

They're little stories and observations from everyday life here. A lock filling with water, rain on the canal, animals meeting each other, boats getting stuck, a cat refusing to behave as expected. I take a photograph, tell the little story of what happened and then find the piece of Taoist wisdom hiding inside it.

I'm really enjoying making them. There's something very natural about it because I'm not going out looking for "content". I'm just going for a walk and paying attention.

I've been putting the stories out daily and experimenting with them on X and elsewhere. Apparently emotional storytelling is good for social media. Who knew? I've only been telling stories for most of my life.

But I like little ideas that can burst into bigger ones.

Perhaps Canal Tao will simply remain a collection of small moments from life beside the water.

Or perhaps, one day, there's a book hiding in there.

We'll see where the water takes it.

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

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Join me in the Laboratory of Chaos…

So, this week in the Chaos Laboratory, I got Facebook Live working.

Facebook analytics have been steadily going up for Dark Moon Rocks, so it seemed worth pushing a little harder over there. Friday morning probably wasn't the greatest time in the world to test it, but never mind. The point was to see whether I could get OBS, which is the broadcasting software on my computer, talking properly to Facebook while everything else was running.

And oh, it was annoying as hell.

The problem is that I can't simply send everything directly into Facebook because then you wouldn't hear the music from the radio. So the audio has to be routed around the computer in a slightly ridiculous fashion before being fed back into the livestream. There was quite a lot of fiddling, swearing and asking why something that definitely should be working was very definitely not working.

Eventually, though, it went live. And it worked.

Next time it'll be smoother. The time after that it'll probably be quite normal, and eventually I'll have completely forgotten why I found it difficult in the first place.

TikTok remains slightly annoying to set up first thing in the morning, so I'm still deciding whether livestreaming there regularly is worth the extra effort. YouTube and Facebook together might be a better combination, and I'll experiment with getting both running at the same time.

I do like the challenge. Once a week I don't mind pushing the setup a little further and seeing what I can make it do. But there is one firm rule now: the radio station comes first. If the internet starts struggling under the weight of everything I'm throwing through it, I'll shut down the video streams and protect the radio signal.

The mothership survives. Everything else can fall off. 😂

I've also been experimenting more with Mixcloud, where Dark Moon Rocks now has a presence and some of the Morning Shows are going up. The free account only allows me a limited number, so I'm testing it rather than immediately throwing more money at another platform. There is some of my music there as well. We'll see whether people actually use it and whether it's eventually worth paying for.

Meanwhile, Dark Moon Music is becoming quite a thing in its own right. You can find it through the radio station On Demand, and it's now also on Spotify as a podcast. There are currently around 76 songs and more than five hours of music, and it continues to grow.

I love making the music, and I'm getting much more interested in the theory behind what I'm doing. I'm learning how to direct the instrumentation rather than simply asking for a style and seeing what comes back. Where should the piano enter? What happens if the cello carries this part? Can the flute answer the vocal rather than simply sitting behind it?

One of the songs where I've really started playing with this is Echoes, and I'll put a link to that in this newsletter. I'm still learning the theory as I go, but that's half the fun. The more I understand, the more deliberate the music becomes and the more it feels like mine.

The Teaching Songs are growing as well. The latest is Elder — the Elder Mother.

Elder is one of the traditional trees with a huge amount of folklore around it, and there are lots of elder trees along this part of the canal. For the last few years I've found myself forming a relationship with particular trees around me — hawthorn, oak and willow — sitting beneath them, writing notes and seeing what they have to teach me.

It looks like this year might belong to Elder.

I've been sitting beneath her, making notes, watching the berries forming and exploring the folklore around the Elder Mother. It's a beautiful tree and there are plenty of them here. There are also willows everywhere along the water, so Willow needs a teaching song next. That's probably one for this coming week.

The landscape itself keeps handing me subject matter. The mugwort is beginning to pass its best now, but plantain is looking beautiful and the yarrow is pushing back up through all that dead, sun-scorched grass. Everywhere I walk there seems to be another plant, tree, story or piece of folklore waiting to be explored.

And then I realised something else.

Teaching Songs don't actually have to be about plants.

They could be about crystals. Runes. Tarot cards. Folklore. Mythology. Gods. Symbols. Magical traditions. All the things I've spent years studying and teaching can potentially be explored through music.

So what started as a little collection of Songs from the Hedgerow is beginning to turn into something much bigger: a Dark Moon Mysteries Library of Teaching Songs.

Which is slightly dangerous, because I don't think I can ever run out of subject matter for that.

Oh dear.

Another project appears to have escaped from the Chaos Laboratory.

We definitely need the ongoing experiment.

Last newsletter: Operation First £10 succeeded thanks to Keeley.

Current experiment: Operation £30.

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I've also been wondering what would happen if Dark Moon Rocks started reaching beyond internet radio and became something more local. I've been investigating AM, FM and DAB and discovered the possibility of Community Digital Sound Programme radio — C-DSP. But the interesting question quickly stopped being "can I technically get Dark Moon Rocks onto DAB?" and became "if I did, what would I actually want to do with it?"

I think the answer might be community. There are a lot of people out here who are isolated or lonely, including people living on the boats, and perhaps Dark Moon Rocks could become a little point of connection. I have my counselling and coaching background, I enjoy talking to people and I've already got a little double microphone that plugs into my phone. I could wander along the canal talking to boaters, craftspeople, local businesses, pubs, visitors and some of the fascinating people you meet out here. Nothing enormous, nothing that requires me to suddenly become an events organiser — just conversations, stories and voices from the waterways and the communities around them.

Someone at a local boater pub even asked me for a Dark Moon Rocks flyer the other week, which was a tiny thing but made the idea feel slightly more real. Perhaps the station could become a bit of a lighthouse in the storm — not therapy radio, not me trying to fix everybody, just somewhere warm and human where people can hear another voice and feel a little less disconnected.

It's only a seed of an idea at the moment. I'm not announcing the launch of Dark Moon Rocks FM from the roof of the boat just yet.

But I am wondering what this could become.

The big event this week was Friday morning's Full Moon and partial lunar eclipse on 28 August. Unlike a solar eclipse, where the Moon moves between us and the Sun, a lunar eclipse happens when Earth moves between the Sun and the Moon and our shadow falls across the lunar surface.

This one was a deep partial eclipse rather than a total one, but it was still substantial. From Britain the eclipse began in the early hours, with the partial phase developing before dawn and maximum eclipse around 5:12am BST. By that point the Moon was already very low in the west-southwest, so you needed a clear horizon and preferably a willingness to be awake at an unreasonable hour.

At maximum, roughly 94% of the Moon's diameter was inside Earth's dark central shadow, which is why it came so close to being a total eclipse. From much of England the Moon then set while the eclipse was still underway, so we didn't get to watch the whole thing play out from beginning to end.

I rather like that this eclipse completed the pair we started with earlier in August. On the 12th, the Moon passed in front of the Sun and changed the daylight. Two weeks later, Earth cast its own shadow back across the Moon. Same three bodies, completely different arrangement.

The Moon is now waning again, and there is a very easy thing to look for tonight, 30 August. The bright waning gibbous Moon is sitting close to Saturn, which should appear as a steady golden point nearby. Saturn is becoming one of the best planets to watch as we head into September and is now well placed later in the night and into the early morning.

And then there is the simple change that doesn't require any astronomical knowledge at all: the nights are coming back.

At the height of summer you can wait forever for proper darkness. By the end of August there is noticeably more night again, and as we move into September the evening sky becomes much easier to explore. The rich summer Milky Way is still there on clear, dark nights, particularly away from streetlights, so if you're somewhere properly dark it is worth simply stepping outside and giving your eyes twenty minutes to adjust.

So two very easy things to look for this week: find the Moon and Saturn together tonight, or get up before dawn and see if you can spot Mars, Jupiter and Saturn stretched across the morning sky.

No telescope required.

Just a clear patch of sky, a little patience and, as always in Britain, some negotiation with the clouds.

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The Dark Moon Oracle is open for readings, so if you've reached one of those crossroads where you could do with another perspective, you can now book a personal reading with me through the Ko-fi shop. I don't believe readings should tell you what to do or hand your power over to a deck of cards. I use them to explore what's happening around you, uncover patterns and perhaps help you see the situation from an angle you hadn't considered.

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And that's about it from Dark Moon Rocks for another week. Thank you for reading, listening to the radio, watching the livestreams, following Canal Tao, listening to the music and podcasts, wandering into the Facebook group, or simply quietly keeping an eye on what I'm building here.

Things are beginning to connect in ways I didn't really expect. A walk down the canal becomes a Taoist story. A thought becomes a song. A song goes onto the radio. The Morning Show becomes a podcast or a livestream, and somewhere along the way people I've never met are listening, reading and occasionally reaching back. That's the bit I love.

I'm still building all of this slowly, experimenting with what works and cheerfully abandoning some of the things that don't. There are plenty of ideas ahead, but I'm learning that they don't all have to happen today. Some of them can just be seeds for a while.

So thank you for being part of this strange little world while it grows. Whether you've bought something, sent me a message, shared a post, listened to a song or simply opened this newsletter over your Sunday morning coffee, it matters.

I'll be back next week with more tales from the canal, more music, more radio and undoubtedly something else I haven't thought of yet.

Until then, take care of yourselves, notice the small things, and occasionally allow yourself to follow an idea just to see where it goes.

Much love,

Kate Silveness
Dark Moon Rocks 🌑