The next New Moon will happen on October 19, 2017 at 19h12 GMT.
The symbol for the coming new moon is a pearl. Do you know how a beautiful pearl is formed? It is made inside a mollusk shell. There is a soft rim that protects the internal part of the shell, and sometimes a foreign body such as a parasite or a grain of sand enters the rim which will be enveloped around nacre secreted by the mantle tissue and become a natural pearl. The process of natural pearl creation is random, and it is said that there is one natural pearl out of 1,000 shells.
The oyster farmer starts by growing the shells necessary to create cultured pearls and it takes approximately two years before the right size shells are ready. Then, a “nucleus” is artificially grafted onto the soft tissue inside the shell around which nacre will form. It will take another two years before the shell is opened to take the pearl out. In the meantime, the farmer needs to clean the shells, make sure it does not get damaged by hurricanes or red tides, so it takes a lot of work. Despite this care, half of the shells die during the process and more than 20% is of inferior quality so it cannot be used. Only less than 30% can be crafted into accessories.
At the beginning, it takes pain to create something beautiful like a pearl. But even though the process is painful, it is not guaranteed that something beautiful will come out of it. We may feel some pain now. If we clean our acts, it may become a pearl as time goes. But it takes patience, and even then we cannot be sure we will get what we hoped for. What is the pain we are experiencing, can we try our best to purify our actions, and are we ready to accept whatever result we get? Let us use the next two weeks to think about this. Today the Hindus celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Light. As we brighten our inner light on a day before new moon where the light of the moon is at its dimmest, we might be able to see what we could not see before. Om Shanti.