The Power of Timing

A nature-based guide to health, nutrition, gardening, housekeeping and more.

In pre-industrial times, people worked in tandem with the cycles of nature. In this book, husband-and-wife team Paungger and Poppe (The Code, 2011) parlay the folk wisdom of “natural timing” into tools appropriate for modern life. Each combination of moon phase, sign and position, they write, correlates favorably to certain aspects of life and unfavorably to others. (Housecleaning, for example, goes more smoothly under a waning moon or a Virgo day, according to the authors.) Paungger’s rural Alpine upbringing informs many of these extensively delineated, eminently practical techniques. Some topics covered here, such as forestry, may be outside the ken of many suburbanites or city dwellers, but most of the advice speaks to readers in any location. Paungger and Poppe urge readers to watch such characteristics as the moon’s sign and position in the zodiac (specifically, whether it has the ascending, increasing force of winter and spring, or the descending, declining force of summer and fall). However, the authors’ approach is more complex than simply following moon phases, as in farmers’ almanacs’ planting charts. They also address matters not specifically connected to the moon, such as how to determine one’s specific nutritional type (and recommended diet) and how to find personality characteristics in the numbers of a birthdate. Although some information here runs to the technical, the overall tone is easy and conversational, with little hint that the text has been translated from German. To encourage its techniques, the book provides a calendar of the moon’s signs, phases and positions from 2013 to 2020. (A prior edition was published in 2002 as Guided by the Moon; both are outgrowths of the authors’ 1993 German-language book.)

A successful natural reference book and an easy-to-use planning and scheduling tool.