Let It Change Me
Dear Ones,
There is a fever pitch feeling right now as we move toward the Saturn / Neptune conjunction. For those of you who don’t follow it (which is me half the time, btw), Saturn and Neptune are very close together in the sky right now, moving toward being exactly conjunct, as it’s called, in early February, at the very beginning of Aries. I feel this in my personal life and I feel it in the collective. Many other things too. There’s a river of despair, as Rev. Cindy Pincus named it to me recently, and so when I write to you right now my prayer is, what can bring us to inspiration? What is the most life-giving, life-offering thought?
For me lately it’s I don’t ever have to transcend anything again. (This is a repeat I wrote recently but I need to stay with it longer!) I think this is the opposite of death-denial, since that is my inquiry in this season. There’s this idea I still have, and I see it in my clients / people in my life. It’s really old and deep. Which is about a version of transcendence, which is—I am feeling more and more—still just escape: if I do my life right, I won’t suffer. I won’t have body pain, I won’t have money troubles, I won’t have relationship issues, I won’t have an anger problem, I won’t have health issues. Insert your particulars here. Maybe we need to escape, we certainly shouldn’t judge ourselves for it, since it seems to be a part of so many of our activities and even our spiritual pursuits so often can be about getting out of the mess. I’ve certainly been wildly helped by some life moves supported by others to help get out of the mess at one level, Codependents Anonymous as a beatific example. But for me, for now, it feels like transcendence becomes another way I perfectionize my life, and come up with all these thoughts that are not acceptance. Thoughts that put me in comparing - if I do this thing that I see someone else doing, I will evolve out of suffering, like they have.
What I have to do / get to do instead, is let this change me. This conjunction of these two planets, the current transits of my chart, the current movements and stagnations and horrors of my country, let it all change me. Let it change me. Let me not resist the change that is moving through. Let me be willing. Let me be willing to be changed, and therefore available to whatever I can offer.
Willingness is such a powerful word for me. It was a key word as I entered the birth of my second child. And birth feels a lot like an astrological transit. It really helps get a feel for the offering of an astrological transit. In the sense that as much as we try to control birth, we still do not know when a baby will come, and how they will come through. We are still not in control of that wildness. We are subject to the mystery of it, and we can resist it or we can go with it. I don’t even know what going with it means, other than willingness to be changed.
Willingness involves trust, and that can feel so hard right now. Especially with so very many horror shows occurring on the planet. I put my feet on the floor of this office as I type. I ask Earth for help, to help me find where and how to be willing. How to stay on the banks next to the river of despair, and I certainly enter it sometimes. But help me find the activities and paths and locations where I can keep some part of myself on shore, and remember the long arc, and the vast universe, and the nervous system conditions I can steward for myself to be a hand to anyone else to arrive on shore at times out of the river of despair. And help me to trust that when I can’t stay on shore, others will be there to help pull me out.
This is what I’m humbly contemplating today, with the smell of ginger steaming out of my cup. Let all of this change me, as it must, to offer what I can while visiting planet earth in these few seconds of cosmic time called my life.
Thank you for existing! Here with me!