We are so lucky.
I mean, sometimes it doesn’t feel like that at all. But really, we live in a time of immense prosperity and luxury and you and I were born into a part of the world where we get to partake in that. And I’m not even referring to the ease with which we can get things like caviar and champagne, or even just bacon grilled cheeses and whiskey, but rather those taken-for-granted delights like indoor plumbing, trash collection and grocery stores. Lord Saturn does us well with his infrastructure and social codes.
Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day
I live in a part of the country where this time of year is particularly pronounced in terms of its darkness. I came out of a 90-minute massage today (talk about luxury!) at 4:00 and it was about 15 minutes away from sunset, the nuances of which couldn’t really be seen due to heavy cloud cover and rain. Translation: it was already dark.
My massage therapist expressed her inability to deal, and from my very out-of-it haze, I exclaimed — “But Solstice is Monday! The light is coming back!”
The six months since the summer Solstice have flown, and time seems more compressed than ever. I found myself typing the date today, a mundane task if not for the fact that I began to type “199…” before realizing that was in fact the last century. Easy to correct, yet being two decades off is not an insignificant glitch — one that perhaps has been compounded by how often I’ve been proclaiming that I’ve become un-tethered in time. I can’t seem to get my footing, even though I’m absolutely participating in daily life with gusto and practicality.
Still, the details of the past six months at the personal level remind me why time might seem to be compressing: six weeks of cleansing; the ending of a few lover-ly relationships and the beginning of several more; my first foray into facilitating at a regression training, and a seemingly out-of-the-blue expansion of my astrology practice; the suicide of a family member and then the scattering of his ashes along with my brother’s, who was also lost to suicide; and the remarkable exit from Saturn in Scorpio… I won’t even add in the events of the first half of the year, which took me through the ringer in ways I never really thought possible.
There is a separation I’ve remarked upon a few times. I observe world events and, sometimes, even events in my personal life, and sense a weightiness to them. There seems to be an invitation to get bogged down, or perhaps an impulse. It reminds me of some Barbara Hand-Clow something-or-other that I read once, which insisted that the fourth dimension is made of beings and emotions that would trap us here, in the third dimension. I find concepts such as those to be as problematic as I do what I refer to as “Headline Buddhism” — without a closer look, one could insist that adherence to the ideas gives permission to bypass the emotional.
I’ve come to realize, however, that it’s the getting stuck in the emotional that is the problem. Getting stuck in the fear, the grief, the sorrow prohibits growth. I’ve noticed lately, and I know I’m not alone in this, that I often feel like we are being manipulated into staying in those realms.
Whether there are fourth dimensional beings at the helm, conducting the whole experiment, or just a response in the primitive parts of our brain that is being stimulated over and over again is not really relevant to me — but there is a truth in those ideas that speak to my heart. Opportunities to be manipulated into fear and constant survival-mode are abundant. Detachment can in fact be healthy, whereas ignorance rarely is.
I’ve remarked here before on the disturbing trend of absolutely, over-the-top gratuitous violence on prime-time television. Of course, that’s been the case on the cable networks for a while now. But seeing someone’s brains blown out at close range on ABC or Fox seems to be commonplace these days.
I tend to read a lot of young adult fantasy-fiction. In my recent foray, Leigh Bardugo’s The Grisha Trilogy, I was taken with just how dark the themes were. In the stories, there are creatures called Volcra who are made of darkness and who are described in such detail that every time I came across them in the books my imagination would begin to run free, imagining all of the dark and awful deeds these creatures would be capable of, only to have it all described in detail in the books.
This past weekend, I was reading a book called Armageddon’s Children, and realized my body and psyche were screaming at me to stop — the story hit too close to home and was entirely too plausible. I pushed through it for a bit, and then relented. Why immerse myself when my instincts are telling me to stop?
Imagination is such a powerful — and vital — thing. It is the fundamental key to our survival as a species. It allows us to dream big, to envision where we want to go and how to get there, and then we get to use our will to manifest that. It seems at this point that our imaginations, brought to the surface in such fantastical ways by Neptune’s current transit through Pisces, are being filled with the dark, the violent and the apocalyptic in its modern form.
What I mean by that last bit is that the apocalyptic cycle is inherently a positive thing in that it brings us into the darkness and then out in the light with an infusion of creative energy, so that we can take what we learned in the dark and move forward, applying those lessons for the betterment of our community. But we no longer have a cohesive, connective mythology that speaks to us as a tribe, showing us the way out of the dark. Add to that the Neptunian/Piscean shadow of escapism and our addictions to social media and electronic gadgets, and the trajectory seems pretty abysmal.
At the same time, I am aware of how much groundbreaking work is being done that actively uses and embraces the powers of imagination, key aspects of sustainable culture and the knowledge that we have to act now. Planet Waves is one. Joanna Macy, Center for Planetary Culture and the Thriving Cities Initiative also come to mind.
The light is coming back; it’s getting brighter all the time. I have no idea what the last two weeks of 2015 will hold. My un-tethered-in-time self can’t seem to plan much past today. I hope it holds celebrations, though. I hope those who want to can band together with loved ones in whatever way is meaningful. I hope we get to indulge some small bit of luxury as we grapple with what it means to be alive in such challenging times.
Happy, merry, blessed Solstice everyone! See you on the other side.
Amanda, Thank you.
We can continue to dream our world, and have the will to make the dream in this time and space.
These times are sooo strange and not what I ever thought we would be living. When 2012 came and went I could not write 2013 on my checks without correcting my mind till almost the end of that year.
I greatly appreciate you and all the staff of Planet Waves.
Many Blessings for a beautiful Solstice return of the Light.
Jeanne
Many blessings to you too, Jeanne.
The pace of motion of our planet allows us to spend enough time in the dark of winter solstice. Time to be with the Angels of Sorrow, Grief, Death, even Fear, Hunger, Cold and Deprivation, though you are correct: most of us reading this website today are lucky not to be familiar with hunger and deprivation. Thank you for a reminder to feel into the darkness, with faith in the promised light. It feels important to re-member the darkness, which our early ancestors knew so well. It’s in our DNA. Being aware of where the sun rises and sets on the horizon is centering. When my own eyes become familiar with this placement, I feel myself in the center. This self awareness cannot be given over to any priesthood. Each of us presides over this sacrament of the Light.
Indeed! Thanks for all you are and all you do…
Yes, Amanda, “time seems more compressed than ever” for me as well – some might say it’s just a getting-old thing, but I believe there’s more to it than that. Not only did my countdown from Autumnal Equinox to Solstice fly past at breakneck speed, time’s been feeling fluid & elastic (for lack of more precise words). My mind has been ranging far & wide.
Yes, we are so very lucky – privileged, really – something I am reminded of not only by my awareness that billions of people live without the comforts we have, but also by my memory: I grew up without running water, electricity, or phones. Do I still appreciate turning on a faucet, or my gas furnace etc.? You bet!
I’ve chosen to remove my eyes/mind from visual or written violence – I understand your choice to close the book that disturbed you. We KNOW horrendous things are being done/suffered – I consider all of that becoming ‘entertainment” a symptom of a jaded, very sick culture.
When I was substitute teaching one day, I found a few teenage boys who had sneaked off to the TV room on a spare, who were playing someone’s “Call of Duty” game, laughing at the explosions & the bodies flying amid blood & gore. They insisted that they were allowed to do this, but I simply escorted them back to their classroom & didn’t bother to inquire about the permission issue. These are the same young fellows who, growing up in a rural area, find it sporting to go out & shoot beavers, muskrats & other small wildlife, just for fun.
I don’t think it’s surprising that in later years they can become fighter plane or drone pilots, killing & maiming with the push of a button, just like the game. As you say, “we no longer have a cohesive, connective mythology that speaks to us as a tribe, showing us a way out of the dark.” Many of our young seem to get stuck there, & some don’t survive it. Recalling the angst of my own late teens, & the parallel years in my daughter’s life, I remember that particular dark. Thankfully, with the love of those around us, & probably more than a little grace, we grew through it.
Yes, the light is coming back! Thank-you for the good wishes, Amanda – & thank-you to all at PW who have been sharing light that is clear & warming as we approach the turning toward spring.
Yeah… it seems sociopathy is being bred into the individuals of our culture at an alarming rate. A friend and I were talking tonight about the difference between being desensitized and being jaded. I guess in my mind there is still a bit of hope in being jaded as it suggests some level of emotion whereas desensitization leads to ambivalence at best. Both are disturbing trends…
Thanks for being here 🙂
That feeling of being untethered to time is familiar to many of us these days. In so many ways, the idea of schedules and routines, especially when one is retired, to me seem part of the past. I suspect it is indoctrination into a world without time constraints; the past, the present and the future are becoming inseparable as we move away from third dimensional restrictions and forms. It can be kind of scary but also incredibly liberating.
It is tragic how over the decades the life styles of so many Americans, if not people from all over the world, have been bombarded with so much they can’t give proper attention to it all. Many families have resorted to not resisting the onslaught of violence in entertainment their children are exposed to. To the very young it must seem no more than cartoons; not real life. Not until it hits close to home do they learn the truth. What a terrible awakening; not so very different than what refugee children must endure; that life can be cruel. It changes them and makes them susceptible to the negative escape patterns that Neptune provides in many forms.
To me the increase in emotionalism seems to be the result of letting our feelings get out of shape. Over the centuries, the feeling sense has lost respect in proper society and given way to what we call logic and common sense. It’s another form of polarization. Long ago intuition was considered a reliable form of knowing, an honest God-given sense bestowed on human beings as well as all other animals. Schooling focused on the skills that were useful in the workplace, and becoming an artist was frowned on as not a profitable way to survive. In the good years education included art and music but when in difficult financial periods these things were the first to go when considering education for young people.
I believe we are getting a chance right now to balance the feeling/intuitive side of our brain with the logical/scientific side of the brain. It always seems that, instead of finding balance , things have gone crazy or the world itself has gone mad. We have reached such extremes, as Len spoke of on Friday, that the total 2-part brain no longer exists. Either one side or the other monopolizes all the functioning. The jihadists symbolize the total takeover of the right brain functioning while New World minds are totally dependent on left brain functioning. Each wants to annihilate the other.
Astrology, through its daily transits and cycles between sets of planets, remarkable patterns and even events like eclipses and solstices are – sometimes subtly, sometimes rudely – trying to awaken the side of the brain that has been stifled. For us in the parts of the world we live in, it is our emotional nature that needs to be stimulated into awareness. I don’t pretend to know how the Universe can do it or even if it will work, but I am pretty sure that if we don’t the species homo sapiens will end its reign on this planet Earth.
So how does this astrology, the same astrology for Americans as for the jihadists, work for both extremes in behavior. I should be so wise, but in part I think/feel it is the interaction with natal charts where the gods and goddesses work their magic. Uranus is still Uranus in anyone’s natal chart, just as Pluto and Neptune and Saturn symbolize the same basic energy in Kansas City as they do in Kuwait. There are many ways to interpret these interactions between souls and sky travelers and they all seem to work for at least some of us. Probably they all more or less agree that Neptune dissolves borders and fences of all kinds, that Uranus awakens and that Pluto transforms.
Personally I’m committed to trust the astrology I’ve used for decades to awaken and liberate humanity, even if it means we must grovel and beg for answers to impossible problems. There are other means of increasing the light of course, but first we need to find balance in many everyday things we take for granted. We must do it in our own lives and we must do it in communities and in nations. Peace and Love in the coming days to you all.
be
I’m committed to trusting astrology, too — its potential to liberate and awaken, and its potential to connect, be it with ourselves, each other or the cosmos (ideally all three). I’m committed to helping to bring it out of the fringes, as well. Thanks for all you contribute here – you help me learn 🙂