“The skill of grief work is the capacity to swallow bitter pills of grief and transmute them into love, to turn our grief into something generative to our community.”
Francis Weller, Entering the Healing Ground lecture, 9/9/2023
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I am walking the path of grief tending. I realized after a month off, that I have held our climate crisis as a concept in my head, but not allowed it into my emotional body, my nervous system, nor fully into my awareness. We have been distracted by political power struggles and domestic terrorism, but we are doomed unless we wake the hell up and pay attention to the monster that approacheth. I’m going to focus more on popping bubbles with stark facts that we must face NOW. We cannot afford to coast through another political cycle. We have to prepare for the future right now, since we didn’t tend the present when we had the chance.
In our age of “Enlightenment” that ushered in the fascinating allure of science, we became enthralled with materialism. We abandoned our sacred connection to the Spirit from which we all arise. We turned devotion into an institution and reduced the Great Mystery to fairytale dogma, relinquishing our connection to our souls. We abandoned our love for the Earth, objectified her and began to plunder her resources. Now we are a consumer population, preoccupied with our technological toys, isolated from one another, escaping into our own imagined realities. And we have sacrificed our personal power to elected advocates who ignore our needs. We are suffering an epidemic of helplessness, loneliness and alienation, involved in our personal journeys of suffering and transformation; but the Earth is going through her own transformation right along with us. To deny this fact is to deny the sacredness of the initiation we are entering and our irrefutable symbiosis with our environment.
I am trusting that you all can handle these facts if I can. And I trust that you came into this life to help midwife the birth of Humanity’s awakened state. We are among the guardians of the future. We have a sacred oath with our soul, a power within that drew us onto a spiritual path and keeps nudging us or drawing us forward. This is our time now to make a difference, to step into the Spiritual Adults we were meant to be.
I attended my first grief ritual training last Saturday and it was one of the most healing experiences of my life. I came away with so many great ideas, so many questions to explore, so much dreaming to do. It was also a cleansing experience because we wept together with our ancestors. The most important point is that we cannot do this alone. This is not a single hero’s journey – no one to save us, no god to intervene. And we absolutely must form communities, local as well as global, spiritual as well as physical, to lend each other strength and support.
Before I speak about what I learned, I want to acknowledge that this blog is morphing into something beyond Astrology. I am devoted to the wisdom of the Heavens forming a context for our Awakening, but slowly I’m seeing that I need to get more involved with our 3-D reality. It may ultimately be an illusion, a projection of our collective consciousness, but we are living under its influence as humans, and our physical survival depends on our participation. I have been censoring my social and political writing for fear of offending, or driving you away. Our world is going to change beyond our belief. It changed for me in August and the shock of recognition brought up every intense emotion I try not to feel – terror, loss and deep grief, fury that we let it get this far, the instinct to blame and pass the buck. It was a rough passage to stark reality.
I have been writing for years about our spiritual power to create our reality. I have had many experiences of feeling in dominion. But those were only tastes of this power. We need to consolidate our collective power, will and imagination to make this passage. It’s just not about us as individuals any more. That’s why I’ve been focusing on letting go of our baggage, disentangling from the past and the psychic wounds that we have carried through our lives. and connecting with our authentic selves, making space for the Spiritual Adult to emerge.
The Spiritual Adult
What does it mean to be a Spiritual Adult? Francis Weller read a quote from an ancient sage last Saturday. Sorry I don’t remember the author, but his words are so pertinent now. I was taking swift notes, so I paraphrase: ‘A sign of maturity is being able to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched by the polarity.’ We approach polarity with preference, but one of the alchemical ways to expand and grow our consciousness is to spend time with them, to hold them in our awareness. This precipitates an expanded consciousness as we reconcile the paradox that both are true. This frees us to become more whole and perceive a greater truth, while disarming the duality that separates us.
Astrology provides such clear guidelines to the polarities of our reality through the zodiacal axes. 12 signs, each with their polar opposite, inviting us to live on a spectrum, not a fixed position. We believe that duality is the truth of the Cosmos, but it is only the truth of the physical realm. The bigger truth is that All is One. We need to shift our perspective and remember that the Earth is a spiritual being, alive, responding to our needs, reacting to our conflicts. We are symbiotic with our planet and we sicken and decline together. We must make the return to the Sacred, cultivate our kinship with Earth, shower her with love and tenderness, cry her tears, open our hearts to her pain, and treat her like the most precious gift we have ever been given, because she is. Earth needs us to heal ourselves. She needs us to expand our perception, to heed her cries of anguish, and think not of our safety, but hers.
It’s time to take responsibility for our future, to begin our return to the sacred. We live at a pace that leaves no space for the truly sacred. It separates us from a contemplative or reflective awareness and cuts us off from source. It forces us to live in our minds at the expense of our bodies. At the end of the day we just want to escape. We seek our TV’s, the news, entertainment as a brief respite from our challenging days. The trio of haste, pressure and escape is no way to live. A lot of us realized this during the pandemic shut down.
Duane Elgin, author of Choosing Earth, reminds us that a mindfulness revolution has been growing throughout the planet. That we are “developing the skills of reflective consciousness – the capacity to simply witness their lives and to live with less reactivity and greater maturity.” He goes on to say,
“With a more reflective perspective, we begin to develop collective understanding that serves the well-being of all. Reflective consciousness provides the invisible glue to begin bonding the human family into a mutually appreciative whole, while simultaneously honoring our differences.”
That brings up the Aries/Libra axis/paradox, the signs the Moon’s nodes are transiting now through 2024, balancing the needs of self with the needs of the whole, letting the quest for understanding help us integrate polar opposites that stretch our minds and hearts into a bigger perspective.
But there is more work to do. We need to surrender our attachment to the past and our need to control the future. We need to tune in deeply to the spiritual guidance that encompasses us. We need allies, unseen and beyond the veil, to support our journey. We need the lessons our ancestors learned and the ones they could not. We need to take up the standard and bring our bloodline into peace. The themes of our ancestors are the ones we are resolving in our lives, the end of the line for ego-dominated consciousness and the psychic suffering of our lesser selves.
The Inner Child
So how do we grow up into Spiritual Adults? It begins with healing the wounds of our inner child who is still present in our psyche, still fearful, still reactive. When the child takes over, we lose our clarity, our power, and our lovingkindness. Her needs have not been met. His wounds imprison him in a reactive state and narrow his perspective to self-interest.
Some of you may have had an ideal childhood, but the common, unavoidable wound to the child is the shock of separation. It begins in the “terrible twos,” when we start to claim our autonomy with the precious word “No!” This is our first step away from symbiosis and it’s a necessary step for our development, but the loss the child feels is profound. No longer enmeshed, no longer safe, no longer perfect, the child begins to encounter conflicts of will. Perhaps punishment, criticism or castigation for misbehaving. As the wounds accumulate they form conclusions about themselves as not measuring up, not good enough. Even the boasters who claim to be the greatest, are protecting a pocket of self-doubt and distrust.
All of us as parents know how challenging this initiation is to us as well, but we are equipped to handle it. The child is not. Suddenly she is cast out of the nest and must begin the long journey of separation, at once painful and exciting. This is the birth of our grief – the loss of belonging – and we carry it, along with the grief of our parents, the grief of our ancestors and the grief of our nation and our beloved home planet, because we are still enmeshed in the quantum field from which it all arises. It is part of our humanity, and when we repress the grief, we cut ourselves off from all connection to our roots. We lose the sense of belonging and we experience isolation, loneliness, depression and despair.
Grief must be faced, experienced, expressed and shared with others. This is the healing journey, and if we don’t take it, our suppressed grief morphs into grievance out of which is born resentment, anger, defiance, hatred and violence. That’s an enlightening realization because it explains so much of the turmoil in our collective consciousness. Unexpressed grief keeps us tied to our past, locked in our suffering. It keeps us self-absorbed and reactive, and worst of all blocks the path to connection with our Souls and all other Life. We are facing a collective initiation that begs the question, will humanity survive? Not if we’re in constant conflict. The unrest in our nation has its roots in our collective grief and this grief will become overwhelming in the decades to come as our planet shifts beyond recognition and we are forced into survival mode. We need to learn to walk with grief and balance it with our deepest gratitude.
Francis Weller, creator of the grief course I’m taking now, calls the decades ahead “The Long Dark.” Humanity will be challenged beyond imagination. This is our rite of passage into either enlightenment and rebirth or extinction. It is a sad fact that it always takes tragedy to shake us out of our stupor. We have been warned for the past 70 years to change our ways, to tend the resources of our planet, to stop polluting our air, water and soil; but we are caught up in a consumer paradigm which distracts and entertains us, continually offering more goodies to purchase. We are fascinated by the shadows on the wall of our cave and ignore the light of our souls which long to connect, to belong, to share love and embody spirit.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 21st century was the election of George W. Bush. We had an opportunity to moderate what lies ahead with the foresight of Al Gore who was alerting us to the crisis in our path. Instead we chose a president who lied to our nation and took us backward into the 20th century with its endless wars. We have always believed we were the good guys, defending democracy while killing the bad guys, a perfect example of dualistic thinking. Humans have been doing this for all recorded history. But we were not the good guys in Viet Nam and we definitely were not saviors in Iraq. We devastated a nation over a personal grievance.
Think about the grievances in your own life. Are they sourced in unexpressed grief? Did you create a villain who ruined your life, and are you still blaming him/her? Or in truth, was it a wound – a spiritual wound that hinted at the karma you came into this life to resolve? Was the one who wounded you actually a spiritual ally, planting your feet on the path your Soul chose to tread?
I am beginning to see how we need to prepare for the Long Dark and I will share what I learn with you. 2024 is the critical point of choice at the threshold of this journey. Duane Elgin believes it will take two generations for the total collapse of our civilization and that we won’t begin to rebuild until the 2060’s. I won’t be around, and perhaps you won’t either, but what we choose to do now can make the difference and set the course hopefully with enough momentum that it will become an established path. 2024 asks, will we shrink in fear and turn our power over to a party that has been eroding our democracy for decades, or will we choose to face the crisis ahead with leadership that will strengthen our forefather’s original dream to form a more perfect union? I have faith that we will make the right choice, but in either case, we have to prepare for what is to come. The collapse is just beginning, so we need to consider our basic needs.
Duane Elgin concludes from his extensive research that by 2030, 3 billion people will suffer from water shortages, and 12 major cities around the world will run out of ground water by the end of the century, including Miami. We will see mass migrations. Some of us may find ourselves among them as sea levels rise, or weather events devastate our area.
I think we all have viewed the last seven years as a temporary aberration that will somehow resolve itself, but that is unrealistic thinking, and I am as guilty as any of us. I have tried to frame the chaos of this time as an opportunity for evolution, and it is, but I did not foresee the tunnel of darkness that we must traverse. We are entering the birth canal, so to speak, and must undergo the pressures of a long labor. Like a baby we will leave one environment for another, one state of being for another, and we can only survive if we pull together and care for one another.
I repeat what I have recently learned, not to scare you, but to motivate. Here we are at the New Moon in Virgo, the most reflective sign in the Zodiac, supporting us to question, analyze, grow our discernment and find our conviction to walk the path of initiation, finding ways to support the outcome. We all can contribute, if only an ear. We have big hearts and deep love and the world is desperate for it. We can embrace the sacred mission we chose.
The Astrology of the Month
Sun and Moon come together on the evening of September 14 at 6:39 pm PDT at 21:58 Virgo, essentially 22 degrees. This is significant because the third decan, the final 10 degrees, is the mature expression of a sign. It holds the rewards of wisdom gleaned from our experience.
Virgo is the middle Earth sign and the end of the first half of the Zodiac. The first 6 signs take us on a journey from the innocence of infancy to the reflective state of young adult. We pause on the threshold of the other hemisphere of signs and gather our wits, so to speak. We look at what works or doesn’t. We reassess our opinions and beliefs. We question ourselves deeply about our psychic health – what needs improvement, what is blocking the path, what truth do I need to confront, what can I leave behind? We clear out the subconscious basement in preparation for relationship, the sign of Libra.
Mercury has been retrograde in Virgo since August 24th and makes its direct station on September 15th at 8 degrees of Virgo, 1:21 pm PDT. Mercury is the dominant planet of Virgo although recently other astrologers have suggested Ceres and Chiron as co-rulers. Mercury matures from curiosity to wisdom as it moves from Gemini into Virgo. The Sun, Moon, Orcus and Mercury are all in the 9th House, where we forge our beliefs into a concept of reality. Orcus reminds us of our oath to this work and points to the shadows of our inner life. This is the focus of the coming month when we question our personal paradigms. What do I believe? Is it true? Is it useful? Is it heart-based? When did I form that belief and did I interpret my experience correctly? What beliefs do I hold about myself that are limiting me from expressing my true identity? What parts of me have I disowned that must be acknowledged and integrated?
This is sacred work, the deeply spiritual work through which we grow into the Spiritual Adult.
At the New Moon, all the outer planets are retrograde. Forward motion has paused to allow us this time to reflect on our lives, on our passion and purpose, on the gifts we can bring to the world. The New Moon is opposite Neptune, casting light on our illusions and calling us to connect with spirit. We have a Grand Earth Trine with Sun/Moon in Virgo, Uranus and Jupiter in Taurus and Pluto in Capricorn. This brings attention to our bodies, the sacred temples of our souls. We have learned to connect through imagination, but true connection rests within the body and its complex energy system. Virgo is also the sign that addresses the health of our bodies. Our daily habits reinforce vibrant health or entropy. Are we getting enough exercise? Sleep? Solitude? Nourishing food? Are we taking time to love our bodies and let them know it?
The Sun and Moon aspect all the outer planets, the closest of which is a trine with Uranus at 22+ Taurus. In our 6th House it is asking us to pay attention to the way we live our daily lives, our routines and habits. We are four years away from our Uranus return on July 26, 2027, at 8 Gemini, the very degree at which Mars stationed direct this past January. That degree is energized for radical change and the best way to prepare for it now, is to loosen our illusory control and find those places that are ripe for change within ourselves. We want to get out ahead of the wave so we can ride it, not be submerged in a deluge. Remember that Uranus brings the unexpected, shocking us awake with sudden shifts, insights and synchronicities that startle us with new perception.
The Nodes of the Moon are in the spotlight with the North Node only 8 minutes away from a perfect conjunction with Eris in our 4th House. Eris disrupts our complacency with chaos and guides us to a greater authenticity. She is also within 5 degrees of a conjunction with our natal Chiron. Healing is called for now. Our wounds, our grief, our grievances are up for review. Most of all we must look at our assumptions about ourselves and our early conditioning that twisted and wounded the Inner Child. How can we free it from its pain? How can we offer a new perception of its value? We got a lot of negative programming that shut that child down and threw it into survival mode. It’s still on the defensive and introduces its fear and pain into our lives whenever it feels threatened.
The South Node is conjunct Haumea in our 10th House in Libra, reinforcing the theme of relationships, justice and balance and the need for regeneration. Haumea in turn is within minutes of a conjunction of Ceres at 29 degrees of Libra – we need to rebirth our relationship to the Earth, to welcome our diversity as strength. And in the 10th House, we need to engage on a public stage, to speak up, to become visible, to be advocates for the future and our survival.
Part of our planning for future survival requires consideration of food and water supplies. Seems that with all our rain, we should be collecting this water. Back in the 80’s we lived in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Our house had a cistern that collected the torrential rains that swept in from the surrounding ocean. This is a viable option, much more affordable than desalinization. As for food, we need to come together with our community and begin now to experiment with cultivating a food supply, simplifying our diets and discovering what crops provide the most nourishment in our environments. There is so much opportunity for community building right now and we all can begin somewhere. Approach the subject with friends, brainstorm, read Choosing Earth together and begin to plan. While the book lays out 5 grim decades, Elgin offers sage advice on how to navigate the Long Dark. Begin your journey of collective grieving. It brings empowerment. It releases energy tied up in both grief and grievance. Our tears are cleansing to our souls. We can give them with our blessing to the Earth.
Saturn has made his way back to 2 degrees of Pisces conjunct the transiting Part of Fortune. I don’t have enough knowledge about Arabic Parts to write about them, but the message is in the name. We manifest good fortune when we take responsibility and mature. Saturn in Pisces is our ally, popping the bubbles of illusion, pressuring us to open up our hearts to greater compassion, to surrender to our Higher Selves, to develop a spiritual practice and ramp up our compassion. We need to fortify our relationship with our guides, our Souls, our teachers from the past, the lineage of our family tree. We need to connect with the deeper spirit of place.
One of the things that was emphasized in our first grief session was to connect to the Native Americans who tended the land upon which we now live. Learn their history and customs and open to their wisdom. I actually did some research this morning and learned about the tragic demise and displacement of the Tututni tribes that built villages along the lower shores of the Rogue River and lived off the plentiful salmon runs. And a branch of this tribe called the Chetco whose last full-blooded descendant, Lucy Dick, died in the year I was born.
Saturn is in the 3rd House suggesting we educate ourselves about our environs and form a deeper connection to its past as well as its promise. There is spirit power in place available for support.
Pluto is hovering within 32 minutes of its natal position. Our Pluto return placed the focus on our democracy – can this glorious experiment succeed? We know that it can, not on the shoulders of rugged individuals, but in the hearts and hands of the collective. All along Pluto in our second house has been demanding that we reassess our values. Of course Pluto has been crumbling our social and political institutions and revealing the corruption of power that has brought us to this catastrophe.
In the midst of all this influence, Jupiter made his retrograde station at 15+ degrees of Taurus on September 4th and still lingers at that degree. Last week the Sun was trine Jupiter, and on the New Moon Venus is within one degree of squaring Jupiter from Leo. She is conjunct the asteroid Juno, goddess of commitment and partnership. This is what needs to grow – our commitment to each other to support the survival of the human race. Venus in Leo is about the loving and courageous heart that is willing to step into roles of leadership, willing to hold the heart open despite fear and threat, willing to speak up for the path of the heart.
I am writing this message on 9/11. At my lunch break I caught our President’s speech in which he emphasized our will, our strength and our ability to pull together in the face of crisis. For a moment Americans were united in horror as the twin towers imploded and sank to a pile of rubble. First responders sacrificed their lives to save others. The nation mourned together the loss of our invulnerability. A commentator posed a question after the speech, “Do you think we can reclaim that unified spirit again.?” Biden believes it’s part of our national identity. I do, too. We rise when things fall apart. We’re at our best in the face of adversity.
I’ll be back at the Full Moon in Aries on September 29th. Plant some inner seeds. Nurture them and watch them grow. Mercury has begun a new cycle of information gathering and sharing that will occupy our minds through the end of the year. With all the outer planets retrograde, we are cocooned within our self-reflection. Make the best of it.
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