Saturn as a guardian against corruption
Time as a benevolent limit, Time as a Kindness, Time as Love
We can’t be all parts of ourselves, all at once — be there for everyone, all at once — respond to every call our hearts could potentially tune into, all at once.
We can only be ourselves and take action from who we are in this moment — shining through the facet that’s facing forward from this particular shape of ever-changing cosmic geometry.
Which is also to say —
As multi-faceted humans, some parts of us can only be revealed when we accept the concealment of other parts.
When the Sun shines, we can no longer see the other stars.*
But, the one inside that promises security and validation that we exist — can have a hard time stepping off the stage, and letting go of the power of your attention.
Yet as the world turns,
and the Moon cycles around the Earth,
and the Earth journeys about the Sun,
and the many other planetary bodies move along their own orbital paths....
Life will continually call other parts of us — different instincts, different creatures — to come forward and shine, meeting the moment with their particular perspective and skill.
These other creatures will feel this call and respond through activating a desire, a hunger, an urge in us.
How do we hold that desire?
Can we let Eros flow through us?
What containers support us in letting Life flow — and letting ourselves flow with Life?
Since we’re in a lunation cycle that began with a New Moon in Capricorn, I’m noticing an invitation to soften, squish and sculpt our relationship to (and our definition of) maturity, competence and capacity.
Being in a time where things are so unstable so insecure so scary — it makes so much sense to lean into the parts of ourselves that promise security.
And, as such, it’s a powerful time to track this.
If being the competent or mature one promises us security, it might feel safest to repress any instincts (showing up as urges, hungers, desires) that risk making us appear (by current reigning definition) incompetent or immature. And if we do deny, split off, go to battle against those instincts, more and more people around us often start showing up as that … as either frustratingly incompetent and immature, or more competent than we can imagine ourselves being.
And vice versa. If being the incompetent one promises security, it might feel safest to repress instincts that risk making us appear actually competent or confident. And, if we do go to battle against those instincts, more and more people around us often start looking annoyingly over-confident or annoyingly incompetent.
My invitation (to myself, to us) is to:
(a) look at what shapes our categorical definition of successful, mature, competent, responsible (and their opposites) — and to soften it, question it, sculpt it until it comes closer to making sense through a cyclical or spiralic perception and not just linear progress
(b) lean on Time (rather than our ego) to hold us up and together when we are a squishy mess of all the things. To experience Time and to meet Saturn as a guardian, rather than an adversary.
A guardian that can take on the weight of what our ego is trying to carry.
A guardian that protects us from our own susceptibility to corruption. From our human tendency to try to consolidate power in one tiny fraction of ourselves.
A guardian that offers us the benevolence of limits.
A guardian that teaches us to tend the rise and the fall. The filling and the emptying. The growth and the decay.
A guardian that offers particular moments with particular qualities, with particular shapes and contours, that give us support and structure to let ourselves go. And flow.
In other words, Time keeps introducing new conditions. Conditions that can favor our egos — and then, thankfully, conditions that don’t.
We contain so many waves. Trying to catch one particular kind of wave each time — and to somehow impossibly get rid of the rest — is a futile battle against the Ocean. It can feel like fighting the Typhon.
May Time guard us from giving one Lion in our psyche the power to rule the whole ecosystem, for all of time — denying the intelligences of rest, night, decay, decomposition, relationality.
May Saturn support the possibility of more Life through the acceptance of Death —
May the Planets continue moving, unraveling and re-weaving our stories in ways that keep reminding us that we are wild beyond comprehension —
and that we will never be able to put our finger on what you, me or anyone else exactly is.
We are infinite stillness in motion.
Dying and living, shedding and regenerating — all within single lifetimes, within single years of our lives, within months, days, hours, minutes.
We cycle through.
And, in these overwhelming times, which can bring a flood of various emotions and thoughts —
We can practice being in one place at a time.
We can practice being with one part at a time.
We can practice allowing the coming and going.
We can practice ebbing and flowing with the Moon.
Knowing that all of our moments, all of these moments
Each have their place
about our inner flame.
