I’m living in the US now, the country of
my birth. But I’ve been an ex-pat for a
big chunk of my life, living in Germany, Vietnam, Thailand, Venezuela and
Ecuador. These different countries have
held me and shaped me. They’ve gifted me
with their air, with the fruit from their trees, with their different customs
and assumptions. I am who I am because
of all this.
And I didn’t flee the US because of war,
or famine, or gangs threatening to kill me or my loved ones. I’ve never been homeless or stateless. I’ve never waded across a river in the hope of
deliverance.
Still, like many of us, my choices haven’t
been completely free. All of us are
turned in certain directions, in this world we live in. Some doors are shut and locked for us, and
sometimes we see those same doors standing wide open for other people. We don’t stand there scratching at what won’t
yield; we go another way.
My wife and I left the US in the 80s,
and returned to a different place in 2012.
Only a few months after we arrived, a statewide referendum in Maryland
gave gay people the right to marry. So
we did that, and at last, I was able to sponsor my wife for a green card. I saw myself symbolically putting out a
welcome mat for her. And of course, it
made me feel welcome too, in a way I’d never felt in this country before.
A few years later, the Supreme Court
established the right to marry in every state.
Instead of taking wedding trips up north, my Southern friends could now get
married where they lived.
I’m an old lady now, and when I look
back on my life, I see a wandering lesbian, one who chose love above a
homeland. And I would still make that
choice, because I’m still madly in love with the same woman. But why was exile the best choice? It gave me the world, but it’s also meant
that I’ve never felt completely, permanently at home in any one city.
And now I look around and see people
being uprooted, everywhere around me. I
see people afraid to use health clinics because they’ll be picked up and
deported. I see Hispanic people who are
treated as aliens because they live close to the border with Mexico. I see young dreamers who can’t make plans because
their futures are so uncertain. I see
green card holders afraid to take the next step and apply for passports. I see the doorway into this country becoming a
constricted space - not a place where people
can breathe free, but rather a place where they lose their dignity, their hope,
and sometimes their children.
And I see myself cut loose again, taking
to the world once more. I can see the
two of us going off to more hospitable places.
And then, like a split screen, I see myself angry, enraged, standing
firm. This is my country. If I can, I want to stay here and fight for
the rights of my friends and family, gay people and immigrants.
I probably wouldn’t be sitting here – I’d
be sitting somewhere quite far away - if
it wasn’t for the women that Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia
Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. And so I take
the Supreme Court very personally. I
still see red when I remember the Merrick Garland seat being stolen. It festers.
Thinking of Mitch McConnell’s beady
little thieving eyes, I understand why there are Kentucky feuds that go on for
years and for generations.
As I write this, the Kavanaugh hearings
are happening, and I’m mostly resigned on this front. Pluto is currently trining Brett Kavanaugh’s Jupiter,
and there couldn’t be a better aspect for an enormous rise in status. Sorry about that.
What does his chart look like? He has the sun in Aquarius, which tends to
give pretty definite opinions and principles, and this is certainly what he
projects. But his sun is the middle
planet in a T-square involving Jupiter and Neptune, so it seems to me that his
ego and ambition will always come first, and his actual philosophy will always
be a little shaky and untethered. He
doesn’t quite know what he believes, but he knows what will give him an
advantage.
So this is discouraging. But not everything in September looks like a
slide into the Middle Ages.
Saturn is stationing in September. This means that it appears to pause in the
sky, and very slowly, move forward through the elliptic, instead of reversing. Saturn is in conservative, traditional sign
Capricorn, but it will spend all month making a trine to progressive,
future-looking Uranus.
Because this trine happens in earth
signs, it’s about practical solutions rather than yelling and screaming. It’s about solid foundations which lead to well-established
structures. Like an aide whisking some dangerous
paper off the president’s desk before he sees it, it’s about vigilance and
care. And it can be about using the best
of old traditions – how did people survive back then? how does the earth renew itself? – and creating
new traditions which put the world in a more stable place.
Another helpful September aspect is a
long sextile between Jupiter and Pluto. Jupiter
is in Scorpio, which tends to root up secrets, so I’m sure we’ll see more of
the dank underbelly of this administration.
Pluto signals deep, intrinsic, long-lasting changes. Again, these are not the kind of aspects that
indicate thunder, lightning, and revolution in the streets. But they can signal a slow turning towards
truth and progress.
And this is what we need. The next new moon (on September 9) has an
opposition between Neptune, planet of confusion, and the sun and moon. Someone is going to pull out all the stops as
they try to trick us. There’s going to
be a lot of misdirection, and maybe some really sneaky maneuvers pulled in the
dead of night. But it’s not going to
work. It’s all going to come to
light.
So here I am. It’s been a few years now, and my wife and I
have grown some roots. Roots take a long time to grow, but then they
cling. They take a little piece of earth
and make it their own.
