There’s a place for old habits and patterns. They make
for a smooth life, as your body remembers the way you did everything yesterday
and automatically does it in the same way today. No decisions are made, no extra
energy expended.
But when you move to a new place, you retrain yourself,
and that’s what I’ve been doing. When I reach for a dishtowel, it’s in a
different place. When I make myself a pot of tea, all the little gestures are
slightly different, even if I end up with an identical brew. When I wake up in
the middle of the night, it takes me a moment to remember where the bathroom
is.
I’ve been relearning how to move through my daily
life, in the two weeks that we’ve been in this new apartment. We’re in a more
urban environment, leaving behind the whirr of lawn mowers and the snow drifts
of the suburbs. I like it here, and I especially like living across the street
from the library. I can practically hear the books speaking among themselves, murmuring
their facts and fictions.
One thing that’s different about this place is the balance
between light and darkness. On the west side of the apartment is a large bay
window, and on a sunny afternoon, it sheds an intoxicating amount of light over
the golden hardwood floor, stretching all the way through the living room to
the kitchen. The light is so glorious that you just want to lap it up. We moved
on a day warm enough to open the window, and we could hear the conversations of
people in the street below. We felt plugged in to the life of this small city.
On the east side of the apartment is my study, and no sunlight reaches here. When I walk in
in the morning, it’s a cave, and my computer screen is like a deep glossy well.
I grope for the first lamp, and then walk through the room twisting switches of
all sizes and shapes, making the light happen. Then I turn on the computer, and
it bursts into color.
The front door is also on the east side of the
apartment. This is apt, given that traditionally you enter a sacred circle in
the east, the direction of new beginnings. From the door, especially in the
afternoon, we walk towards the bright light of the west side window. This reminds
me of the journey made by every human on this planet – to begin in the darkness
of the womb and to move towards that famous tunnel of light. The setting sun
symbolizes the end of life, something I’m comfortable with in my later years.
It figures that we would move into this place around
the time of the fall equinox, and that the sun and Venus are now moving through
Libra, the sign of the scales. (Next week, Mercury will also be in this sign.) This
is the time when day and night are equals, when our consciousness strives for
balance.
Libra’s opposite on the zodiacal wheel is Aries, and currently
Jupiter is moving through the first degrees of Aries. The Aries/Libra axis is
all about the delicate negotiations of relationships, the balance of interests
between the Self and the Other. Aries represents the immediacy of the self,
while Libra is all duality, about understanding other people.
The Aries imperative is to be clear about what’s
meaningful to you. The Libra stance is to recognize that we all create meaning
for each other, all the time. Aries, a
fire sign, fights hard for independence, and can see Libra as too wishy-washy,
too ready to see the other side of every question. Libra, an air sign, is the
idealist, the peacemaker, and sometimes this can mean giving up personal power
and privilege in order to share them with others.
So October is a significant month, when it comes to
working out ways to live with each other. We are all somewhere on this track,
moving from birth to death. We all carry a passionate spark
of individuality, and we are also molded by the relationships around us. We can
be both, just as this apartment contains both darkness and light.
There are a lot of new beginnings in October, as we
pass the autumn equinox, the halfway point of the zodiacal year. We’ve already seen a weather shift, with
Hurricane Ian a glaring reminder of our mishandling of the relationship between
land and water. We stole the land from the water, and the water’s way of
regaining balance is to take the land back. Climate change is all about the
earth’s efforts to re-establish equilibrium. When we go to extremes in our use
of the planet’s resources, it has to go to extremes to counter us.
And yes, October means a new session of the Supreme
Court. Libra is the sign of justice, but will justice prevail? We’ve already
seen a Court hopelessly corrupted by McConnell’s dirty tricks, refusing to vote
on a legitimate nominee during Obama’s tenure, and then rushing through much
less legitimate judges during Trump’s tenure. Trump was a minority-rule
president, as most of the last Republicans have been. And so, at this point,
the current Supreme Court doesn’t represent the people. It represents the interests
of the powerful few.
Voting itself is a very Libran concept. Imagine
equitably counting the votes and then conforming to the will of the majority!
Who thought of that? Shouldn’t we just have a free-for-all, and the last one
standing gets to decide everything? There’s a large bloc that has always
believed this. And there are many people who give lip service to democracy, but
feel queasy at the idea of actually distributing power to the masses. But social
imbalance is not sustainable, and sooner or later there is a mass effort to make
things right.
It's the Libran way to fight for justice through
voting, through the courts, through dialogue and persuasion, through community
efforts. But if this doesn’t do the
trick - well, by the end of the month, we’ll
see the sun, Venus, Mercury and the lunar south node all in Scorpio. And Scorpio
is not as polite a sign as Libra. It’s a sign of extremes. It’s not coincidental
that this month ends with a holiday which involves dressing up as whatever you
fear most.
Large, abrupt changes are disruptive, often violent,
but they too are efforts to end imbalance. When the tipping point is reached, things
fall. It’s natural and inevitable. So the question is – what can we do before
we reach that point? There are still
opportunities to retrain ourselves, mostly by seeing where the imbalance
exists, talking about it, and sharing solutions.
So let’s appreciate the incremental but principled
movements of Libra. The sign of balance is all about the energy that flows both
ways, between darkness and light, night and day, law and liberty, self and
other. Balance here doesn’t mean stagnation, but rather many small changes all
the time, each change conscious of the others. It’s a gentle, responsive dance
of opposites.
It's idealistic, I know, but that’s Libra for you. But
it’s also true of astrology, a symbol system that’s full of oppositional patterns.
We all feel these inner tensions between one thing and its opposite, and yet we’re
breathing in and out, finding balance in each moment. We are darkness and we
are light, and all we need to do is accept our shared humanity in this world of
contrasts.
