When I sit down to write, I usually think about all the lessons I’m learning as a new parent. I don’t want to be a one-note writer, but these are the waters I’m swimming in right now. So be patient.
Last night I took a long walk through Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was quiet and cold and dark. I felt that (now) unknown feeling of having a bit of time for myself, a temporary freedom. And there’s nothing like having a few hours to yourself, the right shoes, clothes that suit the weather, and wandering the streets of this city. I decided to call Sonya and check in – to see how bath time with our little one was going, what I had missed, etc. She told me about all the impossibly cute things that had happened in the three hours I was gone: the new smile, the new chuckle, the new hand gesture. At this age, a lot happens from hour to hour. During the conversation, I passed people who looked decimated by capitalism and a city that was one of the driving forces behind it. I thought, as I often do since I’ve gotten older, “What would the world be like if everyone were cared for as much as our child is?” Because we are all someone’s child.
I know this is one of the most basic feelings, but it is more of a feeling that overwhelms me than an academic statement about the inequality of this world.
I can’t seem to reconcile the inequality I’ve experienced emotionally since becoming a mother. My home reality is shockingly different from most of what I see when I open the door. Or my phone. Our child is so loved, so central to our lives and choices, so thought about, so celebrated and so considered, while so much of our human family is thrown away, ignored, neglected, sacrificed for power grabs and land theft. locked up, or worse. Our systems make no sense to anyone except the egos that sustain, power, and thrive in them—which is so few of us.
I want us to build a world that treats everyone as valuable and loved: as if they were someone’s child, aunt, cousin, mentor, student, friend, community member. I want to live in systems that encourage (okay, maybe force) the very best in us to emerge, that center the health of our connections so that the communities we build are naturally self-correcting and our trajectory has an arc that bends towards care and protection of the most vulnerable among us. Instead, we seem to be rushing towards our own demise with gleeful gluttony, selfies, binaries and beauty pageants.
I want us to live.
And while I am far from over the lure of luxury and (temporary) convenience that materialism offers, I am haunted by my and our children’s future if we do not fully embody the changes we know are needed now. I’m haunted by the material and spiritual costs of our daily lives, the hidden toll that comes with having access to whatever we want, whenever we want. I am haunted by the cycles of violence we continue to fall into every time we dehumanize and demoralize each other, en masse and online, from country to country and person to person.
And I’m not above being the problem.
To be honest, I tend to be a bit of a thorn in my side. I have every human characteristic imaginable. I feel jealousy, bitterness, hatred, revenge, neediness, self-pity, love, compassion, weakness, aging, bliss, joy, fear, greed, and sincere gratitude for this endlessly complicated life. I’ve tried to deny the more humiliating feelings on that list, to my demise. My shadow self is strong and fortunately always an enthusiastic teacher. I know that every time I get caught up in the wrongness of the world, I should immediately become interested in what I can do to take care of some part of my own life and myself. I know my red flags are shaped like my own fingers, outstretched and pointing. I know that when I change, my world changes too.
The New Moon in Aquarius
The New Moon in Aquarius occurring on Friday, February 9 at 2:59 PM PT is an event happening for the first time in our lives – one of many that have occurred and will occur in Aquarius, thanks Pluto’s return to the sign. As a line of planets enters Aquarius (the sun And Mercury just done, the moon will be mid-week, and Venus and Mars are about to), they will all be greeted by the Dark Lord.
At the height of the week, Mercury makes its conjunction with Pluto. This means that the week starts with some deep conversations, the unearthing of a few truths, or the deepening of our awareness about a topic that had only been partially revealed to us. There’s always some reckoning to be done with Mercury – and with Pluto it’s all about the sadness, the horrors and the hidden gems of life and this world. A Mercury-Pluto conjunction teaches us that if we don’t name the difficult aspects of life – the feelings we hold deep inside – they don’t cease to exist. In fact, they often become stronger and more difficult to stroll around with us. The grief we carry must be expressed in a way that can transform us and our understanding of what is possible.
In other words, Monday is a great day for therapy, or whatever you have access to that is related.
Since this week’s astrology is so focused on Pluto’s recent entry into Aquarius, we can also guess that something will come to light about AI, about technology in general, and about our collective reality or, more specifically, about how it is changing.
This New Moon is also in a tight square with Uranus. Uranus is revolutionary energy. It is itchy, loud, rude, feral, seeking freedom, excited and ready to break tradition at all costs. This week will be disruptive, disruptive and in our faces. Maybe it’s a week where we’ll be the source of someone else’s discomfort, awakening, or reinvention. Hopefully it will be a good mix of both.
In a recent conversation At the news company Mondoweiss, Aquarian Angela Davis said: “Now when I see large numbers of people demonstrating in country after country, it reminds me that these connections are possible across national borders. That Palestine allows us to imagine a very different kind of world. And so we fight for justice for Palestine – not because it is the moral thing to do, which it is. Not because it is the only way we can imagine a future for people living in that part of the world, which it is, but because it represents an ability to build new lives and new dreams for people everywhere . It makes us dream of a world in which we will have eradicated racism and anti-Semitism, and economic exploitation and gender violence, so… we place our dreams in Palestine.”
This New Moon is about cutting ties with everything that keeps our inner visionary, innovator and world builder asleep. It’s about grappling with and witnessing the sadness that’s hidden in plain sight. It’s about remembering that we’re not too late to make the future better. In fact, this moment is the only place from which we can create change. It is the only place where we can learn to love, cherish and care for each other, and therefore for the world.
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