Dear ones,
In a voice note, T, a skilled tarot reader and astrologer, says that they are concerned about the upcoming eclipse. “I am not usually into the fear-mongering around these things, but this one is going to be…..intense.”
A day later, two friends text me about a conflict with their partner. Another friend describes “feral crying,” to which I respond, “omg, same” because it’s true, I did that too, wide-mouth-hands-in-palms wailing. A parent friend sounds at her limit; a busy academic friend realizes their overbooked schedule is just a dissociative coping mechanism to keep them from confronting the reality of their existence. All week I’ve been hearing, to an even heavier degree than usual, that people are having a hard time.
It is nearly trite now to comment on how bad we’re all doing. And it’s offensive, of course, to suggest that a colonial, white supremacist culture is somehow newly terrible. But the truth is, we have, collectively, been swimming in uniquely horrific waters. And the truth is that sometimes the planets demand that we confront that a little more….rawly.
In Scorpio season—energetically a time for the depths, the brooding, sex and death and shadows, all crashing in with the weight of the ocean — it’s even easier for me than usual to indulge in the grim. The earth is in distress. The pain of heartbreak is nearly unbearable. Capitalism has traumatized us on a cellular level. Everyone you love you will have to say goodbye to. And so on! But the gift of Scorpio — and my astrologer friends tell me, especially of the eclipse — is that confrontation is not stagnation. In fact, as this recent essay from Margeaux Feldman reflects, feeling our sadness is the only thing that will allow us to move with it. We have to sit with pain and all its accessories — feral crying, existential crises, shame — in order to walk with it. Because that’s the truth of it, right? We don’t move past the pain, it’s a part of us now, in our skin as salt from tears in our pores, muscles altered from hunched over despair. But at some point it won’t slow us down so much. At some point we stir.
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