As October progresses, we weigh the harvests of this year — some sweet, many bitter — and welcome the darkness that comes with the lengthening of autumn’s northern nights. We are in a ritual space that asks us to feel the grief, the horror, and the pain of our fellow human beings and our own ancestors, and to begin the process of composting and transmutation. How do we begin?
How does one begin to lift the veil of numbness that ancestral trauma lays on our souls? The first step is this: instead of just being a witness, a judge, a litigator of our experience, we must dive into it and feel it wholly. This catharsis - found in rites, in plants, in secret wild places, in phone-free solitude - is the spagyria that unlocks full the alchemical alphabet. This is the gift of the season of the Scorpion, which will begin this weekend.
The Sun will arrive in Scorpio season with two chariots ahead of him: Mars, the traditional ruler of Scorpio, has been in residence since the 13th of the Month, and Mercury will ingress just ahead, as it has just traveled across the face of the sun on Thursday in an essential moment in the cycle known as Mercury Combust. Certainly, communications (especially those pertaining to the Libran themes of justice and balance) have been combustible this week. I have taken volleys of criticism for speaking up for Palestine as a Jew myself, and I love and feel for our Israeli family, who are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes for speaking up for their beloved country and becoming co-signers and advocates for apartheid and ethnic cleansing. There is no easy way out here. And there is no easy way out for us all.
The only way out is through.
Through the darkness. Through the dullness. Through the impossible wretch of depression and failure and purposelessness. Through everything we have hidden from ourselves so that we can keep going. And deeper through the layers. Because beneath the wound, there is a spark. One that lights us from within. We are our own source of healing, of possibility, of redemption.
With Saturn nearing his end of retrograde motion at 0° Pisces, Jupiter ensconced in Taurus with Rahu and the Part of Fortune, and Venus moving gracefully through her stint in Virga, we are disposed towards embodiment, emotion, and movement as means to metabolize this magic and let love in through our pores. There is no purchase to be won in wordy fights over nonexistent digital terrain. The medicine is leaving the screen, unbinding the nervous system from the atrocity complex, and waging peace with our bodies.
If you are an artist, it is time to make art. If you are an alchemist, it is time to alchemize. If you are a lover, make love.
And if you are a child of your parents and their parents before them, get close to the earth and pour out thanks for this strange, painful, impossibly beautiful gift of life we have all been given.
The darkness is pregnant with the dawn. And our suffering is a seed we can plant that will bear the fruit of a better world if we can love it and tend it.
Let us begin. Again.
I love you
Samu