Hello my loves.
It’s been far too long.
Scorpio season - and the terrestrial turmoil that came with it - laid me low, and I went quiet for this past month. In my own way, jn accordance with the mythos of the times, I died. I am in the process of mourning and letting go of the piece of me that needed to remain there.
And I myself am rising again, a Phoenix from the ashes, Asclepius wielding a serpent gnarled staff, remembering my own wisdom. I am grateful to return to Body Made of Stars, and I am grateful to share it with you.
What conspired to make these recent weeks so blindingly tragic?
We can (and often ought) to consider time a ritual. The demiurgic forces behind the scenes of history operate by this logic, initiating us all in stages, deeper and deeper, towards the hungry maw of succumbing, unbeing. It cuts much deeper than capitalism - they don’t just need our productivity and consumption, our input and our output. It cuts deeper than country. It cuts deeper even than the outward and public faces of religion. Mass history is a ritual of the seeding, the farming, and the reaping of soul.
At its root, trauma — the word of the decade, rightly so, thus far — is defined as the separation from self. It can be brought on in life’s most intense moments, but it also can be invoked more insidiously, even gradually, in the process of inheriting and embodying one’s familial, local, ethnic, religious, and cultural dynamics.
Which brings us to Israel, that little keyhole-shaped sliver of land between the sea and the river, to Palestine, and to the starry context of its tribulation.
For centuries beyond centuries, this land has been the skeleton key by which the great ritual traumas have been enacted on the spirit of humankind. Each of us, in our own way, is afflicted, in hugely variant degree.
As an Ashkenazim child of the Jewish diaspora, whose grandparents fled to North America rather than Israel not because they weren’t aligned with Zionism but because they were looking simply to survive, the horrors enacted by the Israeli ethnostate land in a particularly poignant and shattering way for me. Long-standing Jewish ancestral traumas of ghettoization, vilification, and ethnic cleansing are being externalized and enacted on the young people of Gaza by individuals and institutions who have failed to integrate those wounds within themselves.
The timing of this most recent move on the ritual chessboard was no coincidence. It came just as the eclipse window was opening, and accelerated as we delved deeper into Scorpio season, thinning the veil between life and death in a horrifically literal sense. Eclipses are times when disruptions and surprises are almost to be expected. Especially when they fall in October.
So down we went. Into a collective and, for me, exquisitely personal dying, wailing, grieving. We learned a lot, I hope, about where we stand when it comes to freedom, inclusion, equity, and history. And some of us are lucky enough to come out the other side of it more whole than we were before.
If you are reading this, I want to congratulate you: you are still alive, reading, learning, healing. You made it through the Scorpionic death sequence and are now rising like an Ophiucian Phoenix into the light, mirth, and wisdom of Sagittarius.
On Friday, Mars joined the Sun in Sag, and on Sunday, the Moon will wax full in Gemini, inspiring a flash of collective creative inspiration. Gemini and Sag are a famous pair: Gemini the gifted student(s) and Sag the maestra channeling truth.
With Mercury already ahead in Sag and quickly coming into his shadow in advance of an upcoming retrograde and Venus sextile in her nocturnal home of Libra, we can think of this new season as held between our mind and our heart. It is up to each of us to flow between the two in a way that is deeply authentic and true.
Sri Nisargadhatta once spoke, “wisdom tells me I am nothing, well love tells me I am everything. And it is in between these two poles that my life flows.”
May this weekends, bright lunation bring you closer to Love and to Wisdom, to community and to your own sacred breath. The season of the light has come. Let it surround you, and emanate from within you. You were born to learn from the darkness and retrieve those pieces of yourself that got left behind. You were born to shine.
I see you. I love you. Welcome back.
Samu