The Avalanche

It began when I almost cut off the end of my finger. That was a week after my last post. I was cutting herbs, preparing food for a friends' wedding, and I sliced right into the end of my finger. Having led a fairly active life I have broken a variety of bones but I have never, not even with two natural childbirths at home, needed a single stitch. It was shocking to me, the sense of invasion of my personal space, the vulnerability. It was the day before the new moon in Virgo and something about how material gets worked out in the realm of the body was seeded in that moment.

Within a couple of days I developed a head cold. Not a big deal for most folks, but unusual for me. We were also having childcare issues, so I was sick and trying to take my four year old to work with me or work from home with the sound of childrens movies insistently singing in my ears. Again, I felt shaky and vulnerable, at the mercy of things beyond my control and off my rhythm.

I went to class that weekend and spent three days blowing my nose and talking about the lunation cycle. I got a greater intellectual understanding of the mechanics of it and of where I am in my current cycle but the gut level knowing of it, of feeling the underlying pattern of it in my bones so that I don't have to "think" of the vocabulary, remember definitions, still escaped me.

Two days after class ended, just when my head had finally cleared the cold, I was sitting on the couch with Ruby and was all of a sudden seized with intense vertigo. For about half an hour I was so dizzy I couldn't walk across the room without listing into something and then the puking started. It has been 20 years, at least, since I have been that sick. I couldn't move, raise my head or open my eyes without heaving until I couldn't breathe. I couldn't even crawl out of the bathroom to get my cell phone to call Matthew and tell him to come home. Ruby had to bring the phone to me and, if I remember correctly, I managed to send Matthew one monosyllabic text and leave him a auditory record of me hurling because as soon as his voicemail picked up I was seized with another wave of wretching. After a couple of hours of seriously wondering if I might pass out and need hospitalization before he made it, Matthew got home and carried me to the couch where I passed out and slept the rest of the day.

It was the day after the full moon in Pisces and something was reaching a peak, some surrender was being forced upon me and some boundary between my singular body and the body of the world was thinning. I felt like my life had spiraled completely out of my control, my body was not my own, and I had no stable ground on which to stand. Transiting Pluto was also exactly square, within 3 minutes, of my natal Mars, but that has been true at various times since January of 2010. For almost two years now it has been forcing a conflict between my own personal will (Mars in Aries) and desire to strike out and effect the world in the way I see fit and the deep, chthonic wisdom of a higher Will (Pluto in Capricorn) calling me to submit to my true place in the world. Having it go exact at the same time as this particular Virgo/Pisces lunation cycle, however, which is so much about body/world, ordered practice/chaotic mess, service/sacrifice brought things to a particularly personal and dramatically physical head. The Moon will do that.

At 6 AM the next morning Matthew left for a week on business. Slowly I began to recover. I sent the girls to their grandparents for the weekend and spent 36 hours completely alone, largely in silence. I turned off the computer and the phone, walked in the neighborhood and on my land, imagined a life more in concert with the earth, a daily rhythm more mindful of the turn of the seasons. It was a peaceful, gorgeous, restful day. It was also just before last quarter, this cycle was ending so something new could begin and death is never easy. The kids came home, Matthew came back to town and almost immediately disappeared for two days of astrology class, and life came crashing back.

That Sunday, September 25th, our sheep got out of the fence and onto the road in front of our house four times. FOUR TIMES. Matthew was in class all day, it was inexplicably hot and sticky for September, and I had to chase the little stinkers back into the pasture all by myself. After the fourth time I was out clearing the fence of weeds that we had let grow up right over it, killing any possibility of it carrying a deterring electrical charge, and something shifted inside of me. Some sense of detachment from our land and from being responsible for and present to the daily ritual of maintaining our life fell away. Some fear of what terrible things would happen if I embodied fully the person I am meant to be, if I took the risk, disappeared and a commitment to manage our family's resources and my resources more sustainably took over. In a larger sense, my progressed Moon has moved into the balsamic, or dark moon, phase and I felt in my bones the inevitable winnowing of it, the necessity for everything to eventually die, and I gave in. It was unexpectedly freeing and a bit terrifying- like standing naked on the front lawn on a beautiful day.

Two days later Occupy Wall Street began at the new moon in Libra and a global conversation about our relationship to each other and how we manage and share our resources exploded. It felt like the personal conversation I had just been having with myself assumed a global face. Just before first quarter we saw the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. What started as a few people in a park, unlikely to truly challenge the status quo, began to manifest as something much larger. The confrontation with the powers-that-be was, from the perspective of the lunation cycle, inevitable. The full moon of that cycle, in Aries, came on October 12th- two days after police attacked and arrested many of the Occupy protestors in Boston and other cities and three days before the Global Day of Action when hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered all over the planet. What had been unthinkable just weeks previous, that tiny seed of a conversation, had flowered into something truly awe inspiring.

I cannot tell you both how exciting and unsettling these last two months have been. I have been drawn by my body through a transformation of my daily life. I have committed to something much larger than myself, to diving into the flow and trusting that it will carry me and I find that I have become more sensitive to the flow occurring all around me. It is as if I am walking through the world with no skin on, no separation between me and everything else, and I alternate between exhilaration and the most exquisite sense of intimacy and vulnerability. It is hard to tell at times where I stop and the world begins. Never has every moment that I encounter happening in the world felt so deeply personal and yet so far beyond me. Every protestor, every cop, every person on the street and every politician hiding behind their gilded door is a part of me and I feel obligated to see them, to hear them, to confront them mindfully. I also know that, in actual, daily fact, my life needs to get smaller and more intimate so that I have more space to see, hear and confront myself. The two do not feel like such very different paths in the end, though.

I began this two month period feeling like I was being swept away by an avalanche. Everything seemed to be changing faster and faster, careening towards something catastrophic. If I had written in the midst of all of it that's exactly what I would have written, but I think now that that vision is very narrow. It is based in the anxieties and fears of my ego, which abhors change and never wants anything to die. Yet everything does and I believe embracing that offers a way for all of us to dive into the flow. It will carry us forward and back around. It always does. I know it in my bones.