MTD

When my sister and I were little kids my mother, a person young at heart and temperament, racked her brain for ways to give us joy in a new house, new neighborhood (literally, our house had just been built at the confluence of weed fields and cricket colonies) , and brand new state…across the country from all our relatives and friends.  

We took classes from the local rec department in guitar and painting with tempura, and curiously in cheerleading and in yoga.  I can honestly say I did not become a savant in any of the activities Mom involved us in but it instilled in us a love of place, and of community, we would not naturally have had if she had just set us down in front of the TV to while away our Saturdays.  It would have cost less in dollars and in energy.  It would have been easier to do nothing and hope for the best.

Instead, she took action, in the face of a strong headwind (as a woman of color, saddled with an ex-husband’s debt, single-mother of two, as a person who had only two months of driving under her belt, and no nearby relatives or ex-husband to step in to pick up the slack.).  With difficulty she accepted her circumstances, and moved forward, propelled by the bedrock notion that action was the only solution to giving us the best life she could afford, whatever that looked like.

In March, much of what we’ve seen as settled, continues to crumble in a slo-mo situation that shows us where our attention needs to be re-focused.  In a sense we’ve been prepped for it given the tenure of the year.  A Nine, which is, by its very definition a place of endings, a locality where the center is designed to wither and atrophy in order for something to reconstitute itself, to regrow, always contains within it the very elements necessary not just to complete what we wish to complete, undercover, shrouded in mystery, but to rise again, new in purpose and passion.

We are mortal…our lives are defined by our innate mortality, and so is the world, but that inherent impermanence is ultimately more complex than we allow it to be.  To wit: the perishability of life does not mean that when things die, there then wil be *NO MORE LIFE*.  It means that life, however defined, is regenerating constantly, that certain stages (aka our lifetimes) are not static, even as we may desperately wish them to be.

Most modern humans, like myself (a Taurus and 4 inner trait), are raised to associate the good life with permanence, with stability.   But durability, resilience, constancy—- they are the hallmarks of an organism that readily adapts to the transient nature of existence.   It’s revolutionary to declare that life does not stand still. As Octavia Butler and the Buddhists say…Life is Change. (Reader remember this for the rest of this year…)

Even as we grasp the shifting nature of our current state, the three energy of the month asks us to embrace humanistic principles, to uphold the precepts of respect and compassion, and to recommit to the very foundational and innovative notion of cooperation for the sake of common good.  We need to proceed based on our highest principles, and we need to engage our capacity to be visionaries too, advocating for joy in creative ways. We also need to be prepared for the fact that not all our dreams proceed in a straight line toward attainment…the rocking motion we experience is the rhythm of life.

“A better life won’t always be a happier life. It will necessarily involve periods of extreme unhappiness and difficulty. That’s the cost of doing business; sometimes it rains. “ -Moya Sarner

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