Image: Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Participants were asked to cut the clothes from the artist's body
Sometimes to understand what lies ahead, you have to look back at the past.
To get a sense of what June is all about, close your eyes and remember late December, 2020, when the pandemic was reshaping so many lives. You might remember it as a devastating time of significant and acute loss. Or you might remember the end of that first pandemic year feeling as if you had, crazily, figured out how to live a “normal life” while confined inside an airplane that was slowly but inexorably crashing into an invisible mountain. You might remember realizing that there is now such a thing as The Beforetime, and that it will never come back. You might remember finding a lot of freedom in all this restriction and disruption. You might have even gotten some ideas about what you are done with, and what you’re going to do instead, now that life is (waves hand) like this.
From this moment in late May 2024 until roughly July of 2026, that story that started in December 2020 is going to push fiercely forward. The seeds you planted then, and have been patiently watering ever since, will need your effort, advocacy, and attention if they are going to grow and bear fruit. And what’s interesting about this relatively small moment of struggle in a larger 20-year cycle is that it starts with an opportunity to take radical responsibility for yourself, and thereby learn how to hold and express power with depth, honesty, and compassion.
Regular readers know that instead of dragging everybody’s eyes over an exhaustive list of transits each month, I like to distill thirty days of astrology into one useful idea. And June is a good time to sit with why you made the decisions you made in late 2020, and own those choices, so that you can tap into the kind of loose, flexible, loving power that comes out of deeply knowing yourself. All of yourself. Even the parts you don’t like. Even the bad decisions. Even the parts that you project out onto others and judge and attack, so that you don’t have to deal with them.
The most important tool in your belt over the next two years could very well be your ability to calmly speak for your shame, fear, or grief; for those young, angry, neglected, or even traumatized parts of yourself; and for the personal traits that are so repugnant to you that you can't see that you have them! Instead, you only really see them projected onto the people who annoy you the most. Holding these tender parts with the love they need will give you the only kind of power that is worth having, and that is the power that comes from having absolutely nothing to defend. No blind spots. Nothing that’s sharp or brittle inside you. Nothing you cannot patiently and compassionately bear about yourself, with full awareness.
Another way to say this is that the future is vulnerable. We are only a few years into a twenty year cycle that was seeded during a vulnerable time. In December of 2020, we were all, in large and small ways, vulnerable to a larger crisis. And maybe a small handful of us were rising to that challenge, making brave, vulnerable choices in the middle of chaos. More of us, myself included, set plans in motion that were grounded to some degree in our brittleness, denial, and fear. Now that the fear has passed, and we face the first big conflicts and crisis points in this larger 20-year building period, the opportunity is really to remember the vulnerability of that moment, and learn from it. Take it on personally, and find both strength and strategic leverage in accepting whatever we were fearfully reacting to. From that place of ownership, you might find that the ground beneath you feels more stable than ever before. From this firm footing, you can go on to make new coalitions that are honest, and build structures that are meaningful. You may also have a very different set of fucks to give than you did when you were trying to keep yourself safe. This unguarded, open stance and clarity around priorities is what will feed the right relationships and promote the healthy flow of information over the next year as you build this new chapter.
Ask yourself these questions as you walk into June, periodically stopping to give yourself a hug and some kind words whenever you’re honest:
What was I trying to protect myself from in late 2020 and early 2021?
What was the thing I was putting up a wall about, or never wanted to face again?
What did the isolation of the pandemic help me hide from?
Were any decisions about my “post pandemic life” fear based? Do I still need to be afraid?
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