All Our Skeletons: A Meditation on These Times
CHAPTER 3
Jupiter is associated with expansion, philosophy, wisdom, worldview, vision. It’s generally seen to be helpful and lucky. There are indeed promising potentials with this transit, but Saturn would not have us starry-eyed: patriarchy and fascism will receive the boon too. And because it expands, it makes all the other themes we’ve discussed, bigger. It also brings our attention to worldview, philosophy, belief, ideology.
It becomes easier to discern the air we’ve been breathing all along. Through the hard work of examining our collective shadow--that many of us have been engaged in for many years--we can see better now how patriarchy and systems of power and control have shaped our thoughts, beliefs, and ways of life. Can’t we better see now how capitalism, for instance, shapes our ideologies around the value of productivity, wealth, status, and worth, and how that impinges on our day-to-day lives? That mentality of overwork, of pushing, forcing, bulldozing, of business as usual, as what is “reasonable”, “realistic”, “rational”. The notion that the only way to survive is the be as assertive or aggressive as those at the top. The common sense that we must each accumulate (hoard) wealth. The devaluation of care, softness, rest, cooperation, intuition, retreat, feeling, creativity. Aren’t we starting to trace the the patriarchal impulse through our history?
Aren’t we having a reckoning with colonialism? Isn’t that massive tragic historical arch constitutive of our current situation? Isn’t it time we all reflected on our complicity in this state of affairs? Isn’t there a movement toward analyzing our ancestral history, and how we as individuals arrived at our particular place? And this process of sifting through the unjust privileges and disadvantages we’ve garnered through this faught history is key to opening the door to another way.
Can’t we see now how the past few thousand years, for most of us, were replete with trauma and horror; how we’ve inherited this trauma, genetically and culturally? How so much of our psychology grows of reactions to trauma. We guard now, against threat; against the possibility of horror again. Even when we don’t think we remember; our bones do. Our genes do. Our bodies hold the memory of horror, and the knowledge that it may happen again. And as we examine this history of trauma, we might see how in coping with trauma, so many adopt strategies to survive that end up hurting others: that those who inflict the worst pain are often those hurting the most. Oh, this mess of pain and suffering.
And it’s all bolstered by a vision, supposedly scientific, of a world made of matter, and accidental, and random, in which humanity is a freak accident that arose of the mechanical actions of molecules rubbing up against each other, conforming to a few rudimentary physical laws. In our world, we are isolated individuals, in competition with other individuals, for limited resources, in a genetically programmed struggle to survive for the sole purpose of procreation, and all our beliefs to the contrary are delusions that allow us to cope with this bleak state of affairs.
Am I exaggerating? Perhaps. Many of us don’t personally hold such a vision. Yet something like this has been at the root of the dominant cultural imagination, bolstering a particular economic and scientific paradigm which then justify law and policy. This is the perspective that makes possible ruthless resource extraction, the hoarding of resources, and systems which enact might is right, and some kind of archaic social Darwinism. But this, I believe is just what’s dying. And it’s dying, in part, through the work of examining our ideologies and how they shape us. And this process, I believe, is deeply healing--or a necessary stage of healing--like removing the blunt object that has impaled our gut…
In such a moment when we are reckoning with our own ideology, there is perhaps more humility and an openness to other ways of knowing. Not to adopting other’s beliefs and practices as our own, but to recognizing that we (whoever we is) don’t have it figured out, and we certainly don’t have the one true understanding of things, so we might as well open space for how others see things, and perhaps we could learn from them. And if we take seriously decolonization, don’t we have to take seriously indigenous ways of knowing?
It seems also that there is a surge of interest these days in exploring ancestry, which is such a beautiful use of all this Capricorn energy; and connecting with the beliefs, practices, and worldviews of our ancestors is another way to expand our own world. Learning about where we came from, seeking to know those people and their ways of life can be a nourishing source of sustenance in these times, when we are uprooting so many diseased tubers of culture: we need to find roots somewhere.
Through this process of digging down, of examining this sickness under our feet, in our thoughts and assumptions and visions of the world, something is shifting. I do think new worlds are emerging, that acknowledge multiplicity, and integrate spirituality and science. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We can’t yet clearly discern the new, because we are in the death phase: unplugging from our programming. We don’t need to know yet what comes next. It’s time now to examine what is, to see what’s not working, and to let the old ways die. The new, I suspect, will become more clear later in 2020, once Saturn and then Jupiter shift into Aquarius.
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