Artwork by Aimee Stewart
A Hurricane of Change is Afoot.
These past few days I’ve been thinking about the chapter of my life that is coming to a close under this final Uranus/Pluto Square. A nineteen year cycle is coming to an end. Think about where you were and what you set in motion all those years ago. For me, I went to graduate school to study creative writing and started my current career as a teacher.
I don’t know what is about to happen — what sort of changes are in store for me — I simply know that I feel a bit like Bette Davis right now, warning everyone to fasten their seatbelts because “it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
We are passing through the spiritual equivalent of a huge cosmic wash cycle. As we bump and bang up against everything in this swirling mess of water and stars and rocks and mud, we’re being baptised for renewal, for a shift in consciousness, for a completely different cosmic wavelength.
We’re entering the Age of Aquarius.
Now what matters is not how much money you have, or what sort of trophy woman (or man) you sport on your arm. It doesn’t matter how big your house is and how prolifically you work like a dog. What matters is intention. Why are you doing what you’re doing? What does it mean to you? Are you living an authentic life?
How can you tell?
If you’re living authentically, you’re content. You awaken jazzed to greet another day. You hatch plans and write your ‘to do’ list on the back of your hand. If you live from your wild heart, you look within for answers, for solace, for support. No stamp of approval from friends, family, or total strangers, is needed.
You set your course and you rely on inner knowing — your personal compass — to guide you.
However, if you live your life based on someone else’s vision for you, you feel tied to outside forces. You believe you will disappoint others if you don’t continue to lockstep it through life. If you don’t use an outside gauge to measure your very worth, you worry you’ve failed in some intangible way. You feel angry and stuck. You may even be seething with resentment.
And you feel powerless to change it.
That’s where courage comes in.
What’s Your Story?
The slimy terrain of resentment and anger is a place I know quite well. In fact, I sat in a poopy diaper at that longitude and latitude for a long time. (Too long.) One day, however, I woke up. I realized I could take my sh*tty pants off, hose myself down, get dressed in something more age appropriate, and start living the life I’d imagined.
All those years while I sat at the corner of you-did-me wrong-and-why-is-this happening-to-me, I gave my power away.
Flagrantly. Constantly. Stupidly.
My inner dialog was a total shame spiral:
Loser! What’s wrong with me?
Other people get all the breaks, I get nothing.
Why? What have I done to deserve such a sh*t shack life?
I could blather on like that for days, a resentful toddler, wandering the world in search of mommy and daddy’s approval.
As you can probably imagine, no one really likes dealing with an adult who behaves like she’s still sitting in a high chair, banging her spoon on the tray, demanding the forces of life focus on her and only her.
Here’s what I now know is true:
You cannot be powerful while hanging onto to your stories of victimization.
You cannot shimmy and shake and tango with the life you want, and remain in the metaphorical outhouse, complaining about the stench.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. ~ e. e. cummings
So, circle back to this whole notion of change that’s erupting this week. The final Uranus/Pluto Square is exact on March 16. Depending on where it lands in our charts, we will feel these changes differently, but we will feel them. Personally and collectively.
How can we begin to live more authentic, less voracious, all-consuming, too-much-is-never-enough lives?
How can we become assets — gifts — to this living being called earth?
How can we shift our habits away from those centered on outside approval, to ones that are more reflective, cooperative, and community based?
We cannot continue to eat up the world at a pace that will kill every living thing on it, including us. Part of our hunger for things, for food, for more-more-more, has to do with not feeling at home in our own skins. While we repeatedly try to feel sated by money, exotic food, alcohol, drugs, sex, or another McMansion by the sea, we spiritually starve. At the end of our days ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ we cannot shake the pervasive feeling of total emptiness that hounds us.
The reason?
There are no answers to what ails us, out there.
We must develop reverence for our own lives to have any hope of living softly in this beautiful but brutalized world.
We must grow up.
Otherwise, future generations (if there is anyone left to look back on our follies) will wonder what the hell we were thinking.
We aren’t powerless. We aren’t victims.
We can change.
It will take deep work, but we can do it.
We wouldn’t be here now — at this crucial time in human history — if that wasn’t true.
© 2015 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved
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