ARIES FULL MOON: EQUINOX AND IM/MORTALITY

Presence as an antidote for grief

This past summer, I had the incredibly moving experience of being present with a loved one during their time of passage. Over the course of the month of July, I sat side-by-side with my father's brother while he died. Though incredibly difficult and painful, I found it to be the most fortunate and intimate way I had ever gotten to experience death. There was plenty of room for a more ambiguous kind of grief before he departed; it was a grief that, of course, encompassed the anguish that comes with the loss of a human life- but it was also a grief full of reflection and wonder, deepening my own understanding of the nature of change and transformation as we experience it in our incarnate bodies here on Earth. 

I keep attempting to describe what was happening in that room as I sat silently alongside him, and in my opinion, failing, as words often fail us when we attempt to transmit the gravity of numinous experience. He had been affected by aphasia, and even before the onset of the terminal illness that quickly took its course, verbal communication had been a challenge for him. However, in the room with him as he passed, the most notable presence was not the suffering of someone struggling to express thought through speech against the will of his failing body- it was the presence of a more peaceful silence, the silence of someone who was simultaneously here and everywhere, whose trust in death was much greater than his fear of it. In the days when I sat quietly beside him before he passed, I felt acutely aware that he was dwelling in a state of liminality that was utterly telepathic, lovingly clairsentient, and uncannily omnipresent. In those moments that there were no words that he could say to me, and it felt like there were no words I could say to him either (words felt like an inadequate offering to the awe-inspiring might of eternity), I learned to just sit. I was somehow certain that the only way to truly support this person I loved so dearly was to be quiet, to listen, to still myself and be receptive of the part of him which was immeasurably more vast than his physical body. My initial incredibly human instinct was to show up and clap two cymbals together in an attempt to distract my loved one (and perhaps even moreso, myself) from the reality of death- to arrive skating shakily on the invisible ice of grief, vibrating with discomfort as we the living often are when faced with matters of mortality. However, it became abundantly clear that the most healing expression of unconditional love that I could offer my loved one was to show up with both palms open, offering to quietly hold a piece of the heavy infinity that a person aware of the impending transformation of their consciousness is tasked with carrying alone. Of course, there are certainly times when distraction and deflection are warranted- but it in moments of quiet presence, the room felt illuminated by the understanding that death is the sacred rite of being born backwards through a doorway you will only see once in your life from two different angles. 

As the current of time ushers us past the Autumn Equinox and into the nocturnal portion of the year, I remember the fear of stillness I felt during the frantic height of summer, terrified of what would happen once the goldenrod blooms and the yellow flowers of September reminded us, as they do every year, that they can never stay. The gravity of this season may be felt more deeply after a summer and early autumn full of planetary retrogradity, an astrological concept more commonly colloquially associated with loss than with gain. But after my own experience with grief at the height of summer's bloom, I find that I now feel indebted to any tree offering the chance to observe it turning and dropping its leaves, unabashedly and publicly moving into a new phase of its life. I feel deeply at home in a wood full of towering beings whose inherent grasp on death and dormancy is so intelligent that we turn to them to mark the years which pile up and fall away simultaneously. There is an enormous comfort in sitting at the base of a changing tree after watching it in the apex of its vitality, listening to that same tree's quiet awareness of the need to move on to another phase of its life. More important, perhaps, than the awareness and implicit acceptance of impending change illustrated by the natural life around us, is the omniscient certainty promised by nature's many transformations: the insistence that there will always be something waiting on the other side.

I'm feeling more deeply into Mars and Venus's expressions through the zodiacal signs of Aries and Libra respectively as eclipse season descends upon us, and I think in all of the more common planetary significations that then become synthesized into facile, mathematical delineations- anger, destruction, discord, separation, beauty, harmony, union, pleasure in the other- we often lose an important grasp on the seasonal qualities of these zodiacal territories, marked at their gates by the Autumn and Vernal Equinoxes. We lose the image of the paradoxical door of life, marked on one side by birth, and by death on the other. There are many instances when I have to remind myself in my practice, after sifting through ancient texts and lists of primary astrological sources, that anchoring an understanding of archetypes in lived experience starts with just observing the things that dwell in the dirt here on earth- the rhythms inherent to our natural world, the effects that time has on the seasons in the hemisphere where I live. The planets are, beyond all of their archetypal images, still a part of nature. Taking cues from the point of the Autumn Equinox, we could enliven our understanding of the cardinal expression of Venus by remembering the part of love that becomes grief when its object of affection fades out of our physical realm; remembering the yearning face of an adoration that subsists past expiration, the devotion that becomes nothing more than a passing thought or memory. We could enliven our understanding of cardinal Mars merely by remembering that beginnings have endings- that every 60 seconds, the infantile fire of one moment is swallowed by the hungry mouth of the next. Cardinal Mars is the warrior who bursts forth with desire to establish something new, and with newness comes destruction, always an ending. Maybe the wisdom and the agony of cardinal Mars and cardinal Venus resides on the other side of sweetness and fury: for Venus, love's impermanence, and for Mars, the sheer inability to conquer the last frontier of mortality. This Aries full moon on the heels on the equinox- a day with no half superseding the other- offers us twilight initiation into the dichotomy of a deep, loving passion and the acceptance of the pain that can come with it. It is an almost insulting axiom that we needn't shy away from the pain of change because there is always something that lies beyond- but if the virile young warrior, the enamored lover, and the very event of death itself have anything to teach us, it's that the pain of the ending should never outweigh the exhilaration of the beginning- and so it is, again, and again, and again, and again. 

I find it to be no coincidence that the end of a tree's seasonal cycle is so brilliantly vibrant- we pay attention and offer our admiration, celebrating the next phase of life. We harvest the waning plants of autumn in anticipation of their beauty's natural end, accepting that life falls away. We imbue ourselves with the sacred rites of death, willingly donning the garb of mourners. Of course, every year, the autumn rolls around and the lesson is clear- however, this year feels like my first time actually listening to it. I want to recommend that anyone reading this who is fielding the grief of the season visit a tree (or many trees) showing signs of shedding their leaves. Sit in their presence with open hands, lightly holding a piece of their symbolic death, and feel the depth of their trust; how completely unafraid they are of whatever lies on the other side of transformation.