The maples are turning the hills a dark rose with their new buds as I gather my traveling things and my traveling selves together to leave for some work and summer travels. I realize I will miss my favorite season, early spring, since it hasn't yet come to Vermont and where I am going it has already happened. I will miss that early new green, but I did hear the peepers tonight - a first chorus on my last night here for a little while. Sigh - it's hard to leave. It will feel like a leap in time, and it will be, to another continent, traveling on.

Learning With Saturn

Lately I'm learning with Saturn. His slow, plodding time has been mine. I twisted my ankle again, I've had to really feel my feet. I'm acknowledging the benefits of limitation for soul growth and practicing patience. I haven't been achieving much of anything. On the contrary, though I feel it to be a fertile, healing inner time, I seem to be outwardly blocked. This makes people worry. I haven't found a stable job yet. I'm not really making money. I'm transitioning, in between, I tell adults at parties. I feel for them feeling for me, but I also realize something. I don't want to fill my time and be busy. I don't want to make money. I don't want to make my value dependent on a system I don't believe in. I can of course do this because I'm privileged and was able to move back in with my parents and take the time to look within. To other people it looks like failure and seems unbearable. I get pity or advice or some form of frustration. Sometimes I feel these things too. That's one side of Saturn. But on the other, he winks at me, and I like not using up too much space, not having a car, not creating new humans. I like living in a house that's already lived in and getting rides to places, working for trade, sharing my gifts. It's a kind of ecological contract with myself where I feel okay because I'm using up a little less of the Earth's resources than I might. I want to give back. It feels like one step closer to the gift culture of the natural world that Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about in her book Braiding Sweet Grass. It's how the plants and the animals give to me. It's the least I can do. I'm having trouble even envisioning how I'd charge anyone for the essences I've made and want to share. It's a real problem for me, imagining a business, becoming successful, making my time be worth money. I'll let you know how I get on with it. Is it just me being the typical self-deprecating female and not seeing what I'm worth? It's tricky. I'd rather like to think it's me wanting to step outside of that whole triangle of time, money, work.

How I Can Stand In The Still Middle

But it seems to still be our planet's burden at the moment. I'm not the only one thinking about it. Just as I was thinking up this post, emergence magazine (go play on their website! - explore time for an oak tree!) posted their issue number one all about time, with an article by Paul Kingsnorth about the myth of progress which features my favorite Walter Benjamin quote on that forsaken Angel we all believe in despite ourselves, that blind Angel being swept backwards by the winds of time: how very Saturnine. And here we are all slaves to time, yet Saturn seems to be showing me, not how wrong I am for not bowing down to him, but rather how the system turns around itself and how I can stand in the still middle and see it all moving around outside of me. I can take the time to wonder where it is I will fit in, or even if I want to. No, I still don't. We wrestle some more, playfully.

Outside The Outside

And I see that I've been looking for approval from the patriarchal Sky Gods, as Chameli Ardagh calls them, and that I won't get that approval, in the form of a publication, a job, some sort of validation, because what I'm doing doesn't fit into the model that is their dominion. I'm outside the outside, so to speak, or inside the in. Either way, I'm most invisible, and must continue on my way alone. At least I'm learning how to make friends with Saturn.

(Originally posted April 27, 2018)