Love Songs at the End of the World: The First

My brain only wanted silence this morning. At the edge of my hearing, I could hear mama ocean roaring.

I had a session with a spirit worker recently to help me stitch together more pieces of my ancestry. To help me understand more ways to facilitate healing for the lineages woven through me. Rattled by diaspora. Genocide. Conquest. Soul loss. More.

Ancestor work has been a lifeline since October 7. Framing it as witch work and a sacred responsibility has felt like one of the only/most important things I can do not only to help bring forward healing, but to help me feel at least a little bit less helpless. I no longer feel like it is my job to get lost in their pain. It is my job to get them out of it when and where I can. Because I can.

(I recently offered an ancestor some feta. I’d made a group of my west asian ancestors a whole meal that did not involve cheese of any kind. But the message came through loud and clear, and so I placed a hunk on the table. I could feel her deep satisfaction mixed with her utter, soul level exhaustion.)

In the session, bodies of water were speaking and guiding everywhere we went. A river in Russia. A bay in Lithuania. A coastline in Poland. We were tracing migratory patterns and everywhere we went the waters became focal points.

She said, “I always like to tell people that I consider the waters to be ancestors.” I laughed softly and said, “I do, too.” I felt a pang of sadness that not everyone relates in that way alongside a surge of gratitude that this sacred-to-me way of knowing was shared by someone who was so intimately plunging into my depths.

Saturn and Mercury were both burned clear by the Sun in back to back Pisces incubations this week. The dreamtime is roaring as loudly as the half-mile-away ocean, undulating in giant swells of grey.

In one dream, I walked through a kiva -- a place used by the Pueblo and Hopi people for rites and rituals. It was painted white, and I fell to my knees to wail and grieve, looking to others who I thought would surely join. But they just kept going about their business.

We had a kiva at the center of my elementary school. It was made of brown brick. I had my first kiss there. Or was it my first break up? I still remember the words to the school song:

With the spirit of Sunrise

and a little bit of try

you can conquer the mountains
you can reach the sky...

To have a pileup of planets in the Piscean abyss begs the question Saturn has been commanding us to occupy for the last year: how do we live with grief on a day to day basis? How do we contain it? Not contain as in repress, but contain as in create a vestibule, a sacred ritual, a vessel that can hold the torrents that must arise, protrude, gobble up all the air, water, earth and sky so that it can be purified and we can move forward?

I return to an awareness I’ve had for years but misplaced... grief is a technology. A blessing. Within its coding, necessary ripples and textures. Catharsis. Adrift and feeling fallow. Then rage. Emptiness. Love. Joy.

I increasingly worry about the ability of a secular society to grapple with - let alone find ways forward in - the sobering realities of multiple collapsing systems. Anesthetizing ourselves or hunkering down into pathology and prescription drugs isn’t working.

Secular: not concerned with religious or spiritual matters.

At the same time, I am lifted and comforted and brought to life by so very many people magnetizing towards animism. Land-based witchcraft. Indigenous ways of knowing. Decolonial takes on astrology and tarot. Pleasure activism.

Our grief is political. Human. So soberingly sane, even as it feels like the opposite.

In a recent conversation with a friend we were discussing my urge to move to the woods. Not that it’s a new urge. it just feels different now. More pressing. Desperate. Clear.

My friend commented that they’d also sometimes had that thought. That society seemed to be breaking down, and it might be better to get out before the real chaos began.

I had to clarify: I am not trying to escape potential breakdown in a “get out before shit hits the fan” kind of way. My urge to leave has to do with the enormity of the grief I feel over living in a society where passive acceptance -- or flat out denial -- of genocide is the norm. Where I can see so clearly the enormity of what it means to need to undo thousands of years of oppressive system-building. Where I am othered because my desire to care for my immune system -- and my body’s ability to demand I prioritize it in very specific ways -- at this point mean I can’t do the things that other people are. At least not safely.

Because I don’t know how much longer my system can take the violence of living within this system. Because I don’t know if I can care for myself the way I need to in my current environment. Because I cannot stop myself from feeling the weight of every ethical conundrum capitalism tries to shred my humanity with.

I know I am not alone in grappling with any of this.

A few summers ago, something shifted in my journeys to the woods during the summer for long weekends spent camping. I began to hear and feel the emotional landscapes of the places I would visit.

A forest of burned trees in one area shrieking with grief. Another palpably bracing itself for further destruction. All of them evoking this intense desire within me -- to protect them. To witness and hold space for their grief. Rage. Frantic attempts at survival. I feel something similar now, helplessly tuning in as humans are being massacred. Some days I feel witnessing as sacred and holy obligation, fortifying the cry within me to hold onto my humanity at all costs.

But then, in the woods, the calm, soothing of the waters running though rivers. Constant. Ancient. Steady.

What does it mean to live with chronic grief? A keyword combo for Saturn in Pisces if ever I heard one. Four years since a pandemic began with its cascades of trauma. The emotional impacts seem even more unlikely to be dealt with than the stark reality that Covid is quite literally causing hearts to shut down. Vascular systems and organs to give up the ghost.

I get it. It’s a lot.

In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas says that Saturn-Neptune periods -- which we are definitely in -- are marked by a profound melancholy and pervasive psychic unrest. A darkening of the collective consciousness. Sometimes a diffuse and difficult to diagnose social malaise. Other times in direct response to “deeply discouraging or tragic events”.

And so, as always with astrology, I lean towards the positive potentials, stirring them into my coffee as a prayer. Whispering to the land about it. Asking my students to dedicate everything they do to the healing of the world.

Because the potentials here include the forging of deeper faith in the face of harsh realities. The recognition of spirt in matter. Foundations of a new hope. One that will be -- and has been, for many of us -- active, fierce and persistent.

Amanda is a queer astrologer who is very into relational, evolutionary and psychological astrologies. Sometimes she also writes about the world and her place in it. You can support her ability to do this work through Patreon or by booking a session.