|
An old colleague reached out to me last week. Listening to her voice notes, I recalled the density and weight of lockdowns weighing heavily on each of us, when we were both working with women experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. Years later I find out the major astrological significance of 2020, a year the world was irrevocably altered. When I was living through it, I felt a constant pressure and burden, the seemingly inescapable feeling of powerlessness confronting the immensity of suffering, of my own and others. It was the final year of my Saturn's return. Saturn was approaching my Moon. On the days we were at the office together, we made a pact to walk up and down the street during our 15 minute breaks. We gathered whoever else was in the office, convinced them to bring their cups of tea to go smell the roses. I don't remember the conversations we shared, but I remembered how we would walk 1.5 metres apart, stop at every second house with pretty flowers, point and name the herbs along the fences, and say hello to any oldies in their garden. At the end of the street there was a pomegranate tree hanging over the fence with pomegranates yet to be ripened. We would debate when they would finally be ripe enough to pick. We dressed up the ugly office with daisies instead and made herbal tea with foraged lavender and rosemary. Yet we would return week after week to check on the pomegranates, our attraction to the smooth skin strong, our desire to taste the sweet juicy seeds stronger. We didn't stay in close contact when I left the job months later, but whenever I think of her, I recall her enthusiasm, passion and utter delight she brought to noticing the little beauties we found along that single street on our weekly walks, before we dove back into the intensity of our work, the contrast stark and abrupt. The same street, up and down. Again and again, day after day. Still, the little moments of connection and beauty lingered, carrying me through those dismal days. 𓇢𓆸 There is a particular way in which the current of life sometimes feel outside of our grasp, overwhelmingly outside our control. When we are really in the muck, a moment of reprieve often feels like it is not enough to overcome the weight of fear wielded to make us lose touch with our center. And as I am write to you six years from 2020, I can see how the slow accumulation of choosing bloom over doom has grown into a lush forest I cannot tame but am replenished by, even when fumbling in the dark, even when the path forward feels wobbly and uncomfortable. I didn't know then how the power of paying attention to the most minuscule of life-affirming moments - even if the temporary relief didn’t wipe away all your pain - expands the living archive in your body to lean on through hard times. 𓇢𓆸 2020 was also the year I became in touch with pleasure as in sensing into what pleased my senses. Pleasure as an erotic healing force, pleasure as the antidote to the internal suffering that became palpably loud within myself. Even amidst overwhelming stress, I could still sense my quiet desire for the ripening pomegranates. When I began opening to the sensory pleasures of the moment, nothing in my external reality changed overnight. I continued rocking up to work, continued witnessing the impacts of violence and what happens when a society neglects the fundamental needs of those marginalised by the center. I started to get intimate with what I did not want, and honest with what I might desire for myself and my life instead. The answers did not arrive by pigeon delivery, but through a steady stream of inquiry into my desires, values and choices.
|
