i was lying on the floor thinking about this ram das quote, contemplating death and the role she's played in my arriving to the relief that i find myself now accessing and returning to in the majority of moments that make up most of my days lately.
i rolled over to take this picture to accompany these words, which attempt to capture this moment and these contemplations.
“death is not an error, or a failure,” ram das said. “it is like taking off a tight shoe.” what a saturn (death) in pisces (feet) mood.
and what i’m in process with right now, what may or may not flow out of me over the meandering sentences to come, but what i feel so precisely in this moment, tastes very particularly saturn in pisces opening sextile to my natal saturn in capricorn.
so: shoutout to my fellow saturn in caps. let me know if this hits, and what you have to add. this ingress, albeit not the start or the end to our saturn return, is really big for us, too. the opening sextile is the first contact point between transiting & natal saturn since the death of our naivity at the return. we’re enough removed from that death now that there is room to breathe a bit. room to tend to what is growing. room to relax into these limitations we have been reckoning with for the last ~7 years, and to begin to make direct contact with the life that has been budding amidst our death processes.
saturn in pisces keeps coming up for me as “the hard work of surrender.” but it’s not actually the surrender that’s hard. it’s not actually dying that’s hard. it’s the attempts to hold onto life where life no longer will flow, that are Hard. death herself is relief.
lying on the floor at sunset in my special little shores-y spot in the house, i’m allowing myself to be taken over by this wave of release. taking a moment to really register the relief of having taken off so many extremely tight pairs of shoes that i’d been wearing for so long; the suffocating layers of conditioning around responsibility, obligation, security. the poorly fitting “protection” of meeting (what i perceived to be) others’ expectations of me so that i could feel loved, worthy, belonging. so that i might avoid disappointing these mirrors to my own self acceptance or self denial.
[okay, lean into the cheesy* metaphor with me]
*profound in it's simplicity coming from ram das. cheesy af in my elaborating
i needed all those shoes once. they did bring comfort, support, protection. but then they got worn. and you know how when shoes get worn, it starts to hurt to walk in them? and how when you’re feet are in poor shape, putting any weight on them at all, not to mention tasking them with holding and moving your entire being, is just entirely excruciating?
(a moment of gratitude for the pisces parts of ourselves and the pisces people who are the metaphorical feet that ~unfortunately often thanklessly~ carry the weight of the entirety of our collective being.
in this moment i am thinking particularly about two pisces luminaries dear to me; pisces moon @thedreammami who has been sharing about pisces-generosity as of late and whose magic i am daily watching create ripples in the fabric of a co-dreamed reality; and of pisces sun, @meljplank, my long time living guardian angel, who carries so much energetically for all of her people, always, and whose presence i truly could not even fathom my life without.)
that excruciating pain of wearing shoes that are worn all the way tf down - that’s what my saturn return felt like. and by extension the saturn aversion in the years that followed i suppose felt like the recovery period from having totally fucked up my “feet.”
everything is a process, saturn is always somewhere, growth / healing / deconditioning is a spiral, blah blah yeah yeah - i recognize and soap box about these things relentlessly.
and also -
i feel an asbolute, profound, sense of relief right now. a sense of arrival. i feel free. i feel a sense of finality that is also perpetuity.
i don’t feel like my struggle with death(s) is complete, of course not. but - i feel like i’ve grown into a greater awareness of and a truer comfort with the extent to which all of life is a series of deaths. and i’ve now watched myself move through some painful, challenging deaths, with and without resistance, with and without grace, at times in faith and at times in bitterness, and i’ve seen how regardless, my spirit always resurrects.