My literal "river of life," Six Mile Creek, in Ithaca NY
It will not surprise anybody living in the United States that the month of November is marked by a handful of powerful oppositions—moments when two planets are standing across the ecliptic from one another, deadlocked. And honestly, the first thing you should do upon reading this if you’re a U.S. citizen is cast a meaningful vote. Vote for the candidate who doesn’t want to turn the military on its own citizens. Cast a vote that protects the lives of women, people of color, and immigrants. Vote to heal the legacy of slavery and genocide that we are living with right here at home, and stop what feels right now like an inevitable slide into dictatorship. You might also consider helping others vote in your local community, giving some money to a campaign, knocking some doors, or making some calls. If you are not a U.S. citizen, I think it’s helpful to send us some love and strength because we are going through a time. And then, once that real world action has been taken care of, we can focus on the nature of oppositions, and what it means that we are entering an oppositional time, and an option for working with it.
Oppositions are difficult precisely because they don’t create any resolution all by themselves. Rather, they just sit there and make you look at a problem or situation until you can perceive it as it is. This of course, can be quite a helpful thing to do, but we are not very good at it. Humans tend not to see the world as it is. We are much better at seeing the world as we are, and we are even better at turning the world around us into what we think we see. Who doesn’t have (or more to the point… who hasn’t been) that friend who keeps making the thing they fear the most happen all around them, everywhere they go? Who doesn’t have a pernicious story in their head that they keep cherry-picking reality to confirm? This human tendency to perceive the world through the funhouse mirrors of our own stories gets massively amplified by the algorithmic life we lead. It is harder and harder to encounter, much less sit calmly with, difference, as it is, without blaming, pathologizing, judging, or problem solving. And sit we must! Acknowledge we must! Love we must! Even what we hate! Whether you are a U.S. citizen who is a fan of democracy and is therefore experiencing November as a collective event, or you are sitting primarily with opposition in your personal life, the invitation in oppositional times is to admit that you have a perspective, stop projecting it, and start listening and seeking to understand other perspectives.
In astrology, every aspect, or relationship between two planets, means something specific. My own chart has a couple of defining oppositions, and after more than 50 years of living and studying them, I can say that the opposition symbolizes sin. By this, I don’t mean sin as in “you did something bad, now god is angry, and you need to be punished.” Not at all! By sin, I mean the way life can feel that way, even though god probably isn't the kind of entity that gets angry, and definitely has no need to punish you. I mean the self-punishing illusion that you are separate, alone, particularly unlovable or unworthy, or perhaps you can only experience this as a feeling of being extra worthy and better than everybody else. By sin, I mean that feeling that you are about to be cast out because what you did is uniquely wrong and bad. I experience this feeling
All
The
Time
And in these moments, I am forgetting that I am fundamentally interconnected to all of creation, and that this interconnection includes the people in my life. When I forget that I am being helped and held, it feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders alone. In my experience anyway, when you have sinned, or forgotten that you are in community with others, the impulse is to punish and push further away, but that’s the opposite of what makes it better. What you need to do is to get back into relationship. Stop making it all about you standing naked and sopping wet on the riverbank all by yourself, and jump back into the river of life! Again… easy to say, harder to do, especially if you have some oppositional energy in preinstalled in your natal chart. But jumping back in to the river of life is good advice whenever oppositions abound, and it is especially good advice in November. This month, the oppositions will be particularly nasty, particularly around the beginning of the month. And, because the universe may not give you what you want but it really does tend to give what you need… there will be abundant help. The nasty standoffs of the month will happen in the context of ease and flow. This might show up in your life as seeing an opposition through to the point of real mutual understanding, or abundant flow of useful information, or little voices in your head or in your life creation saying, or even singing, “It’s okay. Join us. Get back in the river."
So, at the risk of triggering some and sounding extremely corny to others, I want to put a song in your head this month. When you feel alone, misunderstood, threatened, singularly oppressed or, frankly, fucked this month, I want you to think of the song Down To The River To Pray, I like Alison Krauss version for this purpose. The words are easy. They are really just repeated requests to come together
Come sinners, let’s go down
Let’s go down
Come on down
Come on sinners let’s go down
Down to the river to pray
Now, just reading these words on a page can ignite judgement and separation. Who, after all, is she calling a sinner!? I love this song, and I love god, and I don’t define sin as a judgment. But I have religion wounds, so I easily slide into reading these words with anger and division in my heart. If this is you, or if something else like that comes up, notice it. And notice it’s yours. Then notice that the only thing that is happening in the song is she’s calling everybody together. Notice that the sinners are getting the same loving treatment as the sisters, and the brothers, and the mothers, and the fathers. Notice that they are all going to the river. Then notice that singing these words feels different than reading or saying them. Let the repetition and the rhythm of the song ring in your body. Then turn to the situation you are feeling oppositional about and see if you can take a step back. Go down to the metaphorical river yourself, wherever that is in your life. Maybe for you going to the river is stepping away from social media and doing some canvassing instead. Maybe it’s remembering that you love your husband or wife and know that they have good intentions, and you can work it out. Ask your sisters and your brothers to join you. Ask the mothers and the fathers. Ask the sinners, knowing that you are a sinner yourself, and that this does not mean that you need to be punished. In fact, the opposite! Nobody is ever really punished for their sins. But we are all punished by sin. It always hurts to forget that we are all in this together.
Note:
This month's writing leans heavily on work Richard Rohr has done understanding the nondual, paradoxical nature of Saint Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament in a way that often holds contradictions without reconciling them... and is therefore totally cherry picked and misunderstood. If you want to go deeper on Paul, or this definition of sin as self-imposed suffering rather than vengance, check out his series of lectures, Great Themes of Paul, Life As Participation
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