This is the third out of three check-ins I had scheduled between the new moon in Aquarius, early February, and the new moon in Pisces, early March. In my natal chart, Aquarius is the sign where I have my third house of (among others) daily life and rituals, siblings and close friends and communication. After making an inventory of these themes, I identified what I want to invite into my life and what it is I am prepared to let go of. You can find both these inventories and my list of things to keep, do more of, start, do less of or stop, right here.
Although I made lots of notes and scribbles for this post since the final week of February, it is already mid March now. Checking in was one of the steps I had scheduled to do. I didn’t. So it is important to ask: what did I do instead? What stopped me from keeping my promise to myself?
We ask these questions not to be hard on ourselves, but to understand how we can support ourselves even better in taking the actions we planned. But before we dive into that, let’s look at what did happen and celebrate those successes.
I have – finally – started decluttering the house. There is still lots to do, both there and in my studio, but with ‘home’ coming into focus now (it is a House IV theme) I should be able to make more progress.
Another thing to ‘tick off’ is the starfish on means of communication, which can be found here.
Also scheduled for week 8, the final week of February, was a ‘letting go ritual’. This seemed exactly what was needed as I planned it, but upon closer inspection it was not. I wrote about this in a separate post:
You might identify something you wish to change and give it a name. You translate this something into a small actionable step. And as you are coming closer to the step, the thing you wish to change turns out to be a little more complex than you thought. You even begin to wonder if you described it properly in the first place.
My aim was to feel less confused, sad and sometimes even intimidated when seeing names of people I used to worked with in my digital lists of contacts.
What I needed was not a ritual to let go of them. Exploring the topic more closely, I came to realise I actually had to say goodbye to an industry, a ‘world’ I was once very much in love with. And this required treating it like a relationship that had ended: take distance, practice radical self-care, focus on other things. Writing the post was a very conscious start to doing just that.
Practicing radical self-care did not prove that easy in recent weeks though. For the same reason I did not write this check-in sooner: my focus was on the external rather than my own centre.
One of the most powerful men in the world is waging war on the country on his southern border. He ordered a brutal invasion in the final week of February, which was, and still is, met with extraordinarily heroic resistance. Thousands of innocent people have, however, already been killed and millions are fleeing their homes. As I am writing this post, the capital of the invaded country is under fierce attack. I am closely following this news, and have been for the past two weeks.
It is shocking to experience that the closer to home a disaster takes place, the more we seem to care. This is certainly not the first armed conflict nor the first genocide happening in my lifetime. People are fighting in other parts of the world as we speak. I feel sickeningly privileged to live where I live. I feel guilty for caring more about this war than I have done about any other conflict in the past. But that is what is happening now.
The leader of the invaded country speaks directly to the rest of the world. He is right in saying that they, we, are effectively under attack too. Anything he says is shared widely and instantly. His people are not anonymous. The media show their stories, their names. They themselves use social media to share information and images. Even when not using any socials, you can read their posts on various news blogs. This war is less abstract than others. The chance of this conflict escalating even further and spreading wider is very significant and at this moment it seems unlikely that the agressor will be stopped any time soon.
In one of the House III inventories I mentioned how I had lost the habit of reading newspapers. Little did I know that I would be glued to The Guardian live blog a few weeks later. Turning to my own writing and blog felt absurd. It still does, actually.
For a while it also felt absurd to pick up my work projects. And certainly to worry about deadlines and about the group dynamics hindering the growth of an organisation where I work. But I did and I do.
Many of my current projects involve encouraging people to visit cultural activities. Although most restrictions to slow the spread of the pandemic have been lifted, theatres and cinemas have reopened. Events are allowed to take place again, but people are not flooding to attend shows and films. That will take time. They have just spent two years at home and got used to the slower pace of life. And besides, many people are actually ill or in quarantaine still – the restrictions are gone, but the virus is not.
Multiple clients however, are becoming frustrated. The want to see higher attendance rates, more ticket sales etc. Sensing this tension, my default response is to push on and work harder, hoping this will have an effect. It would be much better though to pause, take a step back and open up the conversation. Making sure that we both know that I am doing the best I can, and that their frustration is not very helpful at all.
In the upcoming blog posts I shall write more about being clear, setting such boundaries and creating pockets of peace. These themes for me are closely connected to the fourth house topics ‘foundations and feeling safe’. I hope and expect that diving deeper into this matter will help me get back to center sooner and not spin out of orbit as much as I have in these past weeks. That, and returning to the daily routines and rituals I have explored last month. Because despite the recent ‘relapse’, I have been making good progress. Before launching into the themes of House IV, I will reflect briefly on this progress in the next post.
My rising sign 