Virgo Season Comedown: Interdependence, Disability, and Ecology

If you're still trying to hold yourself (and others) to pre-2020 standards, please don’t. Yes, some of us have even enjoyed some of the social shifts that have happened since then, but none of us are truly okay.

Virgo season is coming, and with Sun in Leo, Mercury in Virgo, and Venus in Libra, this is a moment of integration, looking to where we must re-center, and where we might reorient.

We talk about relationship as a foundational spiritual tenet, and it is, but I think part of what gets missed in the attempt to (re)integrate it into the sacred-obsessed western spiritualities is that relationship is often expressed most in the mundane. 

Interdependence doesn't have to be some deep fancy special different thing, despite its challenges to the tyranny of individualism. It's moving your hand two inches on the subway car handle bar to make room for someone else to hold it.

Interdependence is that awkward laugh you share when you pass someone on the sidewalk and can't figure out which side to pass on. That still happens now, but instead of a simple moment of connection and joyous intimacy, it becomes fraught with distance and fear.

A relation of fear with someone else is intimate. We become tethered to each other. Violence is intimate, even between strangers. Those who live in high population density centres, especially during the pandemic, know this. 

The increase of fear-based relations since Saturn-Pluto means even more of our social fabric is woven with these scratchy threads. How do we cultivate interdependence as medicine for the histories and realities of structural violence when the opportunities to relate are so much more rare?

In my abandoned academic MA thesis (I wrote a poem instead), I theorized about the violence of “containment,” and how it is enforced, challenged, iterated and reiterated:

I want to expand the language of captivity to talk about the violence of containment, the closing off of access to the space-between, the space which signifies open access to social relation and ethical transformation.

The violence of containment – an endless array of biopolitical controls such as captivity, denial, incarceration, isolation, segregation, exclusion – is performed most often on affective communities of persons of colour, Black, Indigenous, trans, disabled, bodies who resist, by their very embodiment, the powers of imperialism, colonialism, and capital.

That space-between is charged with affect. If you weren't in grad school in the mid 2010s (bless you), I'll just say that where an emotion may sit in the psychological, an affect is distinctly physiological. I will forever always be preoccupied with Eve Sedgwick’s articulation of “bad affects,” as I believe anyone who deals in shadow work, inner child, and ancestral healing with related projects of anti-racist, anti-supremacicst, anti-speciesist undoing, is also, whether they know it or not. 

The ability to sit with and turn toward bad affects, particularly shame, humiliation, paranoia, is essential to this work, especially for white folks untangling supremacy in their lineages and their relationships, challenging perfectionism, hypervigilance, and ego-pride. 

Margaret Price uses the term “bodymind” to challenge mind/body separation and give credence to the importance of affect as a socially relevant consideration. She defines bodymind as “a socio-politically constituted and material entity that emerges through both structural (power- and violence-laden) contexts and also individual (specific) experience.” 

Jason Holley says this beautiful thing about our Moon signs. How the moon is literally full of craters from bumping into things, and things slamming into it. Our Moons are similar. When we meet someone else, it’s a process of our own cratered, bumpy, edgy Moons trying to fit together. That’s why it’s hard. That’s why we hurt each other. That’s why we carry with us little pieces of every other we contact, whether in the form of their presence, what pieces we carry forward, or their absence, the craters they leave.

When I speak of relational astrology, this is what I mean. When we sit our bodyminds across from each other, with the field of whatever it is between us, we are both the force and aftermath of impact. 

In indie role-playing-game world, there's a mechanic called "I-Will-Not-Abandon-You." In an IWNAY game, players consciously agree to not leave the game, no matter where the story goes. It's a controversial way to play, and takes a lot of trust. Kink culture has developed incredible and elaborate strategies for and approaches to consent. Both of these communities hold space for the impacts between us, in ways that connect rather than contain. This is also why RPGs and kink can be spaces that support trauma healing.

We hear a lot of talk about vibes because we have no other word for the transmission of affect that is foundational of being alive, that challenges containment. Even “energy,” ubiquitous in even mundane conversation, we don’t even know what that means. We don’t have to, I don’t think (see Althaea’s new book A Witch’s Guide to Spellcraft for a brilliant discussion of this), to acknowledge that impacts of relating are not just physical. 

The fact that the English language, and many contemporary materialist societies more generally, lack the metaphysics to discern and discuss more nebulous impacts, such as why shame breeds shame, why paranoia spreads, why we feel humiliated for someone humiliated. We also lack so much necessary to understand and speak to and about trauma, especially complex trauma.

Complex trauma is a term borrowed from the psy professions, as defined by Judith Herman, designated for trauma that is not event-based, but long term, such as the trauma of captivity. Complex trauma is a function of the violence of containment, and most often, this violence is structural. Complex trauma is the violence inflicted by a dominant person or institution onto those who have less power. Complex trauma, such as that experienced by those caught within structures of discipline and biopolitical control, is the consistent purveyance of violence by dominating and exploitative forces of state and capital.

If you haven’t recognized already this time as one of mass collective trauma, I want you to take this seriously. 

Those who have access to adequate resources, whether financial or health-related (usually both), to risk going out for food, movies, travel, to festivals, of course they’re not the ones who will bear the greatest brunt of the long-term effects of this pandemic. This is how structural inequity works, one thing after another.

Those who already experience the violence of containment by structural forces are now being denied basic social relation, the impacts of one another, our Moons’ craters filling themselves with wandering space dust. Some of this ends up being protective and even positive, but most of this disconnection is reinforcing the worst of cultures built on disconnection and individualism.

Don’t get me wrong. I am pro harm reduction measures.

Like those most responsible for climate change who will inevitably be the least impacted for the longest (although not forever), those supporting the mutations of the virus (who survive) will most likely carry less trauma from this time of containment. 

I don’t have any answers. I only know we have to slow down. We have to think about time, achievement, ambition, differently. We can't hold ourselves (and others) to pre-2020 standards.

The current reality isn’t fair, of course it isn’t. Yes, like many previous generations, we should be able to have dreams and goals and work toward accomplishing them. Yes, we should be able to make plans. Yes, we should be able to look to the medium-term future with some level of certainty. 

But we can’t, not in the same way.

I wrote a while back about the shift to the new age of air and how astrology was particularly suited to help us shift how we have to plan. I hold close Austin Coppock’s analogy that the map itself hasn’t changed, but the entire system of mapping must. 

Instead of the topography of a river valley and altitude of mountains, we must look to wind direction, speed, humidity, pressure. Floods used to be our most significant threat. Now we’re onto fires. 

In this shift from earth to air and water to fire, what if, instead of any number of material circumstances, a desired affect was the goal? What if ease, peace, excitement, joy, the ones that are felt in the body, the ones that are felt with our entire erotic soul, what if they were the accomplishments we could work toward? 

With so much less grounded in-person interaction, our relationships are much more mediated by affect, energy, "vibes," more air and fire than earth and water. 

Etymologically speaking, from the Ancient Greek, ecology is to economy as astrology is to astronomy. 

Eco as Oikos, home or household. Astro as astron, star. 

Nomos as arranging or managing. Logos as studying or accounting for. 

Etymologically and practically, astrology is older than astronomy (because they used to be the same).

Might then, at least practically (if not etymologically) ecology be older than economy? (Because they used to be the same.) 

Ecology, as the study of relations, as a scientific field is actually very new. The term only coined in the late 1800s, it became recognizable as the field of biological study of relationships in the early 1900s, and popularized as we know it now, alongside “environmentalism,” in the 1960s. 

I often think of astrology in terms of ecology, where we are studying the relationships between these celestial figures, ourselves, and the world around us, all in a complex web of adaptations, evolutions, impacts.

Much of my ability to think cyclically, astrologically and psychologically, comes from studying environmental history, with its practices of thinking in deep time, glacier time, geologic time, thinking at the levels of species, biome, ecosystem.

I hear so much fear when anyone speaks about the future. The intimacy of that, the way it takes us so desperately out of the present, it’s heartbreaking. And that fear is one that connects us deeply to each other. 

Is it possible to activate our connections with each other with time as explicitly acknowledged what is shared between us, like affect, energy, vibes? If so, isn't astrology the perfect language and mediator?

In my class on Venus cycles this week for NovaaNet, I spoke of how astrology as a way to connect to each other and our world is a Venusian practice of unification, relation, connection.

What if time is now the main force that connects us, and we have to get creative in how we approach it, consider it, manage it? What if we take an ecological approach with time as an actor, as many actors? What if we understand our relationship with time as that between us and a tool, rather than a weapon that is used against us?

We are in a complex relationship with time. Astrology is a way of understanding and organizing that relationship. We need it now more than ever.

I spoke about living cycles and our relationship with time for Fresh Voices in Astrology’s Summit. “Living Astrologically: Cycles, Phases, and Hours” is based on my client and autotheoretical work in incorporating astrology into healing work, personal and ancestral. 

Whenever we go through a personal transit, we are moving with the collective. Living in a time when the collective cycles hit everyone close to home connects us to each other in ways never before possible. Western ideas of relationship, embodiment, identity, and healing are changing to adapt to a planet (and species) in crisis. In turn, this demands more gentle and non-linear approaches to grief, death, trauma, and time.

The complexity of astrological cycles can be overwhelming, but there is a grounding simplicity once we get deeper. Join me in an exploration of planetary cycles, phases, and hours, with Saturn, the Moon, and an appearance of Jupiter in Pisces, to understand how we might work with time as a tool and why it matters for our worlds.

“Virgo Season Comedown” was originally posted on my Patreon,

where you can find more of my writing, research, and engagement opportunities.

References:

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Judith L. Herman. 

"Where do we go from here?" post from December 2020 https://www.patreon.com/posts/45145593

"Who will you bring with you?" post from December 2020 https://www.patreon.com/posts/45434242