Discomfort.

We’ve entered a place in time where, for many reasons, we can not allow to persist. What I hope to get to in this brief lunation is the location of our discomfort and where the lark of creative strategy may sing. The water we bear is not the world but what is in us that is of the world. We can not bear it all. It is not your fault and it isn’t mine. It is a responsibility. The responsibility to make imprecise attempts at describing real things. Things we all believe to be real.

To me, art is the closest attempt at finding this real thing, this reality. Art gathers all of our faculties, whether creating or witnessing, and compels us to connect, to study, and even to reveal something we’ve never known. It can connect us to that loose thread of truth. It is a powerful attempt to convey or understand a message that one couldn’t possibly say or hear without art’s powerful presence. Venus elicits these urges to put forth your lonesome experience and to connect with another alienated body. Not so that they may be understood, but so that misunderstanding can be seen and recognized as strange or familiar. So they (the art, witness, and creator) can be simultaneously marvelous and uncertain and real. Venus in Pisces tells me we could do this together. Collective creativity is possible. Faced with so many different and urgent dangers we need to be as creative as possible.

Freedom is another imprecise word. Many have never experienced this thing, freedom, so the existence of it is dubius. It is a feeling, a location, a thing to get – the struggle for which is universal. The aquarius new moon is here, I believe, to help us bear the unsettling burden of just how far we are from safety and how it may bring us closer to understanding this word, freedom.  

Freedom in the United States is often associated with the frontier, a new expanse of space, uncharted, rugged, and alone. As we know now in this 21st century, that ‘frontier’ was already occupied, so then, a frontier (and possibly the western idea of freedom) becomes a colonial, conquering thing. With this as our heritage in the western world it is important to frame freedom in a way that is not at any one person’s expense. So, in asking what will we do, we also should ask, what will we never ever do. Saturn brings the rules for this game. It’s residence in Sagittarius makes rule number one – dedicate yourself to learning more. Define your discipline around understanding and applying the information you are receiving, whether it be through books, teachers, or mistakes. It is wildly important, in creating solutions for oppressive systems, to try our very best to not replicate or invest in the very thing we are trying to fight.

The square of Saturn and Venus is an irreconcilable conflict. To make art often requires a disregard of the rules. Creativity cannot live confined to old ways. Yet Saturn makes us aware of the problem of unyielding ignorance. The best advice I can offer here is to know that in both circumstances, in both study and creation, there is a point where you must let it go. For art, for homes, and our children, for time, and money, it is only useful when we can let it go. None of it is only ours. It is a risk, bringing anything into the day and night of existence, and at some point we are all called to do so, and when you do choose to take up your vocation, you must bring it to the world in all of its brutality and wisdom. Maybe in this connection of the art, the witness, the maker, regardless of whether or not it is actually collaborative or fair or nice, we can experience a small moment of finding a part of ourselves that may be in fact a part of who we all are.