The Chariot: June 21 – July 22

Content Warning: concentration camps; childhood sexual abuse

I find astrology absolutely fascinating. I have been trying to learn more about my chart and the ways the stars influence our bodies here on Earth for what feels like forever, but for some reason everything astrological has gone in one ear and out the other. I can manage to remember my sun sign (Scorpio), and my rising (Libra), and my moon (Gemini??), and I have a very basic and general sense of what each of those things mean, but really my understanding ends right there. I understand about as much about astrology as I understand about how “The Cloud” works – enough to get by at brunch, I suppose, but not enough for it to be truly helpful or meaningful in my day to day life.

As I get deeper into my study of the Tarot, I am learning about the connections between the cards and many other systems of meaning-making, including astrology. I have been referencing a book by T. Susan Chang called Tarot Correspondences, which catalogs the various ways the 78 cards of the Tarot deck (I’m referring to the Smith-Rider-Waite deck here, and any that have been created in its likeness) correspond to other spiritual structures and teachings. Each of the 22 Major Arcana (“Big Mysteries”) cards corresponds to a sign or a planet, and therefore each of those cards can be said to have a “season”. Cancer season, June 21-July 22, corresponds to the seventh card in the Major Arcana – The Chariot.

When The Chariot comes up in a reading, the first thing I think about is a reading on this card from Lindsay Mack’s course Tarot for the Wild Soul. My paraphrase and spin: We have built a really excellent Chariot for ourselves. This trusty vehicle has taken us this far. It has protected us and helped us feel safe and made it possible for us to reach this point in our shared experience. Now, there is a choice to be made. If we intend to keep moving forward, our Chariot cannot come with us. While this vehicle has worked well for us up to this point, the terrain ahead demands something different. Our choice is to abandon our Chariot here and move forward, trusting that we will be able to build a new vehicle for our new circumstances, just as we did with this Chariot, or we might stay put. There is change coming on the horizon – it feels like big change, and it feels like it’s already begun. We can either bet on our Chariot, that it will protect us and try to stay right here, stick it out and weather whatever storm might be headed this way, or we can get a move on now, away from the storm AND the protection of the Chariot, in search of a safer, better place.

I believe our collective Chariot is capitalism. It is empire. It is the structure of wage labor and exploited bodies and stolen land and thrown-away lives. It is the prioritization of borders and nations over life, love, and dignity. It is profit over compassion. I do not believe our collective Chariot will protect us or get us through the storm gathering and rolling swiftly toward us.

The political campaigns are ramping up and we are all pawns, as we always have been. Our bright and loving ancestors, who live within our very DNA and hold valuable information for us, can support us as we grow into the future, the way a tree can grow through concrete. It is essential that we not be drawn into the lies that will be fed to us. It is essential that we open ourselves to the Truth that cuts us right to the bone, and trust that the feelings we have when we get there – the rage, the overwhelming despair, the heartbreak of feeling the betrayal of the generations that came before us, of our fellow living humans, and the grief over the loss of so much life on our planet, in our backyards – we are being invited to trust that those feelings will propel us into the kinds of actions necessary to heal our individual and collective wounds and bring us back into Right Relationship. Those calling the immigrant detention centers throughout the US right now concentration camps are correct. The comparisons are correct – that there are no gas chambers or mass graves (yet) means they are not death camps, which is what the Nazi concentration camps eventually became, and what most people I know would call a “concentration camp”. The Nazi camps were both concentration camps and death camps; the ones here in the US in 2019 are concentration camps. So far.

It is reasonable to want to resist this reality. When I turn to face it, it makes me feel powerless, nauseous, angry, guilty, ashamed, disgusted, frustrated, defensive. It makes me feel like I have personally failed my people, my friends and my beloveds whose families and children are more directly impacted by the images of the horrid conditions in those camps – an extremely effective and terrifying warning sign about the dangers of being brown and visible, of speaking a language other than English, of daring to care enough for your own or your children’s well-being to risk a long and arduous journey into such a dangerous land as this. It is reasonable to want to say – NO. It can’t be. It isn’t happening because it isn’t possible that it could be happening. It isn’t happening because there isn’t anything I can do about it anyway.

As I write this, I am having a flashback to a time when my father forced my mother to witness him sexually assaulting me. I was a very small child. My mother dissociated. Her eyes were completely blank though she stared directly at me. I learned this trick, too. I learned how to keep my eyes wide open and pointing directly ahead of me, yet see nothing at all but whatever images my brain decided to entertain my third eye with as my body and power were completely taken away from me. I am wondering if we are all collectively dissociating from the painful reality of feeling powerless against a government that is repeating atrocities it purports to work to liberate other nations from.

My mother has been subject to severe abuse throughout her life and it has made her unaware of her power, but that doesn’t mean it has stripped her of her power. I have not been stripped of my power. I have the power to turn away from what harms me and to build something new that will sustain me.

WE have the power to turn away from what harms us and to build something new that will sustain us. We are going to need to learn how to do this work – we haven’t figured that out yet. I believe – and feel validated and confirmed yet again by adrienne maree brown’s ideas in Emergent Strategy regarding fractals and scaling up – that we can start by rediscovering and reclaiming our power in our individual/personal lives. We can start by looking at our personal Chariots, at our challenges, and begin bringing into consciousness the new and different ways we can approach the same old problems that keep recurring in our lives. By engaging in this work on an individual level, we will learn the skills necessary to abandon and rebuild our collective, shared Chariot.

If you aren’t already involved in a movement or organization working to shift the direction our political leaders are taking us, I am asking you to take time to consider why that might be. What fears or worries or conditions are preventing you from taking action? I believe it is important to come to this kind of work from a place of self-determination and self-love and self-healing, because our liberation is tightly bound up together, and our power really only extends as far as our own skin. We must take responsibility for ourselves and our healing, so that we can learn the skills necessary to scale up and heal our wider world.

It is important that we do our work as individuals, and that we look to our communities for guidance and support. When I say “communities”, I mean the communities of the living, the once living, and the plant and animal realms as much as I mean any community centered around an identity, or a neighborhood, or for any other reason. It is important that we look to our therapists, our trusted and loving spiritual guides and elders, and our closest beloveds for advice and counsel, but it is essential that the decisions we make about how to move forward come from our internal sense of what is correct, what is moral, what is aligned with our soul’s highest purpose.

I warmly welcome Chariot season into my life, and I am here to support any of you who would like to explore, on a deep and personal level, what is your role our collective liberation work? What gifts and talents do you have that could be healing for yourself and all your varied and gorgeous and wild communities?

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