<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m harboring a fugitive, a defector of a kind, <\/em>and she lives in my soul and drinks of my wine, and I\u2019d give my last breath to keep us alive.\u201d<\/em> – Fugitive <\/a>by Indigo Girls<\/em><\/p>\n Every year at about this time I feel my skin start to crawl. Feeling housebound and earthbound, I want to do something wild, different, subversive. <\/span> Initially, this leads to an impromptu song, dance or art session. Last night I was Alison Moyet singing Midnight at the top of my lungs to my reflection\u00a0(and my dog). Being subversive means shaking up the establishment, yet with\u00a0revolutionary Uranus located on my Libra Ascendant, the social order I continually need to upend is my own way of moving, thinking and being in the world. \u00a0So I get crazy.\u00a0I shake up my routines. I do something that makes my husband exclaim \u201cWho are<\/em>\u00a0you?!\u201d then lovingly, \u201c…I never know what you\u2019re going to do next.\u201d I change the station, shock the\u00a0system, to restore balance.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been talking with a number of clients lately who are experiencing the Uranus opposition. This happens around the ages 40-42 and is known as \u201cmid-life crisis\u201d. Classically, this is the time where the straight-laced guy buys a sportscar, or the homemaker\u00a0goes back to school to get that degree she really wanted.\u00a0Frankly, the definition of the mid-life crisis itself could stand a reinvention, because this is not what it looks like for many of us. To borrow\u00a0from (Venus in Aquarius) Gloria Steinem\u2019s book title, the revolution is from within. It can be the way we\u2019re held hostage of our internal dialogue; we all have a SuperEgo keeping us in check- a governing body that tells us how we should act, behave or be –most often when we want to do something that might garner judgment from others. It is often\u00a0the way we keep repeating the same old patterns of dysfunction in our life. Or the way we tell our self lies about who we are. Maybe it\u2019s a bit easier to identify who\u00a0our\u00a0authentic\u00a0self is, and is not,\u00a0when a partner,\u00a0government, job or boss oppresses us. At core, what we are all freedom-fighting for, especially at mid-life, is our own legitimacy.<\/strong> Our right to: be our self, to have our own loves, interests, desires, expression. The people, systems and institutions that stand in the way of our authentic self-interest show us where we need more love, individually, collectively.<\/p>\n I believe we\u2019re each harboring a fugitive, \u201ca defector of a kind\u201d. It\u2019s our authentic self,\u00a0extradited to\u00a0an\u00a0island of one. Maybe we\u2019re afraid of not fitting in, or belonging, being rejected or not being able to survive in a world that doesn\u2019t support who we are. Maybe it\u2019s always on the run, hiding what it perceives as different, because our survival once depended\u00a0on it. Or maybe our authentic self gets set\u00a0aside for providing for,\u00a0supporting our family.\u00a0\u00a0But oh, oh, oh the delicious\u00a0life-affirming freedom\u00a0of breaking the expectations that shackle us, doing something unpredictable, surprising even our self.<\/strong>\u00a0A\u00a0disruptive mid-life reorientation isn’t\u00a0necessary. It\u00a0takes only a wild hair, an idea, and a free Sunday afternoon. Maybe a\u00a0convertible,\u00a0an open road, a spontaneous weekend getaway, alone, goes against all the “established rules” in your relationship. Or maybe attending a nude figure drawing class goes against the\u00a0inner rulebook of propriety your parents and church implanted\u00a0in\u00a0you (note to self: if you\u00a0shock your loved ones,\u00a0you’re on the right track).<\/p>\n Our social world is trying\u00a0to address\u00a0oppression, big time, as groups who have been classically oppressed are crying freedom. I read recently that the greatest social injustice movement of our century is women\u2019s equality. Also, note the rising \u201cpolitically correct\u201d movement where you practically can\u2019t say anything without offending someone. Yet all this needs to be hashed out, if somewhat inelegantly, awkwardly,\u00a0painfully. We\u2019re in the soup of change. Change is good and it\u2019s hard.<\/strong><\/p>\n Mars in\u00a0Scorpio squares\u00a0this New Moon.<\/strong>\u00a0Like doing psychic surgery whilst being the surgeon our self, \u201ctruth\u201d arrives sharply at this New Moon and it may cut deep. I had an\u00a0interaction with someone who said something about me that stung. Despite being patently untrue\u00a0it\u00a0cut to the bone because it mirrored a fear inside me that was a part of an ancient story about how different I am from everyone else. If someone\u00a0feels inimical at this New Moon we may need to emotionally dissociate, fight the urge to retaliate, in order to allow the interaction\u00a0to reveal what’s unhealed inside. Acknowledging that it\u2019s (a) all just information coming in, and (b) it\u2019s not personal (it rarely is), takes the sting out so we can receive this as a\u00a0teaching moment, a\u00a0catalyst for our healing and growth.<\/p>\n Aquarius New Moon is a time to love\u00a0what is real, true and different in\u00a0us, to liberate our self from shackles of judgment and shoulds\u00a0— external and internal.<\/strong> Because let\u2019s face it: we all\u00a0have patterns of oppression that keep us in a prison so high, locked up so tight and far from our own freedom\u00a0that, if we don\u2019t admit\u00a0that we are our own jailers, that we are indeed our selves, imprisoned -and-that we also hold the key to our release, we may need something more radical, say, a bolt of lightening to free us. How to know you’re oppressed?\u00a0A case\u00a0of the\u00a0blahs and blues: that’s your\u00a0soul, aching for freedom. Feeling this, I just did an Artist’s Way exercise called Your Secret Desire, in which I listed 10 secret desires, then long-hand wrote about one of them extensively. The effect was\u00a0instantly liberating; the very next day I had an\u00a0adventure. Venus, Patroness of Pleasure,\u00a0flirts\u00a0with Jupiter, God of Freedom, at this New Moon. Shouldn’t you?<\/strong><\/p>\n These times are\u00a0confusing. So much needs changing that it\u2019s hard to know where to put our change-making energy, or how to affect anything, really. In\u00a0an old interview, David Bowie (Aquarius Rising) said that the revolution of the 60\u2019s made it easy to be subversive- there were clear villains and clear heroes- but nowadays, he said, those roles aren\u2019t clear, which makes it harder to know what to do. I have one idea. We can dance. We can\u00a0sing. We can heal. We can… one by one… break free.<\/p>\n I stood without clothes<\/em>
\n I danced in the sand<\/em>
\n I was aching with freedom<\/em>
\n Kissing the damned<\/em>
\n I said remember this<\/em>
\n Is how it should be – Fugitive, Indigo Girls<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n