This week’s horoscopes look at both Mars square Saturn and Jupiter trine Saturn, which are big points of reference and reckoning in their cycles. The horoscopes also look ahead to the opportunities that come with next week’s New Moon in Virgo on September 10.
Shawn Boyle, our News Bureau Chief, let us know yesterday morning that the poet Wendell Berry died at the age of 92, adding to the list of bright stars that have left us in just one week.
Shawn sent us this article by Paul Kingsnorth, author of the book “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” and editor of the U.K.’s first printed collection of Berry’s writing. I recommend the short article in its entirety, but this part caught my eye:
“Berry was not a “simple farmer” who had never left his homeplace. He was a writer, with a writer’s mind, who had initially set out for New York City in the 1960s to work on his literary ambitions. Only on arriving did he come to see that the city had no stories for him; that his work, in fact, was to tell the stories of the place he had left behind in small-town Kentucky…
…By rooting himself in one place and calling it home, Berry found what he needed to become the writer he wanted to be.”
Not “Just” a Simple Farmer
This idea that he was not a “simple farmer” but a writer, “with a writer’s mind” got me curious and I looked up his birth chart. Gemini rising, Gemini Moon, and Mercury, the ruler of Gemini conjunct Pluto in the 3rd house of thought, communication and connections made. Yes he is a writer, with a writer’s mind! The conjunction though, is in Cancer (part of a stellium), the sign of home, traditions, memory, belonging — the roots we care for or neglect.
Remarkably, this theme is repeated with his Leo Sun in close proximity to the IC, the place where we find information about the roots of our existence. His life’s dharma was to shine his powerful Leo light into the underworld source of his humanity and share with us what he found there.
His writing shares a poetic resonance with the deepest message of Planet Waves; that our technology is surpassing our humanity, and that if there is anything to be done, it is to return to and attend to our roots, to that most essential quality of who we are when we are alone, in our relationships and communities, and with the land we live on; to question everything we may take for granted, developing greater awareness of the environment we inhabit.
(Interestingly, Sedna, the minor planet newly in Gemini that Eric delineates with the phrase “situational awareness,” is currently conjunct Berry’s ascendant.)
The poem, “The Want of Peace,” also discussed by Kingsnorth, shares a humble recognition that the peace of the “simple life” we yearn for is elusive, that there is no easy formula or way to go back to how things were, that the darkness of our times can be overpowering and reduce us to the childish “wish for the dumb life of roots.” But also, by evoking the earthy life of roots, we do, if for a moment, return to them. What happens next is up to us.
The Want of Peace
by Wendell Berry
All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.
I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.
Today, I can’t think of a better meditation for Virgo season, the sign of the goddess and the harvest. The featured articles this week offer some ideas and inspiration for deepening into the gifts of this season, including Eric’s famous call for reviving the potluck.
With love,
