Editor’s note:В There are people you meet with whom you can carry on a lively conversation for an hour and feel as though you’ve made a wonderful discovery for that moment in time. Then there are people you meet whose interests, philosophy, and open-wonderment about the world make you feel as though you’ve met long-lost family. That’s the feeling I got meeting Rahmana (pronounced “Rahk-mana”) Finney.В From politics to astrology, Rahmana’s got a lot of things covered, and its my pleasure to introduce her to our Planet Waves community.–Fe Bongolan.
Dear Friend and Reader,
YOU KNOW HOW IN HORROR MOVIES, the haunted house is always built on a mass grave of people who died horrible and unfair deaths? Our country is built on a foundation of slavery and genocide. As we have all this astrological activity in the sky with Pluto, the planet of change, moving into Capricorn, an earth sign—foundation/structure—it seems the cracks in the foundation are really showing now.
I had this dream once based on a book I read by the late great Octavia Butler, an African-American science fiction novelist. It was called, Pattern Master. The lead character in the book was a woman who could literally see the connection between all humanity as this golden thread that went through everyone which connected us all to each other. It was a golden string that went through people’s middles into other people’s middles like an energy thread in a huge quilt. It felt like what ever sickness or suffering that came out of one person could somehow affect the next person their thread went into and so on and so on.
I think what’s going on in America right now — the recession that no one will officially name and all the financial drowning related to it, the environmental woes & natural disasters, the wars — has a lot to do with the karma of this country. My grandmother taught me that there are three types of karma: individual, family and national. What you do comes back to you.
Even if you don’t believe in karma we can probably at least agree that you reap what you sow. There’s the family karma. I’d like to say first that I’ve noticed over the years (’cause I love doing people’s charts) that most families seem to be ruled by a cluster of signs. Because I’ve always felt like such an orphan, I’ve spent a lot of time with other people’s families, you know for holidays and such, and somehow I find a way to find out people’s birthdays and ages. I’ve done hundreds of basic charts, knowing at least people’s planet signs and often house placements or rising signs. And I’ve noticed that people in the same family tend to have a lot of planets in the same signs.
Like me, my aunt and my cousin all have Venus in Scorpio. My grandmother has her Moon in Scorpio. I had a boyfriend once who had a lot of Aries and Scorpio family members. Fiery family — lot’s of laughter, dancing and shouting; lots of tempers. My step-father’s family had a lot of fire; lots of Sagg, Leo and Aries people. And I mean isn’t everyone’s family MADLY dysfunctional? In a proverbial smorgasbord of ways? I just can’t imagine that we could go through some of the things we go through with our families if we didn’t have karma with them.
Relationships with family are so complex. Full of anger, guilt, love, co-dependence, pity, miscommunication and angst. Such heavy bonds. Human beings have had a lot of evolving to do when it comes to parenting, which is why a show like The Sopranos was so monstrously huge. The reality of the people you love the most being the ones who are hurting you the most is something that most people can relate to. We are just not getting along at all. It seems everyone’s deeper needs are clashing. Our values are so different, especially in response to this planet of ours that is in the eye of the storm as we begin the movement of changing from one age to the next.
I’m watching the alcoholic of the family get sicker with age. I’m watching people acquire more and more things and worry more and more about those things. I wonder why my lower back aches every time I leave dinner.
I’m watching everyone get ill and over-weight from eating all this toxic American fast-food, becoming almost bipolar from the side-effects of their pharmaceuticals, and giving me the screw-face or odd silence anytime sex comes up and then retreating to the television — which is doing just what George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic said: “sucking their brains until their ability to think was amputated by pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny and strung out.”
This is my five planets in Scorpio and Virgo rising talking. But sometimes my Mercury in Sagittarius says, maybe we are helplessly, and with much resistance, learning to love each other more and more, if we’re lucky. Well, a country is just a really large family.
I’m a little irritated by this undercurrent in the media, even by people who genuinely want things to get better, along the lines of “Let’s get this country back to what it used to be.” Hmmmmm. What it used to be? You mean the place where a whole other race of people lived before another race of people came and slowly exterminated them with war and disease? Pushing them further and further West until they stole the entire joint?
Where our “founding fathers” wrote these amazing documents about freedom and equality while the descendants of another race of people were enslaved to perform free labor so that the new people could make more money to own a lot of stuff and buy say, a lot of guns and open banks? The country who after deciding to free the “slave labor” workers, continued to terrorize and harass them and deny them any type of real equality until they started getting real mad and bought some guns for themselves because they couldn’t take it any more? What is this old America that people are talking about?
You know what I’m realizing about my family? That I never knew them at all. And that they never knew me. That we’ve both been frontin’ and just trying to deal with each other with a smile. There are all these secrets. There are all these painful things that no one ever talks about. Abusive relationships that haven’t even been identified as such. It’s the same reason John McCain can say he’s appalled at anyone making a comparison between him and Strom Thurmond and bombing six little girls in Sunday School.
Yet most of us know that there are probably a bunch of straight-up racists voting for McCain/Palin. Every time I listen to her speak, the word Nazi just pops in my head. Is that something I’m not supposed to say? Like how I’m never supposed to make an issue about what a freaking bully my large bossy cousin is. She is who she is. That’s the new phrase today. “It is what it is.” What the hell does THAT mean? Yeah, she IS mean, she IS a liar, she IS a verbally abusive person and I AM tired of it.
I’m little. I was one of those kids who got bossed around a lot. I can relate in a very symbolic way to how the Korean kid at Virginia Tech and the Columbine boys felt. It is very difficult to endure physical and verbal abuse when you are a child. And it shapes who you are. And some-times people snap.
When you have established in a family this pattern of behavior between the more aggressive, self-centered people and the more thoughtful, contemplative people who after a while get sick of the way they are treated, the family begins to dwindle. The Christmas dinners aren’t as full as they used to be, because who wants to come around for a side of abuse with their turkey?
As far as I can see, America has never, ever been a place of total equality, justice and opportunity. But I think it will be one day. I think a large portion of our population is going in the right direction. If you’re even reading this. If you’re voting for Barack. Yeah I said it. And I ain’t saying he’s perfect. We surely need him though. If you try to turn off all your appliances at night; If you try to get your kids to watch less TV; If you’ve even had your chart done, you are going in the right direction.
We’ve been fighting to make those words in the Constitution come true since they were written. I think it’s more like, we’re trying to get the world to where it should be.
Yours & truly,
Rahmana
JanesDefense & Fe: I am so overwhelmed at the response to this concept of “separation from family”; this is quite healing for me. Being the 7 that i am, i guess i have been so isolated, i thought i would be a labeled a heretic for this opinion . . . i’ve been saying for years that parenting is something that is truly in need of some serious evolution. From every culture–every race. I have moon in Cancer and i am so very concerned about the little ones . . . As a side note i would like to say that the place i ‘ve been to that seemed to be the most compassionate and kind to their children was Cuba! I am presently in my separation phase, and it is very difficult. I have shed many tears and often feel very alone. But i’ve got to find my joy, as Bob Marley said, “Cause if you don’t come gonna go lookin yeah, for happiness . . .”
whether war, colonialism, slavery, alcoholism, poverty or cycles of abuse, no one is free till all are free, and the foundation is so very important. Let’s step out of this circle yall. Draw a new one with peaceful paint.
Peace & love
Janes:
“It doesn’t seem likely to me that millions of immigrants from hundreds of wartorn, impoverished countries were much better than the ones I got.”
How true. There’s quite abit of generational “cover up” of the trauma that gets transferred under the child’s skin. That penetrates deep into the bone. I ran from home early on, after my dad died. I needed the air so I could breathe as my true self. I was afraid of being caught there in my home town. As time wore on, I needed my family.
As for the other part of your comment, I only have this to add: I consider myself pretty lucky that most of the values that were instilled in me were solid enough to get me through this life. I was also exposed to alot in my life that many kids probably didn’t need in their childhood.
It had to be a combination of what I found to be good in my family background combined with my personal choices forged from my own life and ultimately the family of choice I built that allowed me the strength to come to full acceptance of myself and my blood family. The journey has been worth it so far. But the distance at first was necessary.
“The more I’m reading here at this site, like Genevieve’s story “Eating Supper off a Mirror”, and yours today, the process of national repair here in America definitely begins at home. It begins with, as Rahmana suggests, an examination of history. The American meta-family is a dysfunctional one.”
The other possibility is that it was always a fantasy. My grandparents came from the Ukraine, they were drunk all the time and truly awful people. It doesn’t seem likely to me that millions of immigrants from hundreds of wartorn, impoverished countries were much better than the ones I got.
What I seem to be seeing more of is grown people going home. Whatever your family did to you you’re not going to get away from by getting a studio apartment two thousand miles away. And if you’re not ever going to you might as well get it done to you by people you know. Or: finally transcend it with your older brother looking right at you across your mother’s kitchen table instead of at the therapist.
~j
Fe, i was just having a conversation, a somewhat painful one, with my boyfriend and i was saying that i think we are living in a time where we need to separate from our families. This is the time of breaking away, at least for a bit, to try and determine how you react to the world, sans the madenning buttons that the people you grew up with know to push. Discovering different ways of relating, with people from different cultures and different backgrounds. I’m amazed at Black folk who are against Prop. 8, forgetting that once, black and white people couldn’t get married. Generational values are so incredibly, vastly far apart these days. It’s like, you know you can’t even get into a conversation without vehemently disagreeing at some point. Makes you want to stay away . . .
Thank you Fe! I am new at this blogging thing–what fun!
To Gaelfire: Ms. Butler probably would have had duel roles even in ancient times, as teacher and seer. What i love most about her work is how feminine it is; how she is able to make it so clear how much more balanced the world will be once the feminine is truly divine again.
To Victoria: I KNOW!!! You pick them right? That’s the conclusion us Karma believing folk come to. I’ve been like, WHY did i pick them? Was i hanging witches or sinkin chicks with stones cause they were just too sexy? Whew . . . family karma.
To Tachikata: I always love a good film reference, THANK YOU! I will check that one out. Is it my imagination that it often feels like the most negative person in the group seems to be the one that wields (sp?) the most power? We gentle people have to sing up, dance around and otherwise divert people’s attention with fun, music and wine.
Peace yall,
Rahmana
Rahmana:
There’s a great line in one of Sekou Sundiata’s poems:
“Who knows why the crazy uncle goes crazy at the family reunion?”
Or that scene in “The Prince of Tides” where the family, post-assault, all sit at the dinner table with their unsuspecting father, as if nothing at all had happened to them, except that one tell-tale sign of the little sister, her dress buttoned on backwards and inside-out. Fitting metaphor.
I think we’re paying the price in trying to contain the nuclear family, uprooting ourselves from the continuum of family/community, struggling to make our own–or not. Are more than one generation of families in a close enough proximity to keep together? Are there many who would prefer to stay as far away from their family as possible?
The more I’m reading here at this site, like Genevieve’s story “Eating Supper off a Mirror”, and yours today, the process of national repair here in America definitely begins at home. It begins with, as Rahmana suggests, an examination of history. The American meta-family is a dysfunctional one.
I do consider karma.
Reading the books put out by astrologers, I have learned that aspect interpretation has alot to do with the perception of the writer. One of the first I read, told me that Saturn square Pluto meant that my death would be the result of mass karma. Not exactly what I was looking for when I was working through my crap and trying to make sense out of a life blown up so that I could continue on.
But that got me thinking about mass karma. Like what are we all doing here on this planet at this very exciting point in time? I am feeling like America and independence and pursuit of happiness and melting pot has some big part in this. And also this Pholus thing Eric mentions and all this abuse of power stuff that we have all been ranting and raving about (not that that’s a bad thing).
One thing I know for sure. Every belief system I have bought onto is being dissolved (that is too soft a word for sure).
And that family of yours. Are you not like the others? A toast. I’m there. I’m in the midst of that cleansing as I do the primary caretake for my aged mother. Don’t know why I ever felt bad about not being a member of that club. Some healing has come. At the very least, I know who all the players are. The hell I have been through trying to follow the rules or even find the rules in the double speak has been a big part of my rant in life. The rage of the bullied. But I set down there for some reason. I just really didn’t get why till now. Karma can be a bitch.
There is much to think about with karma. Like karma and will, karmic lessons in shaping conciousness. Am busy buttoning up for winter or I would think more about this now.
I adore the late Ms. Butler’s writing. She was eerily prescient (in my view) the way she visioned how a future U.S. run by fanatical Christians would look, in her books “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents.”