Mending Our Broken Dance
It’s the New Moon in Leo, and the west is on fire.
In northern New Mexico, a low haze hangs in the air. I’ve seen many report their losing hope the powers that be will quell the natural disasters falling around us like dominos. I spent a lot of time today with my feet in the small river behind the orchard to remind myself that not all is dry. And I still have a lot of hope.
I’ve passed the weekend in some discernment around what it is I’m doing with my work. It’s been two weeks since I launched my new website and services, and I’m stunned by and grateful for the response. My books are almost full of new one-on-one star pals (though I’m hoping to take on a few more!). On Friday I sat down and began listing the occupations of my new clients: social worker (two of them!), writer, theater director, lawyer, church professional, hospital chaplaincy director, non-profit director, and intuitive. I was stunned to see a list full of helpers and artists (at times I have trouble distinguishing between the two).
This evening, with my feet in the rio fresh from recent storms, I began reading Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements by Stephen Arroyo. I don’t spend much time trying to convince people that astrology is “real”, but I do love these two quotes that Arroyo included in the first chapter. Astronomer and physicist Johannes Kepler said that “the unfailing concurrence of stellar configurations and sublunary events compelled my unwilling belief” in astrology. Isaac Newton apparently said that he wished to study “mathematics, so that I may test astrology.” When his pal Haley (of the comet, yes) teased him for his superstitious beliefs, Newton replied “It is evident that you have not looked into astrology: I have.”
A lot of folks have recently asked me what Christianity and astrology, or being a pastor and astrologer, could possibly have to do with one another. To me, they both are (or can be) helping or healing arts when applied practically to the suffering of humans. More broadly speaking, I believe both systems (as well as the system of tarot), are whole symbolic reflections of the cycles and rhythms of human experience. My favorite part of church ministry was moving through the cycles of the liturgical calendar: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time. Colored lights glowed on the porch of the parsonage all year and I would change the bulbs every time a new liturgical season clicked over. When the institutional church “cancelled” me I, upon the traumatic loss of my immediate spiritual community, began utilizing the system of astrology to mark time and make meaning instead.
Speaking of mainline Protestants, there’s a truism that white people can’t dance. I wholeheartedly believe that this is representative of a more universal truth that white people, and those who are working the inner machinations of empire, are so wildly out of touch with the rhythms of the cosmos that they are not only destroying the world as we know it, but also can’t dance. There’s a term in Christian theology called perichoresis, which describes the “dance” (think choreography) of the human and divine essences in Christ, or the dynamic of the three “persons” of the Trinity. Like the individuals who comprise it, the white institutional church has so lost its touch with the Holy Spirit that it can’t fuckin’ dance (in the literal and theological sense) either. The perichoresis has become antichoresis. Better yet— will some Greek scholar out there please tell me how to say “broken dance” in the ancient language?
It isn’t entirely odd to consider an imbalance of fire is connected to the creative expression of dance on the New Moon in Leo. After all, Leo is a fire sign and concerned with externalizing feelings into creative form. New Moons indicate the beginnings of new emotional cycles, so I ask you, what creative urge is newly pressing for your attention, so that you may be in erotic and ecstatic perichoresis with the galactic?
We are violently out of time--chronos and kairos. But the hope I mentioned is that swaths of us are turning toward the arrhythmia of our existence and applying the cosmic defibrillator of cycle-reverent spiritual practice. My New Moon blessing to us all is this: may we swiftly and creatively take up the practice of mundane intimacy with the extramundane. Our lives depend on it.
However I may fit into your creative journey, whether it be accompaniment through the lens of Christianity, astrology, or tarot, I am here as an usher, a helper, an artist, obviously and especially to those who call themselves the same.