Conviction

Without adversity we cannot know what we really believe in.  Only in the face of loss or deprivation can we see what matters most deeply to us. Just the prospect of losing something can illuminate a treasure languishing in the shadows; so life's favors include not just what we receive, but also what is taken away, and it is a valuable opportunity when we are forced by circumstances to make a difficult choice.  This week I was faced with the possibility of losing time...

What a week!  It began Tuesday with tragic news about my little old car, prompting a serious inner struggle about taking on more work for car payments, quickly followed by news of someone wanting to GIVE A CAR AWAY!  It is an old car, older than the Honda I will be giving up.  But it runs, and my son likes it!  (It doesn't squeak and it is not rusty) As of today this new old car will not start, but I have faith.  I will jump the sleeping battery from my retiring car this weekend and then we'll be on our way.  This process has revealed something in me which I had always felt I lacked-conviction.

I love my customers, but it pained me to contemplate taking on new ones in order to pay for another car.  I did not want to give up my plans of becoming an astrologer; more work cleaning houses would have meant less time doing charts, forfeiting the experience necessary to fulfill my dream.  As this crisis passes I can see that for once I know what matters to me.  Up until now I had only known that my son was important, and it bothered me that I could not hold an opinion about any other worldly matter deeply enough to struggle for it.  Decriminalizing recreational drugs merits a bumper sticker,* decriminalizing immigration calls for guarded friendships with undocumented workers, the movement to criminalize, or at least delegitimize war is one to which I only sporadically and very hesitantly add my voice.  By choosing the gift of an older, but functioning (and very intriguing- it runs on bio diesel) car, I can see with certainty what is most important to me:  the  resurrection of the culturally relevant and more intellectually rigorous predecessor to Christianity (Yes, I'm talking about astrology) is my chosen endeavor.

With each stumbling step forward my conviction grows that astrology has value.  As I meet with people, and we talk about their lives in the context of time as marked off by the motions of the heavenly lights, I am lifted up and really do find myself picturing Mercury as it passes to the far side of the Sun.  I have assigned myself the task, and so given myself the strongest permission, to look for the Moon when ever she is visible and follow her soft light, which I find enormously comforting.  I am becoming day by day an integrated citizen of our solar system, and it is, by this attention which I pay to it, becoming an ever more familiar and wondrous home to me. 

I am convinced, this is my path.  I am not a true believer, but astrology does mean the universe to me.

*Hemp:  Fuel, Fiber, Freedom         I had this bumper sticker on a Plymouth Arrow.