Just because we are coming to know and appreciate who we really are (bold, beautiful creatures, children of the Earth and Heavens born to be free and wild) doesn’t mean we are free of systemic impositions and demands. Like the mismatch of a majestic stag doing a menial cleaning task, it feels wrong and even blasphemous for us to be corralled and forced to work subsistence jobs, fork out increasingly unfair amounts for housing, food, taxes, struggle with fractured and broken institutions for health care and basic needs. It IS unfair. It IS wrong. It IS against nature. Still, these demands must be met. Still, the lower laws seem to trump higher laws over and over again. (Interesting that today’s card is the reverse number of yesterday’s—perhaps this speaks to improper order, and succumbing to fantasies instead of dealing directly with dirty, unjust reality.)
But notice that the stag gazes upward, observing the signs of the times, looking for higher wisdom, as he labours to meet these unfair demands. That’s what the beginning of 2023 is like: we can all feel the sense of degradation, decline, fragmentation of traditional Saturnian institutions—can’t we just be done with them already? We fantasize about the end, perhaps in cataclysm, perhaps by new and hopeful possibilities being realized. But perhaps the least destructive path of change is a slow crumble that we can clear away diligently, all while knowing and nurturing the Great Being within, and the immense changes heralded by the stars.
(Method: With the Aquarian collective in mind and heart, I shuffle the deck until a card falls out. Deck: Wisdom of the Oracle by Colette Baron-Reid)