Becoming Children of Earth and Starry Sky
Becoming Children of Earth and Starry Sky
Saturn in Pisces, Love, & Cosmic #RelationshipGoals
What if the solution to our current apocalypse of alienation and environmental destruction were not some complicated formula?
What if it were as simple as wild, unfettered love?
Love of the land, the flowers, animals, trees, and stones. Of the sky and winds and rain. Of the sun on our skin, the salty air of the beach, the bracing chill of a mountain lake. Of the buzzing of sleepy bees drowning in crocus pollen.
Love of the chorus of sparrows chirping at me from the bushes in Brooklyn, of the tenacious chickweed growing up through the cracks in the pavement, of my cat’s purr and his startled eyes as he registers the red-tailed hawk swooping 18 stories up outside our plate glass windows.
We often are fed the lie that combatting climate change is some huge, insurmountable goal. And I’m not saying it won’t take some ingenuity, hard work, and determination. But come on, we’ve invented chat robots that can fall in love…we can definitely do this. So why is it so hard to imagine a world that is not in crisis?
As I’ve written elsewhere (audio version here), my time spent translating the ancient Greek Orphic Hymns has allowed me to view the cosmos from the perspective of having always already been interpenetrated by and with the world. And from that perspective of cosmic interpenetration, I’ve come to this insight:
The reason why we feel overwhelmed and stymied by the lack of a “solution” to climate crisis is because we are not actually in need of a “solution.”
We are in need of a relationship.
When we are in Right Relationship, solutions come naturally. This is just as true with the earth and sky as it is with other human beings.
And it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that Right Relationship is never achieved through hate and exploitation. It is achieved through Love—whether sweet joyful love or tough mom/dad/nanny love. It’s the LOVE we feel for and with the earth that will shift things.
Fewer “solutions,” more Love.
Reading the Human Condition through the Lens of Astrology, or What does Saturn in Pisces have to do with Love?
As you may have heard, in a few weeks the planet Saturn enters the sign of Pisces after having spent the last 3 years or so in Aquarius. In the Orphic Hymns Saturn is primarily defined as the ruler of Time and Space-Time Continuums, and as such, He is associated with the structures and restrictions that come from living in a certain location and certain (human) temporal experience. (As a side note, Saturn also is the ruler of time-bending, which is one reason He is the traditional planet associated with herbs like cannabis, which alters our experience of temporality.)
So the Lord of Time is moving into the sign of Pisces, the Fish. Watery and intuitive, Fish are associated in the Orphic Hymns with the Fixed Stars. Nepodes (“the Footless Ones”), they are called—along with other “footless” but mobile beings like babies and human souls.
To be footless, for the Orphic poet, is to be borne (and born) by the cosmos. To lean into the way we must be carried by others: the fish by the sea, the stars by the heavens, the baby by the adult, and the human soul by the Kourotrophos. (For those unfamiliar with the figure of Kourotrophos (or “child-rearer”), I’ve appended direct links to my discussions of this Orphic Lunar goddess in the endnotes below.)
My prayer for this season of Saturn in Pisces is that it be a calling for us to let ourselves fall into the arms of the waiting cosmos, and be re-structured there.
That is to say: To let ourselves be borne (and born) like fish-stars in the ocean of our particular place and time.
To let the migration of our souls unfold in trusting Right Relationship with land, sea, and sky.
To let ourselves laugh like babies in the arms of our beloved Caregiver.
To let our joy create possibilities that are both ancient and brand new.
To let our love generate visions that nurture not just humans, but all the beings in this living, breathing, shimmering Cosmos.
This is who we are destined to become because we always already have been, as the Orphic Initiates declared themselves, “Children of Earth and Starry Sky.” Since before even the beginning of Lord Time Himself.
Let it be so. Because it always ever was.
With the love of earth and starry sky,
Kristin
*For more on the Moon as Kourotrophos see:
Note 7 of my Hymn to Ares translation (link below)
Minutes 29 and 48 of my January 2023 Live Chat
My notes on “Crescent Moon with Horns like a Bull” in Part 1 of my Commentary on the Orphic Hymn to the Moon (link below)
