graduation

saturn returned & i am returning & i am going to plant seeds with my friends

Congratulations to the graduating class of Saturn in Aquarius! Consider this my speech.

My Saturn return should be made into a case study that is used in astrology training courses everywhere to illustrate a “classic” Saturn return. It began in March 2020 coinciding almost exactly with the shutdown of, well, everything. I finished grad school on Zoom and moved across the country a few months later. I got ordained as a minister. I got married. I worked in a prison during a global pandemic. I bought a house. I got divorced. I started a new call as a hospice chaplain. I fell in love again.

It was an initiation into adulthood. It was trial by fire. It was a time of defining myself for myself.

I feel bright with clarity. Kevin Kling says in his OnBeing interview, “When you are born with a loss, you grow from it, but when you experience a loss later in life, you grow toward it.” He says that when you experience a loss later in life, you have to become a person you aren’t yet. On April 9th 2011 I woke up knowing I had a father and that I would see him the next day. On April 10th I woke up and found out he was dead. I was thrust into a new way of being - fatherless - and it took many years to make sense of who I was and who he was in his absence. I not only lost my father, I lost a future with my father. When I got divorced, I similarly lost an imagined future. I remember thinking in March 2022 that I couldn’t see past April. The feeling that accompanied that thought was terror.

Writing poetry gave me hope in the present moment, allowed me to notice what the light looked like at dawn on the third day of Spring. I began to grow towards an unknown future, imagining what I wanted it to look like and creating it as I went. Cheryl Strayed speaks of losses as “empty bowls” and says that we have these empty bowls eternally in our hands, but also have the capacity to fill them. As I sat in my living room this morning, face towards the sun and my cat on my lap, I thought, as I do in some form most mornings these days, “You filled the bowls and now you get to feast.”

I have become the person I wasn’t yet. I have language for who this person is - what she believes and values, what she wants from this life, what she hopes to give. The hits will keep coming, I’m sure of it, but it’s a lot easier to imagine my future when it’s shaped not by someone or something external to me, but by the deepest desires and convictions of my heart. I just keep thinking of how much less afraid I am. Less confused. More sure-footed. I walk through the world feeling an internal safety - I cannot remember the last time this was true.

I chose “return” as my 2023 word of the year, not thinking about Saturn. Instead I was thinking of little Riley. 3-year-old Riley in particular, on the edge of entering the sometimes-hell that is called consciousness. This version of me is so easy to love.

Adult Riley keeps her so safe and held, that precious angel baby. She’s safe in my house with me. Every day, I return home to her, greet myself as I arrive to my own door.

It has been one year since that terrified March when I couldn’t see past April. This March, I see ahead of me, vividly, a wild summer of planting seeds.

When seminary shut down in March 2020, the best community I ever had was fractured physically and we never really got to say goodbye. Moving across the country in an isolated world was a lonely experience - so much of the last three years were so lonely.

Here is grace: Just a few days ago, a friend reached out to a group of us and said she had been invited to grow on a piece of land and she wanted us to be a part of it. The invitation into this communal space, the invitation to create and dream alongside people who have welcomed me into their community with such warmth, is - in the pure Ross Gay sense of the word - joy.

More grace: I can see myself laughing hard at something someone said, hands covered in dirt, warmed by the July sun and the feeling of my own body in the world - so loving, so loved.

reading / listening / watching:

1 - cheryl strayed on dear sugar, the rumpus advice column: write like a motherfucker (what i read when i need a pep talk to write)

“But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked.”

2 - natasha lyonne on talk easy podcast

at one point she laughs about some truly awful part of her childhood, acknowledging that it was indeed truly awful at the time but really great now in terms of creative content. the images, so vivid! à la - “everything is copy” (an ephron family saying)

3 - the coldest case in laramie

a solidly good true crime pod with a thought provoking takeaway

3 - the pamela anderson doc - pamela: a love story

tbh i never knew much about the lady and now i’m endeared to her forever! also - she is why i’m quitting instagram (only kind of kidding)

xoxo