Yesterday Mars left retrograde motion behind, resuming its perceived correct direction, and hopefully cooling the battles it tends to elicit. I’ve had a fair share of moments when I’ve wanted to scream and yell about some very obvious wrongdoings, but I held off for fear of sparking a war. We can afford a battle now and then, but not a war. Never a war. Wars are not worth the cost.
And so I’m focusing on the peace, and the calm and centeredness that I’ve located within myself over the past year or so. That also makes the maelstrom of others’ emotions more easily managed, or in some cases not managed at all – I’m just better able to walk away, at peace with the truth. That may be the greatest superpower. With the holidays right on the horizon, that skill-set may come in quite handy.
Such a perspective arrives just in time, as fall limps into winter, and outside beauty slowly loses its vibrant color. I have a difficult time when that happens – the diminishing light, the faded hues, the way the gardens go to sleep and don’t want to be bothered. There’s a difference this year, however, in the awareness of that, in the refusal to allow it to get to me the way it usually has. I’ve got a shiny new toolbox of coping mechanisms, an arsenal of weapons designed for peace, and a suit of emotional armor whose clever secret of strength is in revealing the truth of the heart and owning up to its vulnerability through honesty and honor.
There is work to be done. There will always be work to be done. And there’s no better time to work on the soul than the winter.
The Harvest Moon
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
