on listening, jupiter, saturn, & aquarius
This was originally published to my Patreon on July 31, 2021, at 9:47am Pacific Time.
One of the most recurrent overarching themes I’ve been witnessing over the past year & change involves the presence, or more often the lack, of ACTUALLY LISTENING. I was recently reminded of this thanks to this tweet thread on heterosexual divorce and the strange cultural expectation that marriage is supposed to be unpleasant, especially for women.
I saw this when I ended a relationship last year after literally months of explicitly saying I was unhappy, embodying burnout & depression, & sharing my conviction that the relationship was not going to last. Somehow, despite nearly an entire year of foreshadowing, my ex was shocked by the actual end of the relationship.
I saw this when I ended a different relationship more recently. Again, I had explicitly communicated with that person, explicitly laid out the most likely consequences that would occur because of their actions, and even so, that person was utterly amazed when what I’d articulated came to pass. They could not deal with the well-forewarned consequences of their actions, leading to increased suffering for both of us.
I saw this when a large quantity of hwhetye folks were shocked and surprised by the events at the Capitol in January, despite literally decades of BIPOC people & social science researchers very clearly observing & delineating the dynamics that led to that particular clusterfuck.
I’m continuing to see this now as people react to the ongoing news regarding the panorama. Current events — variants, vaccines being very good filters rather than impermeable shields, ongoing adjustments to “normal” activities & freedom of movement — were extraordinarily well-predicted by epidemiologists, virologists, disease historians, public health experts, astrologers (yes, astrologers!), etc., and even so, people are astounded to discover that while we’re post-pandemic in the sense of “life after pandemic has descended,” we’re far from post-pandemic in the sense of “and now the pandemic is over.”
Why people don’t truly, genuinely listen is obviously complicated and somewhat dependent on context. Even so, from my perspective, I believe that the combination of relative power (which we could also call relative privilege) and the (over)prioritization of personal comfort can go pretty far in terms of explaining this phenomenon.
With the prioritization of personal comfort in particular, there’s an accompanying amazingly deep cowardice. This cowardice prevents people from fully accepting the consequences of their actions, embracing accountability, and altering their behavior accordingly, even if it means experiencing temporary or permanent alterations to personal comfort.
This cowardice? It actually makes a lot of sense inside of the punitive, carcereal sociocultural reality that I perceive here in these “United” States of America.
Living inside a punishment-oriented culture prevents a full comprehension of the utility & kindness of accountability. I think a lot of people actually use the word “accountability” as a stand-in for “punishment” or the negative-connotation version of “discipline.” And not just people who are avoiding accountability! I cannot tell you how many twitter dramas I’ve witnessed where people are calling for accountability when what they really want is to see the offending person experience pain, shame, and/or ostracization. None of these things are accountability. All of these things are punishment.
This then perpetuates a culture where admission of wrongdoing, regardless of intent, is continuously expected to be met with harm. If this is the case, why would someone willingly acknowledge & accept that what’ve they’ve done/said/embodied is wrong? Why would they listen to someone else articulating that wrong? If the body & subconscious believe that being/doing wrong inevitably leads to pain & punishment, there’s literally no way that the human animal system will allow for the possibility of being wrong because being wrong is contrary to survival and comfort.
Now, on the other hand, if acknowledgement & acceptance of wrongdoing/wrongsaying/wrongthinking can be seen and felt as the first step towards repair, towards building something that is better & more supportive & more enjoyable for everyone involved, then the motivation for truly listening — even when it’s uncomfortable! — increases significantly.
If this orientation is combined with an awareness that better is always possible and the awareness that better isn’t about becoming perfect or good enough, there’s a massive increase in the room available for nuanced, relationship-strengthening, community-building conversation.
Obviously, this applies in one-to-one personal relationships, but I would argue that this very much applies on a larger social scale as well. For example, what if hwhyte folks in the USA understood reparations processes to be a civic, communitarian action that alleviates the consequences of historical harm for everyone and ultimately strengthens everyone’s capacity to live well, rather than seeing reparations as a fucked-up punishment for their ancestor’s sins? What if governments who have failed to sufficiently protect ecological services for both their own countries and other countries with less power & resources came clean about their corporate-interest-serving decisions and reoriented their, say, military spending to genuinely protect human and more-than-human life on this planet, not because they’ve been fined or guilted into it but because that’s the most communitarian choice to make?
Returning to the personal level, what might it mean for you to have a hard conversation with someone who harmed you and within that conversation, with your body language and word choice and capacity to sit with someone through any immediate defensiveness, you made clear that punishment wasn’t the point? That the point was witnessing and acknowledgement and changed behavior moving forward?
What would it mean for you to trust someone else’s articulations of experiences of harm because of your actions/behavior? To trust that you will not be discarded because you behaved imperfectly? To trust that your causing of someone else’s pain does not require your punishment but does require your real, deep, humble, non-defensive listening?
On the mid-scale level, what does it mean to understand that all of us, including you and including me, are complicit in a wide array of harms, and that our complicity does not damn us to Hell but instead asks us:
to be as aware as we can handle
to deliberately work to increase our capacity for awareness
to alter our choices & behavior as much as we can
to accept that our own choices & behavior alone will not change the world
to understand that participation in culture shifts requires several individuals all acting independently AND together towards the desired changes
to truly, deeply hear the human and more-than-human others who are on the acute receiving ends of our complicities
Jupiter recently retrograded back into Saturn’s sign of Aquarius, which is where Saturn is currently grinding away. Aquarius is the fixed air sign of the zodiac: it wishes to maintain, and it wishes to think. As the “farthest out” sign from the Sun’s home of Leo, Aquarius serves as the intellectual, conceptual, and social boundaries that allow our centers, our hearts, to exist.
Back on the 21st of December 2020, Jupiter & Saturn conjoined each other at 0º29’ Aquarius, marking the beginning of the “air elemental era,” a 200 year period where every time Jupiter & Saturn meet, it will be in air signs. The last time an air elemental era occurred — and, like this time, it began with a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in early Aquarius — started in 1226 CE and ended with a conjunction in late Aquarius in 1405.
As an historical period, the 1200s-1400s marked massive changes in social structure, religious belief, awareness of public health, and philosophy. It featured the Crusades, the birth of the university, the Black Death (which, globally, is estimated to have killed as many as 200 MILLION people), the “recovery” of ancient Greek & Roman philosophy, some wild imperial dynamics, lots of trade of ideas & stuff across Eurasia & the Middle East & Africa, and, ultimately, laying the foundations & seeing the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance.
To bring this back to now, and back to this question of listening:
We are on the initiating edge of truly significant changes socially, ethically, economically, intellectually, religiously, spiritually, ecologically.
Jupiter & Saturn together create a collaboration between vision, optimism, expansion, & belief (Jupiter) with reality, legacy, & constriction (Saturn). Maximum awareness and acceptance of what is actually happening as best as you can manage to comprehend it (Saturn) is what facilitates clarity of perception of what is possible (Jupiter), both in terms of negative possibilities (Saturn) and positive possibilities (Jupiter), and how that allows for planning (Jupiter) and enacting those plans in the real world (Saturn).
Bringing this to an even smaller scale:
If you cannot listen to another human being telling you about their experiences of harm, how are you going to listen to the world at large as it yells — with disease and ecological disaster and economic inequity — about its experiences of harm?
What might it mean for you to deliberately expand (Jupiter) your capacity for social & intellectual interconnection (Aquarius) in order to participate in the creation of new & different conceptual (Aquarius) boundaries (Saturn) that, ideally, hold more (Jupiter) rather than less? Do you understand that your capacity for interconnection is always, always, always strengthened by your own commitment to relinquishing punition culture and cultivating accountability culture instead?
Accountability requires listening, and it requires care, and it requires discipline in the positive sense of that word.