Love Note #2: Decisively Deciduous
Mornings after Mourning: Reflections on Fear, Pilgrimages, & Rituals
Hey Friends,
It's been a long time, but what is time when love is on the line?
I started this Scorpio season tired of being tired. Exhausted of my own fear and doubt lurking at every corner.
This season has traditionally been unnerving for me as someone who reckons with loss on several planes. Death has been one of the most formative parts of my existence. What it takes from us. What makes of us. How we recover. And grief, how it lingers and erodes, shape-shifts, and saturates living.
At some point, being tired of death has to lead to something else: an opportunity to transmute. What if unnerving can steadily become reinvigorating? What if bracing for an inevitable losses can become a self-possessed and nimble inner knowing? A sense of: come what may, YOU got you. I say this but don't want to idealize loss, death, the marshes of life, or even the conditions in which many of us have come to know resilience intimately. But instead to ask: what does it mean to be decisively deciduous*?
Metamorphosis marked by death is at the crux of the Scorpio archetype, here we are in the territory of the detective, alchemist, shaman, researcher, and therapist. When we think of the traditionally Mars-ruled sign, we have to consider the God of war's predilection for violence, conflict, aggression, and destruction. This planet also points us toward what deem worthy of protecting, where we spring into action without a second thought, and where we are quick to defend our vulnerabilities. It's where we find courage and renewal to do the things we must do, where we draw boundaries and decide what we will and won't accept. It's both righteous anger and terror-inducing rage.
As a fixed sign, Scorpio is also stubborn, controlled, or controlling (of self and others), defensive, cautious, persistent, and slow-moving. Of all the fixed signs, (Taurus, Leo, Aquarius) Scorpio stands out as the shapeshifter. The scorpion, the eagle, the phoenix, Scorpio is represented by all of these different symbols. The last and final iteration is where from the ashes, the phoenix rises, whole. So consider what it means to cautious and immovable yet still know that you must change form to both survive and thrive. How exhilarating must it be to understand your competing impulses to be meticulous and resilient but also open to radical evolution that wipes away traces of your former self?
I mean this in the most adventurous way.
To wake up after the unimaginable has happened to you, and say, "I am different now, but still whole." To wake up after you've done the worst thing imaginable, and say, "What I did is not who I am." "Who I was is not a prescription for who I can be."
What I'm suggesting is a project in untethering ourselves from shame and regret. It's not a project that divorces us from our inheritances of oppression and realities of trauma. It's a project in beginning again and letting go. Getting free by blood, sweat, and tears. Stepping out the trenches of life and leaping into what Lucille Clifton describes as"spring and honey time," in "new bones."
The marshes of power, a struggle for dignity and purpose, can make us resolute in fear or faith. Our shortcomings, our failures (and yes, we fail spectacularly sometimes), our ineptitudes, and our inadequacies are not the summary of our worth and value. Your worth is not bound up in the production of your work, good or bad. I know that sounds crazy but in truth, while excellence is great, the quality of your life will be based on an internal barometer and standard set by you. At any moment, if you decide to live a fuller, deeper, and different life not based around your ability to be productive, you can begin again!
In moments of crisis, pick one: fear or faith.
And ride with it.
Both are the stuff of radical imagination. What you water will grow. With roots and thorns and leaves and flowers. So decide. Decide that your life is worthy of faith-dreams. Teach your imagination to catapult you into the fullness of yourself.
Tell fear it can wait.
Reflections on Rituals
Last week I decided I wanted to take take a trip, a pilgrimage. The universe decided that it would be Nassau, Bahamas.
When I got the ocean in time for sunrise, I prayerfully poured my 27 years of doubts fears and anxieties into Cabbage Beach's clear waters. This ritual —using the sea to gain clarity and connect to the ancestors, universe, and God in an unadulterated way —helps me to refresh, begin again. As a Scorpio sun in the 4th house (with its ruler Mars in Cancer in the 12th house), this Mercury retrograde had a lot to teach me about returning to my ancestral roots and honoring my primordial self.
Photo by Stephanie George, Bahamas . Shared via lovestephgee November 12, 2019
On Instagram, reflecting on other rituals, I wrote:
A few years ago, I started my sunrise practice. This is another ritual I used to help center me in chaotic times. I would wake up every day to watch the sun break into dawn, and eventually, it also turned into making sure I caught the sun meeting dusk.
Every day the sun rose. Gloriously. Brilliantly. It took its time. Releasing yesterday's inadequacies and failures and picking up a spectacular something else.
My relationship with light steadily became a promise. Whether or not I woke up to greet it, the sun rose without fail. It stretched across morning sky and embraced what could be, what hadn't yet become, and everything in between.
I think it's time we recover our light. Excavate it from the caves of doubt. Bask in the sunshine of our existence. Grow like sunflowers, always towards the sun. Aren't we all worthy of a fresh start, a deciduous dawning?
As a Leo rising, my chart ruler is the sun. If I'm not moving and living from my light, I can get stuck — my Leo rising answers to my Scorpio sun in the 4th. To shine is to accept the emotional intensity and the ancestral call to look deeper and broader. To listen more generously.
I turned 27 last week, and I am remembering and letting go.
i am running into a new year
by Lucille Clifton
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
Thank you for reading this to the end. For sticking with this irregular-ass newsletter.
May we soar, beam, and thrive. Asė.
With gratitude,
Love,
Steph Gee
I want us all to have rituals that remind us that our living is ripe with possibilities. As always, I want to be a witness to your greatness. If you are in need of ritual exploration and astrological guidance, I would love to help catalyze your journey.
If it's right for you, book a session and let's talk about your grow up and glow up.
Definitions
*de·cid·u·ous
adjective (of a tree or shrub) shedding its leaves annually." sun-loving deciduous trees like aspen."
Suggested Reads
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe.
"A Knowing So Deep" by Toni Morrison from What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. It also appeared in Essence 5 (May 1985).
"new bones" and "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010.
Originally posted via Substack on Nov 18, 2019.