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Astrology from beautiful midcoast Maine
“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great" - Randall Jarrell
Today is the winter solstice, one of nature’s many calls to rest. Our culture’s disdain for rest is a symptom of the patriarchy: rest, passivity, and the ability to cycle (in this case between rest and action) are functions of the divine feminine, so the enormous strength of rest goes unrecognized and undervalued. Rest is the hidden side of genius.
I love exploring the connections between what little we know of quantum physics and what we experience of magic, but this is a simple matter of good old kinetic physics, the kind you learned in elementary school with levers and pendulums. You may remember learning that there are three basic types of energy: kinetic, potential, and chemical. Potential energy is the least obvious of the three: it’s not what’s happening, it’s what could happen. Potential energy is the energy that is stored in an object due to its position relative to some other possible position: the force with which a suspended weight could hit the ground if released, the speed at which a stretched rubber band will travel when released, the ability of a battery to make a toy car zoom across the floor when connected and turned on. Kinetic and chemical energy is always potential energy first. Yin and yang: the more potential energy you have, the more kinetic or chemical energy you get.
Regardless of our sex, our spirits get potential energy through the feminine power of rest. There is no infinite motion machine, and you cannot eternally generate forward momentum from nothing. If rest were a vitamin, practically no one in this country would be getting their RDA, which is why no one can shut up about “burnout”. We pay lip service to the value of rest in healing burnout, but we’re focused on the end product of getting back to productivity. Even our rest must have a purpose toward action, which defiles it – similarly to how we undermine the call to respect women when we demand the right for women to express masculinity but continue to deride men who express femininity.
Even the patriarchal Judeo-christian traditions called for cyclic rest on the Sabbath – a cycle divorced from nature, and an insufficient time devoted to rest, but at least a formal recognition that periods of rest are sacred. And our secular culture has one-upped the church and shed even that most basic tradition of rest – I remember the last of the local “blue laws” broadly prohibiting retail activity on Sundays falling away early in my childhood. Not coincidentally, this made it harder for family-staffed stores to compete with large retailers, accelerating the demise of traditional downtowns, the proliferation of big-box stores on the edge of town, and the degradation of the ties between local community and local economy.
If we were to follow the suggestions of the earth and the stars, we would rest at least as much as we acted. We would slow down in the winter, and sleep longer hours through the long dark winter nights. We would rest at the new moon, and while the moon is void of course as it travels between zodiac signs without aspecting the planets. Women would rest throughout their menses and until their bleeding stops following the birth of a child. We would speak and travel more slowly when Mercury goes retrograde, we would temper our urges to flee, fight and fuck when Mars goes retrograde, and we would lean into restful solitude when Venus goes retrograde. Then we would all become dramatically more powerful because we would be drawing on the power of yin as well as of yang.
It takes so much faith to rest, because you cannot “see it work” as our child-minds desire. Mature faith is a virtue lacking in our “show me” world. We cannot quite believe that passivity has force. We believe that submission is something that is forced upon us from the outside, not a powerful choice we make for ourselves. This is a patriarchal belief, related to the idea that the feminine is lesser than the masculine and therefore a role that one would never choose out of free will. I have Aries on the ascendant so it is my instinct to meet the world with cardinal action. I didn’t know there was another way until I became a mother, a transition that forced me to face my own feminine nature. The first time I birthed a child I thought I would have an easy time of it because I knew I was very strong and very determined and I thought I could fight the pain and force the child out of my body. That pain was as strong as god and I could not conquer it, nor could I birth the child, until I lay down under the pain and submitted to it fully. My will had to go dark so that my body could split open. The rider cannot master the horse until he submits to the rhythm of its stride. The surfer submits to the omnipotent ocean to ride the wave. The Harley rider leans into the turn, not against it.
My beloved partner likes to say that we are all hypocrites: here I am writing an essay on the winter solstice instead of burying myself under blankets like a seed. But at least I have reminded myself, and now you, that what this holy turning day really demands of us is rest, in tribute to the divine feminine in us all. Demanding constant productivity can only result in constant mediocrity: a sputtering engine with loose rods and water in the gas tank, not the powerful roar of a race car that spent weeks parked in the shop getting perfectly tuned. Grind and grind, and you will spew out pablum. Rest, and you will be struck by the lightning of greatness.
About Randall Jarrell: Jarrell was a poet and the author of several rather unusual children's books that got illustrated by Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame. Born in Nashville, TN in 1914, he served as a “celestial navigation instructor” in the Air Force during WWII, a title he called the most poetic in the military. A sometimes vicious literary critic, he was known as a champion of clarity and accessibility in writing; ironically, I think his own poetry tends toward opacity. He died in an ambiguous (possibly suicidal) traffic accident following a two-year battle with severe depression.
I love exploring the connections between what little we know of quantum physics and what we experience of magic, but this is a simple matter of good old kinetic physics, the kind you learned in elementary school with levers and pendulums. You may remember learning that there are three basic types of energy: kinetic, potential, and chemical. Potential energy is the least obvious of the three: it’s not what’s happening, it’s what could happen. Potential energy is the energy that is stored in an object due to its position relative to some other possible position: the force with which a suspended weight could hit the ground if released, the speed at which a stretched rubber band will travel when released, the ability of a battery to make a toy car zoom across the floor when connected and turned on. Kinetic and chemical energy is always potential energy first. Yin and yang: the more potential energy you have, the more kinetic or chemical energy you get.
Regardless of our sex, our spirits get potential energy through the feminine power of rest. There is no infinite motion machine, and you cannot eternally generate forward momentum from nothing. If rest were a vitamin, practically no one in this country would be getting their RDA, which is why no one can shut up about “burnout”. We pay lip service to the value of rest in healing burnout, but we’re focused on the end product of getting back to productivity. Even our rest must have a purpose toward action, which defiles it – similarly to how we undermine the call to respect women when we demand the right for women to express masculinity but continue to deride men who express femininity.
Even the patriarchal Judeo-christian traditions called for cyclic rest on the Sabbath – a cycle divorced from nature, and an insufficient time devoted to rest, but at least a formal recognition that periods of rest are sacred. And our secular culture has one-upped the church and shed even that most basic tradition of rest – I remember the last of the local “blue laws” broadly prohibiting retail activity on Sundays falling away early in my childhood. Not coincidentally, this made it harder for family-staffed stores to compete with large retailers, accelerating the demise of traditional downtowns, the proliferation of big-box stores on the edge of town, and the degradation of the ties between local community and local economy.
If we were to follow the suggestions of the earth and the stars, we would rest at least as much as we acted. We would slow down in the winter, and sleep longer hours through the long dark winter nights. We would rest at the new moon, and while the moon is void of course as it travels between zodiac signs without aspecting the planets. Women would rest throughout their menses and until their bleeding stops following the birth of a child. We would speak and travel more slowly when Mercury goes retrograde, we would temper our urges to flee, fight and fuck when Mars goes retrograde, and we would lean into restful solitude when Venus goes retrograde. Then we would all become dramatically more powerful because we would be drawing on the power of yin as well as of yang.
It takes so much faith to rest, because you cannot “see it work” as our child-minds desire. Mature faith is a virtue lacking in our “show me” world. We cannot quite believe that passivity has force. We believe that submission is something that is forced upon us from the outside, not a powerful choice we make for ourselves. This is a patriarchal belief, related to the idea that the feminine is lesser than the masculine and therefore a role that one would never choose out of free will. I have Aries on the ascendant so it is my instinct to meet the world with cardinal action. I didn’t know there was another way until I became a mother, a transition that forced me to face my own feminine nature. The first time I birthed a child I thought I would have an easy time of it because I knew I was very strong and very determined and I thought I could fight the pain and force the child out of my body. That pain was as strong as god and I could not conquer it, nor could I birth the child, until I lay down under the pain and submitted to it fully. My will had to go dark so that my body could split open. The rider cannot master the horse until he submits to the rhythm of its stride. The surfer submits to the omnipotent ocean to ride the wave. The Harley rider leans into the turn, not against it.
My beloved partner likes to say that we are all hypocrites: here I am writing an essay on the winter solstice instead of burying myself under blankets like a seed. But at least I have reminded myself, and now you, that what this holy turning day really demands of us is rest, in tribute to the divine feminine in us all. Demanding constant productivity can only result in constant mediocrity: a sputtering engine with loose rods and water in the gas tank, not the powerful roar of a race car that spent weeks parked in the shop getting perfectly tuned. Grind and grind, and you will spew out pablum. Rest, and you will be struck by the lightning of greatness.
About Randall Jarrell: Jarrell was a poet and the author of several rather unusual children's books that got illustrated by Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame. Born in Nashville, TN in 1914, he served as a “celestial navigation instructor” in the Air Force during WWII, a title he called the most poetic in the military. A sometimes vicious literary critic, he was known as a champion of clarity and accessibility in writing; ironically, I think his own poetry tends toward opacity. He died in an ambiguous (possibly suicidal) traffic accident following a two-year battle with severe depression.
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