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Weekly Ingredients: 9/20 - 9/24. LIBRA season. - Smart Crone Talking

9/21/2020

Blessed Mabon.

Libra - cardinal sign - masculine - ruled by Venus. Light side: fair judgment, balance, seeing both sides, seeing all sides, social, ambitious, works well in partnership, hard wired for partnership, easy charm, killer smile, argumentative, (disagree anyway) wonderful, explorative lovers(!), great friends, and quite often brilliant artists. To be the recipient of a Libra’s tender affections is to be wrapped in one of the best reasons to be alive.

Shadow side: Pathological self-involvement. A player; both the men and the women and the they. Mental conclusions supersede instinct and intuition. Peace at any price, even when that peace is a whip to the soul. The fact that someone may not understand Libra’s point of view drives them crazy. How could they not understand? Libra knows they see all sides of the story, and is remarkably effective at presenting their case, so how can someone not understand? Obsessive thinking, toxic-hamster-in-the wheel-thinking is the result and can go on for years.

Tarot card for Libra is Justice. Sweet merciful justice. The sword of truth belongs to evolved Libras. Balance belongs to evolved Libras. (as does imbalance) Libra follows detailed Virgo. Libra makes sense of the details and finds the balance. Libra’s do not like the fact that balance isn’t a solid thing; it shifts, it changes. Soul task for Libra is shadow work. What’s been split off? What needs to be reclaimed? What’s the wound and what’s growing out of it? Shadow work is not an intellectual exercise, it’s experiential; explored through feeling, not logic. Logic will get you to the gate, but it won’t take you through.

As ever I do not believe that astrology controls the actions of human beings. I do hold true that there are energetic currents worth paying attention to, that can be worked to your benefit, if that’s your choice.

Mabon is the autumnal equinox. Equal hours of light and equal hours of dark. What could be more Libra, whose symbol is the perfectly balanced scales? Equinoxes for this witch represents the balance of the opposites; the light and shadow. One without the other is useless; everything has right use. As god-awful as it seems, or actually is, there is always right use. The bleeding key is acceptance and surrender. In acceptance and surrender is the ending, the death. Re-birth follows death, all death contains re-birth, but you can’t skip the death part. You have to own how that makes you feel. Dive deep; breathe it, taste it. That’s the feeling you were taught was bad, that’s the feeling you’re judging and why you’re coming up lacking in your own eyes. Stop. If you’re coming up lacking in your own eyes, your judgment is rooted in poison soil. It’s a plot to keep you on your knees and groveling. What’s truly happening is you are coming to understand your humanity. You are on the planet to become humane, to own your humanity. All of it.

The fires in California, the anniversary of 9/11, and then Ruth died. I just lost it. I’m still grieving, and yes there are things I know I can do, actions I know I can take in her honor, but those actions are thematically the same political actions I’ve been taking for the last 30 years and now everything I fought for, laws that were passed to protect the planet and humanity are being destroyed. I am either enraged or curled in on myself like a leech sprinkled with salt. Right use of trauma triggers the search for meaning, for reason. Right use of trauma breaks the perceptual frames through which we see and judge. 2020 has deeply traumatized the individual and the conscious and unconscious collective. Everyday, it seems to get worse. The most effective, healing, and beneficial way I know to work with trauma, from both my own experience and the experience of friends and beloved clients, is through acceptance and surrender. Acceptance and surrender opens the path of right action. Not quite sure why people tend to think that acceptance and surrender are signs of weakness. Nothing could be more powerful because it’s the beginning of walking away. It’s the end of doing the same thing over and over and expecting difference results.

As it’s Libra season, theoretically it’s a great time to find balance. But my darlings the scales are see-sawing in the extreme (like Libra does when trying to make a decision) and balance is not in the cards. You cannot impose order on chaos, the harder you work at shutting down chaos, the stronger it gets. Life force is thick with some pretty ugly insanity right now and your task is to recognize it when you see it and not engage. Look out for same arguments, different day. Take a conscious step back, very Libra, and survey the dog fight. Look East. Call the air, call the angels of the air, call the ancient shining ones of East and air. Call the sylphs. Give over to the all powerful energy of Air. None of us could live without air; none of us could live without what has been freely given. You’re looking for something else, and no you don’t know what it is yet but you’ll know it when you quite literally run into it.

If there was ever a week to practice restraint of pen and tongue, this is it. This week, tend to what’s in front of you, do the best job possible, and nod. A lot. The entire collective (and the individual) is feeling pretty fucking powerless and in the mood for a fight. Hooks will be baited and cast – avoid, avoid, avoid. Rant to those who love you, who intuitively understand that your rant is a tsunami of your most painful feelings and not a conclusion.

You are resilient, you are quite capable of bearing what some say cannot be borne, and if you walk the path of consciousness you know the time for compromise is flat-out over. Maat, the ancient Egyptian Goddess of truth, justice, and cosmic order, is woke. I have been shown that the new world, (individual and collective) will be built on the seven principles of Maat: justice, harmony, balance, order, reciprocity and propriety. We (you) don’t know what that’s going to look like…yet. And getting there won’t be pretty but the love that is taking us there, the ever growing love we feel for one another and the planet, has never been more radiant, more powerful, more connected. We (you) have this one and we’re (you’re) not letting go.

Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools, Kat

art: still from shahzia sikander video

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Weekly Ingredients 9/13-9/18: Virgo Season. Dark of the Moon.

9/13/2020

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Energies slow, shift, changing tracks. Pressing need to change bumps hard into Mars retrograde. Nothing feels like its happening fast enough. Virgo season reigns, permeating and penetrating every cell of being. The utter inability to skip the steps of life’s dance. The shadow of Virgo is perfectionism. The light of Virgo is the ability to draw, to cull, to edit. The voices in Virgo’s head are loud and can be quite debilitating = the dance of not being good enough. Threaten or take away a Virgo’s security, that which he/she holds fast to, and it could take 20 – 30 years for her to get over it. It’s easier to bury under than heal, its easier to resent than heal. Healing involves changing the dance of not being good enough. It’s hard, not pretty, and decidedly uncomfortable.

Yet, the Angels of Virgo are the Angels of the Witches, and Vulcan, ancient God of Lightning and fire, is one of Virgo’s rulers and the Hindus consider Virgo and Scorpio the signs of initiation. Changing the dance of not being good enough is the ultimate initiation, an arrow into who and what you are and why you’re here. What’s been accepted as reality has been wiped away by the pandemic, by the fires, by civil unrest, and there’s more coming. A piece of the sacred, of the divine, the heart and soul of earth, lives in each of use. There is something to be said about the law of attraction, but the law of attraction does not have ultimate control, the law of attraction is little more than an ingredient. Planetary energies are also ingredients, they do not control, they do not determine. But, when I body surf I surf with the currents. Capisce?

The critical voice in your head doesn’t belong to you, it’s an interject, a piece of the culture that’s splintered off into psyche and taken up residence in shadow wounds. Human beings, in their genuine truth, not their programming and their defense mechanisms, are absolutely fascinating. Those who question, who love beyond all reason, who create, are smack center in an unforeseen, unexpected wilderness. You are not the easily definable lost. You are not the mime in the phone booth. You are living through changes, the dying, the ugly war between the ideal of mankind and the reality of humanity. As you heal you take a stand for your humanity. The micro (you) reflects the macro (the world.)

Sun wanes and the cool wraps round. Sweet night, all powerful, compassionate night. In dream, you float in the waters of formless, pure potential. Wonder, Ask, Hold the question. You, my darlings, embody all of humanity’s hopes and dreams.

Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools, Kat x0x0x

Art - Raquel Portnoy

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Pisces Full Moon 9/2/2020 - The Take-away

9/3/2020

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Bent Priestess 9/3/2020

Full Moon in Pisces – 1:22 AM EST 9/2/2020

Weekly Ingredients: Remarkably emotional, insanity producing full moon. Finding freedom. “To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” Dancing does not come easy, the world is blowing up. The center no longer holds and we are slouching towards Bethlehem (Thank you Joan D.)

Meltdowns and more meltdowns. The inability to “people,” today. The overwhelming desire for change; a life changing, lightening strike of a change. Insane dreams. Raging intolerance for what no longer fits: feelings, behaviors, relationships, work. Discouragement. Feelings of what’s the use. Wrap it all in compassion and stop listening to New Agers who tell you to release this, that, and the other, so you can get this, that, or the other. It’s pretty much bullshit. If you can’t release something, it’s because it holds soul value and needs to be transformed. See the not-so-pretty, the suck of you, in the mirror. See without judgment – the heroine’s/the hero’s challenge. Wrap who you see in compassion. Keep the scars, they are marks of beauty, they are marks that you are divinely human and of the tribe of the humane. The ability to bear what happened, the ability to go on. Thriving in a way that cannot and will not be culturally defined. An unknown path, untraveled, unique unto you, hold its secrets close to your heart.

Cycle breakers stepping up to the plate – people actively refusing to pass on hideous lines of overt and covert dysfunction and abuse. Present and ancestral healing. The present is rooted in the past, and the future is rooted in the present. To change the future, look to the past. The challenge? Victimization and abuse cannot be the soil of identity, an integral part of forming identity yes, but not the soil. The soil is the ever evolving answer to – what is humane? That is THE question, to ask and to hold. In the words of Emma Ray Earle: “Any fool knows fighting a liar on a liar’s terms is useless. To win a fight with a liar, you got to cut through the lie with straight up facts and leave it at that. Then, when the liar tries to keep it going, you got to step around ‘em with a smile, committed to done.”

Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools my darlings.
Katherine Manaan x0x0x

Art by Richard Bosman

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Weekly Ingredients: 9/20 - 9/24. LIBRA season. - Smart Crone Talking

Weekly Ingredients 9/13-9/18: Virgo Season. Dark of the Moon.

Pisces Full Moon 9/2/2020 - The Take-away

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