I've spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about liminal space.
The space between feels like all we have lately. We tend not to pay these spaces much mind, try to hurry through them as quickly as possible to reach our destination. But recently, as I stared at the contents of my tiny New York apartment and wondered how, after throwing away so many things and donating so many others, I still had days of bending and wrapping and packing ahead of me, I realized these spaces might have lessons of their own.
Pregnancy is its own liminal space: a place between maiden and mother, between pleasure and pain, between passion and purpose. It's a place between life and death, and for the last nine months I've been keenly aware of this state. Weeks of prolonged nausea and back pain forced me to slow down and actually live in the moments I occupy. I had no choice but to be present for the transformation I'm undergoing. My body is not my own, my dreams are occupied by my child’s presence, each movement communicates a need, a desire I wouldn't hear if my mind was elsewhere.
But I did miss other opportunities for growth. I recognized the importance of tuning into my body and soul during pregnancy, but I had no patience at all for my moving process. I felt so overwhelmed by the journey I was already on that the idea of facing so many years worth of physical stuff felt completely beyond my capacity. It's not that I procrastinated--it wasn't a top priority for sure, but I still cleared calendar days to pack and clean. And each time, my progress was halted by my body--old obstacles like dizziness and shortness of breath kept me from working at full capacity and completing any one task on my list.
By the time our initial move date came around, I had made no noticeable progress on the apartment. We put the few boxes I'd prepared into the back of our car and looked around in defeat. We weren't going to be able to move right then and there. It was an agonizing realization. The idea of even another few days spent hunched over boxes, sifting through piles of things wracked me with guilt and anxiety. I cried as I blocked days off my calendar to get the job done. I resentfully returned and began throwing our kitchen cabinets into bins, tearfully wrapping up bedroom decorations and tossing old toiletries. But I knew my desk would prove most difficult.
For years it stored things I wasn't quite ready to deal with--letters from ex boyfriends who didn't know when to quit, Polaroids from my childhood that stirred up conflicting memories, notes on artistic projects I might one day revisit. And that's when it crashed in on me. Holding a photo of my 7-yeear-old self clutching my first kitten, overcome with rage and sadness over my youth, my body, and all the ways it still controlled me, I knew why I was still in that apartment.
It was my Hanged Man moment.
The Hanged Man, like any liminal space, is one we tend to rush through as quickly as possible. It's an uncomfortable energy lived inside for any length of time. Most Little White Books reduce it to keywords like "martyrdom" or "delay," but ruled by Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces, its depth defies reductive language. It feels at once philosophical and mystical and its symbolism is often Christ-like--or Odinesque, comfortable in the agony of divine madness.
Pisces, as the twelfth sign of the zodiac, is all about transitions. It's the place where we untether our egos in preparation to meet what's next, to return as the single drop into the vastness of the ocean. During Pisces transits people often feel called to release old patterns and transform themselves through deeper spiritual understanding. But human beings are resistant to change. We bind ourselves in excuses, refusing to see how we've shackled ourselves to our own problems.
Letting go feels like madness. Surrendering the comfort and certainty of what we knew before seems insane, even when it's impossible to reclaim the past. That's because in order to move forward, we tell ourselves we need to see the future--and that vision is rarely clear.
Thomas Hobbes once said that imagination is a decaying sense. Human beings are able to imagine only what they have experienced before. All inventions and visions of the future are at best mashed up versions of what's come before, spruced up with new developments and repurposed for whatever speculation requires. And while there have certainly been revolutionary minds who seem to defy the boundaries of human thought in order to bring new inventions to life, this is far from the norm. I certainly can't blame anyone for holding onto older models of life--the lives we had in 2019 were, for the most part, comfortable and certain. And both are rare commodities these days.
To say we live in uncertain times is an understatement.
Each day seems to bring new crises. If our five year plan went out the window in 2020, our weekly agendas now seem dodgy.
My job is to hold space for others.
People come to me with questions and concerns, usually deeply personal situations. My job is to fill in the blanks of their perspective, to put these issues into the context of a larger whole so they can move past them with grace and courage.
This doesn't mean I just wake up and take phone calls. It's not all charts and channeling either. I have always been of the ancient mindset that a good astrologer is equal parts historian, strategist, and mystic, and all three of those things require immense preparation and research.
It was around the Nodal Axis shift in May of 2020 that I started getting the sense something was off. The space I held felt less liminal and more concrete. People weren't using that space to ground and reorient. Rather, it became a waiting room for a more recognizable vision of life. While I and other spiritual professionals continued to speak about the importance of individual understanding and personal empowerment, the loudest voices in media continued to berate people with tragedy, insisting that not only did we need to know, we needed to fix it. With the literal weight of the world on our shoulders, many looked backwards to 2019 waiting for the moment they could return to that form of existence.
But we can’t go back.
We’ve seen too much, bound ourselves too tightly.
This is our Hanged Man moment.
The Hanged Man sits in discomfort, sinks into the dizzy head rush of deprivation in order to find a new perspective. He deprives himself of certainty, allows dis-ease to overwhelm his senses until nothing is quite what it seems. He breaks down the boundaries of self and sits in the spaces between to see things in ways previously unexperienced. He compromises himself in order to commune with a new reality.
And this is where we are.
It's time to look in new directions.
It's time to stop relying on our decaying Hobbesian senses and allow imagination to take us.
Surrender to the madness and find the divine.
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