Robin
My yoga teacher is also a psychic, astrologer and reader of auras.
This seems unfair.
One’s aura seems terrifically exposed in, say, downward dog.
Fortunately, I don’t worry about such things.
I have no truck with the stars or planets or phases of the moon.
Give me the earth.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Why look up for indications of fate?
Look down.
I have a friend who has mapped the astrological chart of the city of San Francisco.
The whole city, he suggests, is shaped by the time and date of its founding.
(That is June 29, 1776, when the Spanish established a mission.)
That makes San Francisco a cancer.
My friend is an artist – and a Sagittarius.
It makes for cool art.
But is did alignment to distant stars shape San Francisco, its bay, its hills, its spirit even?
Or was it the earth, rattling its fault lines and shaking up its inhabitants?
Was it Uranus in the 12 Ashbury or Silicon Valley?
I read my horoscope today and it said, “Become a teacher of that you most need or want to learn.”
This fortune cookie pabulum suggests no relation between astronomical phenomenon and the lives of those born in March.
I learned recently that the Catholic Catechism places horoscopes under the “forms of divination” that violate of the first three of the 10 commandments—alongside palm reading, tarot cards, consulting mediums and all other forms of desiring to get a jump on the future.
He is a jealous God.
Fate from distant stars might appear more gentle than the Old Testament.
Also, safer and more malleable, than the fate handed out by the earth: drought, earthquake, mudslide, dust bowl.
Still, the earth deals us generally a gentle hand: Seeds drop, plants grow, and most days the ground stays still beneath our feet.
Tilling soil, tending seedlings, harvesting fruit that grows to abundance despite my pathetic efforts at gardening—those are the moments convey the power of larger things.
Such moments tell me what I need to know about life, about joy, about sharing, about legacy, about temporality.
So when my yoga teach tells me that it’s a new moon, and time to try new things, or that mercury is in retrograde, I sigh.
I know where my fate originates.
And it comes from the earth.
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