Saturn, In the Time of Putrefaction
On July 2, 2018, I woke up from a dream that struck me so deeply I shared it to Facebook. In it, “a surprisingly potent young woman” convinced me to join a protest by saying, “We can’t breathe, and revolution gives us life.” Two years later, as I began writing this piece, that dream resurfaced.
In 2020, in the United States—
We have watched Black men die of asphyxiation, crying out, “I can’t breathe.” Black activists on the streets shout those words in protest.
COVID-19 spreads unchecked, filling our lungs, making it hard to breathe.
Others complain that wearing a mask, the recommendation to minimize the spread of COVID-19, is a plot to suppress their breathing. That wearing the mask prevents the inflow of oxygen, or smothers them with their own carbon emissions.
Our collective carbon emissions continue to move the global temperature further up. Blazing fires consume acres of trees, the lungs of the earth.
In Seattle, our city council, mayor, and even a judge have all stated at some point that tear gas would no longer be used for crowd control, only for the police to continue deploying it against the eyes, mouth, lungs of protestors.
Breathing is a politicized act.
As a white person who teaches meditation, breathing was a portal to step out of the stress and reactivity of the moment and into contemplative space. Yet now, many of us cannot breathe without feeling our collective traumas. Breathing is grieving when so many beautiful souls have lost their breath, are losing their breath, will lose their breath.
In this time of pandemic and lockdown, so many of us have been pinned to our realities with no escape. To be here is to hurt. Whatever we did to distract ourselves was taken from us. Those who fully accepted this, and yielded to the restriction, gained a measure of control over the pandemic.
In the United States, many of us half-assed our lockdown efforts and then decided to stop them prematurely, and used the resulting failure as evidence that they were always misguided. The United States has always had within us a form of freedom that resists instruction, clinging to a false sense of innocence and a proud kind of ignorance. Compulsive resistance to authority is as limited as compulsive submission to authority. Both allow authority to define us. Neither is liberation.
For a moment, collectively, the death of George Floyd struck an undeniable note that something dreadful was happening. Even the most staunch conservative and pro-police folks I knew agreed that what happened to him was awful. Moderate liberals who formerly cautioned restrained and incrementalism started posting memes about not judging riots and beginning, in their way, to consider the possibility of police abolition.
It was a moment of profound opening, and of course there comes a backlash of malicious lies, lynchings, intensified policing, violent punitive crackdowns on protestors. The more one begins to look at the history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism in the United States, the more apparent it is that all our systems are implicated. Policing, mental healthcare, healthcare as a whole, social work. And to consider undoing all these at once, particularly for white people whose senses of security and well-being are built upon these institutions, is hard to tolerate.
Saturn’s love is harsh and unyielding. Through Saturn’s love we are given flesh and separation. Instead of being limitless beings of light and love, we are sparks of holiness who animate bodies that bruise and hurt against concrete walls, bodies that get sick, bodies that experience limitation.
All spiritual and religious teachings have to reconcile with this seeming dualism of human experience, that we are limitless beings of light and love and we are also limited animals in this painful world. Or they should. In the United States, we have a thread of spiritual and religious teachings that clings to a childish sense that sickness and poverty are the results of personal morality. So instead of compassion and care, they are met with judgment and condemnation, the most useless interventions.
White spiritual people who preach prosperity gospels under the guise of New Thought tell us not to listen to the protestors shouting “I can’t breathe.” They say this chanting is a spell that would make our vibrations unfashionably low. Instead we should affirm, “I can breathe.”
I cannot escape the irony of how many police, too, chose not to listen to those words, with fatal consequences.
My responsibility is not to tell Black people how to protest. My responsibility is to tell white spiritual people that, when we say things like this, we are assholes. We are assholes when we “channel” the spirits of dead Black people and it so happens those spirits say exactly what is most comforting to us, that they only want love and forgiveness rather than a reckoning of justice. We are assholes when we tell people that their illnesses, mental and physical, are manifestations of their fear or anger or unhealed ancestral wounds.
If we do not listen to what is said to us, how can we support healing and liberation? “I can’t breathe” is a diagnostic statement. If I went to my doctor and told him I couldn’t breathe, the last thing I’d want is to hear him telling me how I’m being so “low-vibration,” I should focus on what breath I have and forgive the illness that after all is simply here to help me evolve into the next realm of consciousness.
White supremacy is an invasive species that threatens to choke the indigenous flora and fauna of the land. It vines around the trunks and leaves of hardy species, depriving them of light and life and benefiting from their growth by taking up all the space.
That which cannot coexist interdependently endangers the ecosystem in which it lives. Unchecked, it swallows everything and then collapses. Burning it back is one way of restoring space for the native species to breathe and flourish.
Once I had a vision of a Black Sun, a symbol associated with Nazis and groups in the alt-right, eclipsing the land, so enormous that it seemed insurmountable. But then I saw many small fires igniting. Fires that had no connection with each other, but burning and tended by their own communities. Together those fires ignited so many pieces of that symbol that it burnt into ash.
That was shortly before the uprising, in which communities all over the world moved out to protest white supremacy and police violence in the United States. All these fires, not organized by anyone, enough to push forward policies and conversations that seemed impossible before.
During those first few weeks of uprising, the energy permeating the air and every interaction with my clients had that feeling of urgency. I could hardly feel my feet, let alone the ground. My body had a constant sense of leaning forward, ready to jump out and do, an urging often thwarted.
In the second week, however, something shifted. My clients were running on stress and exhaustion, coffee and adrenaline. My sense was that we needed to sit back in our bodies. To slow down for a moment and notice the ground under our feet, the chair holding our bodies.
This is a mindfulness practice, too, simply noticing the ground under our feet or that which supports our bodies. If breathing is too emotionally painful, we can feel the weight of gravity holding us, and the ground which offers relentless support.
Our bodies wanted water, sleep, nourishing food. Our bodies wanted to be held and to be with people who understood us, whom we didn’t have to explain ourselves. Our bodies wanted moments of feeling safe from threat and harm.
These needs, I believe, are basic to our animal selves, as much as our bodies also yearn for exertion, challenge, and useful work.
Bypassing and avoidance are ways we squirm away from the feelings in our body that arise when we’re activated, terrified, angry, powerless, ashamed. Part of our being in this world is that constant struggle to be here and to escape simultaneously. To be in this work for the duration requires a core and a container, a center and a circumference.
What are the values and virtues around which we center? To make space for those we may clean our inner house and invite in what is holy, enlivening, and beautiful. To protect those, we may build strong edges that deter what is harmful and invite what is beneficent.
Yet if we only live in a walled garden, those values and virtues become brittle. To be strong, we need to meet the world as it is. To bring beauty and aliveness into the world, we need to risk bringing those values and virtues out into practice. To risk failing. To risk being hurt. To risk heartbreak. To risk losing faith.
Since this pandemic began, I’ve been engaging in two particular practices. One is to write down the griefs, losses, and disappointments I’ve suffered. Another is to write down all the things I’ve done to help others.
The grieving lists go to a place on my altar where they collect over time, and then I take them out to burn them. Sometimes this burning is about simply releasing. Sometimes the fire charges a new intention.
The helping lists go on my wall, where I can see them. Whenever I feel overwhelmed and despairing that I’m not doing enough to help, seeing what I’ve done grounds me.
It’s never been a good time to believe in love, and right now is a really hard time to believe in love. Love sounds so naive now, or like a luxurious lie in which one can wrap one’s self. And no one needs that soft, indulgent kind of love right now.
What one needs is a love strong enough to be confined together, to give water to the thirsty, to pay reparations, to hold the line. And one wants a love that will give a soft place to land, where heat presses against heat and fire grows. One wants a love with respect, dignity, and justice.
Our great audacity to remake the world necessarily meets with the hopelessness of seeing how vast a project it is, and how much opposes it. Aliveness matters, and we are called to nurture what brings life.
ANTHONY RELLA
Anthony Rella is a witch, writer, and psychotherapist living in Seattle, Washington. Anthony is a student and mentor of Morningstar Mystery School and a member of the Fellowship of the Phoenix. Anthony has studied and practiced witchcraft since starting in the Reclaiming tradition in 2005. More on his work is available at his website.