Astro PSA: The Great Conjunction
Tomorrow is winter solstice, the most sacred day of the year. Here in 2020 it will be sacred on steroids because it coincides with the Great Conjunction, a super-charged astrological rarity whose magic I urge you meet halfway.
Astro PSA: Light in the Darkness
I stir from my recent blog slumber to herald’s today’s solar eclipse—taking place on the fifth day of Hanukkah, no less. Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of light in the darkness, of right trumping might against all odds. And solar eclipses occur when a new moon blocks out the sun’s light to reveal our personal energy resources. This solar eclipse in particular is on the South Node of Destiny in Sagittarius, which means something momentous is ending to make room for something even bigger. So it is no coincidence—nothing ever is!—that today the Electoral College officially declared Joseph Biden the new president-elect despite the many, many efforts to steal this election from the American people. And that today Sandra Lindsay, a New York ICU nurse, was the first American outside of a trial to receive the Covid-19 vaccine. Because today is an enormous turning point.
We may have felt all year that we were just stumbling blindly but today shows us that a lit path will materialize so long as we have the faith and courage to move forward in the dark. Truly, today is about the essence of miracles—which, really, are the marriage of willingness and will. So tonight hug whomever you can hug—your loved ones if you’re lucky enough to share space with them, your pets, yourself. And then go to bed as early as you like. Because you know what, babies? We have earned our rest. Love and light to all.
Pictured here: Dr. Michelle Chester administering vaccine to Sandra Lindsay. Photo by Scott Heins for the Office of Governor Cuomo, doctored by yours truly.
Waiter, There’s a Sociopath in My Soup
I’ve been thinking a lot about psychologist Martha Stout’s book The Sociopath Next Door. It’s useful on many levels, as it demystifies sociopathy and teaches you how to protect yourself from its many garden varieties. Sociopaths are more common and insidious than you’d think. Some are smart, some are not; their defining trait is an utter lack of conscience. But rereading this book during the Endless Unrest That Trump Wrought, I am most struck by Stout’s warnings about sociopathic leaders. Basically, her point is that most people are neither good nor bad so much as impressionable–reactive to larger social mores (lemmings, sure). So if you have a government or culture in which the dominant values are essentially sociopathic, you’re going to see sociopathic behavior embraced as the norm.
“In Western culture,” she writes. “Particularly North America, a lot of social rules are descriptors for sociopathy: a general acceptance of lying as long as you win, an attitude of ‘me first,’ an attitude that what it looks like is more important than what it is. This makes it much easier for a sociopath to be camouflaged in our culture.” Keeping in mind that she wrote this in 2009, it’s scary to see how prescient and lethal–literally–this proved to be. At the end of the day, it’s not Trump who scares me most. It’s the many many many who will thirst for his Kool Aid in the years to come.