I
am at a Chinese wedding banquet in San Francisco, seated
at a table with eight strangers and my husband. I
don't want to be here; it's only four days since
the election and I'm still working my way through Kübler-Ross'
five stages of grief. But one of the grooms is a dear
friend who was best man at our wedding, and besides,
it feels very fitting to be celebrating one of last
winter's legally sanctioned gay weddings so soon after
eleven states passed gay marriage bans.
The
room is crowded, warm, and noisy - it's hard to hear
even the woman seated on my left. As the dishes arrive,
one by one, Sharareh and I lean toward each other to
make conversation. When she mentions that the woman
seated next to her on the other side is her daughter,
I ask if she has any other children. Her face clouds
over and she shakes her head. Before I can recover from
having asked what is obviously a painful question, she
leans in a little closer. "I had another daughter,
but she died," she tells me. "I don't like
to talk about it." My heart sinks. I express my
sorrow for her loss and assure her that, of course,
she needn't talk about it. But she can't shake the
question, and something in my manner must seem reassuring,
because as we help ourselves to some spicy beef she
tells me the story. How her daughter was killed
in a car accident in Turkey. How she had called her
daughter, frantic, after a terrible nightmare, just
the night before the accident. "I'm fine, mom,"
her daughter reassured her.
Eventually
the conversation steers to shallower waters, and she
asks what I do for a living. When I tell her I'm an
astrologer, her eyes light up. "Today is my birthday!"
she tells me. A Scorpio, I register, reflexively. "Can
you tell me what the year will be like for me?"
Now, almost any astrologer will tell you this is a question
we dread in a party environment. There you sit, with
only a birthday to go on, with no charts, asked to deal
with serious matters in a light, social setting, with
none of the usual tools of your trade. Ordinarily, it
is a game I don't play. But Sharareh has entrusted me
with a confidence, and all I could give her in return
was a sympathetic ear, and it doesn't feel like enough.
I decide to trust that the universe has something more
for me to give her. As we fill our plates with the
next course, a beautiful Chilean sea bass, I struggle
to bring the heavens into focus in my mind's eye.
It's
been four days since I bothered to look at an ephemeris.
I try to locate myself in the lunar cycle, and counting
backwards from the New Moon (I know the date, because
of my deadline for this article) I find the moon's placement
for the day. I retrieve the recent eclipses in Libra
and Taurus and place them alongside her Scorpio Sun.And as can sometimes happen - especially with water
signs, who tend to be so open, psychically - I see
some things, and I tell her about them, and she nods
emphatically; and we talk about where she might go next.
She is smiling now, and her brown eyes are snapping.
We
talk for awhile of other things, and then dinner is
finished, and a few couples begin to dance. I'm not
a dancer, nor is my husband. But Sharareh and her daughter,
and the two middle-aged, conservatively dressed women
sitting next to them - also strangers to them when the
evening began - take the floor with enthusiasm. Sharareh
is Iranian, and a Scorpio, and her dancing is foreign,
exotic, sensual; she is completely and utterly alive.
The other women form a small circle and take turns in
the center, emulating Sharareh's dance, and they laugh
ecstatically.
Sharareh's
daughter dances over to me and pulls me onto the dance
floor. I don't know how to dance, I'm awkward in my
body, and I've spent four days wrapped inside a small,
dark emotional space that has left me raw and stiff.
I don't want to dance. But the DJ is playing
music from the early 80's, and my body suddenly remembers
what it was like to be 19. I find myself dancing, and
laughing with the other women, and while I can't emulate
Sharareh's dance moves, I find myself entering into
the spirit of her dancing - letting the seriousness
and the pain and the depression of the past few days
fall away, giving myself over to the ecstasy of being
alive.
This
is what the Scorpio season asks of us: a total commitment
to being ecstatically, completely alive, even in the
face of death and defeat. A modern-day Demeter who
has lost her daughter, Sharareh didn't hide her pain,
but neither did she hide in it. She simply added
it to the banquet table, like another Chinese dish,
and when the lazy susan in the center of the table began
to swivel she instinctively moved on to the next course.
I admired the way she fully inhabited her feelings but
was able to come back and inhabit her body as well -
enjoying the food, dancing with spirit and joy.
A
few days after returning home, I'm not any happier about
last week's election. I still skip back to revisit the
steps of grief, especially anger, which I'm finding
is especially persistent. But the cool autumn winds
of Scorpio, and my chance meeting with an extraordinary
Scorpio woman, have stiffened my spine. Now when
the hard feelings surface, I try to simply let them
be instead of immediately stuffing them away. And when
they ebb again, I look out the window at the impossibly
gorgeous autumn sky, and breathe in the wood smoke from
a distant fireplace, and pet the cat, and have something
nice to eat.
The Scorpio season teaches us that life, like a temperamental
lover, sometimes likes to test our commitment by showing
us its ugly side. It's easy to love life when it
is kind to us, when it makes sense and makes us feel
good. But can we love it when it is harsh and disappointing
and determined to break our hearts? Scorpio answers,
"Yes." So while we're alive, we would do well
to live like Scorpios. To commit ourselves with passion
to the process of living, to dance with that temperamental
lover, and to taste every dish at life's banquet table
- with spirit and with joy.
