When I listen to the radio, visit my favorite websites, or
watch television these days, I see a world that is essentially
a dilapidated vehicle with expired registration, careening
headlong toward the edge of a cliff. The sheer scope of humanity's
troubles is enough to make you want to take to your bed, pull
the blankets over your head, and wait for it all to pass.
Ideally, of course, we would learn from our current crises
rather than simply enduring them - or worse, ignoring them.
So how can we transform the demands, frustrations, irritations,
and boredom of daily life into spiritual nourishment? This
is Pisces/12th-house work - and it's a tall order, because
for many of us it's a challenge just surviving our days, let
alone mining them for Big Lessons. An overwhelmed mother of
two with a full-time job would probably love to spend an hour
each day in soulful meditation, surrounded by candles and
incense. But between keeping her job, cooking dinner, and
keeping one kid from biting the other, she's got her hands
full.
When you've got too much on your plate, even the most trivial
chores can quickly snowball into Herculean tasks. Take the
several baskets of paper, folders, and files piled up right
next to my desk that need sorting, filing, and shredding.
Every time I walk into my office, determined to roll up my
sleeves and get to work, my heart sinks as I survey the sheer
size of this pile. Not only does the prospect of dealing with
it seem overwhelming, but even if I somehow managed to subdue
this pile, another tower of paper would surely rise up in
its place.
It's not just papers, laundry, or preparing tax returns that
overwhelm us now, but more serious worries such as evaporating
retirement accounts and ballooning mortgage payments. At
this Full Moon, with the Sun moving through sensitive Pisces
and moving into a conjunction with radical, unpredictable
Uranus, we may be finding it especially difficult to contend
with terra firma's recent, violent shifts. When we're
overwhelmed, spiritual enlightenment sounds like one more
burden, and it's tempting to seek escapist pleasures instead
- TV, the internet, our iPods, alcohol, food. Retreating into
these immediately gratifying mini-retreats, while not the
healthiest or most enlightened response, is sometimes the
best we can do.
Interestingly enough, the very tasks we find overwhelming
may potentially provide the spiritual solace we seek. I offer
you a tactic proposed by my sensible, Moon-in-Virgo
mother. Growing up, I was an extremely oversensitive kid who
generally coped by reading books and as I got older, making
music. But there were still days when I felt so rudderless,
so completely ill-equipped to meet the challenges awaiting
me in the real world that all I could do was to lie on my
bed and stare up at the ceiling. Fortunately, my mother was
a cheerful sort and regularly dragged me from my pit of despair
with a well-timed nugget of practical advice. "Whenever
you get overwhelmed," she used to say, "Do just
one small thing that doesn't take too much thought and that
you can finish quickly. Clean one drawer."
How can cleaning one drawer in your dresser, desk, or kitchen
help you save your house or send your kid to college? It can't,
of course. It won't even get rid of that pile of papers in
my office. But when you're overwhelmed to the point of inertia,
taking even a single step at least sets you in motion. And
focusing on one tiny area of your life - setting a modest
goal and seeing it through to completion - immediately gives
you a sense of power and control.
At this particularly ferocious Full Moon, the Moon and
Saturn meet their opposition to the Sun and Uranus with
a yearning for stability, for rules - for a plan. Unfortunately,
Saturn can also make us feel as though we're all alone and
the tasks before us are insurmountable. Finding security is
especially difficult now, as retrograde Venus (March
6 - April 17) reflects the widespread realization that a large
portion of our carefully amassed savings and investments has
vanished. But there's another way to read retrograde planets,
which is that they offer an opportunity to look within and
rediscover the resources that are your birthright. And there's
another way to think about Saturn, too - which is that the
dismantling of your external support systems can teach you
just how much inner strength you possess.
Our tasks seem to grow more and more difficult at this Full
Moon, our "To Do" lists longer, and the help we
need to complete them in short supply. What's more, the Sun/Uranus
conjunction warns that it's too soon to get attached to any
one solution to our problems, because as Bob Dylan once wrote,
"the wheel's still in spin." But Moon/Saturn's promise
is that we can, by accepting the limitations of the times
and attacking our problems systematically, build a strong
foundation for the future - even if it takes awhile to
see progress.
So if you feel overwhelmed at this Full Moon, try tackling
your days - and your life - in bite-sized chunks. File one
folder. Shred one stack of old receipts. Clean one drawer.
The world is set on its own precarious course, and it
will take awhile for the dust to settle so we can glimpse
the long view. In the meantime, as long as you're breathing
you have more than you know. You are more than you
know. Just wait and see.
