I wrote this not long after the 9/11 attacks. Rereading it today, I was surprised to find that there is little I would add to it ten years later – except, of course, to note that America has not responded to its Pluto/Ascendant transit any better than I did.
Heart of Darkness
by April Elliott Kent
” ‘ When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences.’ “
“I don’t really understand that.”
“You will, one day. When the worst has happened, and still you continue to breathe.”
Grief can make you angry, and a little nuts.
From about 1995, when my brother died, to 1997, when my mother died — a time frame which, incidentally, coincided with transiting Pluto crossing my Ascendant — I felt like the angriest person in the world. And since there was nobody to get angry at, lots of people caught schrapnel from my periodic explosions. Soon after my brother’s death, his widow — a woman I’d regarded as a sister for twenty years — made a couple of tactical errors and was vaporized from my life with a single nuclear blast. Several long standing friendships were destroyed in bloody, surgical battles. Clients who transgressed my boundaries were unceremoniously kicked to the curb. And one day when my boss hollered at me I turned around, threw some personal things in a box, and simply walked out. Every day, it seemed, I grew angrier and angrier, increasingly depressed, and more and more isolated. Several people — nice, interesting people — made overtures of friendship during that time, but I resisted getting too close. Suddenly I could see other people only in terms of the harm we were capable of inflicting on one another.
Six months after my mother died I could literally barely walk. My back, always my weak spot, was constantly seizing up and putting me out of commission for days at a time, and I was having problems with my feet. I tried prosthetics for my feet and saw my chiropractor regularly, but these remedies were limited in their effectiveness. The message was clear: I wasn’t moving forward. In fact, I was hardly moving at all.
Fortunately I was pursuing a degree from my local community college which required that I take two physical education classes. In 1999 I signed up for a yoga class, and after only two classes of breathing and stretching I was able to get around almost completely without pain. For an hour and a half, two days a week, I devoted myself completely to relaxing, giving in, softening. The physical relief was enormous; I still practice yoga regularly to keep myself getting around smoothly.
Along with the physical pain, some of that white hot anger gradually subsided too; but six years down the road I find I’m still a lot more short tempered, irritable, and judgmental than I used to be. Every step of the way, it seems, I took the wrong approach in handling my grief and consequently hurt myself and other people. In hindsight, it’s easy to see where I went wrong, what I could have done differently, how I might have allowed those experiences to deepen me, to increase my compassion, to teach me. Instead I fought back at an ill defined enemy with everything in me, with all my implacable hatred, and launched dozens of powerful but unnecessary battles. In the end, nothing was accomplished except that I was left physically and emotionally hobbled.
Two deaths. That’s all it took to transform me, in two years, from a fairly open, emotionally accessible, and forgiving person into someone I barely recognized, someone a lot more bitter and wary than I ever wanted to be. It took only two deaths, two years apart, to upset the balance in me between love and hate, to tip the scales just a little further in the direction of hate. Who knows what the deaths of 3,000 people in a single day will do to the character of my country?
Like most everyone else I have personal feelings about what happened here on September 11, and strong convictions as to why it happened and what my country’s response should be. But my feelings and thoughts are not unique and are no more valid than anyone else’s, and I doubt I could express them with any more eloquence than the dozens of talented writers speaking out on the subject. Since I have very strong feelings but few answers, all I will offer a country currently experiencing its own Pluto/Ascendant transit is what I learned from my own walk through the heart of darkness:
- There is no such thing as safety.
- The consequence of hardening ourselves against possible threat is pain.
- The consequence of distancing ourselves from other people is loneliness.
- The consequence of hatred is unhappiness.
My own response to Pluto/Ascendant grief and loss resulted in excessive pain and suffering for myself and others. My hope is that my country can find a way to transcend its collective suffering, will choose its battles very, very carefully, and will ultimately prove much greater, stronger, and more compassionate than I did.
Sibley (12 Sagittarius Rising) Chart for the United States at the Mountain Astrologer website. On the date of the attack transiting Pluto was at 14 degrees Sagittarius.
