For we in the northern hemisphere, the long dark nights of winter cold coincide with the December solstice. This year’s Solstice also marks Saturn’s December 19 ingress into Capricorn, calling us to consider community and the responsibilities of sharing resources through difficult or lean times. For the indigenous peoples of our NW Coast, it is a time of ritual and community building, storytelling, gifting and sharing that carries the people and the land through the dark and wet winter. As Saturn’s movement suggests, our modern orientation to the season might benefit from tapping into such older traditions as we face shifting realities. But whereas Saturn in Capricorn represents a fortified dose of discipline, duty, responsibility and obedience, the larger astrological picture calls into question the very idea of service. Saturn also joins Pluto in Capricorn about midway through Pluto’s 15-year trek through the sign at the tail end of the Uranus-Pluto square, asking us who and what do we serve? What relational matrix are we responsible to? Let us gather to sow seeds of a renewed responsibility to celebrate life and its many communities. *no slides
