This hits home

It's been a rough few weeks

I’m no Einstein, but I’m taking a stab at expanding his Theory of Relativity by connecting time and space to memory and home - all relevant themes in Tuesday’s New Moon. You can play along, too, by bringing to mind the last time you went home. Already, you may be tripped up about which home. Home, a location in space, must also have a time thread to yank on. For the sake of this exercise, think of home as the place and time that has the strongest hold on your psyche. This is the place that shaped you, either because you built your life in resistance to it, or alternatively, built your life recreating its emotional contours via the subconscious choices you made.

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I estimate my younger brother Danny I traveled the same two lane suburban Seattle road together some 2700 times on our way to grade school and later, high school. Yesterday, I drove that same hometown road by myself. As kids, the walk to our Catholic grade school took us about 30 minutes, even though it was just over a mile. Dressed in the requisite scratchy plaid wool uniform skirt and white Peter Pan collared blouse, the third grade version of me was just as serious and driven as later versions, and I would prod my first grade brother, already a dapper figure in navy blue corduroys and a white polo shirt. “Stop talking so much, or we’re gonna be late and get in trouble!” I would berate him, as he stopped to tell his friend a story every 50 yards. He didn’t listen to me then, nor later, as adults, when the potential trouble was a lot bigger than a visit to Sister Joan’s office.

In our teenage years, I drove us to high school down the same road in my little red Ford EXP. The tables had turned and he nagged me for the opposite reason I used to nag him. “Slow down, sis, you’re gonna get a ticket, and that’ll make us later.” Had his words hit home, they could have prevented a perilous pattern that would repeat for decades: me, in a constant hurry towards somewhere I didn’t really want to go, self-sabotaging along the way. Years later, my sermons about sobriety and health failed to hit home with him, and he would respond with something like, “The way I live is not bothering me, so why should it bother you?” Later, he’d send a text to satisfy my obsessive need for validation: You’re a good big sister. I love you.

As I drove that road yesterday, I felt all past versions of us riding along, present for this final day of my brother’s earthly history. It felt important to simply allow the memories to build their own history, rather than making a tidy story about my brother, or about our relationship. After all, we are still in relationship, continuing to make memories together, although we are in different forms - he, now a being of light, and me still flesh and bone.

We traveled yesterday as we often had all those years ago, me in full Leonine drama, a fountain of self-pitiful tears and snot, and he, the epitome of Aquarian cool objectivity. He reassured me that I really couldn’t have done anything to prevent him from making the choices he made (classic Aquarian trait: obstinacy). Further, he showed me that while he has returned Home, he is still here wherever I consider home to be, too. And I know in my heart he’s right.

My brother and I, exactly 3 years ago

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With this New Moon, we are experiencing the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in a unique and highly cooperative configuration, 60° each from the next, at 4° of Gemini, Aries, and Pluto. The outer planets offer a higher consciousness toward freedom from the known (Uranus), belief systems and spirituality (Neptune), and the meaning of transformation (Pluto), and they are inviting us into conversation about these themes as they pertain to the Cancer archetype.

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Three of the inner planets - Mercury, the Sun, and the Moon - are joined in the sign of Cancer. The inner planets reflect our conscious self, which as a collective seems to have lost its inner compass, its home base, if you will. Cancer is associated with the feeling of home, emotional history, and the archetype of motherhood. Perhaps we’ve forgotten the importance of home. It’s not just a physical space filled with IKEA minimalism or Pottery Barn neutralism or thrift store eccentricity and a smattering of too much clutter.

There is a home that birthed you and a home that can infinitely rebirth you. In order to understand how we’ve grown into who we are, and understand our trajectory in time, space, and history, we need all the memories of home we can mine. Why? Because our souls came here to have experiences, especially the painful ones, those we often numb from or attempt to banish from memory - we need them in order to evolve. And to evolve, we must raise as much from memory as possible to our conscious awareness so we can zoom out and say, “Ah hah! I get it. I see what my soul was doing with that [illness, divorce, death of a loved one].” From this perspective, we see we’ve been home all along. Home is everything that is emotionally true, hence the saying “it hits home”. And so as we expand what we can hold, we may not need to project belief systems, or to fear transforming beyond what we have known.

The New Moon is always a time to consider where you wish to go next. At this Cancer New Moon, consider that home means much more than where you are from. Home inhabits us across time, space, and memory.

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Thank you so much for making Substack feel like home! I feel so fortunate to have met many of you in other spaces and in real life over the last 2+ years.

How are you doing out there? How is home feeling to you these days?

Please share my work if you know of anyone who would be interested!

You may enjoy this one from the archive:

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The next paid subscriber gathering is Tuesday, July 21st 9 - 10 a.m. PDT. These are interactive! Your questions and comments are welcome as I discuss the current energy. The recordings will be shared with paid subscribers afterward.

In the Seattle area, join me at my pop-up every Friday at West Coast Willow Apothecary and join us for community bonding over plants at the free Herb Nerd Night on July 21st.