Fall Cleansing

My friend Susan just returned from a visit back East with her sisters.  She was thrilled with their recent successes and aware she didn’t have any to rival theirs, except that she’d changed.  She wasn’t the way she used to be, and that was good.  Still, she felt uneasy, unfinished somehow, and in the days following her trip, there was that persistent inner voice, complaining “I just want to be happy… but what is that?” 

I often enter the Scorpio season likewise unsettled.  This can happen after the explorations of intimacy during the previous Libra month.  With Libra’s greater sensitivity to outer feedback, we more readily see just how our lives are in--or out of--balance.  We want to get newly organized, make the right changes.  Autumn is the time to call back and re-organize the loose, outward-flowing patterns that flourished in the warmer months.  As the natural world draws its energy into the ground, we are likewise shifting our focus, to what matters at our roots. 

As a fixed sign, Scorpio can help us hold and develop whatever new awarenesses we’ve achieved.  It also tests our attachments, clarifying what needs eliminating.  During a Scorpio season years ago, I discovered just how powerful Scorpio’s purging can be.  I was at the tail end of a difficult divorce, and one of the last gifts my husband had given me—a little desk terrarium—was inadvertently damaged by a co-worker.  I collapsed into such grief, even I was surprised.  Wasn’t I done with this yet?  After so many months of anger, loneliness and tears, I was still holding on to the marriage.  With a friend as support and my shoulders shaking with grief, I performed a ritual of letting go:  I threw my ex-husband’s last gift into the parking lot dumpster.

From such small acts of release, our lives transform.  The next day was startling:  I met somebody new.  I fell in love!  I met the man who five years later would father my son.  Room for new futures is made whenever we let go.  The waning Moon invites us monthly to clear space and release attachments that no longer serve, but this work is especially significant throughout Scorpio’s season.  As the days shorten, the air cools, and the geese fly south; as we take ourselves indoors, wear warmer clothes, and eat heartier foods, we can resist or go willingly into nature’s plan for us--to go inward now and renew our souls, clearing the way for future joys. 

Scorpio's Virtue: Patience

Scorpio is a water sign and it’s the depths of our emotions (what the water element rules) that we feel most intensely this season.  Working with our feelings, we need Scorpio’s tenacity and focus, particularly when the emotions are difficult ones.  Spiritual psychologist, Robert Sardello, further suggests we can benefit in Scorpio’s season, profoundly, from practicing the virtue of patience.  Patience means not wanting anything more than what we have right now.  It is the ability to endure the present without hurrying towards something we might hope is better.  It helps us to taste the quality of the moment without resistance or anxiety.  Sardello calls this a “virtue,” not in a moral sense, but more from its earlier meaning, as a quality of divine beings, an act or influence of the gods.  Practicing patience this month is a mystical means for becoming more soulful and divine.  It’s not a word that modern astrologers readily associate with Scorpio—but calling on patience now just might hasten the transformations you most desire.