In the days immediately following last month's election, my husband and I talked a lot about moving to his native New Zealand. It's an option that's still on the table, but we find ourselves deeply conflicted about it. In the nearly 14 years he's lived here, this has become my husband's home. And as for me - well, as much as I like to think of myself as a world citizen, the fact is that I have a long and somewhat tortured history when it comes to making big moves.

I was born in rural, southern Indiana, a place that probably has never been described as exotic. Growing up on our farm, I never imagined a larger world until we traveled to California to visit my aunt the summer I turned six. It was exciting to see other cities, other states, and ultimately the dizzying, palm-dotted mecca of Los Angeles. Everything was so big, busy, flashy, and loud! I had a really good time that summer, but I wasn't sad to return home to our familiar corner of the planet. For me, then as now, there was no place like home.

Four years later, when my mother decided we should move to Los Angeles permanently, I mounted an all-out insurrection. I didn't want to leave my home, my family and friends, my school, the wheat field where I used to lay on my back for hours and look up at the big, open sky. Suddenly Los Angeles, which as a vacation destination had been mildly amusing, seemed threateningly foreign, a blinding maze of asphalt, freeways, and taco stands. Once there, my sister and I, with no religious upbringing to speak of, were sent to my cousin's Catholic school, where a bewildering assortment of rituals awaited us. It was all very upsetting.

Well, I've lived in southern California for thirty-four years now, and it's become home, of course. And as much as I like New Zealand, and as unhappy as I feel about the state of my country, I hate the idea of living anywhere else; I would miss the enchiladas, just for a start. I'm not quite as sheltered as in the days when I fought hammer and tong against leaving the farm. In fact, relatively speaking I've become downright worldly. I've traveled to foreign lands and married a man from a country which, for the first twenty-five years of my life, I would have been unable to locate on a map. I even graduated from college, a sort of foreign country for the mind - the first in my family to do so.

But I've never completely outgrown the Indiana farmgirl parochialism. I'm still a little wary of unfamiliar food like curries and sushi. I'm unenthusiastic when my TV channel-surfing husband pauses on a Chinese film with subtitles. And I am ashamed to confess that, on occasion, I have made uncharitable assumptions about other people based solely on the fact that they are different from me.

The irony is that Sagittarius, the sign of the pilgrim - the traveler to other lands - was rising in the east at the moment of my birth, and a cluster of planets were hovering in the part of the sky we call the ninth house, the house of Long Journeys Over Water. I came into the world, it seems, to sojourn - to sample the world's cultural delights.

But I am a reluctant pilgrim, born with many planets in signs that are fixed by nature, intractable, bent on holding onto and mastering the known instead of expanding into the unfamiliar. A creature of habit, I would be happy to spend every day in the same place, with the same people, doing the same things; but the world has had other plans for me, periodically placing me on a collision course with upheaval and the unfamiliar.

I suppose, like many of us in the United States, I can trace my uneasy relationship with foreignness to my Puritan ancestors.These pilgrims came to the New World in search of religious freedom, yet it took them less than a century to begin burning people at the stake because they held different religious beliefs. And confronted with a native people so different from themselves as to seem like a completely alien life form, they destroyed them as quickly as they could. Such were the consequences of Puritan pilgrims refusing to adapt to their new land, seeking, instead, to remake the New World in their image.

But while the chart most popularly used for the United States has the Sun in conservative, protectionist, sometimes xenophobic Cancer, it also has Sagittarius rising. As a people, we are wary of the unfamiliar, but with Sagittarius leading the way we are continually grappling with it. Our immigrant tradition combined with our rather ethnocentric beginnings propels us into a kind of perpetual cultural improvisation. It is to our great credit that many of us, Puritan ancestry nothwithstanding, acknowledge the wisdom of accepting different cultures on their own terms and learning what we can from them. The great strength of Sagittarius is its flexibility in the face of the unfamiliar.

But embracing the unfamiliar requires an intellectual honesty that acknowledges the limitations of one's personal reality. Sagittarius, at its best, teaches a reverence for the truth. Sagittarius is the emperor with no clothes, who is so enlightened that he laughs at the absurdity of his nakedness instead of denying it. It is the pilgrim and the native, sharing a meal at the harvest table despite having not the slightest idea how to talk to one another. It is the Indiana farmgirl who keeps reaching for other worlds, even though she is scared to death of them, because she has a nagging feeling that her own world is a little too small.

In the coming months, we may or may not sell our house, pack up our cats, and head for a new life in the South Pacific. There are many emotional and logistical obstacles to doing it, not the least of which is simple inertia. But the Sagittarius season is as good a season as any for evaluating the option of bringing the American pilgrimage full circle, and for learning lessons about reality as it is, and reality as we would like it to be - but mostly, about bending with whatever reality comes our way.