I am paradox and you are, too
I am a mass of contradictions and so are you.
I’m ambitious and optimistic, taking chance after chance in pursuit of learning, new experience and meaning, freedom…I’m lazy and content to wallow in as much material comfort as possible for as long as possible.
I’m friendly, approachable, gentle and kind…I will come at you like a rabid dog if you try to control me or threaten something I care about.
I’m very intelligent and endlessly curious…I’m stubborn AF, it takes me a long time to fully process information, and I get uncomfortable with lots of change.
I will purposefully and effectively defy every “rule” I possibly can…I want to get along for the sake of peace.
I’m organized and an impulsive procrastinator.
I have a great sense of humor and take things too seriously.
I’m grateful and content and restlessly dissatisfied.
I’m easy-going and flexible and so picky and aware of what could go wrong that one tiny “off” condition can throw off my whole day.
I tend to be headstrong and outspoken and am rather ambiguous about what I think about things and struggle to be clear with my words.
My thinking is existential and I’m very concerned with what we’ll be having for dinner.
I’m quite sensitive and often offensively blunt.
I’m fair and I want to win.
I’m confident and riddled with self doubt.
I’m humble and reserved and brash and loquatious, happy to be the center of attention.
I’m an introvert who needs to verbally process her experience with many people to fully grasp it.
I’m loyal and reliable, can be counted on to come through, and I have a short attention span and unceremoniously dump things that I'm bored with.
I’m a daydreamer with a lot of focus.
You get the picture. I’ll stop before we all start singing One Hand in My Pocket.
We aren’t just one thing or another. All the things we are, are contradictory, bumping up against one another and against what we wish were true, or different…and what society tells us should be true or different.
What do we DO with it all…with all the parts of our nature in a tug of war within us and with the external?
Culture will tell us to stop being one way and decide to be the other. There’s a seductive notion that we are blank slates that can be fully re-written to fit a particular narrative. So we try. We try to change not just habits or patterns, but who we are. Those messy parts that don’t fit the narrative? In the closet they go. But even when we keep our back pressed hard against the door (“door? What door? There’s no closet! Nothing to see here, folks”) those parts are still alive. Whether we claim them or blame them on someone or something else, there they are, impacting us, driving our behavior, making us uneasy, afraid to be found out…that fear causing us to betray ourselves in so many ways, causing us to live lies.
We can live out our lives with half of us in shadow…that’s one option. We can try to jettison the parts of ourselves we don’t like or that others don’t like. The parts that don’t fit in or blend neatly with our own or cultural narratives. We can immerse ourselves in movements and belief systems and groups, follow gurus, try to meditate it out of ourselves, try to outrun it, out-spend it, out-achieve it, out-drink it, out-perform it, out-shout it, out…whatever. Been there, done that, may feel safe, also feels exhausting, hard and ultimately…it feels sad. Our soul knows when it’s being abused and neglected.
Another option is opening up that door we’re holding shut, and seeing that behind it is a significant part of our self. Maybe we can cultivate the courage and love to invite those parts back in to our conscious life. Know them. Accept and accommodate the tensions between them. Learn to work with them skillfully so they don’t need to sneak behind our backs or become monstrous in order to get their needs met. Integrate them into ourselves, so we can feel whole.
Wholeness requires that we accommodate it.
Really think about that, because it goes against the grain of what we’ve mostly been taught wholeness means. We can’t rely on society to support our wholeness, because it doesn’t. It won’t. It can’t.
Despite all the things I’ve worked at in all the ways, I could not see my own wholeness until I started to learn how to see and understand my natal chart through the lens of archetypal astrology. There it was…”in black and white,” so to speak. No judgment or value systems were implied within it (those were my own), it just was what it was. As my understanding of the lens deepened, looking into my chart became like looking in a mirror, not to assign value to some traits and critique others, but to see it all. Really see myself as the complex, paradoxical miracle I am.
We are all that. Complex, paradoxical miracles, and when we stop fighting the complexity and paradox, we grow up. It’s not that everything suddenly becomes easier; we just learn to better accommodate the hardness. Complexity and paradox requires much of us. Wholeness requires much of us. We’re worth it.
The archetypal astrological lens has become part of the work I do with other humans, too. Not as something to believe in; not as instruction, but as an unbiased mirror of the whole mysterious and beautiful and difficult self. The self that isn’t shaped by culture and can never be erased and recorded over for the sake of a narrative.
I find great joy in working with this mirror because wholeness and integrated expression of that wholeness are fundamental to me. I care.
Another paradox in me: I want to know everything, right now, all at once…and if I came to the end of all there is to learn, the world would feel gray and dead for me, indeed.
I’m leaning into the life that sits in the in-between, and the goodness and beauty of not-knowing, of leaving some things to mystery.
It’s what works for me.