We are not afraid of death.
My neighbor and I share this conversation in between sips of tea as the morning light spills in warm waves upon a front porch freshly tidied clean of leaves.
There’s a break in the oppressive August heat. The past few days have staggered into 100 degrees and up, but this morning there’s a slight coolness, an ease in temperature that relieves the pressure around my heart.
The emotional holding drifts up like a hot air balloon when I first hear my neighbor sweeping to classical music. The brush of the broom blends into the orchestration, a cleaning spell performed before 10am. I hear the magic in the bristles announcing a renewal, a beginning again. I sit at my kitchen table, eating breakfast in solitude, and nestle in closer to this moment shimmering in aliveness: no phone, no TV, simply the view of the garden and the chickens hustling through dirt and piles of leaves searching for tasty bugs and critter treats.
The sweeping to the classical music weaves into the scene, and instantly, I smile.
Yesterday, sweeping the steps up to the garden enticed me, too.
A spontaneous and intuitive urge to sweat and clear prompted the venture into the garden.
Broom in hand, I travel the steps and press away the scattering of leaves, the splattering of dirt, the heat fried chicken poop to the side of the stairs. The chickens party in the garden like rockstars in a hotel bedroom – they destroy and trash with self-focused abandon, and so the steps will soon return to the painting design of talons intent on coating cement steps with twisted twigs and tossed earth.
And yet, it’s a messy cycle I find peace existing within. The cleanliness disappears into destruction and the dirty chaos dissolves into tidiness, and the loop continues.
My neighbor understands this. She participates smoothly in the cycle as well.
We catch each other after the sweeping, in the in between moment when I am in route to contribute another donation item to a growing box in the car, and she enjoys tea on a gleaming porch.
She sweeps the porch to clear her mind. I sift through my belongings to honor what-was and make room for what-will-be.
This is the Scorpio in me.
I sweep my life clean, repeatedly, to rise and reconstruct into a new forged reality.
I am not a nostalgic person. I live intensely, in lush appreciation, in fierce introspection in the moment, and therefore, goodbyes are rituals that rinse and ready me for the next.
The Scorpio in me wisely instructs not to cling, but to trust the rhythm of forward and to cleanse.
The Scorpio in me finds kindred solace in my Scorpio neighbor. Our conversations gleefully gallop into the underworld of emotionality, consciousness, the shadow work of spirituality.
My Scorpio neighbor reads the stars and has directed studied eyes at my natal chart.
On the surface, my sun sign of Gemini dazzles in the spectacle of lightheartedness, whimsy, playful speech, but it’s truly my ascending sign in Scorpio that governs the show so that the luminous qualities of my Gemini sun sign illuminate the darker and deeper currents of life. I swim into the depths, and feel enlivened and at home in the oceanic heartbeat. I seek the root of the truth. I attract and eagerly engage in interactions that revolve around spirited revelations and emotional epiphanies and heart-spilling stories.
So when my Scorpio neighbor and I cross paths, our conversations delve immediately into the energy behind the action, the intention hidden or seen.
The act of sweeping initiates passionate commentary on the emotional release of cleaning which effortlessly glides to a discussion on death, the mini-deaths, the essential winters and reentries into the womb that dictate the natural pace of our lives.
She reminds me of the butterfly cycle; the wisdom of the cocoon that recenters our life-force right back into the nothingness and everything-ness that is the mother womb.
We are not afraid of death. Death returns and reunites us with the womb, a darkness not to be feared, but an embracing coolness that kindly soothes and nourishes a resiliency for rebirth.
In an August that swelters to 100 degrees, we both agree that we are in a winter. And in winter, we take note of the energetic cleanliness of our cocoon. We organize to create space for the life readying into the next bloom.
Scorpio, like the butterfly, inherently knows and trusts that there will be a following stage. We will emerge from the cocoon, lift from the depths of the underground. This is fleeting. And we must live in the fleeting to gather the lessons to unfurl strong wings into the spring.
So soften into the season of your life. Accept with clucks of laughter the glorious mess of chicken roommates. Clean the porch, and if you do, play classical music for the enjoyment of your magical broom.