It’s been one moon cycle since I’ve left Ireland and crossed the ocean of potentiality 😉
The moon is full again today, once around the earth.
Much has happened since. I‘ve arrived in my new apartment with a warm welcome – my dad and his wife had arranged camping furniture and decorated the place with balloons, ribbons, candles and flowers and put bottles of champagne and chocolates in every corner. I entered the door to my future to the Bavarian anthem playing from my Step-mom‘s mobile phone.
It was a significant new beginning. And right on time for my 50th birthday the day after.
Shortly after that day, Germany celebrated Mother’s Day and, a week later, Father‘s Day. Both days I got to spend with my actual father and mother.
To understand the significance of this, I‘ll tell you my story very briefly:
I didn‘t grow up with either of them. At least not until the later parts of my childhood. I grew up with my great-grandmother.
She was an amazing woman, a survivor if there ever was one. She came to Germany as a refugee from Romania, after a long and difficult journey, years of hiding from both the Russians (she was part of a German travelling minority in Romania) and the Germans (her husband was Jewish). She lost her youngest child to starvation and has, since the end of the war, dedicated herself to feeding and loving all of the children around her, including me.
My mom‘s mom, who was 14 when they arrived in Bavaria, was traumatised from the war-events, developed eating disorders, addictions and wasn‘t exactly a wonderful mom so all of her five children were (some full-time, some temporarily) brought up by my great-grandmother. Her name was Ida. On my 50th birthday, she would have been 116 years old. Yes – we share a birthday, which makes her memory even more special to me.
I lived in a magical house – at least that‘s what I thought. Surrounded by my aunts and my „Oma“ Ida, I felt like everything was steeped in love and protection. The garden was full of wonderful, living things – dragonflies from another dimension, spirits that lived in trees and mermaids who taught me how to swim in our little garden-pool. It was a beautiful childhood.
But of course the separation wasn’t without consequence and led to some complications – some years later I lost touch with my dad completely.
This phase lasted for over 25 years until we finally – through a sequence of circumstances that would make a great novel but would lead too far here – re-connected.
This re-connection was like a key that opened a door that had been locked for a long time and behind that door was a whole new place. You know those types of dreams where you are in your house and suddenly discover all these new, amazing rooms you didn’t know you had? Well, it felt like this. Like a well of energy that had been sealed and now came bubbling up, bringing so much new potential with it. All of a sudden, and seemingly unconnected to what was happening between my father – my parents – and me, my life changed – I felt more confident, more clear, more abundant and sure of what I wanted. It was like an awakening. A blessing. The blessing of Shani.
Shani, in Vedic mythology, is Saturn. Let me tell you his story:
Surya – the sun – shines brightly. Like a king in the heavens, he radiates his energy, giving life to all that is circling around him. Like a king, he looks after the world, but is oblivious to what is going on close to him.
Sanjana, his wife, could not bear the heat. She needed respite. To not disturb the absent king of the world, she fashioned a clone of herself out of her shadow. Chaya, the shadow-wife, stayed with the king in her stead, while she took leave, visiting her own family, enjoying the cool of the earthly forests, the shades of the trees and the wind. In form of a horse, she ran free and wild across the plains, liberated for once, from the duties of the wife of the sun. But soon she got word that Chaya had a child with her husband. This made her angry. It had gone too far. The shadow-clone was simply to stand in for her so the king would not notice her absence. She was not meant to have his children! Full of resentment and fury she returned to the heavens and banned Chaya back into the shadow-world. But the child, Shani, was already there. Her resentment extended to the child and she could not bring herself to love Shani. She kept finding excuses and blamed the child for anything that went wrong, until even Surya was convinced that this child is not worthy of love. So Shani grew up rejected, unappreciated and treated like a slave, while his siblings were given favours and gifts. But Shani was tough – he bore everything with patience and endurance. He never made demands, never complained. He did the lowliest work. He watched his older siblings grow up and, when they were coming of age, receive the most amazing gifts, treasures and boons from his parents. But then, when his own time came, he got nothing. He was ignored, like he always was. But this time, he did not bear it. He confronted his parents.
And so, Sanjana was forced to tell them the truth. She admitted to her husband that she had been taking refuge and that Shani is the son of Chaya.
Now Surya understood Shani and regretted his behaviour. To make up for the lost years of his childhood, he gave him the biggest boon there was to give – immortality. He made him a heavenly star – Saturn.
Shani is like a diamond – shaped through many years in darkness, under a lot of pressure. He is clear, shining, transparent, pure, as only those can be who went through the underworld, the unconscious mind, and brought the light of the sun into the darkest corners.
Shani is a teacher of the soul.
A being that is billions of years old, teaching us how to be that diamond. Does he care if we feel some discomfort in the process? Probably not. All he cares about is that eventually, we do shine, we become immortal. Like Saturn.
When we clear our issues, our „daddy-issues“ or our heal our „mother-wound“, when we recognise the most uncomfortable truths about ourselves, then we are learning Shani‘s lessons.
For the individual that means, when we have the courage to face our darker truths and shed some light on our shadows, and when we heal our relationships with our parents, or by extension, our life-partners, friends and children, then unexpected treasures may come to us. Energy that was previously blocked, will become freed up, opening up new possibilities in life.
For those of you interested in Vedic Astrology (Jyotish, the science of Light), it is interesting to see that since the beginning of the pandemic, Saturn has been particularly strong in his influence on earth (Saturn being in his own home, in Capricorn), on a global level. Maybe it is our relationship to the eternal mother, to the earth, that we have to heal, maybe we have to face our deeper issues of disconnection from nature, or from the spiritual „father“. And by that I don‘t mean God, in the Christian sense – I mean the masculine and feminine principle of the Vedic teachings: Consciousness and Nature. We seem to have lost both – our deeper connection to the divine, to the pure consciousness that is in everything, and to nature, the mother who feeds us all.
The lessons of Shani, be it in form of our individual stories and relationships to our parents or in form of a global pandemic, are the same. We have to face our deeper issues. Our fears, our darkest truths. And heal the relationship to the divine masculine and feminine outside and inside of us.
So, for me, on a personal level, I feel like this part of my journey is complete. Of course the journey is long from being over, like the moon cycling around the earth many times, where one story ends, a new one always begins.
I look forward to the new one. The next chapter, the next book. And I hope that Shani can keep giving his blessings, even though they may come in form of challenges and hard lessons we first have to complete. But that‘s what life is all about, isn‘t it?
