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I’m not sure why, but the moon has served as a messenger, lover, dancer, and wisdom carrier for me for the last few years. I always make sure that I honor time passing by doing a small ritual on a full and new moon, alone or with others. It serves as a guide for taking time to be in the present moment, like a guide or reminder of what I am supposed to be doing. Humans look at the sky as the home of the unknown, but also as a place where we can fish stories that can be rewilded here on earth. The sky has served as a canvas for mythological histories but it has also served as a practical guide for many civilizations, Mayans, Babylonians, and Greeks, who looked at the sky for direction, livelihood and survival.
In Catholic culture, dominant in the country I was born in, there is a general consensus that heaven is in the sky and hell is under the ground. As a child I was told that dead people’s spirits would go up in the sky, so for me, the sky is the home of all my ancestors. Years later, in my quest for deconditioning from patriarchal and capitalist thinking, finding my ancestral origins became an important part of the work. I would lay on the grass and look up at the sky for answers, and sometimes they came. Despite my fascination with the history of religions, I don’t buy into the institutionalisation of them, but I do believe in spirituality as an experience to seek meaning and connection, or to echo Comte-Sponville, as "the lived experience of transcendence, the lived experience of the infinite, the lived experience of what gives meaning, value, and depth to life."
As my dear friend Nahum, artist educator and director of KOSMICA Institute said in his recent course Spiritual Cosmos, “In Western traditions, spirituality is often associated with religious beliefs and practices, and is often understood as a means of connecting with God or a higher power, whilst in non-Western traditions it is intertwined with everyday life, and may not be separated from other aspects of culture and society”. We tend to forget that before religion became the only known source of attachment to the spiritual, Europe was filled with pagan spiritual practices and traditions that fostered human communication with the sky and the spiritual realm.
When I look at it, the sky reminds me of possibility, of an unknown that feels exciting to discover. Celestial awe is the name given to the feeling we get when we look at a night sky, it brings us a sense of surprise and admiration that consequently brings us closer to nature and the elements, therefore urging us to take care of them. Perhaps, the sky serves as a way to connect with joy and the spirit right here. This sense of moving forwards, this lack of control that the sky represents for many is very anti-capitalist in nature.
As Silvia Federici says in her brilliant essay In Praise of the Dancing Body, “Fixation in space and time has been one of the most elementary and persistent techniques capitalism has used to take hold of the body. Nature has been an inorganic body and there was a time when we could read the winds, the clouds, and the changes in the currents of rivers and seas.” In pre-capitalist societies, she adds, people thought they had the power to fly, to have out-of-body experiences. It is no coincidence that the practice of astral travelling is called like that, it involves an exploration of realms beyond our immediate physical reality.
Human’s urge to explore beyond what is tangible is as old as humanity itself, but somewhere along the way we stopped travelling with our imagination, or to find a spiritual purpose, and began travelling to conquer, invade and colonise. The same is happening with current space exploration and the billionaire dream to colonise Mars or space to escape climate disaster. The questions that come to my mind are: who will benefit from this dream? Who gets to go up and who gets to perish? Flights to the sky are currently inaccessible unless you are a millionaire. It is embarrassing that the capitalist mindset has made it so that even access to the sky, or heaven you could say, has become a question of privilege.
Merely looking at the sky and imagining new ways of connecting with the spiritual part of us can therefore be a poetic antidote. This is why I believe that astrology can be a revolutionary practice, and not in the coopted way of horoscopes that perpetuate patriarchal romantic ideas devoid of storytelling, but astrology as another tool to connect to our ancestral practices and to mythological storytelling that we can rewild here on Earth. After all, we are dualistic beings who must connect to our spiritual part as much as the logical, and practices like these can help us with that. The sky is a reminder of our cyclical nature, but it is also a reminder that our actions should consider future generations.
To use the words of astrologer Dayna Nuckolls “spiritual practices allow us to get back into bodies. Freedom begins in Imagination, revolution begins in the body”.