When a ship carrying British soldiers arrived in New Haven, Connecticut in July 1779, Yale president Ezra Stiles watched it for a while and wondered what it meant.
As the soldiers started to disembark and head toward New Haven, Stiles hurriedly moved his belongings.
In his journal he recorded with dismay that, in his haste, he broke his Fahrenheit thermometer that he had owned for many years.
There’s about to be a battle in the American Revolution and Stiles is worried about a thermometer!
Yale historian Joanne Freeman frequently tells this story and says, “The everydayness of history is vital to remember and it’s particularly important to remember now.“
She notes how part of us freaks out when dramatic things happen in the collective and the other part of us worries about running out of milk.
“The way change will happen will not just be from big decisions on high. How change happens will be from people on the ground doing everyday things.”
Of course that reminds me of what Clarissa Pinkola Estés says:
Imagine the entire world in aggregate as having a soul. Imagine it is our work to reach out to repair the part of the world soul that is within our reach–the edge that belongs to self and the corresponding part that belongs to the world. The key words are ‘to repair that which is within your reach.’ So we ask ourselves, ‘What is within my reach?’ I am! I am within my own reach.’ (Terror, Violence, and the Impulse to Destroy: Perspectives From Analytical Psychology).
The question of ‘”what’s within my reach” has been on my mind a lot lately, which is why I keep finding myself drawn to historians for reassurance alongside my depth psychology reading.
Church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch says “the historian is the guardian of sanity in society.” He also describes a historian as a “non-directive counselor.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson recently said in an interview, “I think people spend a great deal of time worrying about what might happen. I always hear, ‘How is this going to play out? What’s going to happen next?’ My answer is ‘We don’t know. You never know what the future is going to bring.‘ Until something actually happens I tend to get less concerned about it than other people do.”
Those of us who study and practice astrology have asked, or heard clients ask, those same “what’s going to happen next” questions. Especially this week, with a dramatic eclipse in Aquarius (February 17) followed by a rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries (February 20). The last one happened in 1703, well before Stiles broke his thermometer.
Quite frankly, I’d prefer to worry about my thermometer (assuming I could find it!) than spending the week doom-scrolling through the news and predictions.
It’s easier to obsess over a rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction–something vast and impersonal happening “out there”–than to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we have agency and have choices to make. Small ones, mostly. Ordinary ones. The kind that might not show up in an astrology forecast but that actually shape how we move through change.
While we’re all watching the dramatic eclipse on Tuesday and the rare Saturn-Neptune conjunction on Friday, the Sun quietly enters Pisces on Wednesday, sandwiched right in the middle. Pisces–the sign of dissolving, compassion, mending.
Maybe that’s the real transit to pay attention to. Not the loud ones infecting us with anxiety, but the quiet one inviting us to the “mending loom,” to borrow an Estés phrase. To sit with what’s within our reach. To do the small Piscean work of tending to what’s broken and reaching out to what’s hurting.
Another story Freeman likes to tell is about George Washington. He would take a walk every day, pause at a church to look up at the clock, and then take out his time piece to compare the time. He did this to show everyone he was a normal person like everybody else and not a king. He even received fan mail about it. Coincidentally his Sun sign was Pisces.
We can look up at the cosmic time, so to speak, but also take out our own figurative time piece down here on the ground and focus on the everydayness. The mending looms are waiting. We can be “guardians of sanity,” doing our part to “lift off the world’s shoulders our personal part of the burden” (James Hollis, p. 128, Tracking the Gods).
Sources
Joanne Freeman quotes from Good History, AI Slop, and Why It Matters Right Now-a LOT
Diarmaid MacCulloch quotes from How to Write Rigorously
Heather Cox Richardson quote from Heather Cox Richardson Returns!
Block quotes from Clarissa Pinkola Estés and James Hollis are cited inline.
