Reflections on 2020 so far, a year of upheaval and change
I started off 2020 with a new job in downtown Minneapolis, as an assistant PM to a Senior staff member. Then a month in, she abruptly left, and I suddenly found myself in charge of a disorganized, chaotic mess of a project that was sorely behind schedule. had to learn the course development business from the ground up, build business relationships necessary to complete the project components and lead project groups through an extreme makeover.
It was intense.
But hey, we were still curling and having fun on weekends. Until Covid 19 became a thing, seemingly overnight even though that wasn’t quite true. Let’s face it the entire country was in denial unless you were on the coasts. I remember my last day commuting to work before we were all sent home. It was a ghost-town in Minneapolis and the busses were empty of commuters like a scene in a strange dystopian nightmare.
At that point, in March we thought it might be a few weeks to a month, tops. Boy, were we wrong. I very quickly had to spend money getting a new desk chair, since the one I had was sorely inadequate for eight to nine-hour stints and was falling apart. Moreover, I had to get used to long periods of time at home - alone. The curling season canceled, and the staff turned off the ice machines, several months early.
In the early days of the lockdown, I would double-time with my Instacart business sometimes pulling in almost $500 a week. I didn’t shower as much, and my body hair started growing out – everywhere. I didn’t wear make-up. I just didn’t care. Most of us joked about how infrequent we were showering.
Then just as we started re-opening states, despite the fact that maybe it was a bit too early, George Floyd was murdered at the hands of a group of cops on a training outing with a senior officer. It was filmed by a young teenager. All of a sudden, Minneapolis was on the world stage as outrage gave way to expressed chaos- burning buildings, protests, looting, National Guard, curfews…
The beginnings of something we still can’t truly fathom, generated from one act of violence that represented the sum-total of systemic racism, police brutality and 400 years of white supremacy.
Buildings toppled, police disbandment processes began, statues representing slavery and racism came down and a new dialogue about how we consciously or unconsciously contributed sprung up on social networks and real life.
These movements were predicted by archetypal astrology and I took several courses presented by the intuitive astrologer Robert Ohotto to begin to understand the wider cosmic forces at play, represented by the tableau I lived each day.
The intensity of walking down my street in St Paul, Minnesota lined with National Guard one week and boarded up against looters while grappling with the personal and emotional implications was exacting. I really had to look deeply at my own complacency in some areas while listening to the stories of others in my networks who were both directly and indirectly affected.
As the protest movement spread from the source, where I lived, to the rest of the world, it became clear that this was neither going to go away swiftly nor be some quiet revolution but instead change was happening on a global scale, and quickly. The one world consciousness, Robert spoke about in class was a real event, a new dawn.
What did my psychic reader say, earlier in 2020? "It is the year of the rat. It is not going to be easy and I don’t know if anything will work out the way we think it should." Great, I thought at the time. Little did I know the depth of her prediction.
We’re halfway through, and there is no end in sight to the turmoil, as another wave of Covid threatens additional lockdown measures in some states. And we aren’t even into the flu season yet! My esthetician, who I finally saw on Saturday, to remove the vestiges of what will now be known as the “Granola Period,” was absolutely prepared for another round of lockdowns in the fall.
We aren’t even bothering with rosy pictures or high-minded positivity. We know better.
I doubled down on my healing work and trauma therapy – what else do you do with your time when everything is shuttered? It became a fruitful time for coming into my own, I suppose. My obsession with decorating my living room knew no bounds. Each paycheck I would add to my collection of living room furniture and organize my crap, which was still piled in the corner from my October move.
Something about getting my environment in line with my LifeBook vision, gave me solace from the remote and quiet lifestyle I’d suddenly been catapulted into. The uncertainty and unknown could somehow be tamed with a new floor carpet and an organized kitchen.
At one point we had six planets in retrograde with Venus being a doozy and now Mercury adding flames to our communication systems. All I can say, is you best be on your toes with self-assessment and a willingness to do the deep inner work of transformation in the crucible of 2020.
If you aren’t conscious about it, it will certainly take you kicking and screaming.
In the meantime, it seems most of us are getting used to life lived by hand sanitizer and masks, social distancing and new methods of connecting virtually for everything from work meetings to personal gatherings. We’re actively pursuing cleaning up our behavior, language and systems of authority.
And the rest of world bitches and complains about those things…2020 continues. We’ll see how the second half unfolds.
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