Alysa Liu is love in motion: ♒︎ – ♓︎ 🌓
The Lovers card is the root of this eclipse season’s slow tarot spread.
“When we are taught that safety always lies with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect–to find ourselves in the other.” – bell hooks, All About Love
In the dark moon reading unveiling this slow tarot spread for the season, I spoke about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s definition of reciprocity in relation to the Lovers card. In her essay the Serviceberry, RWK describes reciprocity as the act of keeping a gift in motion, ensuring abundance spreads instead of accumulates or stagnates. This engagement in reciprocity requires us to acknowledge and tend to our own individual gifts, so that we can brings these gifts into the thriving constellation of life.
Through this loving generosity of self, we are transformed, and so is our world.
Alysa Liu’s joyous figure skating at the Olympics, and her authentic love for her competitors following her performance, is a beautiful representation of authentic gift-sharing.
As has been widely discussed, Liu walked away from a lifetime of figure skating as a teenager, only to return after a two-year break on her own terms. She showed up to the olympics completely authentic, not focused on winning but on sharing her love of her art form. Her boldness and joy subverts tradition in the figure skating world, in which competitors are usually poised and staid, sharing polite smiles with their opponents, if anything. Alysa, instead, radiates warmth, ease, and above all, LOVE – for her sport, her artistry, her teammates, and her opponents.
She showed the world that opposition and dominance are not the only ways to be powerful.
Her authentic, loving expression of self is more powerful, more earth-shattering than any of that stodgy old competitive tradition.
This all happened under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, a slow coming together of two antithetical archetypes that became exact on Saturday, February 20, and will continue to influence us for months, as they have for the past year. These planets meet every 36 or so years, with Saturn, a planet of structure, material reality, tradition, and consequence joining Neptune, a planet that represents the highly spiritual notion of our inherent oneness, a concept deeply connected to love.
When these two planets meet, a new cycle begins, our collective reality and underlying ideals shift, alongside much that connects us, including technology and our shared understanding of humanity.
bell hooks was born under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra 1953, and carries that signature in her 5th house of self expression. In her lifetime, hooks expanded our understanding of the structures of oppression, and she also expanded our understanding of love. She wrote many books about love and loving, a beautiful, soul gift to this aching world of ours. And she defines a love ethic, which is a way of rooting our action towards others in love. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who was also born under the same Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra, brings us home to love as the engine of what she terms the gift economy, which centers reciprocity instead of profit.
Reciprocity is a collective orientation, and individual for each one of us. Alysa Liu swelled so many hearts this week with her gifts, which will keep moving through the collective as others are inspired to show up more authentically and more loving toward their so-called opponents after witnessing her.
May the world being birthed under the extraordinary astrology of this week be one rooted in love,
dreamt into being by the insights of two women who carry within them the vision of more loving structures, bell hooks and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Finally, I can’t resist but include Alysa Liu’s ebullient performance here. Of course I checked, and she has her Saturn in Leo and Neptune in Aquarius, building to opposition. How fitting her light would shine so brightly this week.
