I started my career in the California nonprofit sector on Monday, January 26, 1998.
I ended it yesterday — Friday, February 15, 2008.
Whew.
These days I’m reading about the Age Point in Huber astrology. It starts at birth at the Ascendant and moves through each house over a period of six years. So, for example, the day you turn six, your Age Point enters the second house; the day you turn 12, your Age Point enters the third house; and so on.
Each house is divided into three sections: cardinal, fixed and mutable. You enter the fixed zone two years, three months and 15 days after the multiple-of-six birthday.
I mention this now because on Thursday, February 21, I’ll reach that “balance point” in the seventh house, having also just moved into Pisces from Aquarius on November 29, 2007.
For non-astrologers, or even non-Huber astrologers, this probably sounds pretty technical. But what it means is that I’ve spent the last couple years trying to extract myself from a way of life that was very cerebral, idealistic, systems-oriented — and, yes, sometimes psychosomatically maddening — and into one more concerned with empathic, intuitive engagement in relationship.
I don’t mean to disparage my work in the nonprofit sector. I did lots of good stuff over the last ten years: raised funds for good causes, wrote helpful articles, managed people for better or for worse (I hope for better) and supported positive change in the world.
But in a way, I also wasn’t greatly suited to it. Though I am a good writer, a good manager, a good employee, I also felt the confines of my work strongly. I am not an institutional enthusiast, and I prefer interchange and mutuality over hierarchy and dependence. The deeper I worked my way into the nonprofit sector, the more of the latter I felt.
Charitable giving is an honorable and generous act — yet it bothers me deeply that our most-needed institutions spend inordinate amounts of time and resources simply struggling to survive, to get the money and please the donors they need to keep the lights on. And even in the context of self-sufficiency, nonprofit organizations have to work so much within the bounds of what is socially, legally and politically acceptable that that, too, eventually began to grate on me.
As I moved out of sixth-house Aquarius and into seventh-house Pisces, the hardness of thought and airy analysis that I had to put into my everyday work began to wear me down, to wear me thin. I operate so much better through feeling and intuition than through thinking and research. So much so that, just a month before I left my career, my neck — the gateway between heart and mind, between feeling and thinking, gave out as if it had finally had enough of simply trying to shoulder the density of my thoughts. I was laid up for a week, popping Vicodin and musing on the metaphor.
Today was my first day of my new life. I woke up sick: sore throat, cough, general aches and malaise. I know what this is; it happens every time. It’s gunk I’ve been carrying around throughout a cycle I wasn’t suited to — gunk I needed to make it through, which my body can now expel in anticipation of a new cycle that’s more aligned to my truth.
I can’t wait to see what this cycle brings.
(Photo credits: curtain call, Pisces)
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