Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
And Georgia O’Keefe should know about time. She lived for ninety-nine years, from 1887 until 1986.
I recently advised a client to spend an hour eating an orange. This was not originally my idea; it came from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace is Every Step, a series of short but profound thoughts, such as “Tangerine Meditation” which reads, in part:
[The children] saw not only the tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. Then they saw petals falling down and the tiny green fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. … Each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite …
Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. (Source)
This, in turn, reminds me of the beautiful poem “The Shirt” by Robert Pinsky, wherein the poet sees, in his simple button-down shirt, the whole world and the whole, in its own way, of history: the farm laborers harvesting the cotton, the sweat shop workers cutting and piecing it together, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the development of Scottish tartans, more, and more.
Astrologically, Mercury can be seen as little bits of data like Pinsky’s “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar.” It is the calories and grams of fat we eat, the telephone numbers we store in our heads, the time we’re scheduled to meet someone and the silent agreement with other drivers that we pass on the left and stop at red lights. None of life could go forward without these things, but they are not the essence or the energy of the life.
On the other hand, Jupiter is the entirety of the poem, the full-tongued experience of eating an orange, the whole breath-sucking vision of an O’Keefe. It is the sweeping view of the day, the sensory themes, the long arc of energy that embraces the whole.
And yet neither of these things is seeing a flower deeply, or taking an hour to eat an orange, or knowing your shirt so well that you feel its history. These, I would say — the interweaving, the interlocking, of many visible details into an integrated, structured whole — is Saturn. Saturn is physical, boundaried structure that binds together many small pieces into a coherent and useful whole. It is the legal code and all its individual laws, ordinances and rulings. It is the work plan and each step that must be taken. It is the mother’s security and each little thing she does — the schedule, the snacks, the snuggles — to create it.
Saturn is the way the cuticle, the xylem, the phloem, the stoma, the upper and lower epidermis, the cells, the veins arrange themselves in startling symmetry to become a single leaf. It is the way that leaf retools and restructures its resources and sends them back out into the world to sustain life.
Poor Saturn. It has been denigrated as malefic and destructive. It turns the world, sometimes, in ways that make us want to cover our ears and sing, “La la la la la la la…” But Saturn is about preserving what it important. And what is important may not always be to our liking.
Photo: didbygraham
Fascinating observation and yes I agree that Saturn is perhaps the one who sees all because he sees through to the bones of things. Sometimes I’ve sung the la la la song too but he has a lot to offer does Saturn