Week 38--in which we enter an Equinox, New Moon, and Eclipse, carrying and renewing our beauty

Beautiful Ones,

I have returned from my son, Jerry, and daughter-in-law, Maura's, wedding in New York filled with exquisite stories, memories, and experiences.

I feel deeply blessed to have been welcomed into a beautiful family and a vibrant anti-fascist community.

The doors to a beautiful home have opened for me and I have waltzed right through.

I realized today as I sat down to write this Notes from the Field, that there are five important stories I’d like to tell you. Five radical life-affirming realizations that I think you would like to contemplate too.

But it is late on Saturday evening and I am preparing with my creative mystical partner, Cathy Stevens Pratt, a deep exploration into Mother Gaia for our fourth of five Immersions in ART 6 on Reverence and Devotion on Sunday.

I don’t want to rush through any of these profound ideas:

1. the power and beauty (and perhaps necessity) of brokenness and repair
2. the rarity and joy found in true safety
3. the deep question of who family—true family—really is
4. the nature and power of real vows, nonnegotiable vows, vows to self, to life, to truth, and to one another
5. the unconscious ways we convey who we really are

Plus, I think you’ll love the story of how I unknowingly purchased my son’s wedding present in 2002 when he was thirteen and Maura’s wedding present in 2003.

So watch for the first story next Sunday. For today, I wasn’t sure what to say.

Then I read this quote from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in this morning’s Spelling Bee community. You might recall that I was so moved by this quote when I stumbled upon it in January, that it became the theme for all newsletters in 2025.

This is why I open all these letters addressing you as “Beautiful People.”

Given the broken, shattered, appalling world cracking all around us, it feels healing and important to revisit this truth:

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

There were 120 beautiful people at Maura and Jerry’s wedding. Every one of them has struggled and lost. And every one of them lives with compassion, gentleness, and deep loving concern for the world.

The room, which was Aaron Burr’s barn and carriage house (a story unto itself), could not contain the beauty.

So, as we step into an Equinox, New Moon, and Solar Eclipse season, we can’t help but feel the intensity. And it’s easy to forget hope. Forget beauty. Forget possibility.

May we all find our way back to compassion, gentleness and beauty.

And perhaps, some food in this very intense Chandra for Virgo 29 degrees, 5 arc minutes from Inside Degrees:

Supersensible beings manifesting through geometric forms

“Sacred geometry inscribes the pattern of the world going through its great shifts, its quantum leaps. If you learn to stand back and be within the greater archetypal motions, you find yourself being placed in perfect strategic positions, in exquisitely rightful initiations and assignments. The transparency of things is superlative to behold. You are called to serve the highest, to respect and honor all manifestations, to be there for everybody.

Interior steadfastness and implacability; knowing the law, the code, the way. Magnificent in applying vaster awareness to life’s particular, detailed variations on the them of how everything fits together perfectly and is woven by divine deign. The fine-tuned sensibility of the master craftsman, particularly adept in staying modest, unadorned and straight on. It is the exemplar of the way it is done when you know who you are and how things are around here, and when you see it coming through in every jeweled detail with little lost in translation.”

I hope this Chandra renews your sense of hope. And help each one of us dig deep to find who we really are. And stay true to that.

That, in a sentence, is what I experienced at Jerry and Maura’s wedding:

A hundred and twenty beautiful people, who have dug deep to know who they are, and stayed true to that through brokenness and repair, gathered to celebrate love and joy. And what a celebration it was!

Life is Fragile. Handle with Reverence.

Janet
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