This week, the moon is helping us to discern what there is to do with what is happening for us so that we are ready to seed the next cycle of movement. Today the energy of Libra moves through our bodies and hearts in a deep, instinctive way. We might want to get into our heads about what needs to stay and what needs to go, but let your awareness drop deeper into your energy. Open your heart to what is in your life today and let your body tell you what needs to be rebalanced. You may need more rest, or you may need more activity. You may need both. You may need to maintain and polish, or you may need to put it all into the recycling bin so you have a clear space for something new.

For the next several months, the current of will runs backward. The polarities are reversed. If you’re used to barreling through life and getting what you want, you might feel stymied. If you’re used to controlling yourself to manage others, you may find new options available.

Mars likes for us to make our mark out there, to be a channel through which life force moves outward. But in its ostensible retrograde motion, it wants to move inward. It wants to take in, to direct aggression inward. It’s like there’s a dark veil covering that channel of life force and we’re trying to reopen the current. It’s quite frustrating.

Following the flow of energy tends to work well, so if you can’t get traction out there, you can seek to bring light and vitality to the inner world. You might find what you sought dwelled in the dark places inside all along.

This week I am again confronted with my impatience, my tendency to take on too much, and my difficulty slowing down to talk about what’s going on so that others both know and have the chance to support me. Something in me feels it’s easier if I do it myself, and yet doing it myself brings great tension, and these days the responsibilities I hold are becoming too complex and varied.

A burden carried alone is far heavier than one shared, but to share a burden we must:

1. Acknowledge it is a burden.

2. Decide if it’s worth carrying or letting go.

3. If we choose to carry it, tell others how they can help us in doing so.

Each step may be excruciating in its own ways. There is a terror in disappointing or being disappointed, harming or being harmed, and yet so much freedom when we can honestly acknowledge how we feel. “I hate doing this, and I don’t want to do it anymore.” Or “I hate doing this, but not doing it would be worse.” Or “I love doing this, but it’s still feeling like too much.”

Then we can have an honest conversation with those involved in our burdens. We can put on the table our gifts and limits, our desires and frustrations, and look at them together like a puzzle we need to solve—rather than a series of personal attacks on each other.

If you’ve been around activists for a long time, you might have noticed an oddity when they start getting success. When people finally are ready to hear their message, or show up newly awakened to problems and ready for direction and guidance.

Sometimes, that activist who’s been at it so long doesn’t respond in kind with gratitude or enthusiasm. Sometimes, they respond with resentment, bitterness, and a kind of collapse. Sometimes, they’re pissed at the newer people for taking so long to see the issues. Sometimes, they’re utterly unwilling to continue the work of educating.

This sucks for the folks new to the work, who could use the mentorship and wisdom of the ones who have been on the journey for a while. It sucks when we blast our new would-be allies and co-collaborators with more hostility than we’d direct at our adversaries. It feels unfair, and disillusioning, and may alienate new folks or lead them to marginalize the cranky elder.

It also seems self-defeating. Why would a person who’s tried for so long to get attention to their causes be so dismissive when people begin to care?

This emotional pattern shows up also when the resentful leader in the organization cannot stop complaining about their work and obligations but is also wholly unwilling to relinquish them. There’s a longing to be supported and mistrust that anyone could shoulder these burdens.

I’ve never understood either of these expressions until I began practicing Internal Family Systems therapy. Then I began to see a parallel experience in the inner work. When we as clients are finally able to access our Self energy and turn toward our protectors and our wounded parts with love or caring, the response is not always joy and gratitude. Frequently, it’s some angry version of:

“Finally! Why now?”

This response may feel daunting, like our connection is unwelcome, but now I see it as a sign of finally connecting. These parts of us have felt neglected and alone for too long, fighting a tough battle to keep us safe or endure their personal suffering.

As much as they may hate it, our parts also tend to cultivate a kind of pride and righteousness in their capacity to endure: I hate being alone, but it’s because I’m the only one strong enough to do this.

When it turns out there is a well of strength, love, compassion, and caring that is available and ready to take over leadership, our protectors might experience a rush of resentment and mistrust. Where have you been all this time? Now you’re going to come in and take over? And beneath that, What will happen to me if I lose my only job?

One source of this anger is the eruption of all those unmet needs and dreams deferred in service to the mission. Our protectors may have endured years of hard, unappreciated work to fight a threat that seems obvious to them and yet somehow invisible to everyone else, which only hardens that sense of I’m the one who has to do it.

All along, what these protectors have needed is concerned, caring attention. To be heard and understood and taken seriously. To be supported in community. To know that others were watching out for the same threat so there could be time for rest, or play, or enjoy the comforts and ease that those oblivious to the threat appear to enjoy.

So in these moments, that spark of anger and resentment is a good sign. Finally feeling heard and understood means there’s enough safety to feel all that exhaustion and need for care.

When we are doing our inner work from the IFS model, we have the resources of the greater Self to build trust and take over leadership from those worn-out parts, and let them take a true rest knowing their concerns are being addressed. That Self only needs to be with the resentment and the sadness, the exhaustion, offering its compassionate understanding and witness until trust is restored.

In the outer world, such ease is harder to draw upon without a larger community or spiritual body to serve as that font of care and compassion. Trust is a tricky qualit. It requires nondefensive presence, clear expectations, and making promises that are kept. In early stages, it’s easy for one mistake to undo all the gains.

When I think of my own experiences in community leadership, I was able to let go of resentful exhaustion when I felt there were protocols and people in place who were attending to the important work of the community without it all having to be my responsibility. I could let go even more deeply once I accepted it truly was not my responsibility to save anyone—that all my skills and brilliant ideas actually exist in various forms across the world, as though some larger intelligence keeps offering them to those ready to listen. So many of us are doing the work of liberation.

In observing this emotional pattern, it seems to me a kind of psychological law to understand rather than a problem to solve. Now I feel great compassion for the cranky activists I’ve met whose irritability felt so confusing and personal. I feel, too, great compassion for the newly awakened and ready to work, unsoiled by cynicism and too many years of defeat, who could not be expected to tolerate a torrent of resentment that isn’t really about them specifically.

In my dreams, we build communities with rituals of care, honoring our elders and giving them space to process these feelings with loving witness, and honoring the newly awakened to bring them joyfully and gradually into responsibility for the work we are doing. Until such rituals are in place, we can begin by honoring our own resentments, our own hard work, and to have gratitude for those cranky, battle-hardened protectors in us that were given more responsibility than one person should bear.

A recent opportunity to see the contemporary play Nonsense and Beauty, about Edwardian British author E.M. Forster, inspired me to return to my English major roots and revisit Howards End. Having only read this book once, two decades ago, my memory of it was nonexistent other than one of the central epigrams of the protagonist, “Only connect” being her message and aim in life.

As a young, voracious, American reader who spent a lot of my youth and young adulthood trying to read classics, I had read a great number of English novels without understanding them. The romantic idealism in Forster’s heroes resonated with me as a young man with spiritual inclinations, but I did not understand the class system or the economy that made those young women independently wealthy and able to pursue their philosophical and artistic interests, even in a patriarchal society that demanded marriage.

Upon rereading the novel, much later in life, I now see how central issues of class, economy, and imperialism are to both the novel and to much of the English classics I loved. “Only connect,” as expressed through our protagonist, is multivalent in calling for the connection of mind and heart, of one’s own responsibility to others, to seeing how others are guilty of one’s own sin and letting that recognition halt the call to merciless judgment. It is also, explicitly, the heroine’s call to connect her recognition of her idealistic liberal ideals and wealth to the brutish world of business, war, and empire upon which her wealth was built. Her Romantic family is set up in contrast to the businesslike capitalists in the Wilcoxes to critique the limits of both and then to literally marry them together, which illuminates and recognizes that these worlds were already bound up as one.

Because you cannot have plucky, independent heiresses living off their investments and having thoughtful debates about social issues and welfare without the business people who make those investments grow, who make calculated and cold decisions, who see the world as a resource to be harvested and managed.

More than a century after the novel’s publication, I am struck by how the central conflicts around liberal guilt have only continued to evolve. Forster’s anticipation of the continuing incursion of urbanism into undeveloped land and the rootlessness of people who do not own their own land, merely rent, seems to be well borne out at a cultural moment where more and more “ownership” as an experience seems reserved for the wealthy, and everyone else rents and pays a fee for access to even the technology they purchase.

Yet even this transformation of property and culture is lain on a foundation where many of us do not belong to the land on which we live, and would not know how to if we desired it, and would be penalized for doing so. We are trees balancing precariously on sawed-off trunks with no roots to hold us steady when the wind blows. But instead of turning toward the grief and horror of this condition, we direct our attention outward, in the pursuit of power over others or the longing to save others from our own suffering.

One of the most unsettling developments in Howards End is the deft and subtle ways Forster shows a young poor man’s life be absolutely destroyed by the well-meaning charitable interventions of our heroines, who ostensibly put all the blame on their antagonists the Wilcoxes for giving bad business advice and not caring for the outcomes—but the women themselves take on the young man as a project without his knowing or consent. They involve themselves in his life, blunder about without understanding his world or his heart, and lead to his ruin while they move on with their own concerns.

For the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of the savioristic tendencies within me. As with so many folks in mine and prior generations, I thought to balance my confusion and guilt about my unearned privilege with a dedication in service to the uplift of those less fortunate, without considering what I actually had to offer. My first years out of grad school, working with chronically homeless and mentally ill people, showed me that I knew nothing about their world. All I had to offer were values and disciplines that made little sense to their day-to-day needs for survival. They were of greater help to each other than myself, and many only saw us because we were the gates to resources they needed.

In Forster’s England, as with today’s America, this ambivalence about privilege and inequality rest upon the trembling foundations of an empire. The urges of seeking power over others and seeking to save them are two edges on Imperialism’s blade, and together they ease the blade into those countries to carve out the resources we exploit for profit, to keep the empire running.

Of what value is the inner life when it relies upon war and profiteering to exist? And what purpose is business and commerce when there is no soul to harvest its resources and give it meaning? Is there any escape to this dialectic when it only continues and seems to grow harsher with every decade?

No wonder we become tense, vigilant, reactive toward our neighbors and families, unable to tolerate the wrong word used when it may signify discord and disagreement. Our debates become shallower and emptier of thought and reflection, merely memes and talking points thrown at each other, and a listing of words that do not connect us to each other, and companies that use our anger to sell us more things.

When I look at the world in this way, it is tempting to imagine there is the possibility of going back, of rejecting empire and its fruits, of even rejecting “whiteness” as an identity and a descriptor. And yet to what could I go back? As a person of mixed-European descent who has always lived in the United States, to “go back” into my heritage would still be an act of creation, of going forward, of curating my various histories and lineages and creating a new identity.

Increasingly I find social justice discourse to be empty wind rattling litter down the road. I see the “-ism” words strung together like a spell against cancellation, as though naming all of them without explaining what is meant is enough to convey one’s conscientiousness. I see people weaponizing their identity as a basis for the authority to gatekeep and shut down disagreement rather than engage—even when it’s coming from someone sharing that identity. I see white people telling each other that there is nothing we can do to escape our whiteness, and so no action we can take is generative, all we can do is stay lost in our self-reflective white neuroses and know that we’re failing. (And I’ve been that white person.)

We all want to connect. To belong. Few of us truly want to be harmful to others, while most of us cause hurt because we feel it is necessary to do so in the moment. I do not know how to undo centuries of empire, and increasingly I think it is a paralyzing distraction. What I want is to connect to what’s here in my life. To say hello to neighbors. To nourish and nurture the people I can touch and talk with. To water the plants and keep the floors clean.

We cannot set aside generations of trauma in an instant, but we can try to take a risk with the person in front of us today. Connect the mind and the heart. Connect one human to another. Connect to the land on which we live.