Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Horoscope for Friday, Sept. 5, 2008:
Why not radically change the way you behave toward others, Clare? You are in the process of orienting yourself towards establishing relationships that are more fraternal, with far fewer risks involved. This wasn't the case before. When you don't try hard to seduce and impress, your audience claps louder. Haven't you noticed?

Tru dat. Seriously. I have noticed (with surprise) my very fraternal (or sororal, mejor dicho) feelings toward everyone of late. It is such a different way of being... I've always oriented myself around sex, power, and attraction, unconsciously and then consciously as I grew up. It is weird to have those impulses and reactions so wholly subsumed and disengaged. It was not a conscious process; on the contrary, all of a sudden I noticed that I was orienting myself to the world as one human meeting others, rather than one woman meeting other women, men, children, anzianos. This new tendency to interact as one in an imagined community of brothers and sisters (rather than one woman in a sea of other beings with gender and power) has given me more peace, and more permission to be alone. I think all this makes me a more effective human being; that is, more caring, more patient, more aware. It makes me approach my passions in life--children, family, pregnancy and birth--in very different ways, too. I have a newfound confidence and calm about the role of doula and woman that I never had before.

I chalked all this up to growing a bit older (I can reach out and touch 30 now, after all :) ), to having been married for 4 years already (together for a total of 7 uninterrupted years), to having completed my college degree, to exercise, to my brain gelling, to learning anthropology... and all those are important factors, no doubt, in my mental paradigmatic shift; but there is, I'm willing to believe, a celestial element to it as well. Qué chévere.