Despair is the Great Temptation

The discovery of fire.

I won’t lie. It’s been a struggle lately. The madness of the world, set against my own brand of madness—the great temptation of despair—feels like an endless unraveling. It’s as if the world is ending right alongside the many endings I’ve faced over the past decade. Not to blame Pluto, but…come on. It’s hard not to. In astrology circles, we’ve been hearing about Pluto’s influence for years.

October’s cosmic weather was intense: we experienced a new moon and annular, or ring of fire, solar eclipse over Easter Island,  a blood supermoon, an extraordinary display of the Northern Lights all around the globe in places they are rarely, if ever, seen, along with meteors, and a comet streaking across our night skies.

Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006. Maybe he’s holding a grudge. But more likely, it’s his journey through Capricorn—a sign ruled by Saturn, which started in 2008—that’s pulled America into this dark night of the soul. This all presumes, of course, that you suspend any disbelief and agree to humor me by considering astrology as a lens for not only this past month’s cosmic upheavals but the broader chaos and transformations we’ve been facing for years.

Here’s a twist: Pluto got his name thanks to an 11-year-old girl, Venetia Burney, in 1930. From Oxford, England, she suggested to her grandfather that the newly discovered planet be named for the Roman god of the underworld. Her grandfather passed it on to the Lowell Observatory, and the name stuck. Pluto, the Roman counterpart to the Greek Hades, became the cosmic symbol of the unseen depths.

I was also 11 when I stumbled upon astrology on a magazine stand at the grocery store, a frequent haunt for a voracious reader like me. A Dell Horoscope caught my eye, and I bought it with my allowance for something like 95 cents. Horoscopes originated in Mesopotamia around 1800 BCE. That’s a long time ago. Way before the Bible and the fundamentalist bible-based religion I was born and raised in came to be.

 Growing up, I was occasionally compared to my great-grandmother—and not in a flattering way. Stories of her “witchiness” floated around: she read tea leaves, predicted the first moon landing, and foresaw the birth of my oldest sister. These tales were accompanied by my father’s deep-seated misogyny and disdain for anything hinting of the occult. Pride and fear tinged these stories, wrapped in a layer of shame as if some dark family secrets lay hidden beneath. I learned caution. I hid my astrology magazines, knowing they’d be condemned as the devil’s work under our strict beliefs. 

Yet, I was fascinated. Horoscopes intrigued me. Like the Bible, astrological wisdom was full of symbols and mythology. Even as a girl, I learned to read between the lines during our weekly Bible studies. I knew David’s slingshot against Goliath was more than just a story of a boy defeating a giant—it spoke to the battles and struggles I was facing as a teenager. It offered truths about what I was up against in my own life. Astrology stories also brought me wisdom and guidance.

Astrologers would call me a Plutonian because my moon and Pluto are conjunct in the eighth house. The eighth house, traditionally ruled by Scorpio, is the domain of Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. Yet my moon and Pluto sit in Leo, the sign ruled by the Sun.

As a child, my grandmother planted tall sunflowers along the edge of her garden, like sentinels standing guard. Those sunflowers—my true sisters—spoke to me. They affirmed my joy and reminded me of my need to shine, to let my light radiate into the world. I was often a lonely child, but those sunflowers imprinted on me, along with the music that filled our days: hymns sung at daily church meetings, my grandmother’s folk ballads, and lively family jams every Sunday. My double Leo Pluto Moon soaked up the sunflowers, and the rhythms and cadence of story and music nourished my imagination and creativity and helped me survive a lonely childhood.

Despair is the great temptation. Sunflowers follow the sun. Sunflowers taught me to turn to the light; once fully matured, they stop turning and remain facing the east, where the sun always rises.

 Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I first encountered despair at eleven, when my friend Ronnie—also eleven and born on the same day as me—was killed in a go-cart accident just a month after our birthday. I was told Ronnie would go to heaven because he’d died before reaching twelve, the age that, according to the Bible, is when one must choose to serve God. It’s the age when Jesus, found in the synagogue by his worried parents, said he must “go about his father’s business.”

Ronnie, it seemed, had slipped through heaven’s gates with a free pass, leaving me behind to face the impending weight of turning twelve alone—the age when I would become accountable for the fate of my soul. The thought overwhelmed me. As I later wrote in my essay Secrets of the Two by Twos, Ronnie’s death planted the first seeds of rebellion in me; faced with no choice but heaven or hell, I defied the God of my childhood.

The darkest moment of my soul came at twenty-four years of sobriety. I drank a beer in the dead of night in Alaska. It was the only one in the fridge, belonging to my husband, a normal drinker. I didn’t care anymore. (Or so I thought.) Along with my despair came a deep sense of blackness and the medieval concept of acedia—a kind of spiritual lethargy where the will to act is overtaken by apathy. Acedia, once considered the eighth deadly sin (later removed from the list as it was thought to be “a monk’s sin”), signifies a dangerous absence of care. Its most profound form results from a lack of spiritual self-awareness. Like depression, acedia is a kind of deadly indifference where nothing seems to matter anymore.

Or so I thought.

This place of spiritual indifference was where I found myself—angry at God but worn down by a series of crushing events. Seven knee surgeries with complications from a ski injury, getting hit by a car while biking, and a growing realization that certain hopes I’d entangled with my faith would never be realized. I had believed that God had promised something different, that my hard choices would lead to the outcomes I imagined. When they didn’t, I lost the will to care. I felt betrayed. And I got mad at God.

Richard, my sobriety angel, had told me you couldn’t bargain with God, but I’d missed that essential principle. Hadn’t I stayed sober? Hadn’t I asked for and followed my higher power’s guidance in making the hard choices life brought me? Looking back, I see that my psychological and spiritual immaturity was at work; I was still trapped in either/or black-and-white thinking, and in transactional love. If this, then that.

You can’t bargain with God.

My despair coincided with Pluto’s entrance into Capricorn in 2008; if you follow astrologers or pay attention to astrology, you’ll know this has been a much-discussed phenomenon held responsible for much of what we’re experiencing in world politics today. In its transit of Capricorn, Pluto has revealed the underbelly of the patriarchy and our institutions and exposed the shadows. Pulled back the veil.

It couldn’t have been more fitting that my dark night culminated in February’s bleakest hours in Alaska. Late in the night, I opened the only bottle of beer in the fridge and drank it. It was an act of defiance, yet nothing dramatic happened. It was still dark, cold, and February. Homer, Alaska, where we lived, is reminiscent of summer paradise. But in winter, it is like a photograph drained of all color, faded to sepia and grey tones. The sun barely traverses the horizon from mid-morning to early afternoon, then is gone again. I dreamed I saw wolves pulling it across the sky. The Pushkin, or devil’s weed, freezes, the willows’ branches scratch dark lines of nothing in the cold air, and time disappears. The low tide leaves gray mud stretching far from the rocky beach, then comes back high up against the bench. The bench, where we lived, was coveted as a place that got the most sun in Homer, and in the summers, that was evident in the rapid growth of our garden. But in winter, the sun was so low on the horizon that it brought little warmth. 

Any further north and I might not have survived.

I am a child of the sun. Florida may be known as the Sunshine State, but Colorado, where I grew up and lived most of my life, gets more sunny days. I had always struggled when the days grew short; moving to Alaska was an impulse, born of adventure, a brainstorm my husband and I had when, on a summer trip, we wandered into Homer, perched at the edge of the Kachemak Bay and known as Alaska’s banana belt.

My journey back to the light was difficult. The dark night of the soul had swallowed me. I didn’t immediately spiral after that beer in Alaska—that’s a common misconception, the idea that one drink transforms us instantly. All that single beer meant was that another drink was sure to come. The day after I drank, I visited a nearby psychologist and told him that, after 24 years sober, I’d had a beer. He shrugged, and I did, too.

What was the big deal? I handed him a check for a hundred dollars.

Within six months, I was having wine with dinner. By seven months, it was daily. One glass turned to two, then three. Bottles gave way to box wine. I sought out pills from Alaskan doctors who were quick to prescribe; like a deluded pharmacist, I tried to control my drinking with a mix of stimulants, benzodiazepines, and sleeping pills. I dismissed everything I’d learned in recovery, reasoning that my sobriety had only been a misguided bargain. I told myself I hadn’t been an alcoholic—I just needed to fill the developmental gaps in my psychology. After all, I’d only been thirty when I got sober. Now, in my fifties, I believed I could move on. But drinking was just an attempt to abort the dark night of the soul in which I was drowning. It wouldn’t work.

The dark night of the soul

The death of the old self; the birth of the true self ~ Eckhart Tolle

Going through a Dark Night of the Soul? Make Sure You Watch This! - Eckhart Tolle Explains

I drank for two more years before packing up and moving back to Denver, my home and the city where I’d first gotten sober. The insanity of alcoholism had returned, I couldn’t recognize that drinking was the problem—wasn’t it always the solution? Yet a deep dread rose within me, a sense of impending doom. Despite my defiance, I was scared. Help. I’m in trouble. I prayed for the first time in a long time. The answer was immediate: Leave Alaska.

There is a line in one of the books used in the 12-step rooms: 

We are seized with a rebellion so sickening that we simply won't pray. When these things happen we should not think too ill of ourselves. We should simply resume prayer as soon as we can, doing what we know to be good for us. ~ Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions  

The Twelve and Twelve also says, “The outstanding characteristic of the alcoholic is defiance.” 

The outstanding characteristic of the alcoholic is defiance.

The despairing soul is a rebel, writes Joyce Carol Oates. Despair, she says, is the unforgivable sin. 

However, Emmett Fox asserts, it is only unforgivable in the sense that it cuts us off from what 12-step literature calls “the sunlight of the spirit.” In  Around the Year with Emmett Fox, he writes:

Naturally, as long as this is your state of mind, no help or improvement can come to you; and in that sense only is your sin unforgivable—unforgivable while it lasts. When you do change your attitude, enlightenment will come, and the sin will be destroyed.

The concept of an "unforgivable sin" here is not about a specific act that can never be redeemed but rather about the persistent refusal to acknowledge the need for change and self-improvement. It’s a form of defiance.

While I don’t ascribe to the doctrine of original sin, I know the experience of error, which is what “sin” really is. I’ve written about the allegory of recovery being like a rocket ship’s journey to the moon and the recalibration process along the way versus a straight line leading to its destination.

Two years into my relapse, the instant I turned toward something greater than myself and asked for help, the rocket ship’s path began correcting and pointed back toward the moon. It simply resumed its course.

Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us. We no longer live in a completely hostile world.

~ Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

With the resumption of sobriety came realization, chiefly that despair is the great temptation. I could no longer indulge in self-pity, misery, or regret. Recognizing that my alcoholism—and my problem—was centered in my mind was like discovering fire. Though I’d intellectually understood I was not my thoughts, for the first time, I experienced it. I could see my mind, like a vehicle, needed constant recalibration by a force beyond it.

This isn’t forced positive thinking. Rather, I learned that thoughts are like things; much like a drink of alcohol, I can’t pick destructive thinking up. I must turn toward something deeper—something greater than my small self. This was the gift of desperation: Turn to the Light of Consciousness. The discovery of fire was the discovery that I could focus my attention and awareness; in 12-step parlance, this is the proper use of the will.

The intellect, our thinking, when directed, is a beautiful thing. When I turn to the light, I enter a flow and am inspired; this fuels my thinking, which is placed on a higher plane. This is where freedom lies.

I’m still working toward the maturity of sunflowers, which eventually stop turning and simply face east. My thoughts drift toward darkness; perhaps they always will, but I don’t entertain them for long. I turn away and toward the light of consciousness. This isn’t repression or affirmation; it’s an alignment with true essence, which IS consciousness. As Eckhart Tolle said, the dark night of the soul is the death of the old self and the birth of the true self. The birth of the true self happens now in each moment as I dis-identify with my thoughts and align with awareness.

My thoughts may will once again tell me all is for nothing. I will not argue with despair, tell it what existence is, or debate the nature of Reality. To do so would mean being caught on the karmic wheel of futility duality.

The dark night of the soul and the gift of despair took me to the end of myself and into the great mystery. No doubt, it will again. There is no arrival. It is in my resistance to the dark and my clinging to the light that the mind traps me. Whatever the opposite of despair is lies in my ability to accept both light and dark.

Pluto has accompanied me on this journey and taught me his dark power and radical acceptance. The dark is great. So is the light. I sit in the middle. 

In my natal astrology chart, the moon and the Lord of the Underworld are in the 8th House, but they are in the sign of Leo, of sun and light. Despair is a rejection of the dark, a defiance, a refusal.

Pluto has taught me to respect the dark, and though I chase light, he has shown me the value of both. I am the daughter of the light, but I am also his.

In a month, Pluto will leave Capricorn and enter Aquarius, where revolution resides and the collective is called. What that revolution will look like depends entirely on each of us and our ability to choose, not one or the other, but all of it, and, in that choice, find the power to create a future. 

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One Thing

Begin (or resume) prayer and meditation.

Yoga Nidra, or the yoga of sleep, is a gentle method of feeling and being versus doing and thinking. My teacher, Kamini Desai, has helped me tremendously with this. Use the link below to experience a short yoga nidra guided by her.

• Visualize where in your body you feel pain, discomfort, or density.

• Breathe into it, not through it. It just wants to BE.

As you do so, the energy will slowly loosen and move like ripples on a pond.

10 minute Yoga Nidra Non-Sleep Deep Rest

On Repeat

Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars.

Shout outs:

I met Michelle Dowd on the pages of her amazing memoir Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult about growing up on a mountain in California in an apocalyptic cult and finding her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness. No woman raised in a world that conditions the wildness out of us can read Forager without glimpsing her own story. Through Dowd’s powerful storytelling, readers are guided back to the garden, the wild girl, the wild woman—the unbroken self within. In a recent collaborative post with Dr. Deborah Vinall, Michelle asks, “Do you have to be broken to be free?”

Michelle writes:

There are so many versions of wild. So many versions of brokenness. So many versions of family. So many definitions of free.

Michelle’s work will be featured in the upcoming anthology:

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What’s your definition of free?