IN THE GARDENS OF SATURN

 

I stood up, after having spent more than three hours nestled among the thoughts and the weeds. The task of pruning has helped me to focus my thoughts on what was previously hidden from me. The discernment, here, between the plants and shrubs and the remnant of wild flowers, tends to be more lucid and persistent, little noise shakes this part of me, much more active than my fingers full of dirt, stapling on one side, and pulling out on the other. From above, I could see the big picture of the moments lived in the glory of the crown of thorns. Suffering is redemptive when it reaches the summit. Until then, it enslaves, in a stroke and, at other times, slowly. And the slow death of situations is always more hampered, more painful. The garden that I got used to having as a child, plant by plant, flower by flower, person by person, everyone dying, everyone leaving, everyone staying, and replacing the colors of the garden, the pains colored everything. But I didn't give up. I continued to draw stanzas and set moments to music. Then someone wanted to make a garden grow, the weeds broke up, there was no one to prune them, all around negligence, only the children alone, left without direction, without empathy, without compassion. In my garden, my father, my brother, my grandparents and friends are still present, because I anchor myself in the good times, which the bad ones I prefer to forget. And I remain in the light, to replace blindness, because I want to see. And so, I learned to prune, to garden emotions. He doctored me with life, in wounds and abandonment, in permissiveness and in the return of Saturn, which is my favorite teacher. 

I have always appreciated gardens. I had many times in my life, segmented by shocks that only I can speak of with due propriety, in which I thought I had no right, to want to take care of a garden. Somehow, I felt guilty if some pleasure came to take me away from suffering, where many wanted me. And the crown of Jesus was of thorns, and that of all mortals is made of the spoils of ignorance, envy, anger, backbiting, pettiness, smallness, malice, and also tenderness, understanding or its absence, the lack of character of others. I met people from the most different backgrounds, living the most different clichés, such as wanting the good for themselves and not for others, others wanted the good for others, but never more than for themselves, and I even met people who never wanted the good for themselves or for others. I have inserted myself, and it is never in any way, but always in the same way, when we speak of the nature of the personality or the cohesion of the character, in the range of those who put good for others, above your own, believing that when others are well, then we too will be well. And so it has been, until I reached the gardens that I began to take as my own, on the eve of the return, for the second time, of Saturn to my sky. I remember many figures and many machinations, carried out behind my back and even in my presence, like images from an archival film, where I gave my consent, via silence, complicity and a lot of naivety on my part, to the spread and continuation of the evil of others upon me. A kind of modesty prevented me from being who I am at all, offended, ashamed, not wanting, in any way, to be a victim or persecutor of unhappiness or the aim of the envy of others. I was the one who built the beliefs about my life. I can't blame anyone for such nonsense. I was the one who wanted to see the good everywhere, I was the one who saw beauty in others. It was I who built plateaus and pedestals for my past and present enemies. They all could not stand one another and today they are united for the common good, that of enmity. Today, in this part of the world, the earth is still beautiful, the flowers, the wind that passes, the butterflies and birds, my cats in constant interaction with me, everything that surrounds me is beautiful and natural. I have the notion, as I go through both the earth and the thoughts, that I have always sought affective aesthetics, the aesthetics of values in the lives of those around me. And to my existential questions, answers come that do not come late, because I am still alive, because we are still cultivating gardens in this physical dimension, which all the ailments we bring, all, unavoidably, are the mark of our childhood. Childhood, its pains and questions remain and are revealed throughout life, like a puzzle, like more daisies and marigolds, milk jugs and the fragile pansies. We are all made of stamens and carpels, petals, sepals and peduncles: Just like flowers, only with other organic technical names to which we attribute different nomenclature. The seed we bring and the fertilizer we receive will dictate the sentence of its fertility and sterility. We humans, like flowers, possess all this, obeying a rhythmic and assertive nature, from which we do not escape. The petals of the flowers, as well as the sepals that are the corolla that receives the petals, the green receptacle where they are protected in order to their inflorescence, the peduncle that is the stem that supports the fruits of the seed, we also need all these elements to happen and become complete. It is never by looking at the seed that we will tell of its fertility, but by sowing it and offering it the minimum conditions for its reproduction. When I say that the sepals and petals contain in themselves a beauty of appearance, I also mean that they already carry in their memory the final outcome, the physical inglory of the disintegration, and if with flowers the process is rapid, usually obeying a season, in which, Compared to humans, we would say that it is a moment, a brief instant, between us humans and other animals, the thing takes longer, for seasons, we need more time and space, to mature and fulfill what is expected of us. What is expected of us by our higher entity, not by others like us. We have not come to be what others pretend, nor to be what our parents could not be, but the progressive continuation. And life is not only the flowering of our species, it is the macrocosm of dynamic and responsible intelligence, in the possible comparison to that of a garden, for an expected evolution. Forests and woods, as well as public gardens, have a continuity of ages and usually surpass the lifespan of humans, if they are not victims of the negligence or pride of man, and accompany human generations on the planet. Individual gardens do not. They are more fragile, more instantaneous and much more susceptible when it perishes, by all conditions, whether external or internal. Both progress and a garden, when it is an individual pleasure, will have a duration similar to the time dedicated by the individual to it. Collective gardens are more durable, when humanity gains wisdom, to care for and maintain its brightness and vitality. Thus, gardens take on properties very similar to human nature, when there is, behind it, a higher consciousness, for their vitality and evolution. Expectations stain, condition, motivate or eliminate, but they are part, like commas in an extended sentence, with various subjects and predicates, of the unfolding of the path. Expecting humans to be sensitive to life, conditionings of the other, is like expecting lilies not to die. Or that lives are born where there was no insemination. We are all conditioned, we all suffer from expectations, we are all bound, in some way, to fulfill what others expect of us. We must often water the dreams that are born in the intervals of other people's expectations and in control, on whatever scale, of our own life. Parents, like the earth, the water and the seed, must fertilize the soil, condition and protect the embryo, the baby, the boy and let him, as he grows, like the children of my cats, that they allow their offspring to explore, to question and to have thirst and water to nourish them. Animals do not keep their young in captivity, they offer them the world full of dangers, but they walk close to ensure their safety. They do not prevent them from living. They are not taught to steal, nor to lie, nor to omit, nor to discriminate, nor to fear, nor to dry up or wither. And human beings should be supervised, by a larger collective, they should be prevented from diverting the natural course of their missions, the proper routes that they carry in the invisible memory of their being. And we all came to leave a mark, to add a legacy, to enrich a higher way of life. The flower has this memory that is already imprinted in the seed. The child has a memory of the legacy he brings And in the eyes of those who do not know themselves, all those who think like me are called crazy, preferably silent and chained to a wheel of development. If that were possible for them, they would do so. And I call myself a marginal. And all those I know who are similar to me have been and are marginalized by a copyist and conservative, ignorant and oppressive society that insists on following fashions instead of following reasoning, that insists on producing continued chronic diseases instead of extirpating them at the root, that maintains the appearance, in the use of a coercive ethics in the standards of character,  instead of an ethics by conviction and analysis. The light will always find a way in. If only because of the crack in the blindfold that they want to put on us. 

Saturn is rigorous, hardworking, requires constancy, assertiveness, selflessness, patience, restriction, resilience, longevity, the end of it. He does not aspire to riches, he does not accept coquetry or hypocrisy, he tears up lies as if they were rose petals at the end of his life. Saturn does not appreciate pleasures, it is a rigorous, insistent, slow, time-consuming teacher, a fighter. We will all know about its numerous qualities and defects, it's all a matter of chronos. That is why they call him the evil lord. Saturn, even though he is solitary, and he knows himself, does not like to socialize with others, he knows that he has to do it, because this hermit lord also depends on the exchange of other lords. And if Saturn could, it would destroy my garden, my pleasure and delight in the flowers and shrubs that I prune and arrange, around its halo. But until Saturn I do it, who succeeds is the spirit I cherish, my nobility of intentions and actions, my purpose. Saturn knows that I love flowers and that I can't see empty vases, just like my paternal grandmother, but Saturn also knows that I didn't come to imitate my grandmother, because I wasn't a copy of her. I came, in the first place, to dignify those who came before, to their work, fatigue and love, little or not at all, and so often forgotten, and I came to add my own mark, to the well-formed mark of those who preceded me. And my children who bring dreams and plans, they will also add and commit themselves to the dignity of those who have passed and those who will come. That is why, when, already far from the weeds and their ignominy, and from the fatigue transmuted into pleasure, there, on that piece of ground, I look at the upturned earth, the greens and blues, and for me the music continues, in the background, fertilizing my intentions. 

If I could fill a room with all my enemies, declared and hidden, they would all be ashamed to see the lies fall before their eyes. Those who walk in the light are not afraid of anything. Those who walk in darkness are afraid of the truth, of knowing themselves completely, of defending things and causes. This is a matter of character or lack thereof. And character can't be bought. Either you have it or you don't!

Forgiveness of others is not a matter of Saturn, nor of the gardens that we make bloom there, it is a matter of neptune, of pluto, of Jupiter, of Venus, of Mars, of the sun that is in me and of the moon that brought me. And of the character that does not bend. I came to add and not subtract. I have come to abolish exclusion. I came to be real people. And as I know that what does not add to me, nor identify me must prevail, I soon learned to resort to poetry, to replace adjectives and personal pronouns with more pleasant ones and the word war, I replaced it with love and the word hate with flowers. I was still young when I learned to do these magic tricks. Manifest who we are. Before I felt embarrassed about my choices, today I know that they were necessary to truly know who I am and what I came here to do. i came to cooperate, not to fight.  

I chose not to repeat patterns, not to be Dolly, the cloned one, I came to be me, to sow peace, love, tranquility, wisdom and pleasure of my pleasures, to set to music the moments that identify me. I am the harvest of what I sow and not the harvest of the expectations of others and, even less, of your intentions. I am marginal, I am blunt, rude sometimes, not always, I am frontal and direct, I am part of the whole, this whole that, instead of choosing love, leaves the door open to avenge the ugliest thing that makes them feel Our ancestors wanted to change. The primary objective of the gardens of Saturn is to show that no matter how much conditioning I experienced in childhood, no matter how much trauma and harm, no matter how permissive, no matter how many temperaments and defects I have, if I can produce good feelings, despite what has conditioned me, you can also do it, being loving and constant and leaving ignorance aside,  Character flourishes, without victimizing anyone. This is having Saturn as atmakaraka. This is who I am. 

I retire to the cave again, after a batter of rain falls on the weakened earth, and the thunder I hear, I replace it with musical scales, I enter the darkness of the shelter and propose another composition of myself, and I compose a prelude to another text, from another sacred garden. Ryan O'Neal provides the soundtrack to this garden and Saturn fertilizes me from within, before the arrival of Mercury retrograde.