All Things Without Complaining or Arguing

The Moon has just entered Sagittarius and is applying to Venus, Saturn, and Neptune through this evening.

With Mercury diving more deeply into the Sun in Scorpio, let’s continue examining the symbolism of Mercury combust the Sun.

In the past week I’ve been revisiting the Psalms, or what was called the “Tehillim” in Hebrew. The word means something like “songs of praise” or “praising,” and the book of Psalms is part of both the Hebrew Bible and also the Christian “Old” testament. The study was prompted by the singing of traditional hymns at the Quaker meetings we’ve been attending. Some of the lyrics were so beautiful, but I also recognized them from the Psalms, and it made me want to reconnect to the book.
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Somewhere in the process, I recalled something I used to do when I was a kid…maybe the roots of my studies in divination. I used to close my eyes, say a prayer to God to tell me something important about whatever I was going through, and then I would randomly flip open some part of the bible and place my finger somewhere on the page. Without fail something would speak to me. Not always straight forwardly, but always at the very least poetically or symbolically. While thinking about this yesterday I realized it wasn’t so different from my love of the Psalms. The thing about the Psalms is that they were often sung and their imagery is the stuff of poetry and art. This has always been the language of my heart.

So, in that spirit, I decided to randomly flip open a page and see what it spoke about the Mercury/Sun combustion in Scorpio. Here is the verse I landed on…

“Therefore, my dear friends….Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure…then you will shine like stars in the sky.”

The line that really got me was, “Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you become blameless and pure…then you will shine like stars in the sky.”

How easy is it for us to feel justified in our complaints, especially the most legitimate complaints? How hard is it to surrender to our disappointment with ourselves or others and simply feel what we’re feeling without twisting things to our liking or acting out in deceptive and manipulative ways?

They say Scorpio can be a vindictive sign, but the images that come to mind with the word vindictive usually aren’t small enough. Like those moments where we feel wronged, upset, disappointed, frustrated, or threatened, and so from that basis, in order to “right the wrong we perceive” we act out. We twist, manipulate, and act out from the place of our bad feelings. We might even go so far as to glorify the bad feelings and twist them into images of beauty and then shove them in other people’s faces.

Yesterday under the New Moon I got exactly what I wrote about yesterday…some difficult news and a startling but clarifying revelation that opened a new cycle. Since then I have been struggling with the desire to complain, argue, and act out against what came forward. I then noticed my mind trying to deceive me by suggesting that the archetypes of hatred, revenge, contempt, aggression, frustration, and judgement are “just as valid” as love and peace. In fact, maybe they are more “real” and “honest” and “gritty” than words like “acceptance” and “love” and “patience” and “peace.” Maybe they are more poetic, more truly and sincerely at peace with the way things are…etc.

But then I caught myself and put my foot down. “No,” I said. “That doesn’t work for me.” And then I flipped open the verse about not complaining or arguing and found this deeper insight about the Mercury/Sun combustion in Scorpio.
When we don’t like the way something is…something about ourselves or others or life, we don’t invalidate the reality of that complaint by choosing not to complain or act out about it. In fact, one of the deepest forms of validation that exists comes when we allow the frustration to fill us and we enter into it with the reverence reserved for sanctuaries. The silence or the acceptance isn’t about condoning but rather about communing sincerely. Then when we emerge from that holy darkness we have gone beyond our sacred rage or some naive form of holy acceptance…such dichotomies are washed away by a different kind of acceptance. The same acceptance that the writer compares to the luminosity of stars…great churning balls of fire.

The Mercury/Sun combination in Scorpio may signify something trying to convince us that our complaint or offense is sacred…or in turn it may try to convince us that our “being above something” is sacred…but we should consider that both approaches to our pain are secretly the spirit of grumbling and complaining trying to deceive us into a false response.

​Prayer: We don’t worship our complaints, and we don’t worship our acceptance…remind us what the words really mean, “all things without complaining or arguing.”