Full Woman of Wholeness = Crone.

I was late for my appointment, an appointment I had arranged weeks before. I shuffled in my worn sandals as quickly as I could through the hot crowded narrow alleys towards my hotel, our agreed upon meeting location. I skidded into the front reception of my hotel, only knowing it was the right one from all the other nondescript doors along this particular alleyway because of the large cow that was tied up outside.  The cow was tan and white with a large green rope gently draped across her neck.  Here in India the cow is sacred and treated accordingly. She was my location finder.

As I dashed past the front desk of my hotel, I was sweating and out of breath.  I plowed through the mazes of tunnel-like hallways to the “backyard” of the hotel property.  There he was, a vedic priest, sitting on an old plastic chair in a patch of thick bladed green grass, the kind that is sharp under your feet.  The grass patch was surrounded by a concrete patio.  He was dressed in the traditional white wrappings of his caste and the “sacred thread” of the Brahmins laid diagonally across his body.  It astounded me how in this ancient city filled with ash, dirt, pollution and so many people and cows, the locals kept their clothes so pristine. Despite my tardiness and the midday sun blaring down on us,he seemed cool and patient, a gentle smile spreading across his face as I approached.

There was a white cinder block wall to the left of my priest and over that wall was the thick greenish brown water of the Ganges river.  We were down a few hundred feet from the ceremonial cremation grounds so prevalent here in the holiest of cities, Varanasi. The smoke from the funeral pyres was a constant as it rolled over the walls of the hotel property and surrounded our small gathering.

I sat in the faded red plastic chair that had seen better days - there was a small, slightly tilted card table in front of us. To my left was my little hotel, the troublemaking monkeys still scurrying about on the balcony railings above.  As I sat and gathered myself I recalled replying to his email a month or so ago with the answers to his questions in preparation for this vedic astrological reading. My birthdate, birth time, location etc.  

He laid out my charts he had created onto the wobbly table. In my hurry to get to this meeting I had forgotten to grab a notebook or pen and paper so I couldn’t write down the pertinent information he was to lay out for me.  I did jot a few notes down in the margins of the charts he had prepared.  I remember asking him about the unsettling changes that I was experiencing, my entrance into perimenopause, hot flashes, mood swings, and a lot of anger.  Specifically how I hated the word Crone. 

One date was extremely important, he told me and asked me to mark this day in my calendar. Perhaps seeing my glazed and slightly preoccupied look he said “put it in your phone”  I grabbed my phone from my bag and scrolled into the future.  Six years into the future, March 7 2023. He spoke these words as I typed them into my phone “Full Woman of Wholeness = Crone.”

I absorbed as much of the profoundness as I could that is India. India touched deep into my soul, I cried often there, I felt things deeply there. It is designed that way. Varanasi, a congested, bustling city dating back to the 11th century B.C. the spiritual capital of India stirred up long forgotten dreams. On my last night in India, in Varanasi, my roommate and I got tattoos.  Again we were late for the appointment with the American tattoo artist we had run across, the boyfriend of another friend we had just met. I dozed on my small bed in the cramped room as he tattooed my roommates forearm with the waning and waxing phases of the moon.  It was well past midnight when he began to tattoo the piece of street art i had snapped a picture of earlier that week onto my left outer ankle.  This idea of getting a tattoo (I had never had one before) and its design and placement had come to me a few days earlier in restless mid day nap dream in this same bed.  

This trip was over six years ago now, but I still treasure those memories, even if I don’t think of them often. It sometimes takes a little reminder, like someone inquiring about my tattoo or by wearing a piece of jewelry or shawl I purchased there, and then they flood back.  The sounds, bells, gongs, taxi horns and chanting, and the smells, a mixture of incense and smoke, are what first come to mind when I cast my thoughts back to this sacred city.

This particular memory of my meeting with the vedic priest came back to me in full this past Sunday evening.  In my little mountain home, I was preparing for my week as I generally do on Sunday evenings by reviewing what is in my phone calendar and transferring those events of the week into my bullet journal notebook.  I scrolled through the days of the week on my phone and was stunned when I read the words “Full Woman of Wholeness = Crone” on this upcoming Tuesday.  It took me aback and at first puzzled me.  What did that mean? When did I write that?  Was it a mistake?   It was in a different color bar than what I typically use in my calendar and yet it was distantly familiar. The swatch of thick bladed grass, bending down in my unstable faded red chair to dig my phone from my bag, the seemingly endless scrolling forward into the future six years.  The late afternoon meeting in the holy city of Varanasi and a vedic priest insisting I put this entry into my phone calendar.

It was a Tuesday, a full moon, a day I could have easily skimmed through as I do so many days. I began doing some research and scrambling to find those old chart papers with my scribbles in the margins. My Second Saturn Return. I had heard this term recently from some friends in casual passing, I wasn’t sure what they meant and I didn’t really have any pull to learn, until now of course.  Google searches and Wikipedia revealed:

“The second Saturn Return is meant to reconnect people with their sense of purpose and set them up for meaningful later years,  it's a time when you pick up that metaphorical megaphone and announce who you are  At the second Saturn Return, people often feel like they're finally free to do what they want -- no longer trying to please or prove themselves to others.  The return occurs in Saturn cycles of approximately 28 years. If we are lucky we have three Saturn Returns in our lifetime: the first at ages 27-30 years old, the second at ages 56-59 years old (the exact years depend on the degrees of Saturn in your personal astrology birth chart) and the third at about 85-88 years old.  Saturn is a Roman name of the ancient Greek god Kronos that rules over boundaries, structure and time.   In horoscopic astrology, a Saturn return is an astrological transit that occurs when the planet Saturn returns to the same ecliptic longitude that it occupied at the moment of a person's birth.[1][2] 

This forgotten calendar entry brought back a flood of memories.  Memories from six years prior when I was on that auspicious trip to India. 

Complete any unfinished business. Now is the time.

This seemed even more poignant to me now as I recalled the funeral pyre smoke drifting across my nostrils all day and all night while I was in Varanasi.  

We don’t have as much time as we think.