dancing in the ruins

I had a plan.

It was a good plan, the kind you make when you finally decide to stop waiting and start living. I would leave my full-time job. I would rebrand, relaunch, reclaim the parts of myself I had quietly shelved in the name of practicality. My birthday was August 31st. My new life would begin September 1st.

On September 8th, a neighbor called from across the street.

Eight days after my new life was supposed to begin, I was on a one-way flight back to Texas, into the room I grew up in, living out of two suitcases. The cedar trees in the backyard were exactly as I remembered them. The same beige high-pile carpet in the living room. Painted pine walls. The same particular quality of light through the kitchen window. My father had suffered a stroke — several, it turned out, on both sides of his brain. The doctors were gentle but clear. “There’s no such things as a small stroke.” Vascular dementia doesn't get better. He would need someone with him. Always.

The plans went into the rubbish pile. And I stood in the ruins of them, on the very ground that had first made me, blinking. I have found, through years of working with astrology as a psycho-spiritual practice, that the planets can be allies in moments like this one — presences that help you find your footing when the ground shifts beneath you. Saturn is one such presence for me.

I have come to know her as a planetary ally. Which is to say, I have come to know her the way you come to know anyone who has sat with you in the hardest rooms of your life. I have come to understand her as the one who arrives to be with you at the edges of what you thought you could endure — when you are already there. Saturn is the midwife of necessary endings, the companion who knows this territory and has tended it before. She does not cause the ruins. She simply refuses to let you look away from what they are trying to show you. I came to know her more deeply through this passage.

What nobody tells you about ruins is that they are loud.

There were so many voices in those months — clamoring, competing, insisting. There were voices of fear and grief that told me my life was passing me by, that my potential could only wither in the Texas heat. There were voices of guilt that told me a good daughter would be joyful to make this sacrifice, and that wanting my life back made me selfish and ungrateful. Both sets of voices agreed on one thing: I was always doing it wrong.

But this is what ruins do. They strip away the noise of your plans only to replace it with the noise of your reactions to their loss. The scaffolding falls and you discover just how much of your inner life was scaffolding too.

At that time, Saturn and Neptune were moving through Pisces together — the planet of necessity and the planet of dissolution, meeting in the sign of the deep waters. Mystics know these waters. The Christian contemplative tradition teaches this dissolving as the precondition of real prayer — the moment when personal knowing must give way to a knowing that is older and ungovernable. What gets stripped away is not your life but your certainty that you are the one running it.

But underneath all of it — and I had to get very still to hear it — there was another voice. Steadier. Almost impersonal in its calm. It didn't offer solutions or timelines or consolation prizes. It only said, again and again like a mantra:

It's just my turn.

I did not like this voice at first. It gave no gold stars. It assigned no blame. It offered no reassurance that things would return to normal, because it seemed to understand, in some deep and unhurried way, that this was more normal and real than anything. That the sudden unraveling of a life was not an interruption of the human story but one of its oldest plots. It was the voice of necessity itself, which does not argue and does not apologize and somehow, because of that, becomes the only voice you can actually trust.

And yet. Slowly, I found I could rest in it.

***

There is a particular image I return to.

My father's hands were enormous — once thick and strapping, now knobby and gnarled — the hands of a man who had worked and built and held things for nearly a century. Toward the end, those hands would struggle with the simplest tasks. I would stand beside him in the bathroom doorway, turned slightly away to give him what privacy I could, and I would wait. We both pretended, graciously, that this was ordinary. That we were not standing together at the threshold of something neither of us had words for.

"Thank you, sweetheart. Daddy sure is grateful for you."

"Yes, sir. Always."

***

What I know now is that something was happening in those moments that I did not have the capacity to fully recognize while I was living them. I was being danced. The steps were not mine. They were older than me, older than both of us — and my true task was to stop resisting long enough to follow them. The theologian Howard Thurman called it "the sound of the genuine." That voice beneath all the other voices, the one that knows who you are when everything else has been stripped away.

Saturn, at her most merciful, is the one who stays with you while you find it. Not pointing. Not instructing. Just present. The way dirt is present. Steady in the knowledge that what is being born in the ruins is real, even when you cannot yet see its shape. The ruins, it turned out, were not the end of something. They were the beginning of an education I could not have chosen for myself.

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My Daddy looked at me on January 15, 2024, and said, “Sweetheart, I think I’m done.”

We spent the rest of the day talking about exactly what he meant.

Seven days later he took his last breath.

My father died four months and fourteen days after I came home.

Three months later, I was getting dressed for work. I was freshly showered, hair done — and as I pulled up my jeans, something about the gesture, the shushing sound of the fabric, dropped me into a memory so vivid it buckled my knees. I saw his hands again. His thin, pale legs. The grab bar. The way he put his arm around my shoulder and let me help him.

I flopped down on the floor and sobbed until my head ached.

And then, eventually, I got up. Put on my shoes. Went to work.

This is what it means to dance in the ruins. Not to be unbroken. Not to be ungrieving. But to keep moving. To keep showing up for life as it is, with the full knowledge that the floor beneath you is cracked, has always been, and will always be. And to sense, however vaguely, that this is not a reason to stop but a reason to dance more honestly, with more presence, and with less pretending that the ground is solid when it isn't. We are not dancing despite the ruins. We are dancing because we have learned, the hard way, what the ruins are made of and what they are not.

The ruins will come for all of us. They already have, in their various forms. The question is not how to avoid them or rebuild over them too quickly, but whether we can get still enough, in the midst of the noise and the grief and the indignity of it all, to sense who has come to accompany us. To hear what they are trying to teach us. To stop the world, as the mystics say. To look more closely. To be ready, in whatever small way we can manage, to do our part.

The mystics were not describing extraordinary states available only to the rare and the disciplined. They were describing what becomes visible when ordinary life is stripped to its studs. When you are standing in the ruins without a plan, and something steady arrives that was always already there.

What is mine to do?

This is the question I carry now — the gift of this Saturnian initiation. This wisdom teaching from my father. Not what did I plan, but what is mine, and only mine, to do. Not as despair, but a real question I am in conversation with. As an open hand extended toward something larger than myself that will always remember me home.

The dance continues. The ruins remain. And somehow — breath by breath — so do we.🪐