What is freedom, exactly?
In the age of Aquarius, this is something that we’ll need to define as a collective. I recently lost a friend over the fact that I had had some expectations of him when I moved in with him. I expected him to be my friend once in a while. Hang out with me from time to time. It seems like those expectations– to him– were impinging on his freedom. An egregious attempt at controlling he who wanted to exist on his own terms, separate, at peace.
In Canada, a convoy of truckers recently went to Ottawa to fight for freedom-- against the vaccine mandate. Yet there are some Canadians who don’t have the vaccine, they haven’t been forced to get the jab. There have been consequences– with jobs and restaurants, social gathering— for not having a vaccine. Consequences for choices are not the same thing as a question of freedom. Yet here we are having a debate about freedom when we don’t really know what it means.
What is freedom? There is a libertarian idea of freedom– that I have no responsibility to society or to the collective–- I do what I want, I put in my body what I choose, and no one can tell me what is right for me. And that makes sense until it doesn’t.
Can we live in society, and ever be truly free? Are we not bound by each other, by humanity, to operate in what’s good for the collective? Can one fish live autonomously in the ocean? We’ve seen that corporations have operated without this bounding to society. They are neither humans (although they have human status) nor are they concerned about the collective. And so with their rise in power, and their unbridled freedom– this has come at a great cost to the collective. They’ve poisoned water, killed our animals, killed our forests and voraciously gained power.
Is that truly what we want for each other? Was it fair for me to have expectations in my friendship, and is it fair for there to be expectations of conduct in some jobs? Is it fair to say that you take a jab, even though you don’t think that you need one, for the collective? The way you pay taxes towards healthcare. It’s probably obvious where I sit with this, but what if my expectations of my friend were not fair, or the jab is actually dangerous for people and we don’t know it yet? How does freedom work in this case? Freedom of speech is a hot topic here, especially surrounding vaccines. Are we allowing dissent as we should be, or are we suppressing ideas that we don’t like?
I think we are hitting this as a collective, no matter where we sit with opinions on the vaccine, or whether or not you can live with someone and have expectations of how they will treat you.
I’d like to explore the idea of freedom a lot more. What does it actually mean? What does it actually represent? I have a concept of what it means but no real application, and there's the rub.
I am free to choose what kind of cheese I want at the supermarket, but does that truly represent freedom? I cannot trespass on private property, so then, I’m not free? There are rules that bound us to reality (Saturn) and by astrological nature, doesn’t that presuppose that I’m never actually free? Saturn is Aquarius’ ancient ruler, and right there we have ideas of rebellion versus the rules embedded in Aquarius’ DNA.
These nuances and questions beg bigger discussion than vaccine mandates. They ask us to define what kind of society we want to live in, and furthermore, the freedoms we would give up to live in that society. Some people in the pro-vaccine camp speak of "letting anti-vaxxers die" and have no access to medical care. Yet that was a predominant sentiment about those suffering from addiction for a long time. We now understand that many of those people who are addicted are people suffering from trauma. Do they deserve to die for trying to survive their trauma?
Perhaps there are people, like my once-friend, who would prefer not to live in society at all. I, for one, am committed to the collective and what we can do together. But I am traumatized by how divided we’ve become. How the illusion of separation has made us more comfortable with making enemies out of others. This is the Aquarian vibe, coming after us all. Aquarius, and Uranus, want to throw us into revolution. Change how we are doing the thing. Uranian freedom comes at a cost. We are outsiders trying to decide what to make of insiders. We are part of the collective deciding how to have freedom within. We don’t get to make the rules and yet here we are trying to change them.
What is freedom? I ask again. We are all part of each other, and all part of this living organism, and all part of the same planet. Are we free like the bird flying overhead, or is that bird even free? Like a cell in my body, can I really rebel against my own nature. Can the bird decide to walk instead of fly? Change it's course from flying south to north? Is there a design leading, bounding (Saturn) us all to our respective paths?
Losing that friend, someone I had loved so much, and losing that connection, was devastating. Every time we separate ourselves out from the whole into action (Mars,) there will always be a part of us that wants to be a part of the womb again (Neptune,) a time when we are wholly dependant on someone else, and freedom is just a thought in the mind.
