I had a boa constrictor winding itself around my neck, and it felt really good. It slid slowly around my shoulders and behind my back, and then glided onto the next woman. It was Womongathering, the annual gathering of pagan womyn in northern Pennsylvania. After an intense welcoming ritual, I felt connected on so many levels ­ by emotion, by song, by the press of hands, by the delicate power of the snakes.

I am a woman of many places and many tribes. Sometimes the connections are shallow and fleeting. When I stop at a rest stop on the highway, I am part of the tribe of travelers. I look at a slighty greasy guy in Bermuda shorts at a New York rest stop, and know we have something in common: that highway hypnosis, the swallowing of the miles, the contrast between rolling and stopping. (I feel a variant of this kinship when I look up at a flock of birds.)

Sometimes the connections are strong and enduring. I stop to talk to the beautiful harpist DeLuna at Womongathering, and find that our lives have the same punctuation marks: we’ve given birth, found our crafts, loved women, grown older, all in echoing cycles. Everywhere, I find myself in other women - sometimes my past, sometimes my present, sometimes my hoped-for future.

Coming out of the dining hall which is the social center of Womongathering, I run into Rainbow. She is tall as an oak, and I always feel that she has an equally strong skeleton. She is older than me, a vision of what possibilities lie in aging.

The women at this gathering are distilled into their essential selves. Names are often carefully chosen, and so are given to each other like offerings. Women wake up in the morning, roll out of the small beds formerly occupied by summer campers, and put on feathers and velvet. (I, in my ubiquitous T-shirt, am lost in admiration.) Then they go off to present and to take workshops on belly-dancing, breast-casting, and turning their fears into powerful action.

As we intersect with each other, we are each other’s milestones. As we reclaim our breasts, our bellies, our aging, we offer our experiences to each other. Recognition is the spark that runs between us.

I find it easy to muse on the gathering, because the sun is in Cancer, and Saturn is close by. Cancer is the sign of the tribe, the family and the domestic hearth, and it is about enclosing, nurturing, and supporting. In the human body, Cancer rules the breast and the belly.

July, when the sun is in Cancer, could be called the month of the Woman, and this particular July could be the month of the Old Woman. Saturn, the planet of age and experience, is close to the sun at both the full and new moons. The sun brings consciousness to Saturn, and puts the Old Woman at center stage.

Saturn gets a bad rap in astrology, because it is also the planet of pain and fear. Any painful experience is crystallized in Saturn, and becomes a fear of whatever caused that pain. And yet is it better to be oblivious to the results of past experiences? Aren’t we seeing the fruits of that kind of oblivion in the current US government? (Hello? Vietnam? The fall of the Roman empire? Any bells ringing?) Fear is not something to be denied, ignored, or done away with, but a teaching tool.

Saturn is the planet of the reality check. When you put something out, and it comes right back to you, that’s Saturn. Pagan womyn teach that it comes back to you many times over, and so it’s always best to send positive energy out into the world. (We also see this in the policies of the Bush administration, which creates new terrorists exponentially, every time it takes action against the old.)

Saturn in Cancer is the Old Woman, the Crone, who takes her long knobby stick and raps you on the kneecap. Yes, it smarts. But yes, it also makes you smarter. The usual response is a sheepish one. (“Ah yes, that boulder has been sitting in my path for years, and I’ve stubbed my toe on it hundreds of times before. Why has it taken me so long to see it?”) Sometimes the response is a defensive one. (“How dare you tell me the truth?”)

But the best response is gratitude, because it’s only in facing your fears (and the boundaries of physical existence) that you become free. Each of us dances through time, showing a new face and body with every season. We are all infinite beings in a finite form, and this is the essence of creativity. Each one of us creates our bodies, our personalities, our lives, as an individual flash of beauty in this endless cycle. Women follow women, in the long passage of the tribe through history.

This is the time to remember that. This is the time to go to your grandmother, whether she lives or just lives inside of you, and ask her to tell you all the stories she remembers. Make yourself comfortable. It will be a long night. But the longer you keep your eyes open, the wiser you will become.

Index of Jenny' Writings on Blowjobasian.com