Four Moons Astrology- Donna Woodwell, Austin, Texas

My Dearest Friend,

In a near-universal suburban ritual, my husband and I leave the house in the morning to our various destinations – he the commute to work, me to drop off our daughter at school then back home to my office.

One morning last week, we left the house at the same time. As we drove down the neighborhood thoroughfare, cars side-by-side, my daughter could see her dad waving at her from the truck.

“Daddy!” she cried.

At the stoplight came the inevitable parting of the ways.  I blew him a kiss.  He turned left and I turned right.

In the backseat, my daughter burst into tears.

“What’s wrong sweet?”
“Daddy went away!”
“Yes, I know. But he’ll be back this evening, you know that.”
“Tonight? But that feels like forever!”

I sighed to myself.  “Sometimes it does.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about waiting. I marvel at the world my daughter is growing up in.  She is only four years old, and can’t read yet, but she knows how to navigate her favorite PBS kids website on her own.  She can download movies from the Netflix instant queue with our Roku box.  She talks to her grandparents each week on a Skype video call.

“I don’t want to wait!” she says with a stomp of her foot.  In this ultra high-speed world, where so many whims are satisfied with the touch of a button, how do I explain to my 4-year-old how to wait?

I was recently talking with my wise astrologer-friend Kenneth Miller about his lifelong embrace of “delayed gratification.”  He said: “Learn to get pleasure from delayed gratification and all of a sudden the world becomes a very pleasurable place.”

Waiting in traffic. Waiting in a check out line. Waiting for the printer to warm up.  What if we perceived all these suspended seconds differently? What if instead of focusing on where we wanted to be, we focused on where we are right now?  The pleasure of standing still. Of feeling air filling our lungs. Of listening to our heart beat…

The world would be a different place indeed.

Some lazy afternoons, my daughter and I go to an English tea shop tucked away on the historic main street of our little town.  We share scones, jam tarts and a pot of tea.  This week, rather than asking “is the tea ready yet?” we made a game of watching it brew, studying honey amber tendrils as they wound through the steaming water.

Life is too short to wait for it. Savor the small moments.

With love, from Luna.

Waning Quarter Moon in Pisces, sextile Venus and Mars in Taurus.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Letters from Luna.