“october, lay my worries and insecurities to rest, and birth a more peaceful me. bathe me in awareness, and allow me to notice important signs when they are given to me. water my friendship with intuition and grow my trust for everything it tells me. give my intentions flight.”

It was not a simple evil, however. All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out. Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering. By the same token, the most profound human suffering becomes a mere pedagogical tool.

“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.”

“A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is not purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.”

“Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. Digital connections may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. [They offer] just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control, [putting] people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of […] people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay.”

Ultimately, shame and guilt are an obsession with the self, and a totally unproductive one at that. Convert your shame and your guilt into humility and responsibility. Both require acceptance, compassion, and the willingness to give yourself a little grace. Make it a practice.

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

Venus Signs & Their Loves