The Problem with Sundays
Notes from the Lab
As part of my ongoing experiment in ordering my days by the planets--not some new age conceit, but a very old one--the latest frontier is Sundays. The other days are coming into focus pretty well.
Let’s see.
Since my post on the days of the week, Saturn and I have become pretty tight. I’ve grown to love my labor-heavy, ascetic Saturdays. They’re rewarding, reviving even. (Old-fashioned values like sweating it out never really get old.) Okay, sometimes they’re just a grind, but embracing the grind has been good medicine. And my Saturn perfume is coming along beautifully, if I may say so: I fancy it’s powerful, austere and compelling enough to bring a thin-lipped ghost of a smile to lord Shani himself.
Mondays seem to vary as much as the moon, but find a common refrain in a weekly phone date with my mother, and attention to the domestic sphere of kitchen and garden. It’s pot-of-soup day, often a rest day, too.
Tuesdays belong to Mars, with whom (as a Scorpio ascendant) I have a special, if not always simple, relationship. Tuesdays are a clinic day, when I pursue the Martian (and Scorpionic) practices of inserting needles into people’s bodies and burning pieces of plant matter on their skin (to put it crudely). This is my day to cultivate personal fire and intensity, so Tuesdays I make a point of doing some taiji training (which is about as close as I get to martial arts these days). After the long day, energy-intensive day I’ll usually have some red meat (lamb).
Wednesdays may be named after Odin, but before that and underneath it, they belong to Mercury. Like all tricksters worth their salt, Mercury likes to hang out at the crossroads, and Wednesday is the crossroads of the week: a busy place, full of meetings, communications and commerce. Wednesdays I mainly try to keep up with the budgets, spreadsheets, and emails clamoring for attention. A successful Wednesday is a productive one, but also a playful one, where breaks for little games keep the mind limber, and nothing is taken too seriously. I eat and wear green things.
Thursdays are Jupiter’s—wise planet, teacher to the gods. I’m in clinic again this day, but I’m thinking to shift the Thursday focus towards the consulting side of my work, especially once I open to seeing Jyotish clients (probably early 2024). That’s to say, Thursdays ought to be less about the needles, more about whatever I can muster of sage advice. A lot of my Jyotish studies seem to fall on Thursdays, and beyond that I try to keep a backbeat of wisdom running this day if only by tuning into philosophy podcasts. It’s a day I avoid meat but go for plenty of rich dairy in honor of the well-nourished but pure-minded planet. When I do slip up and eat meat on Thursdays, I always seem to feel heavy (which is another meaning for guru, the Sanskrit word for Jupiter, as well as for teacher).
Fridays, Venus’ day, my wife and I make a point of wrapping up our tasks by early afternoon and setting aside time for a date. Depending on the tenor of the week and how well we’ve been communicating, this time can translate to a lot of sweetness. It can also entail some emotional heavy-lifting as we get current with one another and make space for what needs to be said.
Of course, Friday would also in theory be the perfect day for some culture, if we were rearing to go out at the end of the week. Yeah, maybe one of these days.
Then it’s back to the discipline of Saturdays. And then…Sunday.
Why, for me, is this the hardest of days?
Let’s start with another question: what is the essence of Sunday? I think of the sun, radiant, shining impartially on all. Of people putting away their labors to congregate, to worship.
Sunday is a day that forces one to ask: what is sacred? What is worth putting away everyday cares to step out and honor?
This is a day that brings me face to face not only with the ways in which our culture is broken (having no sacred center), but also with the ways in which I’m a misfit, or feel like one.
My wife leads a Sunday service here where we live—the perfect opportunity for a Sunday communion. Only this is a service rooted in dance, a language I can hardly speak. When despite this I stay for these events in Heartward Sanctuary’s barn-turned-temple, I’m drawn to drum. But it both does and doesn’t feel right to play along with the recorded music.
Sometimes I’ll take a pass from the whole scene, taking pleasure and refuge in sport, for this, too, holds potential for collective ecstasy. Certainly the Serie A soccer for which I inherited a taste from my own father (for whom watching was a Sunday ritual) has a quasi-religious status in its native Italy; even the American commentators refer unironically to the fans of a given team as “the faithful.” There is indeed a proximity to the sacred here: in the dissolution into fellow-feeling that fandom can occasion and in the rapturous beauty that the play itself can achieve.
Athletics seem to be a gleaming fragment of some larger whole whose shards we scrabble for here below.
Yet there’s a craving in me for a still-deeper ritual. One where spontaneous music brings something through the veil, sets bodies in motion; where voices rise in communion, alive and vibrating in contact with the ineffable.
There’s something primal in this, something basic and essential.
Yet I come from people of the book, for whom the Word is ever foremost. Teachings, stories, remembrance, these too should form part of the Sun’s day of soul and spirit.
Now I see that my ‘Sunday issue’ cuts deep. It gets to the very heart of one of the most important things: how we honor the sacred. How we commune. How we orient our lives.
I don’t expect easy answers to my Sunday questions; they’re questions that have to be lived with, grown into, worked through. But I’m starting to sense that I need to keep engaging in the uncomfortable spaces, so close to home, where sacred practice is being hashed out and sweated over; to find my ways to contribute in the ongoing cultural experiment running here in Silk Hope.
I’ll post updates from time to time.
And for anyone curious about relating with the planets in this kind of way, or experienced with your own versions of making sense of the weekdays, warm encouragement to comment below—or (not least because Substack is a pain in the arse with the commenting) to reach out directly. Also and finally, I’m starting to collect names of folks interested in Jyotish / Vedic astrology readings for when I began doing them officially. If you’ve read this far, perhaps that’s you.