(Human) Nature

Venus crosses the Aries point

✨Today is a great day to make a connection between what is valuable to you and what is valuable to the world. It’s also a great day to stand up for this beautiful planet we call home. This is my story of standing up for what I value as Venus crosses the Aries Point, I hope it inspires you to find yours.🌍

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It’s a gorgeous day here in London.

The whole city is bathed in tones of gentle gold, garrulous green, and creamy pastel rainbow. The trees are singing alongside the birds, and some of the saplings are so eager to connect with the spring sunshine that they are very literally bursting through the sidewalk. It is, without need for a better word, beautiful.

I spent some time this morning under a canopy of newly lush branches, a stretch of sky roots reaching up to the heavens as if to remind me of just how perfectly divine nature is. I let myself lean against a sycamore, and I noticed the tension in my shoulders melt softly into the ground as the trunk became my spine. I felt the tree’s quiet peace permeate throughout my body with studied ease, knowing just where and how to soothe me. It was like being embraced by a loving grandmother, a natural expression of seamless support for all of Earth’s children.

Nature is the story of the Earth. It speaks the truth of how things work here in our physical world, in the same way that your body speaks the truth of your life experience.¹

Nature is, however, not the only story about how the Earth works. There is another story you might be familiar with: economics. This is the story that appears to drive our society. From business and politics to education and health care, modern human beings like to pretend that money is the bottom line. And in our capitalist system, anything that doesn’t generate material wealth is viewed as either a cost or an asset yet to be monetized.

Those trees you see in this picture are not considered valuable in the story of economics; they are sitting ducks in a hungry budget. When we no longer want to pay the expense - and who wants to pay money when you can make money? - the story will tell us to cut them down, sell the lumber, and build a block of luxury condominiums in their place.

But the thing is, we are nothing without trees.² They are not just occasional lawn ornaments; they are not just places to sit in the shade. They are fundamental to our presence here on Earth because they give us bodies and they give us breath.³ Trees are a part of us, and we are a part of them.

This inescapable awareness of our unity with nature came crashing down on me last Thursday in an unexpected and (initially) upsetting way. Over dinner that evening, I learned that my law firm alma mater had inked a deal with the U.S. Government to do $100 million of pro bono work for official causes that include ramping up coal production and negotiating tariffs. The firm - Simpson Thacher & Bartlett⁴ - stated publicly that it was making this decision to protect its own best interests, which I can only presume refers to the economic bottom line.

The news hit me hard. While I had no illusions about the firm’s monetary motivation during the three years I spent there, I joined Simpson Thacher because of their pro bono program. And with the firm’s staunch support, I got to help channel their tremendous expertise and vast resources to so many who could never afford top-tier legal services. We advised a non-profit organization for children with rare genetic diseases; we protected the family home of mortgage fraud victims; we wrote a strategic litigation guide for children’s rights advocates; we negotiated a divorce for an elderly woman in a situation of abuse. And perhaps closest to my heart, we helped LGBT refugees establish a safe home in the United States.⁵

These were my cases, and they are only a small sample of the pro bono work that Simpson does (did?). I always loved doing pro bono work because it felt different than other work, because it was identified and accepted as public service from the outset. And since pro bono sat apart from the usual bottom line considerations of paying clients, these cases spoke deeply to me about the personal values of the firm. I saw Simpson’s pro bono program as a positive contribution to the kind of society I wanted to live in, one where lawyers acted to ensure access to justice for all.

My old firm’s $100 million pro bono promise seems like the exact opposite of this, and it has left me feeling thoroughly alienated from a place I once knew well. It’s been a long time since I left, and I want to be clear that I have no idea what it’s like being at that firm or even what it’s like to practice as a corporate lawyer in the United States right now. I don’t know what conversations took place inside their Midtown Manhattan walls, and I have love in my heart for every single person who works there. I am also grateful to the firm for making its reasons public, for giving me a taste of what the world feels like when we put our own economic interests first.

But as much as I support these undeniably gifted lawyers as people, I cannot align myself with this decision. I do not accept economics as the bottom line against which I must measure my interests, and I will never choose a world where loving money matters more than loving each other and the Earth.⁶ Because the real bottom line is not money, it’s (human) nature. That is where true abundance comes from, and it’s where you’ll find me.⁷

This same choice comes to you just as Venus - the cosmic keeper of our values - prepares to pass over the Aries Point for the third and last time this year.⁸ These past few months, we have followed Venus from the beginning to the end of its recent 40-day retrograde between the first (Aries) and last (Pisces) degrees of the Zodiac. We have looked for ways to express our burning love without fighting words; we have come to appreciate the darkness that directs our light; and we have known all along that it would play out on the world stage.🎭

And now that we have lived it - now that we know more - it is richly rewarding to bring this cycle to a conscious conclusion. So I ask you: What world does your heart want to stand for today?❤️‍🔥

Your future will shape itself around this pronouncement, and today is the perfect time to make it known. It doesn’t have to be grand; it doesn’t have to be monumental. It can be as simple as spending a minute with your feet on the grass and your head in the clouds. Just promise me that you’ll take a moment to listen to the beating heart that is your bottom line. Trust that it will (re)connect you with your true nature, that it will guide your way bravely forward into the vast unknown.

And be ready to let it sing with the trees in all its glory.🎶

Love,

Patrick

1. Another great candidate for my fictitious library of self-evident book titles would be The Body Keeps The Score, which details the present state of scientific evidence around precisely this point.

2. This touching 5-minute video on Why We Won’t Survive Unless We Change This brings this knowledge to life so elegantly. Huge thanks to my friends and fellow Earthlings Nadia and Mike for bringing it to my attention. ❤️

3. We animals do not (yet, at least) generate the tissue that makes up our bodies directly from sunlight. Plants do this through photosynthesis, and we absorb their tissue either through eating plants directly or eating other animals that eat plants.

4. I do not list specifics from the stories that others are kind of enough to share with me, but this is my story and I’m happy for you to know the name.

5. We did this work in partnership with Immigration Equality, an organization with tremendous integrity and a massive heart.

6. This is a false dichotomy. I love money AND I love the Earth. But when we pretend that we have choose between money and the Earth - that these two are somehow not related - we disconnect from the true nature of who we are.

7. Thank you to my fantastic friend

Cynthia Sue Larson

for modeling how to make this choice over a 4-hour (!!!!) breakfast in Berkeley earlier this month.

8. The Aries Point can refer to the first degree of any of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), and in this instance I am referring to the first degree of Aries. As the name “Aries Point” suggests, the Aries Point in Aries is the baddest ass one of all.