My Little Ruin

Glen Hansard wrote “My Little Ruin” for a close friend who was going through a precarious self-destruct period, someone blessed with the greatest of gifts who simply could see how they were letting people walk all over them. He called it an intervention song, an act of love that risks honesty, offered in the understanding that a friend willing to tell you the truth might save you years of slow figuring it out by yourself. There is something worth pausing on in that. Witness is itself a form of healing, and the song holds both the singer and the one being sung to in equal measure, the address outward and the address inward arriving at the same place, tender and fierce and underneath both of those qualities, something older, a grief with many faces.

Come on, my little ruin, won’t you open up and let us in.

That grief has been visiting me these last weeks, and it carries a quality I recognise as ancestral, which means it is mine and simultaneously larger than mine, which is the precise texture of this kind of material when it surfaces. I have been thinking about the long line of people who came before, the generations who, for reasons mostly beyond their choosing, lived inside a life shaped by necessity and poverty and the suffocation of expectation, people whose gifts were present and real and whose inner fire was banked and quieted, and all of that internalised frustration, all of that undischarged longing and unspoken disappointment, moves.

That pain moves through blood, bone and nervous system as well as through the dulcet tone of a family’s silences, as the shape of its rage and the way certain swallowed feelings have remained is passed along in your DNA. I believe that you inherit someone’s unlived life in your body, in the quality of your own relationship to desire and ambition, in the felt sense of whether you are permitted to want things for yourself, whether wanting them makes you selfish, whether taking the time you were given and spending it on becoming who you actually are constitutes a theft from those who had no such opportunity.

This is what Glen sing so plainly:

you could stand among the best of them, if you could hold your own, and no one is going to do it for you now, you and you alone.

That lyric lands differently when you understand what it is asking. It is asking you to receive the unlived life of your ancestors as permission rather than weight, as the accumulated force of every unrealised potential in that long line now available to you, concentrated in this particular life, in this particular moment, as an act of honouring rather than as guilt.

Mars’ embrace of Chiron carries exactly this quality for me. I want to say something careful here about Chiron, because the wounded healer framework has always seemed to me the least interesting thing available in that Being’s symbolism (a topic of a webinar I’ll be offering in October 2026). What Chiron actually carries is the specific medicine of someone who has gone to the difficult places and returned with their integrity uncompromised, and the meeting with Mars at this point in the sky is a rededication, a renewal of conviction, the warrior energy of Mars finding its most purposeful expression in Chiron’s willingness to keep going, to take up the work again with full knowledge of its cost and full appreciation of its necessity. There is a bone-deep quality to what becomes available here, a kind of resolution that has passed through the existential territory and arrived on the other side with something more durable than optimism, which is actual commitment.

At the same time, the 17th, the Sun and Saturn move into a waxing octile, an aspect that demands a forensic honesty most of us prefer to defer, and what it illuminates with particular precision is the place where self-preservation slides, almost imperceptibly, into something that functions more like a gravity well, pulling the needs of those around you toward your own centre and calling it necessity, calling it realism, calling it the reasonable stewardship of what you have worked hard to build. The ego shadow around selfishness is perpetually seductive because it arrives dressed as something else entirely, and Saturn’s specific gift is to illuminate the understudy before the performance it gives becomes the legacy you leave. The Sun and Saturn in March planted that seed of reckoning, and what is ripening now in the octile has the quality of a question you can feel in the chest before you can articulate it in the mind, something about the shape of your impact on those closest to you, something about whether the life you are living is generous in the way you believe it to be.

As discussed in this video, this week is one of four personal planets moving into new geographies, Mercury on the 17th moves into Mutable Air, Venus and Mars on the 19th teleport into Cardinal Water and Fixed Earth respectively, and overlaid on all of this the Sun ingresses into Mutable Air moving into conjunction with Alcyone, meeting Uranus whose is gathering into that same brilliant Pleiadic field. There is a quality to Alcyone that I have always experienced as a brightness that arrives before you are ready for it and becomes precisely what was needed once the initial startlement passes, a kind of illumination that the Pleiades have carried in astronomical tradition across virtually every culture, the returning light, the signal that the season has turned, that what was wintering is ready to move again.

What is awakening in the field, through all of this movement and all of this reckoning, is Grace. I mean Grace as a living quality rather than a theological category, Grace as the ground that was present throughout the difficult territory and is now becoming perceptible again in the way a landscape becomes perceptible after long (purple) rain, everything clarified and particular and lit from within. Grace arrives to remind us that the ruin was always held, that the feeling Glen asks after so plaintively, won’t you tell me where the feeling’s gone, was always present, only waiting for the smoke and mirrors to clear, waiting for the moment when the one who had been struggling through the hours with sorrow leading the way finally remembered that there was another possibility, that the rising wave could carry rather than overwhelm, that the light left in the window was always for them.

There’s nothing lost between us, he sings at the end. You can come back any time you want.

That is the whole of it, really. The door was always open.

There are two questions worth sitting with before the week ahead:

How much of what you experience as your own limitation is the weight of an ancestor’s unlived life, and what might it feel like to carry that inheritance as divine fuel rather than as the evidence of your own inadequacy?

Where has the voice of self-protection been speaking so fluently in the language of necessity that you have forgotten to ask whose needs are actually being served, and what would one honest hour of sitting with that question return to you?

I’d like to offer the following meditative blessing

May the long grief of those who came before you, all that banked and quieted fire, all that longing that had no room to breathe, move through you now as fuel, as the evidence of something imperishable that was present in that line all along, waiting for exactly this life, this particular season of the soul, to finally find its full expression.

May the shifting of these days loosen whatever you have been holding in the name of duty that was always, underneath the duty, the old familiar weight of a self that had forgotten its own permission.

May Grace find you in the ruin and in the rising, in the liminal place between the two, and may the feeling you feared was gone discover that it was simply waiting to learn the sound of your name spoken freely, spoken at last in your own true voice.