The summer has ended, and I’m no longer a vagabond. My lover and I are back to our ordinary lives, apartment-dwellers in this Andean capital.

My lover had had her ear glued to NPR all summer, and it was there that she learned about the protests against the oil companies, in the two border provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana. We wondered what we would find in Ecuador.

It was almost midnight when the plane burst through the clouds and we saw the city below. We finally found all our bags, full of odd things we picked up during our wanderings. Outside the air was chilly, and the altitude made us light-headed. We never completely get used to it, especially when we’ve been away for many months. The taxi driver said that everything was calm in Quito, nothing had changed.

A few days after we arrived, we went to the old section of town with a friend. We wanted to see an exhibit of work by Botero, who generally paints lush, hearty, exuberant people. The paintings and drawings in this exhibit, called “El Dolor de Colombia” (The Pain of Colombia) were quite different. They focused on social victims. We saw the displaced, walking along with their belongings on their back. We saw the kidnapped, sitting chained in a corner, waiting. We saw the dead, floating in rivers, lying in churches.

On the way back, we saw hunger strikers under a tent in the Plaza de Independencia, the city’s main square. They were there in solidarity with the oil protests in the Amazon.

Nothing has changed in Quito, but every once in a while, Ecuadorans do get irritated for one reason or another. The people of the Amazon region are the poorest in Ecuador, socio-economically. But ecologically, they are richest, with an amazing variety of birds, animals and plants. And underground, they are also the richest, with all that oil flowing. Why does this natural lushness not make them wealthy? Where does all this abundance go?

Has anything changed here? The new ambassador from the US has arrived, and the front page of the local paper, El Comercio, shows her throwing back her head and laughing. The headline says that the U.S. is pressuring Ecuador to dialogue and negotiate with the oil companies. That’s not too surprising. The U.S. wants Ecuador to get back to work, paying off that huge debt by pumping oil, never mind if a few pristine wildernesses get muddied up.

Who needs that many species of monkeys, anyway? They just remind us humans of our own shortcomings. Who needs the scarlet macaw? She just makes us jealous because we can’t fly on our own.

It’s oil that drives Ecuador’s economy, and people were protesting the way that oil wealth is distributed. They asked for the oil companies to contribute more to jobs, infrastructure, and social services.

However, there are also people who are saying that they don’t want the oil money. These are the Huaorani people, who just want the oil companies to go away and leave their lands alone. According to today’s paper, they are currently repudiating their former leadership, who signed an agreement with the oil companies. These people say that they do not want their communities disrupted, their animals killed and hunted, their forests cut up by roads, their rivers polluted.

You can read their very powerful letter to the Ecuadoran government (translated into English) on

http://www.saveamericasforests.org/Yasuni/News/

Reading their words, I’m reminded that we once all lived like the Huaorani. We were all connected directly to the earth. Now we’re connected by oil ­ the moonshine, the heroin of the 21st century. We fight and kill and mug old ladies to get it. Does it have to be like this? Can’t we live more solidly, more sustainably, more peacefully, in better balance with each other and our environment? Do we have to take the oil from the veins of the earth, shoot it into our own cities, keep moving faster and faster?

September is a good month to investigate our roots, our foundations, because Mars is slowing down. It will go retrograde on the 1st of October, and so it only moves five degrees during the entire month of September. Not only is it moving very slowly, but it is in the earth sign Taurus, the sign that is the most resistant to change.

Mars is the planet that connects us to the physical. Slowing down in Taurus, it makes us more solid and dependable. It reminds us that we are animals at the core, interested mostly in heat and food and sex and safety. It pushes us to dig down, to get what we need from the soil.

Taurus is a conservative influence, and so most of us will fall back on what we know. For some folks, that will mean rooting around for oil. For others, it will mean planting and digging up fruits and vegetables. All of us are pushed towards the things that are essential for us. One way or another, we all bind ourselves to the earth.

Also moving slowly is Pluto, the planet of power. And so the wheels of power will grind very deliberately in September.

All month, there’s a tense aspect between Mars and Pluto. Pluto is in the excitable, inspired fire sign Sagittarius, and it has some trouble with weighty, deliberate Mars. Pluto pushes us all to believe in something and then try to change the world through our beliefs. Mars in Taurus tells us that it can only happen as fast as it can happen. You can’t pull on a plant to make it yield fruit. All earthlings need patience.

I’m back in Quito again, and I’m here for a while. I’m feeling very rooted. But I still have to look down and ask the question ­ how are these roots of mine made? What do they connect me to? How deep do they go? What do I really need, and what do I think I need?

At the new moon in September, the sun is in Virgo, the sign of discrimination. And so this is what we must add to the mix. We can plod along, chained to the earth by our addictions. Or we can take what the earth so freely gives us, the gifts that renew themselves and also renew us. The choice is ours.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com