Tides

There's nothing quite like the Samhain tide to open your emotions.

It is said that twice a year, at Samhain and Beltane, the veil between the worlds becomes tenuous and crossings from one to the other are more common. But in my case, I reckon it's just that at these times I'm more aware of the existence of the veil, and other worlds, than at more mundane times.

And so I am dreaming, and nightmaring, enough to keep me for the rest of the year, it seems.

My loved ones and ancestors are featuring quite heavily in my dreams - sometimes unrecognisable by their appearance yet completely known for who they are and were to me - old fears are playing themselves out and connections are being rebooted.

Head tipped back into the (finally) winter-blue sky this morning, I watch a fairy crossing above me.

No...not a fairy...a locust, with its rainbow wings whirring. I remember that I am quite averse to locusts on the ground and step out of its flight path quickly.

Music is getting stuck in my mind, so I switch my electronic collection on to shuffle and listen to Joe Walsh, Corvus Corax and Tim Hardin. Ah, the poor heroin-addicted boy who never managed to claw his way out of the poppy's grip before it killed him.

Emotions are raw yet surprisingly manageable in this season of other-worldly connection.

I view a house a friend (and teenage sweetheart) used to live in as a boy - 4 doors down on Arthur Road, long since sold up as the matriarch's health failed.

I reconnect with the Covenant of Hekate, thinking to honour Her Fires again this year, when the Moon is right.

I miss the Gautrain Bus, the drivers of which have been on strike for almost a week now, and don't fancy the stress of driving in a car through Sandton traffic this afternoon - never mind what stress it must be giving Warren to do the actual driving.

I remember my Mom, who, when last seen in the dreamworld was wearing a different face, whose last-incarnation-birthday it is today.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I miss you still.

I'm thinking the tide will be gentler this year, as I get older and possibly more able to handle it. The retrograde motions of both Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn seem to be helping this softer view along. We introspected our immediate daily souls last month with the Mercury backtrack, and now a slightly higher portion of our collective Self will be pondering the tracks and ruts of time and space.

Hopefully. As past the veil we slide together, holding hands, some of us shrieking, some of us crying, some of us looking about in wonder and awe.Tides.

Washed Into The West

My favourite astrologer, Robert Wilkinson, always has a first-class take on what's going on in the spiritual skies ( as opposed to the physical skies, which is more my own realm of competence) and so I always find it worthwhile to take some time and read his posts thoroughly.

His approach is vastly more universal than your average astrologer, in my opinion. For instance, his current article on Saturn retrograde is high-caloric food for thought.

If I were to paraphrase what Robert is saying from my own iconoclastic viewpoint, I'd just say that we (as the Body of God) have entered a period of introspection of, and potential freeing from our personal and collective demons.

Saturn is turning retrograde at 10 Capricorn today, and as someone with a Natal Saturn at just over 3 Capricorn, I fall within the span of this planet's to-ing and fro-ing over the next number of months. I hope to get a good deal of personal exorcism done during this period.

But first, let us take the opportunity of the stationary direct point to start looking closely at our own fear-based limitations, with a view to setting them free of us, Washed into the West, in the relatively near future.

Powerful

Happy Wesak, Happy Full Moon in Scorpio and Happy Partial Lunar Eclipse!

From South Africa, you can catch the eclipse starting just after 8pm, continuing to just after midnight, with the point of greatest coverage occurring a little after 10pm.

This eclipse happens along the Taurus-Scorpio axis, for more astrologically-minded people, and I've always found it to be a very powerful configuration. Not always comfortable, but powerful.

Saturn is still doing its retrograde thing in Scorpio, of course, and with the retro Pluto in Capricorn, I think we're all feeling some dark cthonic energies running through our souls.

May this Full Moon focus and then dispel the demons we have been feeding.

Image courtesy of Blue Light Lady

New Gates

Hmmm...they seem to like me.

Well, I've concluded that I like them too (especially after  seeing this this morning).

So I've gone to the police station to get a bunch of ID Books, 'varsity records, etc. certified and emailed to the recruitment agent.

It's not cast in stone yet, but trending towards a new, different workplace challenge.

In other, connected, news: Saturn has just gone retrograde right over my natal Mars, in Scorpio (.. and anyone who wants to make something of me having Mars in a) my sun sign  b) my ascendant sign  c) Scorpio  had better stand in line for a bashing) turning us inward upon all sorts of essential life connections. With Mercury to follow retrograde in Pisces in three days' time, I'm fairly astonished that I'm getting anything at all done on the Earth plane at the moment.

Ah, but it's good sometimes to drift upon the dissolution of ego. Rearranging, reassembling how we interface with this world.

Namaste, All. I need to go sniff some Frankincense.

My Roots Are A Network

I've looked at Chiron before on this blog. Then, as now, the looking was personal. I doubt if there's any other way to take this little, recently discovered yet powerful astrological marker.

For Chiron, wherever it falls in our Natal Chart, points out the nature of our early wounds: and that's ego-level personal.

So I'm going to talk about myself again, mostly. Hel, this is my blog.

I have a Fourth House Chiron - indicating an insecure childhood. Wasn't it just, though?
Not that my parents were neglectful nurturers. They both did everything in their power, I believe, to bring up their children with love and positive affirmations.

But they both had wandering souls. If it had been just the two of them, I guess they would've tramped around the world their entire lives. As it was, my brother and I got dragged off to live in various countries every few years.

We got to see how the world outside of family lived, and I'm grateful for that. But rootedness was, and to some degree still is, pretty alien to my nature by dint of this constant restlessness.

Add to that the sign of my Natal Chiron is Aquarius ( and the Sign overrides the House in most cases) and, as I've mentioned, conjunct my Natal Moon, and you have one unconventionally insecure little girl in the making.

Who became one unconventionally insecure adult.I have always stood out, in other words, both within and without, and have been fairly uncomfortable with it.

But nothing is all bad news. In fact, the bad news is the good news, when viewed from a sufficiently zoomed-out perspective.

I took as my own the name of the Eagle over a quarter of a century ago. Today I work closely with another bird. Zoomed out is what I'm all about. And despite my love for the local landbase - the reciprocated love I treasure - I know deep within that all the world is indeed my home. My roots are a network, touching ground across the globe. I am at home anywhere and everywhere. Despite my slowly decreasing distrust of most human people, the geography and the non-human life feels comfortable to me all over the world.

This unconventional insecurity has blessed my life in a number of ways.
I have less difficulty than most making non-obvious connections, and I see the bigger picture more often and sooner than most around me. Indra's Net is not just a metaphor to me - I feel it everywhere, all the time.

I can see the outlines and the detail of a program before I even start coding it - something I was not aware was all that unusual.So it makes me a good programmer.I can say Fuck The Police loud and clear, and still have empathy for the benighted souls whose lot it is to be one.So it makes me a good Anarchist.

My partner has a Fifth House Chiron, indicating early restrictions on his soul. And it is in Pisces, pointing to a deep ability to heal, which I can recognise but which he seems reluctant to acknowledge.

All this is a pearl of great price.

But the pain inherent in realising it? Priceless, also.

Pic: Original oil painting Chiron in Aquarius, Kiss The Sky Studio

Niggling Misery

Full Moon along the Cancer-Capricorn axis tonight, which means my House of Mind is being illuminated strongly. And irritatingly.

I asked Warren about crime rates in Joburg at the full of the moon, and he pointed out that in fact the rates are lowest about now, increasing as we get nearer the New Moon. Professional criminals, we have in this city - they prefer to work at night without the Moon backlighting their activities.

That I have a Third House in Capricorn should tell you a lot about my grumpy-old-persona. I can be like your Granddad when his rheumatoid arthritis is playing up, especially as my natal Saturn is right around the same place that Full Moon is sitting in right now.

Tonight I felt like pitching a fit about the number of trailing electrical wires festooning the house. It's temporary, until we get all the lighting and cameras in their proper places. But the demise of the fridge's electrical socket has not helped - a long extension cable now runs right across the living room.

So, niggling misery would be my watchwords for the day, I guess. But not fatally so. I'm still aware of how richly privileged I actually am..not in material goods alone, or education, or anything else which fades like the morning poppy heads.
Just intensely privileged to be...here...now. On the Earth in all her toil and glory. Among the people - human and non human - who sing the hymn to Life Abundant every morning, and chant the evensong of the Sea of Remembrance as each night falls.

I am blessed to be starting to really remember Who I am...and who, by extension, You are, too. You can recall it if you bend your mind to it, you know.

Get Out Of My Eighth House

We don't get to see the transit of Venus live in South Africa, unless we live on the extreme east coast of KwaZulu Natal.

But here's a shot from the live webcam at (urrgh) the CocaCola Space Science Centre in Alice Springs, Oz.
It's purple because of the em wavelength it's viewing the event in - in this case, the hydrogen calcium K line.

OK Venus? Had your moment? Now get out of my eighth house, would you?

.....Has It Gone Yet?...

Remind me never again to wipe my brow and sigh with relief after a Mercury Retrograde.
Just as you relax, it bites down, harder.

Warren and I have the best possible camouflage when we're out driving the Joburg roads: we're a patently middle-aged couple in an inexpensive and definitely not new car. Therefor we rarely get stopped in a roadblock and we're not prime targets for the JMPiggyD's random pullovers.

Until Saturday.
We were coming back from the Sunninghill Builder's Warehouse - having phoned ahead and made sure they had gas refill facilities - with a couple of 9kg canisters behind the front seats, and two lengths of conduit slanting over my shoulder from the backseat. So, I guess we looked like gun-runners. Or drug mules. Or land invaders. Or perhaps we just looked like a soft target, for the two joy-riding piggies on Witkoppen Road.

You know something? I grew up with the firm belief that the Policeman Is Your Friend. I was taught as a child that, if I was ever lost or in trouble, the first thing I should look for was the Bobby's friendly tall helmet. This may still be true - but likely as a landmark to walk away from as fast as possible.

South African Metro Police are the pits. Suffering,correctly,from feelings of inferiority, they never waste an opportunity to boost their...somethings...through arrogant and unnecessary interactions with the public. Suffice to say, the search of my handbag which turned up nothing and the search of the cubbyhole which turned up the Boline are now hilarious memories: but at the time, they were enough to raise all the hackles on my back. Ah well, the Police State of the World, now.

Easter Monday dawned bright and dry. Very dry.
You remember the four or five days we were without water a little while ago? Well, the very same pipe burst all over again on Monday.Or possibly Sunday night. Whenever Mercury was busy tracking across the same part of the heavens it was traversing the first time it happened.
OK, so we can deal with that, in a way. Bottled water from the stores would stretch. And they would have, too, if Joburg Water, in their infinite incompetence, hadn't turned the water on full bore on Tuesday - breaking not only one of my house pipes, resulting in a flooded house and soggy ceiling, but also sundry pipes in the suburb. A trip down along the roads of Bloubosrand turns into a pre-canoe venture, with domestic water sleeting down several of them, and the unforgettable sight of a hand-painted board advertising an itinerant plumber placed in the path of a hill-tumbling torrent issuing from yet another broken-piped house.

Mercury Retrograde in Pisces? Thanks for all the memories.

Mirror Minuet

The last 36 hours have been a time of growing frustration, anger and resentment for me.
I didn't enjoy them in the least, but I can't say I'd have rather avoided them.

Oh, nothing major happened - just a series of everyday occurrences combining to make me wish that everyone would drop dead, or alternatively that I could quietly melt away from this life for a little time.
The bad attitude has passed though, and it was time to take a look at my Natal chart to see if I could start to make sense of this outburst of misanthropic anger.

Well, yes: there went Mercury, in retrograde, trailing across my 5th house, while opposing my Natal Pluto at the same time.
Anyone with half a drop of astrological sense out there would have recognised this as a time of severe social-ego roughing-up. But I don't have much astrological sense. In fact, for many years I resented the very existence of astrology, as I was bent on becoming an astronomer, and hated it when people, on hearing this, would launch into a discussion of solar signs.

 I started to recover from this intractable attitude a few years ago, and now I find astrology fascinating, although I probably spend less time on it than I do talking to the ancestors.

Walking the garden with a plastic bag in one hand and a plastic bag covering the other hand, picking up dog shit, I reflected that this was probably the perfect occupation to snap me out of the last vestiges of wounded petulant childhood - for the moment anyway.

You know, many of us regard astrology - when we don't disdain it completely as superstitious nonsense - as some kind of predictive mechanism. This couldn't be further from the truth, I have found.
Instead of foretelling the future, the shift of local planets against the background stars seems to be a vast cosmic mirror, held up to each of us individually and all of us collectively.
The passage of Mercury retrograde across the tail end of Pisces might have given me an inkling of what to look out for, it is true. But far more it is a reflection of what was going on in my own microcosm. A pas-de-deux, not a forerunner.

And it occurred to me that this is an awesome set up: we dance together, the Universe and ourSelves, doing the steps together in the Round Dance we conspired to create so long ago, this Cosmos and We.

Pic: found at Beta Tarot

For great thoughts on how this degree of retrograde affects us All, read Robert Wilkinson on the subject.

Solar Plexus Of Your Soul

Sunday : Tons of Rain read the 7-day forecast when I looked at it earlier this week.
I see they've changed it to read A few showers. Afternoon clouds. Mild. Which shows us how chaotic the art of weather prediction really is, I suppose.

Now, crossing the garden picking up dog poop for the week, I look up into a brilliant blue sky crossed by those picture-perfect sailing ships of bright white cotton cumulo-nimbus clouds, the horizon constrained from my view by tall Cycads, a Coral Tree in full bloom, two enormous Monkey-Thorns and the neighbors' renegade Jacaranda. Looking down, I see grass grown long enough to be cushiony, patches of Motherwort - who knows how that got in here? - and rose petals fallen all along the garden. Lemons from the home tree I pick , take inside and make delicious lemonade : lemon pulp and juice with ice water and a dash of mint, nothing better right now. Oh, add some ice maybe.

It's hard to remember that we're actually slap in the middle of a Mercury retrograde period - and one, moreover, taking place right across my second house, home of my own natal Mercury and my Jupiter. I'd have thought this one would be quite traumatic, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
For a start, I began earnest work with my Ancestors on a family disfunction near the beginning of this retrograde period, and the work continues well and steadily. I have also noticed an increase in my inner serenity and grounded-ness, about coincident with this period; in fact, yesterday I was incredibly at home during the whole of a trek to the mall to get Warren a new cellphone ; a trek which didn't work out, as it happens - several little Mercury-type obstacles rose up before us. Got to laugh. We also have had absolutely no luck in locating a hardware part for Warren's laptop. These sort of setbacks I can surely live with - and they're nothing to the full-on Mercury retrograde Anne's been having, this time around.

As I pour myself another glass of lemonade - with ice this time - I gather that these retrograde periods perhaps give us each precisely what we need for learning and for growth. That seems a bit rough, when your car is blowing up and your every utterance turns into a miscommunication - but there are compensations. Next time, you learn to take precautions, perhaps. Or you use the retrograde period as a chance to connect at a different level with your antecedents. And you dig your roots in just a little bit deeper to the land on both the physical and the spiritual planes, so that when those breezes blow, they blow with you, not against you. And you have that sense of joy that comes from being incarnate, here and now, with all its little and large disruptions. And you laugh, long and loud and from the solar plexus of your soul.

Image found over here

A Silver Bike And Standing In The Observatory

The weekend's major geomagnetic storm (I've never seen the kp index reach 7 before) may, or then again may not, have had an effect upon my internal vision centres.

On Saturday afternoon, napping on my bed in the strong Spring sunshine, I found myself standing within an ancient courtyard. It was a couple of hours before the dawn, and looking up the height of a dark stone wall, I saw a perfectly circular opening outlining the night sky. I felt the slight chill of the air, heard the hush of the early morning hours, and I knew I was in some kind of observatory. The whole scene bore an aura of wonder and deep, deep beauty.

Sunday night, I dreamt of a motorbike which was about to be mine. It was neither very large nor very small; neither a superbike nor a moped. But it fitted me exquisitely. There was a broad, comfortable seat for the driver, and one slightly different in shape for the passenger. The bum-box was just big enough for all my stuff. The entire bike was bright, reflective silver.

I'm still trying to decide whether increased geomagnetic activity affects my dreams and visions, and these next few years seem likely to provide me with a great deal of data.

Pic: Kokino Observatory, Macedonia. No, I've never heard of it before. But the vision seemed to have been located not too far from here.

Guide Of Souls

The Guide of Souls is with us.

He's always with us,of course, but now as his footsteps slow and start coming back to where we wait, we are far more aware of him.

Looking up, I see the Pied Crow swoop to a landing on the cellphone mast. He fixes me with one eye, leans into the wind and caws at me. My own bright and dark messenger of the gods.

Hermes, Toth, Odin, Corvus Albus. He leads off in the sky and guides our soul. Until the day he stops, looks around and sees us paused back there, somewhere behind him.
He walks back to us, slowly at first, gathering speed.

What is it you've forgotten, little one? He asks. What would you like another look at, another chance to do over and do right?

Mercury Retrograde. Inspiration by Robert Wilkinson

Lessons of Fire

Last night we started into another Mercury Retrograde.Unlike the long string of retrogrades preceding it, this one is not taking place in an Earth sign. That's little comfort to me, however, as the Fire sign of Aries which is accommodating this backward motion is a bit of an unknown factor in my natal chart.

Aries seems to represent the ego at its beginning. The point-like emergence of I Am from the sea of consciousness. The war-mongering, power-grabbing, dionysian-celebrating result of the first stages of individuation. And as such, it can be dangerous.

In fact, if we think about the function of a Mercury retrograde - to review the past 3 weeks or so, and revisit that ground again - I should really be crouching in a corner, whimpering. I mean -the last 3 weeks? For gods' sakes. Car bursting into flames on the highway, spending thousands on towing fees and then thousands on repair and then spending a week without a car at all; intense and vicious little 'flu virus which hit me for a good ten days, which is 8 days too long;failure of serenity and failure of communication and failure of humility. You want me to revisit the last three weeks?

But I'm not taking it as badly as all that. In fact, I'm rather looking forward to what this period can teach me. My natal Mercury does reside in a Fire sign, after all - albeit the more refined fire of Sagittarius - and the Guide of Souls who is Mercury/Hermes/Odin/Enki has not been known, by me anyway, to make too many great big mistakes.
It's feeling like being in a classroom again, and the teacher is saying "Now, class, this is an important bit. I want you to learn it very thoroughly. So, let's just go back over this piece again, hmm?"

I intuit that my personal lessons will involve flash-or-trigger-points, keeping a clear mind, and opening myself to some less savoury aspects of Who I Am. With, hopefully, a hefty dose of gentle humility thrown into the mix. Let's wait and see then, shall we?

Pic: Fire Dragon by Vlad Gerasimov