A friend sent me a lovely, aching poem this morning. “In Knowledge of Young Boys” by Toi Derricotte reads, in part,
i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming
… when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle …
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning
People often ask me whether a birth time is legitimate for astrological purposes if labor has been induced, or the baby was born by C-section, or a child has come prematurely. “Of course,” I tell them. “The birth time is the birth time.” It marks the primordial energetic imprint of the universe on the inhaling, exhaling, screaming, shocked, squishy little being when it emerges from the newty swamp of the womb onto the dry horizon of earth.
Before that instant, the instant of imprint, the child is without a chart, without its own native markings bestowed by the cosmos. It is utterly unto itself, with “connections [belonging] only to yourself,” with “no history to hook onto, barnacle … blank as the sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental.” It is the moment of breakage, when the baby separates from the mother’s body, when the umbilicus is severed, that the child has a chart — which is to say that, at that instant, the child begins, at first unwittingly and then with more intention, to craft connections and hooks and roots of its own.
These connections and hooks and roots are embedded in the horoscope chart. They are described by the etchings of aspect lines and the archetypal astro-glyphs that dot the chart like cuneiform: the bones that give shape to the life. And like bones, such natural tendencies — to love exuberantly, perhaps, or to think deeply or to revel in the pleasure of the senses — can be broken, sprained or strained; can hurt for no obvious reason, can become lame or numb or awkward, can burn. They can, as Derricotte writes, become
red with the cut [or] astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning
When the astonishment of pain — physical or otherwise — takes the child, the youth, the grown-up away from its natural state, fears and complexes and dysfunctions result; shadow settles in. We live this way for a while, often for a long time. We feel the ways that poorly-tended pain gives birth to itself, over and over and over and over, until we forget, maybe, how it is to feel good, to feel whole and natural and vibrant. Maybe this forgetfulness pervades the whole life. Maybe it is isolated, confined to just one area or just one era of the life.
Whenever and however pain happens, repair and restoration are necessary for healing which, at its root, means wholeness. Instead of repair and restoration, though, so many of us adapt to the pain: We limp, or sit differently, or give parts of ourselves away. We begin to forget who we are, what the healthy and whole expression of our natural connections and hooks and roots really looks like, really feels like. We self-medicate or complain a lot or take bold risks or leave our relationships or quit our jobs to “find ourselves.” This is hard work in service of pain.
The horoscope chart is not the end word in healing and wholeness. In fact, it is to that stillpoint at the center of the chart that all roads finally, lovingly, lead. But some pain is so profound that it’s taken us off the road completely, placed blinders over our eyes and cotton in our ears, made it crushingly difficult to find the way back. The chart is like a map — not back to the womb, when we had no history to hook onto, barnacle, but back to our aboriginal selves, to integrate the astonishment of pain with the wholeness of who we were in that first moment of squishy aliveness.
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