The Year of the Storm

I haven’t looked at a horoscope chart since last summer, much less tried to put anything astrological into words since then.

On the surface, this is strange, since I just had an article come out in The Mountain Astrologer, finally completed my Diploma in Astrological Psychology with API (UK), and seen more change in the last 12 months of my life than in the previous 10 years combined.

You’d think I’d be running to clients waving my new credentials like a flag in the wind, running to my blog to capitalize on a bit of publicity, running  to my chart to understand it all: the deaths, the layoff, the diagnosis, the abuse I suspected at the hands of my child’s caregiver, the two new businesses, the job offer, the packing, the move back to my hometown, the sale of our beloved home, the waiting, the chaos, the shedding, the limbo between being settled there and being settled here, the miracle cure for the mysterious pain I’d lived with for more than 16 years.

And the baby! The difficult pregnancy, the frightening labor — and then the mellowest, cheerfulest, healthiest, most startling new baby imaginable, in the midst of it all.

But one thing astrology teaches us — and especially Huber astrology — is that life flows in waves, like cycles, like the startled crash of ocean on rocks, followed by a swirling retreat, and then by the slow, smooth rocking of the water’s surface in preparation for the next big swell.

Only some of those times are conducive to reflection. Other times, the full-throttle living must come first.

There are many different astrological indicators for when such tempests might occur in a life. For me, it was predominantly the passage of my Age Point over the Low Point of my seventh house, followed immediately by Saturn’s transit across my Pluto-Moon-Uranus conjunction in Virgo and Libra in my second house. It was the grace of synchronicity, all lined up and waiting to sweep me off my feet, to steal my breath and my sight for a dark night.

I was only dimly aware of these imminent passages last January, only had a vague notion what the coming months might bring. I knew it would be a seminal year, knew certain parts of my life would be deeply shaken, even transformed. But as the drama stacked up, it began to obscure my view of the year’s astrology. I let go of all but the most essential survival requirements: tending to my children, tending to my health, tending to our money, our house, our safe passage through the storm.

From inside the tempest, it’s tough to see the landscape, the markers you normally grasp to orient yourself, to map your way back to dry ground.

We’re close to landing now, though. We were fully in the clouds and spray last fall; now, though still in flight, we’ve begun to let go of What Was. We’re starting to emerge from the mist, come closer to solid ground, squint the shoreline into view, see a cloudy outline of What’s To Come. And the astrology is waiting there, too.

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