“Tom and myself rode down this hill in a ropey old 1950′s Leyland bus, typical of the Maltese bus fleet, but driven by the stunt driver for the bus scenes in ‘Speed’ where the bomb would go off if they slowed to less than [...]]]> The photographer’s description of this image is as striking as the picture itself:

“Tom and myself rode down this hill in a ropey old 1950′s Leyland bus, typical of the Maltese bus fleet, but driven by the stunt driver for the bus scenes in ‘Speed’ where the bomb would go off if they slowed to less than 40mph! We were on high seats opposite the exit door and had to grip on whilst centripetal force took us and the bus closer to the outside wall. Tyres squealed on the hot tarmac and we were saved by some old dear in black who didn’t seem to need to hang on and dinged the bell as calmly as you like for the driver to stop and let her off.” (Source)

Life feels like this, sometimes, for each of us. Yet some people are more prone than others to careening through the days, whipped back and forth by forces they feel they can’t control. They complain of other people’s actions and influences on their lives: “He made me feel bad,” “She won’t let me go,” “They really have me tied down.”

In traditional psychology, this innate sense of where control lies in one’s life is referred to as the locus of control. In astrology — namely in Huber astrology — we can determine where a chart native’s locus of control lies in different areas of life by examining the dynamic calculations: a series of negative and positive numbers whose values reflect the strength of various mode and element combinations within the chart, based on planet, sign and house placements.

For example, someone with dynamic calculations of +33 mutable and +14 earth will end up with a “build-up” of +47 in Virgo energy (Virgo being the mutable earth sign). This means, in a nutshell, that the person tends to assume that Virgo-type control over life exists externally, out in the world, not within her own domain. So though she may have several planets in Virgo, she may feel their obligation, responsibility and critical analysis being imposed on her from others rather than from within herself.

Similarly, someone with dynamic calculations of -18 fixed and +10 water will end up with a “cut-down” of -8 in Scorpio (fixed water) energy. The person’s sense of emotional depth, intensity and control will lie more within himself than without; he is more likely to acknowledge that his strong feelings are generated internally rather than to blame someone else, or some external circumstance, for them.

This basic knowledge of dynamic calculations, alongside the psychological concept of locus of control, can be enormously helpful for clients who feel they are careening down a mountainside in a runaway bus with a crazy driver and a bomb on board. The astrologer may be the wise woman in black, calmly ringing the bell, telling the client it’s okay to get off, to see what it’s like to descend calmly and quietly on his own two feet.

Image: Harry Willis

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections [...]]]> Most of the time, when I look at the picture of the week, I see right away the astrological archetype with which the image aligns.

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections all bringing energy to an undefined, in-between space.

All of these archetypes are true to the image in their own way but they don’t really get to the core of it for me. What is most striking about this photo, in my view, is the stark, bright, white light against the utter blackness: the striking oppositeness come together. Secondarily (or perhaps primarily, depending on the viewer), the grid pattern kind of couches or embraces a cross, which in the Christian tradition is the symbol of light penetrating dark.

But what is light penetrating dark in terms of astrology? I don’t think I can choose a single planet or sign to reflect that idea, for light and dark are such basic archetypal energies that undergird and run through all of life, through all the energies we carry within us: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Sagittarius, Cancer — each of these and every other astrological energy carries its own brand of light and dark into embodiment, into the life of the person who carries that energy.

For instance, Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and, as such, represents merging relationship, sensuality, art and luscious enjoyment of life. But she can also be desperate and demanding, vain and superficial. These are two sides of the same coin, the light and the shadow of a single archetypal energy that lives in all of us.

There are others: Mercury’s quick wit, light laughter and adaptability is shadowed by detachment, fickleness and nit-picky-ness; Jupiter’s wisdom, perspective and generosity may be darkened by arrogance, excess and sloth.

When we accept, embody or live out only one side of an archetype, denying the other side’s potential within us, we run into trouble. This is the condition first identified by Sigmund Freud as projection and cast into mythic terms by Carl Jung as shadow.

Western astrologers have long identified shadow with the seventh house (the house of relationship), suggesting that we draw people to us who have the qualities we are not yet ready to accept in ourselves and integrate into our consciousness.

But we can experience shadow in any house of the horoscope, for example if we have a strong seventh house and little in its opposite house, the first, we may identify more completely with others than with ourselves, making the self into shadow material: fear of being alone, denial of one’s own worth, self-effacement or self-abnegation or self-mutilation, to go to the extreme. If our ninth house is dominant over the third, we may find ourselves in an ivory tower, alienated from community, and thus critical of people who have strong local connections and networks. And so forth.

This is all shadow material. Light penetrates shadow through the channel of consciousness, of becoming aware of where your shadows lie, where they’re sourced, how they’re triggered, how they grow.

Consciousness, in turn, is cultivated by self-reflection, self-honesty and ventures into the darkness, to discover and retrieve and reclaim what is there. It can be done, to some extent, on one’s own, but is more often effective with a faithful guide, a Virgil to one’s Dante or a Gandalf to one’s Frodo. Such guides can bring the wisdom, insight, faith, humbleness and even humor we need to believe in our own survival through the dark shadows of our own psyche. They can help us find our own light.

Image: Drake Guan

Psychology and sociology have conspired in recent decades to promote the belief that temperament and personality are all nurture, no nature. But as most parents will tell you (and [...]]]> This picture is appropriate in that I’m now reading The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian in an effort to better understand the burgeoning boy in my life.

Psychology and sociology have conspired in recent decades to promote the belief that temperament and personality are all nurture, no nature. But as most parents will tell you (and as researchers have finally begun to admit), kids come out with their own distinct natures — a portion of which are clearly gender-specific.

Though he is careful to allow for each person’s individuality, Gurian’s book describes the ways testosterone, fetal brain development and other biochemical processes drive the traits we’ve come to identify as “typically” male: physicality, competitiveness, task-orientation, skill-building, independence-seeking and so forth. As someone who has historically experienced competition as anxiety- and shame-producing, this sentence particularly struck me: “Competition, for boys, is a form of nurturing behavior.” (p. 29)

I read the sentence to my husband who, as my mind was still reeling, casually remarked that he understood it instinctively. I had to start reshuffling my own neurons, start accepting the idea that the teasing element to my husband’s and son’s relationship might be, in fact, not a form of put-down or rivalry but, instead, a display of deep affection. How strange, I thought.

Not surprisingly, these “typically male” characteristics are part and parcel of the Mars archetype. Mars is the rawest expression of masculinity in the horoscope chart; it gets refined and strengthened as it goes “up the ladder” to solar consciousness and, then, transformative Plutonian will (this structure is per the Huber schema). But at the instinctive level, we can truly feel the testosterone pumping through, the competitiveness and the physicality and the drive to build skills, the urge to perform and succeed.

In my son’s chart, Mars is in Taurus in the 9th house. He learns well through large-muscle movement, through experiences that engage his mind in whole-body knowing. At three, he’s interested in reading and writing, but sitting in a chair and going over symbols and sounds won’t do for him the way it did for me. He is much better with interactivity, with word games that challenge him to build new skills, with learning new words and trying them out in a sentence, with connecting pictures with letters through books or television shows. (He is currently obsessed with PBS’s Word World, which makes letters into pictures of the things they represent.)

He also needs to move in a way I’ve never experienced: If he doesn’t ride his bike or scooter, kick a soccer ball, hit a baseball or run for several hours each day, he is restless and grumpy all night.

My Mars, on the other hand, is in Aquarius in the 6th house — a very different orientation. My body has always seemed, somewhat, like an appendage to my mind; give me an idea and I’ll chew on it and chew on it and chew on it until it’s spent. If there’s time later and I’m inspired, I might go for a stroll around the neighborhood. My Mars gets pumped by exploring and analyzing ideas, especially if I can organize them into a thought system. That’s why astrology works so well for me as a discipline. Whereas other tasks might bore me, I am continually absorbed by astrology, working to increase my knowledge and skills; it gives me energy rather than depleting it. I want to distinguish myself and be the best I can be in this field.

Sports? Meh, I prefer watching instead.

Take a look at the Mars in your chart. What sign and house is it in? Do you feel the energy pumping through you in the ways suggested by the sign and house? How so?

Photo: Lochnagarth

Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

And Georgia O’Keefe should know about time. She lived for ninety-nine years, from 1887 until 1986.

I recently advised a client to spend an hour eating [...]]]>

Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

And Georgia O’Keefe should know about time. She lived for ninety-nine years, from 1887 until 1986.

I recently advised a client to spend an hour eating an orange. This was not originally my idea; it came from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace is Every Step, a series of short but profound thoughts, such as “Tangerine Meditation” which reads, in part:

[The children] saw not only the tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. Then they saw petals falling down and the tiny green fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. … Each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite …

Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. (Source)

This, in turn, reminds me of the beautiful poem “The Shirt” by Robert Pinsky, wherein the poet sees, in his simple button-down shirt, the whole world and the whole, in its own way, of history: the farm laborers harvesting the cotton, the sweat shop workers cutting and piecing it together, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the development of Scottish tartans, more, and more.

Astrologically, Mercury can be seen as little bits of data like Pinsky’s “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar.” It is the calories and grams of fat we eat, the telephone numbers we store in our heads, the time we’re scheduled to meet someone and the silent agreement with other drivers that we pass on the left and stop at red lights. None of life could go forward without these things, but they are not the essence or the energy of the life.

On the other hand, Jupiter is the entirety of the poem, the full-tongued experience of eating an orange, the whole breath-sucking vision of an O’Keefe. It is the sweeping view of the day, the sensory themes, the long arc of energy that embraces the whole.

And yet neither of these things is seeing a flower deeply, or taking an hour to eat an orange, or knowing your shirt so well that you feel its history. These, I would say — the interweaving, the interlocking, of many visible details into an integrated, structured whole — is Saturn. Saturn is physical, boundaried structure that binds together many small pieces into a coherent and useful whole. It is the legal code and all its individual laws, ordinances and rulings. It is the work plan and each step that must be taken. It is the mother’s security and each little thing she does — the schedule, the snacks, the snuggles — to create it.

Saturn is the way the cuticle, the xylem, the phloem, the stoma, the upper and lower epidermis, the cells, the veins arrange themselves in startling symmetry to become a single leaf. It is the way that leaf retools and restructures its resources and sends them back out into the world to sustain life.

Poor Saturn. It has been denigrated as malefic and destructive. It turns the world, sometimes, in ways that make us want to cover our ears and sing, “La la la la la la la…” But Saturn is about preserving what it important. And what is important may not always be to our liking.

Photo: didbygraham

In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the frog [...]]]> Ask a friend to name an animal commonly depicted in literature, myth and culture, and the answer isn’t likely to be “frog.” But from the ancient Egyptian goddess Heket to The Frog Prince to Michigan J. Frog, the croaking amphibians have populated the cultural imagination for thousands of years.

In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the frog was associated with fertility, probably in part because the animals appeared in droves following the annual flooding of the Nile, whose silt deposits fertilized the Egyptian soil. In Asia, frogs are harbingers of fortune and luck, as they are in Scotland: “Households often keep stone frogs in their gardens and they are often given as house warming presents.” (Source) And in the Celtic Druidic tradition:

[The frog] unites the elements of water and earth, bringing joy, delight and healing in its singing and hopping … The frog possesses an extremely sensitive skin, considered magical by shamans. A companion of the rain spirits, the frog can help you develop sensitivity to others, to healing and to sound through your skin and your whole body and aura. (Source)

This symbolic sensitivity actually shows up on a scientific level as frogs are a documented sentinel, or indicator, species. In recent years, deformities in frogs have been noted as an early indicator of chemical farm pollution impacting local ecosystems. (Source) As well, in nature, frogs occupy the space between water and land, much as Heket represents the final stages of childbirth, when the baby emerges from the amniotic fluid to come live on the drier earth.

The composition of the photo above (wittingly? unwittingly?) reveals this sensitive in-the-margins space that frogs occupy both in the scientific research and in the cultural imagination: The stone sculpture of the frog sits at the shoreline between foliage and bark, and its skin is painted both red and blue, as if it could flux back and forth between two innate ways of being. (In Huber astrology, different colors represent different energies: red squares and oppositions are active; blue sextiles and trines are restful.)

The astrological archetype that first jumps to mind when I think about these characteristics of the frog is Mercury: it is light, flexible, sensitive, magical; it traverses the margins between defined worlds. But Mercury is a bit “drier” than a frog, airier and more detached than water and earth would suggest. So I want to say the frog, perhaps, is Mercury in a water sign (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) or, under the right conditions, in an earth sign (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn). Or perhaps it is Mercury coupled with Virgo or the Moon or maybe even Jupiter: a planet that brings it a waterier, earthier sensibility, that deepens its sensitivity in an intuitive and sensual way.

There is one more element in the photo above that deserves comment: the paint is peeling. The frog is obviously old and may be neglected or forgotten (or, on the other hand, intentionally left to the weather). Whatever the case, there is a whisper of Saturn here, of the slow decay that comes with time. In our culture, we tend to turn away from such things.

But the photo instead shows how, over time, the bravely sensitive — and patient — person exposes what is underneath, makes raw and available what is inside, perhaps to help others, perhaps to move closer authenticity, perhaps to become more fertile with the deepening of each passing year.

Photo: lisa_eglinton

This image puts me in mind of Robert Hand’s description of Venus opposition Saturn: youth, lightness and spontaneity juxtaposed with age, graveness and ponderousness. Hand says:

“Loneliness and self-pity sometimes come with this transit. You feel surrounded by bright, positive [...]]]> It is archetypally surprising to see young and old, freshness and decay, coupled together in the same image.

This image puts me in mind of Robert Hand’s description of Venus opposition Saturn: youth, lightness and spontaneity juxtaposed with age, graveness and ponderousness. Hand says:

“Loneliness and self-pity sometimes come with this transit. You feel surrounded by bright, positive energies that you simply cannot relate to. You may feel like a gray presence among colorful people. … In general today, relationships will force you to encounter aspects of yourself that you would prefer not to face. However, like all oppositions, this one could heighten your self-perception and give you knowledge that will help you.” (Source, pp. 202-203)

There is a wistful feeling to this photo, as there may be to a Venus-Saturn coupling. It is as if we are within the vibrant, present moment of the young woman at the same time as we are deeply conscious — through the old building and dilapidated structures — of the long perspective of great lengths of time, either forward or past. That long perspective is dogged; we cannot shake it to simply be in the now, laughing and sightseeing and sipping coffee with our compadres. The duality in the Venus-Saturn opposition separates us from others who may be, right now, less sharply attuned to the connections between what is now and what is elsewhen. The stillness of the moment seems to span centuries.

The picture above reminds me of another image — one I’m sure you’ve seen before — that carries a  similar energy. The drawing to the right may be seen as either an old woman or a young woman, depending how you look. Like the decaying building in the photo above, the old woman reminds us of what the young woman will eventually become — indeed, of what we all will eventually become.

These images remind us that — much as we resist the idea — Saturn and Venus are intimately related. They seed one another. Both are physical, feminine energies (yes! Saturn is feminine) that, at their finest, work matter into its true form in each successive moment. For Venus, the process is instinctive, responsive and spontaneous; for Saturn, the process is thoughtful, careful and planned over time.

It is interesting to me that each of these images contains a downward perspective. The woman in the photo above appears to be looking at something below her eye level, over the railing of the bridge. Both the young woman and the old woman in the drawing above appear to be looking down as well. We speak of being in the present moment as “being grounded,” yet in the horoscope chart the ground — the IC, the nadir of the chart — is the place of the past, of ancestors, of deep memory, of the collective unconscious. When we are happy, we look up. When we are wistful or sad, we look down. When we want to connect, we look across.

These images suggest the manifestation of something solidly material around ephemeral feelings, of introspection seeded by memory, of a forming, a becoming, that is watered by the ground of memory, of time, of the long, deep perspective.

Image 1: Cam Switzer
Image 2: Public domain

But my eye is drawn this time to the colors, which put me in mind of the Huber school, which uses color [...]]]> It would be so easy to write about Venus with this photo: the beauty, the light, the symmetry, the suggested fragrance, the gorgeous growth created through the symbiosis of earth and sun, water and stem.

But my eye is drawn this time to the colors, which put me in mind of the Huber school, which uses color to great effect in its rendering and reading of horoscope charts.

The most obvious color here is the winged violet, but the dark lush of green and pinprick shocks of orange both compete with, and complete, the purple. In this way, all four aspect colors — orange and green, red and blue (i.e., purple) — are present in this close-up photo of flowers in a field.

Orange, green, red and blue represent the four different ways that energy can flow between two things: in the case of astrology, between two planets — that is, between two archetypes.

The field of green grass is the fertile ground of openness where perception occurs. In Huber astrology, the quincunx (150 degrees) and the semi-sextile (30 degrees) are rendered in green, signaling the fecundity of the open mind, of learning, of perceiving, of making decisions through information gleaned from many different corridors.

From this field of grass — receiver and channeler of water and nutrients — comes the impulse for growth. This impulse is sourced in a single seed and symbolized by red in the Huber scheme, red of initiative and activity and pushing-up through the cold winter ground to find the new spring. The essence of red lines (the 180-degree opposition and the 90-degree square) is action, restlessness, forging a path, creating new things. There is often some tension here, some work that must be done or an obstacle to overcome. The red lines are rarely easy, but they are always energized.

At the end of the red phase comes blue: the trine (120 degrees) and the sextile (60 degrees). Here the enjoyment phase starts, cooling the sweat of action, putting a lemonade in our hand and showing us to the chaise lounge, to sit back, to enjoy our work. The green has sourced the flower, the red has pushed it upward into our sights and now the blue allows us to rest. If there is yet work to be done, it is only the work of perfection, of fussing and cleaning and maybe a lazy pulling of a weed here and there. But mostly it is the energy of appreciation, a Look what I’ve done!

And then there is orange (the conjunction: 0 degrees). Orange is the tightest, most intense color, the kind of energy you get when you braid two things together so tightly that it’s hard to tell them apart. It is here, in the flower’s pistil, that the energy of receptivity, creativity and restfulness come together, where its generative ovaries and receptive stamen meet to perpetuate the life of its species. The riotous intensity is emblematic of this clashing mergence, a clashing so bright it hurts — yet it is totally natural, totally at one with the nature of the flower itself.

And so, in the end, there is something of the Venusian even in this rainbow of colors. It is the Venusian manner of bringing elements together into the perfect balance that’s needed to create and to enjoy and to continue unfolding the luscious beauty of purple flowers in open green fields through the unconscious, impulsive union of the orange.

Photo: cornish celt