Yes, power.

First, our local NPR station featured an interview with two Woodbury University professors: Architecture Department Chair Norman Millar and Architecture [...]]]> In the last 24 hours, without even trying, I came across two news stories that caught me up in the Libra energy now swirling around the ether: ideas of love, beauty, partnership, seduction — and power.

Yes, power.

First, our local NPR station featured an interview with two Woodbury University professors: Architecture Department Chair Norman Millar and Architecture Professor Paulette Singley.

The topic, delectably risque, was Architecture and Seduction.

Now, let’s just be up-front about this: Libra, by no means, corners the market on seduction. There are plenty of other signs — Scorpio, for instance, or Leo — with their own unique brands of come-hither. But Libra is the quintessential sign of relationship and art, so it was intriguing to hear the two topics linked up in discussion, with nary a mention of astrology.

The discussion was a preview of a panel held last night at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, which is running an exhibition on John Lautner’s work, “Between Earth and Heaven,” through October 12th. The pair (of course!) exchanged opinions and insights about how a home could be laid out (pun intended) and accessorized to seduce a lover from front porch to kitchen to hallway to bedroom. It was agreed, for instance, that there was something very, very sexy about an open floor plan, about glass.

This struck me as very Libran: A whole environment designed not to bonk a potential bedmate over the head with garish flirtations but, instead, to evoke an atmosphere that slowly draws the lover into your embrace. Venus in Libra might be a little headier than, for example, sensual Venus in Taurus — perhaps engaging in a lively debate that stirs the passions — but it still knows how to evoke an atmosphere. After all, at its best, Libra, ruled by Venus, wants you to agree to follow her lead through the house. Where’s the fun, the challenge, in dragging you?

I drove home slowly, thoughts of a seductive house twirling about in my brain. I parked the car in the driveway, grabbed the mail from the box and slowly opened the door.

There were model train tracks on the floor, a pile of clean diapers on the easy chair and breakfast dishes still strewn on the kitchen table. The lair of a temptress this was not.

I sighed and forgot about the story. I had an evening packed with power struggles with my preschooler. I went to sleep feeling unsettled and pessimistic. When and how would these power struggles ever end? Would we ever just have fun together again? Why can’t he just do what I say?

I didn’t sleep well.

When I logged onto my e-mail this morning, another unwittingly Libran message awaited me. The same message, really, just from a different perspective. It read, in part:

When parents model the “healthy selfishness” of partnership and don’t resist their children’s narcissism, the children eventually learn that it feels good to care for others.

Today, notice all the ways in which *giving* makes you feel good, and how others feel good when you allow them to give to you. Let the line between giving and receiving dissolve. That’s the magic of partnership! (Source)

Hmmmm, indeed.Perhaps I don’t need to seduce my husband as much as I need to charm my child.

Because between the lines of the Libra impulse to compromise, agree and charm is really a question of power. As one of yesterday’s radio panelists put it, a bachelor pad is a place designed to get someone to give up a certain amount of power, to bend that person to your will, to make them want to go to bed with you.

To make them want. There is power there, no matter how much sugar you pour on it.

We often tell our child that hitting us isn’t a good way to get what he wants. Ditto whining, yelling and stomping. So why would I think anger would work well going the other direction? Last night, and many nights before, I tried to force this child to bend to my will and go to sleep before he’s ready. But Louise Huber’s seed thought for Libra goes like this:

I choose the way which leads between two great lines of force. (Source)

What way leads between the two forces, instead of toppling everyone over to one or the other? How can we move beyond either-or into a space where all boats rise, where a third alternative is viable and good? How can we acknowledge the powerful forces that snarl within each of us, but not enable them to dominate? How can we reframe our goal to be not power-over but power-with?

What would happen if we asked questions like this in public life as well as in our private lives?

Photo credits: bachelor pad, messy house, candidates

“I miss my hoooome!” he wailed. “Why aren’t we going hoooome?”

I started with the pat answer: “Wherever you [...]]]> The Dragon always enjoys an airplane ride, but when we arrived at a hotel in the midwest last week — instead of Grandma and Grandpa’s house in the northwest, as he expected — he was a little thrown off.

“I miss my hoooome!” he wailed. “Why aren’t we going hoooome?”

I started with the pat answer: “Wherever you and Daddy and I are together,” I told the Dragon, “that’s home.”

He looked doubtful. You just can’t fool a three-year-old. He wanted his bedroom, his toys, his stuffed orca that we’d forgotten. He wanted the cat, and going to get the mail, and routine. Familiarity.

So we explained a little about taking trips and assured him that we’d go home eventually. As we did, I thought of the basic structure of the horoscope chart, with home, memory, ritual and habit at the bottom, faraway places and new perspectives at the top. I thought about the ninth house up on high, the place where long-distance travel is implicated, and about stretching your mind and pushing out of your comfort zone.

After reassuring him, we talked to the Dragon about the value of experiencing new things, finding out how other people live, seeing different houses and streets and landscapes. A place with fewer people, more space; a place with lots of trees but no mountains. What did he think about not having a mountain in our backyard for a few days?

“I don’t know,” he said sullenly.

How did he feel about seeing a city he’d never seen before?

“I want to see the lights,” he said, referring to a family ritual of driving up the mountain at night to look out on the city. He was troubled when we told him we couldn’t do that here.

How did he feel about meeting a cousin his age who he’d never met?

“I want to,” he said, with a little more perk.

Aah, I thought, there’s his Libran energy emerging.

“You know,” I told him, “This hotel room will be home to us for a few days. This is where we’ll come to sleep, and play a little, and read books and talk at the end of the day. Even though we’re not home, we can make a little home away from home, right here.”

His three-year-old imagination was captured by that phrase: “Home away from home.” He kept repeating it throughout the trip. “Why are we making a home away from home?” he’d say as we rode the elevator to the lobby or got lost trying to find the train. “Why are we making a home away from home?”

And so he turned my mind back to the bottom of the chart, to the realm of home.

While on the trip, I read an article in Wondertime magazine about a family who traveled around the world for a year when their children were eight and 11 years old. I thought about that family, trekking through 28 countries, making little homes everywhere they went: the mountains of Peru, the deserts of Dubai. In the same issue, there was an article about Sukkot, the Jewish holiday in which celebrants build a temporary shelter to commemorate the structures in which their ancestors lived while wandering in the desert for 40 years.

It’s a natural human impulse to create a home — and to inspire a brief sense of it when far away. But how does that happen? And why?

The roots of the word “home” will not be surprising to anyone who has ever had one. Its stem, “tkei-,” meaning “to settle, to dwell, to be at home,” is related to words like “garden” and “situate” and has birthed several other words meaning, for example, “covering,” “village,” “haunt” and “to frequent.” It was these last two that really caught my attention. Of course we settle and dwell in a home; of course a home covers and shelters us; of course a garden and a village are close by.

But it seems to me that — despite pat statements about a home being love, or family, or where the heart is — what really makes a house feel like a home is that our frequency haunts it.

In physics and in life, “frequency” refers to the number of times something occurs within a given timeframe, for example the frequency with which we occupy a space: once per hour, once per day, once per year. In physics:

High-frequency electromagnetic waves have a short wavelength and high energy; low-frequency waves have a long wavelength and low energy. (Source)

It is not just our history, our families and our possessions that mark a home as ours. It is that we make it a frequent, recurring habit to be there. High-frequency visits increase the energy of a place for us. And when we are on the same “wavelength” as a person, a thing or a space (for example, our home) we feel comfortable there — even if we don’t like everything that happens in the place.

When we return home from work, or school, or the neighbor’s house, or a long trip, we download the energies of the day into the space we call home. Simply by being there, we imprint our wavelength onto the place. Our energies haunt the structure, seed it with our feelings, blossom — with repetition — into a certain sensibility that lives there even when we don’t: warm, or anxious, or loving, or sad, depending on how we haunt it. When we infuse our home with our own energy, its wavelength fits us. We feel we belong.

It is interesting, too, that the bottom of the horoscope chart is associated with short trips — commuting to work and borrowing sugar from the neighbors, for example — whereas the longer wavelengths of our lives, up at the top of the chart, tend to be less frequent, slower-going, with a wider perspective. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that we tend to slow down during vacation: We are trying to see a new place, to take it all in, to feel out where our frequency fits into the vibe of the new space. That we don’t get there as often means its energy patterns aren’t so deeply imprinted on us. It takes time to navigate our way through a new city, or up a mountain, or along the beach we’ve never seen.

And perhaps that’s also why that slower frequency is so hard to hold onto when we get home. The familiar is so because we practice it until we can do it in our sleep, with our hands behind our backs. We don’t need to think so deliberately. We can make the repetitive motions of the day quickly and by rote.

And yet — and yet. Even on vacation, we still need that homelike space at the end of the day, that space to return to again and again, larger than we were that morning but still comforted in the fact that familiar ground exists beneath our feet. Even in the midst of adventure, we need to feel somehow moored, to know that habit and familiarity still live within us, even as we allow the unfamiliar to engage us for a spell.

So after the pat answer, I finally found my bearings to say to the Dragon, “We’re making a home away from home because we all need a little familiar place when we’re far away from everything we know — a place we can curl up in like a blanket for the night.”

He seemed more satisfied with that answer.

Photo credits: Airplane, sukkah, light waves