Depth Astrology

The other night my husband and I were discussing psychic phenomena and related curiosities with a skeptic friend. I enjoy these kinds of discussions very much because they force me to do some challenging mental acrobatics, to grapple with important concepts like doubt and proof and faith.

Sometime during the evening, our thoughts turned to telekinetics — spoon-bending, moving things with your mind, et cetera. Our friend said, “Moving things requires energy. How could something move if you weren’t applying energy to it?”

I love this picture because I have no idea what it means.

To me it looks like sophisticated doodling, the meanderings of a creative mind stuck in a dull situation: chemistry class, a doctor’s waiting room, a train station without a train.

I fantasize that my ignorance would be enlightened if I could only read — what’s that, French? Italian? — but maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the words are meaningful only in the turnabout pathways of the artist’s wandering mind.

Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to describe the repressed contents of the personal unconscious — those parts of each of us that we’d rather not admit to harboring. The problem with shadow material is that it comes out when we’re not looking — or, more precisely, it comes out because we’re not looking.

Jung said our shadow elements could not be directly accessed but could, instead, be understood through dreams, complexes, projections and similarly sideways media. So a dream that you’re being chased by a lion might suggest that you haven’t integrated your personal power very well. The perception that someone else is a ruthless gossip might suggest that you look at your own gossiping habits. And so forth.

You know that drawer, or closet, or back room where you throw all the crap you don’t want to throw away, but don’t want in your regular living space, but don’t really have another place for? When I was growing up, it was the junk drawer. In my grown-up house, it’s mysteriously called the studio.

You know what I’m talking about. You avoid that space at all costs, and when you find you need something from there, you throw up a lot of resistance before going in.

Maybe you try to find a substitute for the serving dish that’s in there that you’d like to use for the party tonight. Or maybe you hope against hope that you haven’t really put it in there after all – maybe it’s just wedged behind a tray in the much-cleaner kitchen cupboard. But it’s not, and you know it, and finally you just hold your nose and open the door to the mess.

Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.