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 is a fantastic astrological image! A detail of the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe and now the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction (source), the photo suggests the tension of the Jupiter archetype — the desire to encompass everything — at the risk of losing sight of what’s important. In other words, losing the [...]]]>

This is a fantastic astrological image! A detail of the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe and now the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction (source), the photo suggests the tension of the Jupiter archetype — the desire to encompass everything — at the risk of losing sight of what’s important. In other words, losing the trees for the forest.

The planet Jupiter actually has a feature astronomers call “the eye” or the Great Red Spot:

This real-life “eye” on the solar system’s largest planet reminds us that the archetype Jupiter is concerned with seeing the big picture, with new experience and new ideas, with pulling back from the daily grind to get perspective — the kind of perspective one gets from atop Europe’s largest Ferris wheel:

This is a fantastic place to go — literally or figuratively — when you feel yourself getting bogged down in the details of daily life, in the rules and expectations that unconsciously guide so many of your choices. Studying a new field, taking a trip far away, looking on life through new lenses, making a daring kind of choice that you wouldn’t normally make: All these things are Jupiter activities that expand your horizons, develop your brain and bless you with new ways of thinking.

Jupiter’s style reminds me of this fabulous quotation from Helen Keller — who had the inner vision of a Jupiterian if not the literal eyesight:

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Jupiter is most at home in the zodiac sign Sagittarius, which lies opposite the chart from my last Photo of the Week, which depicted the Gemini archetype. Sagittarius is the only mutable fire sign; imagine a temple full of flickering candles, each one representing a hope or a belief or a different way of looking at the world. Sagittarius is an equal-opportunity believer, seeking truth wherever it may lie; and it sees the quest for truth as life’s daring adventure.The problem may come when Jupiter/Sagittarius cannot help us focus, when each one of those little flickering candles holds such sway over us that we become indecisive, or too agreeable, or mushy around the edges of our thoughts.

Yet Sagittarius also trusts in the process, where more conservative or suspicious signs may balk. Certainly climbing into a little glass capsule with 23 other people to be carried 443 feet into the London air is the quintessential Jupiterian/Sagittarian act. It is big, it is daring, it breaks out of the norm, it ventures into the unknown, it provides the sweeping view of life of which people strong in these archetypes often dream.

And yet the Photo of the Week — the first photo above — tells the other side of this archetype, the side that sometimes gets lost in more popular descriptions. That is the Archer archetype, the seeker brought to the stillpoint of one breath, where focus on a single point 100 feet in the distance allows all else in the world to melt away for an instant, to seize the shortest line between two points and deliver everything you have through that narrow tunnel of vision.

So, too, must the designers and builders and riders of a giant, inspiring, visionary structure like the London Eye have interest in each minute detail as if it held the integrity of every life it supports in each little hinge and latch and joint.

Because, in fact, it does.

Photo credits:Detail of London Eye; Jupiter; view from atop the London Eye