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 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
 Last night I dreamt I shaved off my beard — a stylized goatee that came to a perfect point at the bottom, the sides curving around my jaws like little arms.
For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.
I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning without thinking much about it. But when the boys were gone, NPR was turned off and the dishes had settled in their stacks, the dream came back quietly.
In essence, I think, it was about shedding what had grown: saying goodbye to the old, getting ready for the new. It was an appropriate, if funny, dream for the change of season.
Even though it’s not officially fall yet, the summer cycle is definitely closing: Ask anyone who has school-age children, or arthritis. Last week on our midwest visit, there was talk of sweaters, hayrides and apple presses. Even here in southern California, the air is a little crisper and the traffic much thicker than last week. And Starbucks has mercifully brought back its pumpkin spice latté.
This is the time of year when, in my quieter moments, I tend to remember the ancient myth of Persephone, who picked a flower and was whisked away into the underworld by Hades (Pluto) himself. Persephone’s mother, the earth goddess Demeter, mourned the loss of her child and withheld the harvest from the people until Zeus (Jupiter) brokered a deal: Persephone would stay in the underworld with Hades for one-third of each year and reunite with her mother during the remaining eight months. The separation, disappearance, change in cycles was necessary for the growth of both mother and daughter.
 There are more complexities to the story, but its core truth lies in these simple details; and we see that truth reflected, also, in the horoscope chart. Bruno and Louise Huber identified a way to interpret the chart as a “life clock” — starting with birth at the ascendant and spending six years in each house. At a certain point in each house, people tend to turn inward. They feel their active energy thwarted or stilled. They are forced to take stock and turn the season of their life toward the next more active, more outwardly-effective cycle.
This internal period can often be felt as a crisis point — the point where, like Demeter, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot get what you want. Waiting is necessary, and that can be frustrating. It can even feel like death — like being dragged into the underworld against your will, like being taken away from everything light and abundant and familiar.
But the Demeter story, and the Hubers’ work, and astrology in general remind us, each in their own ways, that life happens in cycles, and thus the underworld period is essential. Shortcuts and bypasses are decidedly not advised.
See: The flower germinates; it blossoms; it dies. The school year begins; it proceeds; it ends. Babies are born; the family coheres; the children grow up and move away. Before the third phase of each cycle, we must catch our breaths, because in truth that third phase is just the preparation for the next cycle: As it dies, the flower must seed the next crop. As the school year ends, the student must make ready for the next. As they grow up and move away, our children prepare to give birth themselves.
 I know a lot of people who say they feel nostalgic every year as fall begins. Maybe some of the nostalgia is a longing for eternal summer, but there’s something deeper going on there, too, I think: a wistfulness for the cycle that was, perhaps; an uncomfortable acknowledgment that time always urges us forward; a wish for the familiar footprints we’ve already put down. We know that place behind us. Why can’t we just stay there, or jump forward to the next activity? Why must we power down a bit now?
And yet we know the fall, too. Its familiarity, it smells and its slower tempo are ancient and comforting. Its darker days cloister us indoors, where we are forced to face the internal. We survive the cold, and the dark, and the frightening because we must — and because our fiber is thicker and heartier than we give ourselves credit for in the bright sweat of summer.
Yet it’s often as surprising to remember our own strength, and our own tenacity, and our own depth, as it is to dream of a woman shaving off her pointed goatee to prepare for what’s next.
Go to Meditations for the End of Summer
Photo credits: Bearded lady, life cycles, autumn
 Because Cancer, the sign, symbolically embodies the mother-child relationship, this month I have re-read the Grimm Brothers’ story Rapunzel, which I used in workshop to explore the opposite sign, Capricorn, six months ago. This time, I was seeking to understand how the idea of attachment, used in the context of early childhood development, related to the Cancer archetype.
In Capricorn, we turned to Rapunzel to study ideas surrounding the traditional father-child relationship: independence, authority, self-possession, individuation. Now, in Cancer, I wondered if the balance point, the mother-child relationship, would make an appearance as well. As a starting point, I looked at Rapunzel’s mother figures, the birth mother and the Wicked Witch, and quickly realized that each of them embodies one of the four widely documented attachment styles.
Rapunzel’s birth mother — or, I would say, her birth parents together — symbolize an avoidant style inasmuch as they allow Rapunzel to be taken immediately upon birth, exposed to the harshness of the world and expected to mature quickly enough to manage it on her own. (Please understand that I’m not suggesting this of real-life birth parents who release their children for adoption but am using Rapunzel rather as a metaphorical look at attachment.) Rapunzel cannot form any kind of attachment with her birth parents, to the point where they might as well be strangers to her. No emotional investment exists from her perspective, though her parents may feel differently.
 On the other hand, the Wicked Witch forms an ambivalent attachment with Rapunzel, attempting to arrest her maturation process by locking her in a tower. The Witch appears in the tower only often enough to provide for Rapunzel’s physical needs and to ensure the girl is dependent on the older woman’s authority and resources. Rapunzel gets just enough from the Witch to want more: more warmth, more connection, more consistency. But what she develops instead is clinginess and insecurity — a near-neurotic need for reassurance and a terrible fear that any connection at all will vanish.
Attachment theory came out of studies by Englishman John Bowlby that found that infants and toddlers need responsiveness and sensitivity from close adults in their lives. Such interactions help children develop a sense of security, or “secure base,” from which they will then dare to move ever-further away from the parent in order to explore and build independence. A secure base is first embodied in the responsive, sensitive adult who provides empathy, compassion, self-management and consistency for the child. Over time, the secure base and its constituent parts are assimilated into the child’s self-image, influencing perceptions and expectations of all future relationships.
In other words, the development of safety and security, in the tradition of Cancer sensitivity and intuition, are critical to children’s eventual ability to risk independence and self-authority in the Capricorn way. Secure attachment in Cancer is necessary to authentic independence in Capricorn. When the Cancer archetype is seriously imbalanced in either direction — by way of an under- or over-emphasis on attachment — then independence becomes either the only available choice or too frightening even to contemplate.
But, you ask, didn’t Rapunzel manage to escape the tower and build a new life for herself despite her childhood? Yes. That’s because she had a third attachment figure that balanced the archetype nicely: the Handsome Prince.
I love this part of my musings because it re-visions traditional feminist interpretations of the Handsome Prince role in fairy tales. In a huge departure from the criticism that the Handsome Prince suggests a woman always needs a man to save her, I want to suggest that — at least in Rapunzel – the Handsome Prince provides Rapunzel with a very necessary secure attachment.
The Prince visits Rapunzel consistently, presumably providing warmth and responsiveness, which are key ingredients in secure attachment. He also treats Rapunzel appropriately for her age and her experience, neither infantilizing her nor heisting her away immediately, which would likely be too frightening for someone of her history. But perhaps most important, the Prince also helps Rapunzel transition from childhood to adulthood. He slowly but consistently provides her with the means to build a ladder to her own independence (one strand of silk thread each night) instead of simply carrying her off to be “his,” which would be just echoing the Wicked Witch’s role. Not only that, he also helps Rapunzel weave the ladder, demonstrating both that he will be there for her — a secure base — and that he simultaneously believes in her ability to create her own independence.
The Prince embodies the perfectly balanced Cancer archetype, the care-giving figure who is secure enough both to act as a secure base and to encourage independence in its own right time.
The Prince is such a strong and secure attachment figure, in fact, that when the Wicked Witch discovers Rapunzel is pregnant and exiles her into the desert, the young woman is able to survive and raise her twin children alone, without the aid of the Prince. We know she has succeeded in internalizing the Prince’s example when she is able to receive him back into her life after years of separation.
This is the legacy of a secure attachment: the capacity for authentic independence alongside the ability to be a secure base to one’s own children (or to others who need one). And to be able to do so, if one chooses, from within the embrace of a mutually loving, respectful and joyful adult relationship.
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What People Say “Truly gifted astrologers are a rarity. Kathy Crabb is one such person. She is a brilliant, original thinker, an intuitive and empathic counselor and a superb workshop facilitator.”
Pam Tyler, Dip. API (1981), Dip. FAS (1979),
AFA Teacher Cert. (1978); Astrologer since 1977;
Co-founder of Astrological Psychology Institute (UK);
Author of Mercury: Anatomy of a Planet
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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.
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.
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?
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