I expected the holidays would make my posting sparse, but I didn’t plan on being absent for four-plus weeks, and I’m especially sorry to my regular readers. The reason for my long silence is that we had a tragedy in our family — an unexpected death, a death by [...]]]> I know. I’ve been gone a long time.

I expected the holidays would make my posting sparse, but I didn’t plan on being absent for four-plus weeks, and I’m especially sorry to my regular readers. The reason for my long silence is that we had a tragedy in our family — an unexpected death, a death by suicide.

I want to say that Brian’s death left me at a loss for words, and in many ways that is true. In the face of intense shock and sadness, and in the midst of my surviving family members’ pain, words just simply escaped me. I suppose this was, on one level, because everything I thought to say rang hollow, trite or simply inadequate to the hugeness of what happened so close to home.

But there is more to it than that.

Of all the words that make up my language of astrological psychology — words like love, conflict, aspiration, tension, learning, fighting, defending, reaching out, needing, limiting, ego, boundaries, dissolution — death is both the most ubiquitous and the most out-of-reach. It is very nearly ungraspable in its absoluteness and in the way it brings everything — everything — to a standstill. I just couldn’t, for the last four weeks, grasp Brian’s death enough to form words around it. And since it was all I could think about, I could hardly write about anything else.

But now that I’m back home, with the burial and the memorial service behind us, and a semblance of daily life returning, my first tentative thoughts are taking shape. Here they are.

We often choose death, each one of us, in the course of our daily lives. Of course, the death we choose is usually not literal: It is the death of a relationship, or the end of a job, or the close of a day, the drop into the dark, unpredictable waters of sleep. A door closes and that is that. An ending has occurred, from which there is no return.

Today, I feel sure of very little in life, but I do suspect that the ways we experience the little deaths of the everyday help guide us toward how we handle the final end, when it comes. And yet, although we choose those everyday deaths, in many ways we feel as if we are not, in fact, in charge of them. And so when someone chooses to end their own life, literally, it feels shocking. How could he do this? we think. And: I could never do that!

And yet, we do it too — yes, in a pale-by-comparison way, but we do. Often we blame others for our little daily deaths: I wouldn’t have quit my job if my boss weren’t such an ass. I would have stuck with the diet if things weren’t so stressful right now. I would have chosen strawberry if everyone else hadn’t chosen chocolate.

I don’t mean to be flip, but that kind of thinking — on any level — wraps us up in the Plutonian dynamic of control: Who is the dictator of our lives? Who ultimately decides whether a relationship dies, or a job ends, or a bad habit is over and done with, or even if our life is coming to a close? If our sense of control lies within, we can take responsibility for those endings that prepare us for the final end. But if we see ourselves as the victims of other people’s control, we feel unable to take charge of ourselves, of our destiny.

I’m not trying to analyze Brian’s life. I don’t know how in control he felt or didn’t feel. I’m certainly not advocating for suicide. I am, instead, asking each of us to examine to what degree we give over control of our choices — especially the choice to end something — to other people. Is it always true that others make the choice for us? Or do we instigate that choice sometimes, even unconsciously? And in cases where we truly aren’t in charge, what grace can we see in that?

It is not that we always need to be in control of what happens to us. But choosing to take charge, or choosing to let go and allow the universe to work its mysterious magic on our lives, is, in the most ideal world, a conscious process that advances the work of our souls. For each ending we choose is a distant echo of the Big One, of the final death that will ultimately end our own life as we know it. How do we handle the little earthquakes? Is it the same way we want to handle the big one, when it comes?

This question is often overshadowed by the bigger mystery of death — the what happens next?

Maybe the not-knowing is the most maddening, the most frightening, the most mysterious of all for those who remain. What is Brian experiencing now? Is there a Brian to experience something? The framework of the horoscope chart tells me that yes, there most certainly is — that the circle of life continues spiraling; that time continues on; that his essence has crossed over a particularly transformative point in time/space but that it continues on in some way, being shaped and made evermore whole with each passing day.

In his seminal work Suicide and the Soul, the brilliant scholar and archetypal psychologist James Hillman notes:

If one stands for psychological life, as the [psycho]analyst must, physical life may have to be thwarted and left unfulfilled in order to meet the soul’s claims, its pressing concerns with redemption. (p. 23)

I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I’m fighting it alongside my family. But I am trying to find the place in myself where I can respect it and honor it, where I can hope and believe that Brian’s soul is more whole and alive now than ever before.

Photo credit

In my astrologer’s [...]]]> This morning, as we do roughly every Monday or Tuesday, a friend and I got on the phone to discuss one dream each that we’d had over the weekend. Though this morning our respective dreams were quite different, they both had the same apocalyptic feeling that seems to be pervading the whole world lately.

In my astrologer’s mind, it was the feeling of Pluto moving into Capricorn:

• In my dream, I was with a group of friends in an outdoor mall where only one store was open and operating.  We heard, and then saw, a huge, heavy military plane fly very low overhead. It looked like a stealth bomber. We watched as it slowly got lower and lower, skimming treetops and power lines, then finally crashed into the ground nearby.
• In my friend’s dream, she was with her teenage daughter on a hilltop in Los Angeles. The hill slowly gave way under their feet and came sliding down to the ground below. They were okay in the end, but the entire hill was just gone from underneath them.

Astrologers are fond of pointing out that, around the time Pluto was discovered in 1930, atomic bombs were developed and fascism and Nazism reared their heads — frightening metaphors for the kind of cataclysmic and totalitarian destruction that can be wrought by Plutonian power. Pluto breaks things down into their unseen parts, forces us to look at them and remixes them into new, unfamiliar and sometimes terrifying structures. Pluto is the life-death-rebirth cycle in all its imaginable forms.

A less truly frightening Plutonian metaphor of 1930 was the debut that year of the U.S. radio drama The Shadow – with actor Frank Readick, Jr. intoning the iconic introduction:

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! The Shadow knows…”

In Jungian terms, the shadow is psychological material that gains its power from the very fact that it is repressed. It’s usually repressed because it’s something we don’t want to admit about ourselves. The more we repress it, the bigger and more powerful it grows, creating projection situations where we can see it only outside of ourselves.

For example, did you ever despise someone for, say, her arrogance, only to be forced to admit that you’ve got a certain self-righteousness about you as well? Or have you ever been the President of a superpower who systematically shut down the freedoms of its own population while embarking on an international campaign for freedom in other countries? The larger and stronger the shadow grows, the greater power it has over you — precisely because you haven’t dared to look at it, to admit it exists, to confront it head-on. And the more you ignore it, the bigger ass-kicking is required to make you pay attention to it.

In the horoscope, any planet can contain shadow material, not just Pluto. But Pluto’s dynamic tends to be the archetypal shadow dynamic — the force of change through exposure of hidden powers — and its expression is generally large-scale and often scary. Yes, Pluto exists in each of our individual horoscope charts, but unless it’s touching a more personal planet in our chart, its effects tend to be wider-spread, more impersonal: across a generation, across a culture.

So we get situations like market “corrections” or terrorist attacks that force us (or should force us) to look at ourselves: Are we, as a culture, a bit too self-righteousness, say, or greedy, or giddy about imposing “freedom” on others without examining our own freedom complex? Are we really as free as we brag about being? As generous? As right?

When Pluto pulls the veil off our eyes, for example when it changes zodiac signs and highlights a different area of life anew, it can feel frightening in the extreme. The last 13 years of Pluto in Sagittarius have been marked by ubiquitous consumption, accelerating depletion of natural resources and idealism-cum-tyranny — the latter starting, I would argue, with the Taliban’s 1996 march across Afghanistan and reaching its climax with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The weaknesses in the structures that have supported these trends are now emerging from the shadows. We are experiencing the breakdowns associated with dictating our ideals in foreign lands, getting drunk on oil fields and building castles on flimsy credit.

Pluto’s movement into Capricorn highlights the reality that the old code is slowly disintegrating. What might be more frightening than that — after all, many of us would like to see regime change here in the U.S. at least — is that we don’t yet know what will come to take its place. This not-knowing can whip up an atmosphere of crisis.

The word crisis comes from the Greek krinein, meaning “to separate.” Also derived from that root are the words criminal, decree, discern, discriminate, excrement and secret: All Plutonian words in that they imply shadowy, secret or hidden elements that need to be separated, sorted and reconnected in new ways — a process that almost always implies crisis of some kind. Separation of a relationship, a limb or an atom requires careful handling in order to reconnect it or remake it or recreate it productively instead of destructively. When separation and reconnection occur, there is always the possibility of something going horribly wrong.

Like powerful military jets crashing in a calm sky and sturdy green hillsides collapsing underfoot, it is hard to imagine such apparently solid structures as markets and governments and capitalism and democracy separating into component parts and being remade in a different form. It might even be frightening to think about this happening: What crisis would ensue if we were separated from our money? If familiar government agencies and commercial storefronts disintegrate and reassemble in some other form? If oil-based energy disappears completely?

But confronting the possibility of change, and admitting where we’ve gone wrong, and remaking those institutions in the spirit of integrity and solidity may bring us together in a way that only true crisis can. Frightening as it may seem to live in this in-between period, we may someday look back at this time and think, “How did we live through that?” and then, “I’m so glad we did!”

Comment below: Have you had dreams about cataclysmic destruction lately?

Photo credits: Stealth bomber, Rose shadow