i knew you before you had a mother, when you were newtlike, swimming … when your connections belonged only to yourself, when you had no history to hook on to, barnacle … i knew you when you were all eyes and a cocktail, blank as [...]]]> A friend sent me a lovely, aching poem this morning. “In Knowledge of Young Boys” by Toi Derricotte reads, in part,

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming
… when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle …
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning

People often ask me whether a birth time is legitimate for astrological purposes if labor has been induced, or the baby was born by C-section, or a child has come prematurely. “Of course,” I tell them. “The birth time is the birth time.” It marks the primordial energetic imprint of the universe on the inhaling, exhaling, screaming, shocked, squishy little being when it emerges from the newty swamp of the womb onto the dry horizon of earth.

Before that instant, the instant of imprint, the child is without a chart, without its own native markings bestowed by the cosmos. It is utterly unto itself, with “connections [belonging] only to yourself,” with “no history to hook onto, barnacle … blank as the sky of a mind, a root, neither ground nor placental.” It is the moment of breakage, when the baby separates from the mother’s body, when the umbilicus is severed, that the child has a chart — which is to say that, at that instant, the child begins, at first unwittingly and then with more intention, to craft connections and hooks and roots of its own.

These connections and hooks and roots are embedded in the horoscope chart. They are described by the etchings of aspect lines and the archetypal astro-glyphs that dot the chart like cuneiform: the bones that give shape to the life. And like bones, such natural tendencies — to love exuberantly, perhaps, or to think deeply or to revel in the pleasure of the senses — can be broken, sprained or strained; can hurt for no obvious reason, can become lame or numb or awkward, can burn. They can, as Derricotte writes, become

red with the cut [or] astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning

When the astonishment of pain — physical or otherwise — takes the child, the youth, the grown-up away from its natural state, fears and complexes and dysfunctions result; shadow settles in. We live this way for a while, often for a long time. We feel the ways that poorly-tended pain gives birth to itself, over and over and over and over, until we forget, maybe, how it is to feel good, to feel whole and natural and vibrant. Maybe this forgetfulness pervades the whole life. Maybe it is isolated, confined to just one area or just one era of the life.

Whenever and however pain happens, repair and restoration are necessary for healing which, at its root, means wholeness. Instead of repair and restoration, though, so many of us adapt to the pain: We limp, or sit differently, or give parts of ourselves away. We begin to forget who we are, what the healthy and whole expression of our natural connections and hooks and roots really looks like, really feels like. We self-medicate or complain a lot or take bold risks or leave our relationships or quit our jobs to “find ourselves.” This is hard work in service of pain.

The horoscope chart is not the end word in healing and wholeness. In fact, it is to that stillpoint at the center of the chart that all roads finally, lovingly, lead. But some pain is so profound that it’s taken us off the road completely, placed blinders over our eyes and cotton in our ears, made it crushingly difficult to find the way back. The chart is like a map — not back to the womb, when we had no history to hook onto, barnacle, but back to our aboriginal selves, to integrate the astonishment of pain with the wholeness of who we were in that first moment of squishy aliveness.

Sometime during the evening, our thoughts turned to telekinetics — [...]]]> 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 pointed out that mental energy could be very powerful and, if applied correctly, who’s to say it couldn’t move things from a distance? I concluded my argument with what I believed to be ironclad fact: “After all,” I said triumphantly, “if we only use 10 percent of our brains, who’s to say what’s possible if we used much more of them?”

I got scoffed at.

Our friend challenged the “10 percent myth,” saying the claim is bandied about too much without any real evidence or backing. He said he doubted, very much, that it was true. I was flummoxed — no one had ever argued back on that point before — so we did what any self-respecting group of forty-ish Americans would do: We consulted the Internet.

Sure enough, my friend was right. Scientific American said so. The University of Washington said so. Even that sacred guardian of Internet truth and legend, Snopes, said so.

Yet I also know, from my work in early childhood development, that psychoneurobiologists have discovered that brain neurons are malleable — they can change and adapt according to input from the self and the environment. So although we might use all of our brains, our brains can also change. So I still contend that there is a possibility they can change in ways we’re not, as a species, even aware of yet, even to the point of bending spoons and lifting oak tables with our minds. I’m sure there are rules and structures and limitations governing how neurons can change (Saturn!), but for now I’d like to maintain my belief in at least the possibility of more than we know.

Interestingly, what the facts did, instead of dashing my hopes, was to bring me back to the sticky questions of faith, proof and doubt, to understand more about the nature of these things than I did before. I got, suddenly, how different people require different things for faith. There are a lot of people, our friend included, who require physical proof of things: “Seeing is believing”-type people. On the other end of the spectrum are the “I just know it in my heart”-type people — those who require no proof other than their own intuition.

These differing attitudes correspond to the Jungian typologies Sensate and Intuitive which, in turn, correspond to the astrological elements Earth and Fire. I would expect those heavy on Earth energy in their horoscope charts to require more solid proof of things and those with more Fire to follow their intuitive beliefs much more readily.

I think, though, that it is not an either-or question. We all have both Earth and Fire in our charts, requiring us to weigh which beliefs we approach from an Earthy perspective and which ones are more Fiery for us. Each of us carries a spectrum along which we fall according to the belief in question. Rare is the person who requires hard proof for everything, or for nothing.

What about you? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Do you require physical verification or strong intuition when it comes to, say, your beliefs about an afterlife? About God/Spirit/Divine? About human nature? About love?

How certain are you of your beliefs? What makes you so sure?

Photo: blondyimp

They want to know how each person will express [...]]]> Astrologers don’t often talk about the structure of the horoscope chart. They’re concerned, instead, with the movements of planets and stars: how the heavenly bodies move across the skies to interact with each other, to brand upon each individual a small, unique form of their unfathomable universal energies.

They want to know how each person will express a Moon square Saturn or a Mars trine Uranus or any other of the seemingly infinite combinations of stars, planets and houses that describe our lives. They want to tell people how these energies may play out in their lives, what to watch for, how to manage the difficult ones delicately, how to exploit the positive ones for maximum gain.

But in the center of the chart (at least when it is drawn Huber-style, like the one to the right) is a small, inviolable circle. I see this circle as the meeting-point of the individual and the universal — that is, the point where the Divine within the person reaches out toward the overarching Divine that pervades and penetrates the whole universe. That small circle is the doorway between the limited self and the unlimited eternal. It is the stillpoint we all long for, even as we try to understand the whirlwind of energies that move and change and dance around us, pulling us in and pushing us back, every day.

In this time of chaos and fear — I know more people now, in this moment, who are jobless than I’ve ever known, collectively, my entire life — I’ve also heard more people say, “I have faith” than I’ve ever heard before. I’ve heard the certainty in their voices, too: They’re not just repeating a platitude, trying to convince themselves it’ll all be okay when underneath they’re quaking. Instead of giving into chaos and fear, they’ve somehow moved closer to the stillpoints at their centers, become able to dance with the rhythms of their charts, no matter how chaotic or frightening. They’re letting go into the largeness that engulfs us — not in a powerless, belly-up kind of way but in a powerful, God’s-will kind of way.

When we’re tested, we can fight back, we can turn over or we can spread our arms to receive what is coming.

In Buddhist terms, this last choice is the choice to let go of attachment to outcome A to welcome whatever may arrive, to trust that the universe will bring what is needed next. My astrology mentor says, “We live our charts, whether we know it or not.” Indeed, energies will evolve in each of our lives, bringing us to Point A or Avenue B without us ever really intending it. But what we do when we get there is still largely up to us: If we want to see a monkey at Point A, are we going to fight back if we see a taco stand instead? Or will we embrace the taco for what it is?

In either case, we can still breathe, and feel the universe well up within us.

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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 [...]]]> 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.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

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Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a [...]]]> I don’t use astrology to predict events. I use it to help make sense of life.

Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a dear friend was killed this weekend in a horrible accident, my first reaction was gasping disbelief. Second came a deep and jagged grief. Third, a need to connect with other friends who loved her. Then, as the reality coursed through me, came numbness, and emptiness.

This morning, because I am who I am, I awoke yearning to understand the senselessness of her death through the perspective of my craft of astrology.

Why does it hurt so much that she’s gone?

Why can’t I grasp that she went the way she did?

What are we supposed to do, anyway, with grief?

I’m not pretentious enough to claim I found answers. But below are my thoughts, the small bits of meaning I glimpsed as I pondered the sudden, premature, tragic death of a beautiful, life-loving woman.

I wrote on Friday about the way astrology views the usual cycle of energy that guides an event, whether it’s the blossoming of a flower, the unfolding of a life or the movement of seasons. There is output, then enjoyment, then — usually; hopefully — slow shifts that dismantle the old order and prepare for the next cycle. I pointed out how important it is to take time when contemplating great changes to an old way of being, how rushing change could lead to crisis. I thought I was talking about politics, and money.

The suddenness of Heather’s death interrupts our sense of how time unfolds. Life is supposed to spin out evenly from its spool, one long flowing arc at a time. When it doesn’t, we say things like: “How can this be?” And: “I can’t believe it.” And: “It just doesn’t make sense.” A sudden, tragic end to a life doesn’t fit into the expected patterns of our mind, nor the gently sloping pathways of our hearts. Life is supposed to allow us some time to get used to change, to learn what we need ahead of time, to shift our gaze toward the next phase. It’s not meant to thrust us into loss all at once. At the very, very least, life is supposed to allow us a bit of time to say goodbye.

When death comes unanticipated, we don’t know what to do with ourselves: our hands, our voices, the alarm rising up in our chests. Our minds: What are we supposed to even think?

Often, then, not knowing what to do, we turn to the specifics of the departed person herself. This is the other way I can look to astrology to make sense of this loss. Because it occurred to me that, while astrology views each planet and sign as a symbol of an internal personal trait, other people in our lives also carry some traits for us — especially, perhaps, the ones we’re not able to manifest well ourselves. We need them to show us the way, the proper expression of laughter, or confidence, or drivenness.

I kept remembering, yesterday, how much Heather simply embraced life — how deeply she drank in the pleasures of the world all around her. She seemed always engaged, passionate about everything from coffee to music to movies to the people she loved. She laughed easily. She teased and admonished and was always good-natured. She seemed to let troubles roll off her back, shooing them away like flies.

Other traits might stand out more for other people, depending who they are and how they related with her. But whatever the specific experience, in relationship generally, each person brings something that the other needs in their life. Sometimes it’s the thing that drives us crazy; sometimes it’s the thing we most admire. Sometimes we don’t even notice the trait till they are gone. And when they are gone, we are left holding our hands out, waiting for more of what they brought: that passion, or that teasing, or that laughter. And when it doesn’t come — again, we don’t know what to do.

We have, then, to find her elsewhere — not to replace her, but to fill the emptiness her death leaves in our lives. Maybe, hopefully, we find her gifts in ourselves.

So my questions now are: What gifts did Heather give me that I could not accept when she was alive? What traits did I unconsciously ask her to hold that I could not yet make a part of myself? What do I need to become, now that she is no longer there to be it for me? I look at the list above and know immediately.

And so to celebrate Heather’s life, and to defy the tragedy of her death, I promise myself, and my family, and my friends, to cling less fiercely to worry — to let it go — so I can sink much more into each delectable moment life hands me, the way I saw her do.

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Do you feel that your belief system is simply the explanation for the world that fits you, or is it [...]]]> A friend of mine, an avowed atheist, has been sending me questions about astrology and my belief system. The most recent question came a couple weeks ago and plunged me into a maze of thought. He asked:

Do you feel that your belief system is simply the explanation for the world that fits you, or is it somehow objectively superior to other systems of belief?

Here’s my response:

Dear K,

I’ve actually been thinking about your question a lot. To be honest, your question made me try to define what my belief system is. I feel like I live it every day, to a greater or lesser degree, but I’ve never really been able to define it so I’ve always just kind of let it lie and trusted that I understood as much as I needed to for the time being. Your question made me return to my question again and I find that I’m better able, now, to define my belief system than I ever have been before.

The first thing I have to say is that astrology is not my belief system. It’s part of my spirituality, but it’s not the whole thing or even really the centerpiece. I’d say it’s an expression of it and a really useful way into my beliefs — and, very importantly, back out of them into everyday life. Maybe like other people would consider the Bible. MAYBE. (NOTE: I’m bracing for the backlash on this assertion. If anyone wants, I’ll explain further in a future post.)

So, that said, I think the dichotomy you’ve set up isn’t really fair. I think there are other ways to characterize belief systems than either “simply the explanation for the world that fits [me]” or “objectively superior to other systems of belief.” I came to my spirituality, as did, I assume, many other people, to many different systems, because other ways of experiencing the Divine (or whatever you want to call it) didn’t feel quite right to me. I searched and searched — mostly internally, some externally — until I knew what I believed. I could feel it resonate on many levels within me, in many spheres of my life.

I think that, in the best scenario, we each find our way to our own spiritual core, and that core resonates with other people’s spiritual cores. Maybe not exactly but enough that some community can be forged around the collective corpus. So in that respect, it’s both individual and collective. But “collective” doesn’t mean “objective,” if by objective you mean scientifically provable.

I don’t think there really is such a thing as objective reality when you’re talking about the great mysteries such as Who are we? Why are we here? What is the relationship of the individual to the universe? What is eternity? What is eternal? What dies when my body does, and what, if anything, doesn’t? So to say my belief system is objectively superior is a signal that my ego is attached, first, to having definitive answers to those unanswerable questions and, second, to the correctness of my answers. I think that when the ego is too attached to having something, or to being right about something, that is where power finds a foothold.

Not that power is all bad, but when it is invited into the faith equation, what I’ve noticed is that we build up hierarchies and institutions around belief systems, which makes no sense to me at all. That’s when the beliefs become more system. It all becomes about what we are in this world — our position vis-a-vis others, our puffed-up chests, the set-up of one person against or over or below another. We cling to the territory we’ve claimed as “the right way” and then feel required to defend it. To me, this all runs completely counter to the mystery questions and separates the person from the Spirit. When beliefs create rifts between people, I think it is because worldly concerns have gotten in the way. I think God (or whoever) is sitting up there (or wherever) laughing his/her divine ass off. And also crying at the same time.

Yet — I guess there are people who can practice their faith in solitude, but to me the fact that belief systems do often develop into institutions says something to me about the importance, to most people who have beliefs, of coming together in community to recognize and practice their shared faith. So that’s why I think it’s a false dichotomy to say my spirituality, or anyone’s, is either individual or objectively superior. It’s neither. We come together because it’s not individual, yet each faith community takes a different form because there is no objective reality or superiority when it comes to pondering and responding to the mysteries.

Are you going to come visit us? I already told Alan you might. We would really love to see you.

Kathy