The First in a Three-Part Series
Last night, I held the Dragon in my arms outside the Terminal B security gate at Bob Hope Airport. We waved goodbye, amidst tears, to my younger sister as she negotiated the gray trays, crisp uniforms and conveyor belts of contemporary airline travel.
A marketing professional with a public library system in Washington state, Jenny’s official purpose for the trip was to attend a highly reputable one-day power training in Web 2.0 promotion.
But her real purpose was to see the Dragon — and maybe Alan and me a bit, too.
We spent five days relaxing in the comfortable gladness of siblinghood, which we hadn’t done, just the two of us — outside of oft-interrupted exchanges in our parents’ kitchen during boisterous family gatherings — in almost 16 years of post-graduate adulthood (for sadness! for shame!). As we caught up on years of lost togetherness, I shared with Jenny the way my eyes had changed since I started studying astrology ten years ago, the way I now experience the world from two simultaneous perspectives: first as just a person, like any other person, coping with the present moment and leaning toward the next; second as a giant scope taking in the archetypes that pulse through the world around us, largely unnoticed, in every successive instant.
And so, below, Part 1 of an astrological photo essay (with lots of commentary: come on, it’s me!) of our five days together.
Day 1: After spending the morning catching up, then eating lunch in our laps at the Dragon’s daycare, Jenny and I and the Dragon hopped in the car and cruised out to the beach. We spent the day splashing, sunning and sauntering along the Santa Monica pier.
Traditionally, the ocean is associated with Pisces, which is “moving water” energy: the waves go back and forth, back and forth, seeking the seashells they have lost, the edges of sand, the toe-tips of little boys and girls.
Though the wide-open ocean can be fearsome and fierce, at the edges, usually, it just finds what’s there, curves around it, laps it up, pulls back. Sometimes shells, sand and sandcastles return with the waves; sometimes they escape the water’s prodding. The ocean’s edge mostly works with the landscape instead of against it; even on cliffsides and jutting rocks, the impact of each moment is not hammering so much as tendering: an offer, a waiting to receive. Pisces, at its best, is a gentle moving-with.
And astrologically, water is feeling, empathy, intuition: a knowing, a responding, without words. Indeed, while Jenny and I employed our Mercurial sides on the drive there — talking up a sisterly storm as the Dragon napped — being on the beach itself was an exercise in just opening to the elements, allowing the flow of sun-streams and water-waves to wash over us, to wear us down, bit by bit, as we gave ourselves over in return. Rhythmicity, reciprocity, response. Relaxation.
Even up on the pier, when the Dragon got restless, we donned a Piscean go-with-the-flow: Play on the railing? Sure! Have an ice cream cone? Yes! Toddle through the restaurant where we had no intention of eating? Why not? It wasn’t so much indulgence as just following the tide of the child as he ran back and forth, seeing and responding to the landscape of the pier, being at one with his guiding hand, with the little bundle of feeling and response walking around on two legs right beside us.
Happy. relaxed enablers, we were.
Day 2: Last year, I won (lucky Jupiter!) a $200 gift certificate to Glen Ivy Hot Springs and Spa for being one of the first customers to patronize my friend Lissa’s new Dream Dinners store. I’d been waiting for just the right time and person to spend it with. This was it.
Glen Ivy has lots of opportunities to frolic in Venus energy, Libra style: facials, body wraps, soaps and washes and delicate aromas; delectable food and drink (Jenny sipped almond-spiked champagne while I reveled in a peach smoothie); even the sumptuous cascades of bougainvillea that wrap their arms around the precisely-landscaped grounds fairly ooze Venus-in-Libra.
But it wasn’t the warm breezy beauty of Libra’s Venus I was after so much as the earthy ground of Taurus — Venus’s other preferred domicile. So after a quick dip in the sulfur hot springs (your nose gets used to the smell fast!), we found Club Mud and, standing hip-deep in muddy water, slathered ourselves in the red clay meant to open the skin and cleanse it deeply. Then we laid out in the 95-degree Sun to let the mud do its magic. Jenny, who’s never lived in such heat, couldn’t bear to stay out in it long.
Whereas Pisces is moving water, Taurus is still, silent earth. Like the Earth herself, Taurus at its best is persistent, enduring and resourceful. Out of balance, though, Taurus can be indulgent, lazy and impervious to input: It’s hard to get up and get moving when you’re as heavy and solid as the whole world. And so, for today, I gave in. I lay there for an hour, my body baking like a quiet clay figure in a kiln.
My mind dropped slowly, like a reverse periscope. I felt myself move away from the bounds of my skin while the clay went about its work.
I knew my mind wouldn’t wander too deep here, with strangers’ voices babbling and outdoor showers percolating all around me. So I just let it drift. It started with the sense of being encased in hard, dry earth, of my skin cracking every time it moved, of slowness and patience, of the stubbornness of time, of Taurus, which is opposite my own sign, Scorpio, still water: icebergs, deep dark lakes. Speaking of impervious.
Jenny and I are both water signs, but Alan’s a Taurus and from inside the layer of drying earth I caught a glimpse — a shadow of my shadow, the opposite I’d quite literally married. It’s important, say the Jungians, to integrate your opposite, make tentative friends with your shadow. If we deny our darkness, we give half our power away — at least.
Alan gets to shower in my element, in water, which is his opposite, every morning. Sometimes he goes swimming. He waters the lawn. He does the laundry. When, but once before, in this same place, have I ever been covered in earth? Maybe we could all start knowing ourselves better by playing with our shadow element. I imagined all the ways we could do just that. I’ll try to retrieve them and spin them out into a post in a few days or so.
Lying there in the quiet darkness of my own mind, my whole body encased in dried mud, I slowly realized that, in the midst of all that unmoving earth, the epicenter of our recent earthquake was very close by.
When Taurus moves, it’s big.
Stay awake for Part 2: the energy of children, global parties and Internet marketing.
Photo credits: Beach, Sand dollar, Bougainvillea
