I am reading, with much admiration, the blog recounting the efforts of the members of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Soto Zen monastery in California, to cope with the wildfires currently ravaging the countryside. The blog is aptly called ‘Sitting with Fire’, and I am much struck by how calm and circumspect the reporting is by the team on the front line. We can all hope to be so serene in the face of our own, often far less life-threatening, crises.
All these years of looking at my chart, as a self-taught, novice astrologer, I can’t believe I failed to notice yod in it! Maybe because I’ve been overly obsessed with Sun-Saturn-Mercury in the 6th house. At any rate, I recently discover that I have a yod, the apex of which points to the sleeping Venus, which I was told to try and wake up… I looked up a few websites and realised that very little attention is paid to the yod, maybe because it is so difficult to describe and analyse.
Bob Marks offers a very decent analysis of the yod, and his article prompted me to get Karen Hamaker-Zondag’s The Yod Book. The result is a flash of amazement on my part — finally, my chart and my life are starting to make sense…
I had lunch with a friend today and discovered for the first time that she is one half of a mirror-image twin. I’d never heard of the phenomenon before. She says that they are basically mirror images of each other.
Apparently it occurs when the embryo splits really late in the cycle and produces two individuals who are genetically identical but mirror images of each other. In my friend’s case, she’s right-handed while her sister is left-handed; they part their hair on opposite sides; the hair on their crowns are swirled in opposite directions; and their fingerprints are mirror images, too… I don’t know if this is true but she says a mirror-image twin sometimes has their organs on the ‘wrong’ side of the body as well!
I finally bought a mirror yesterday after three months of moving into my new flat. I remarked to a friend that living without a mirror has been a good exercise in ego reflection, and although I’d meant it as a joke, it made me think about mirrors, and ego reflections.
Mirrors are funny things, both as functional objects, and metaphors. Do they let us see ourselves as we are? Or do they let us see through to another reality through which a version of ourselves exist? In our age of precision engineering, we presume that mirrors reflect perfectly the object being reflected. However, the idea of perfect reflections is a fairly recent one. Ancient mirrors were made of polished metal. Their more modern incarnations of glass coated with a thin sheet of reflective metal originated in Venice in the 16th century, though other sources indicate that it may have originated in Roman times. And even so, image distortions were not unexpected.
Trawling through my archives, I came across this article by Eric Francis on eighth house astrology, bringing together ideas of orgasm, death, and self-renewal, I’d been musing about earlier. ‘Typically,’ he writes, ‘the 8th becomes a dance of death: ego death; flirtation with orgasm and desire (often secret desire)’.
In the previous post, I made the connection between the Zen notion of dying in each moment, and the notion of death associated with orgasm. Interestingly, astrology seems to correlate these notions within the domain of the eighth house, and I quote Francis here again:
Part of the 8th is the struggle to be free of the struggles of money/death/sex struggles of the 8th and embrace self-acceptance in the face of others. Part of self-acceptance is being aware that all living things die; we die; and relationships, as part of the changing world, will invariably change.
When asked how to deal with the ‘problem’ of sex, Krishnamurti gave this answer:
Why is it that whatever we touch we turn into a problem? We have made God a problem, we have made love a problem, we have made relationship, living, a problem, and we have made sex a problem Why? Why is everything we do a problem, a horror? Why are we suffering? Why has sex become a problem? Why do we submit to living with problems, why do we not put an end to them? Why do we not die to our problems instead of carrying them day after day, year after year? Sex is certainly a relevant question but there is the primary question, why do we make life into a problem? (The Krishnamurti Reader, 167)
An astrologer friend casting a brief eye on my chart recently left me with this piece of advice:
‘You need to wake up your Venus.’
Venus in my chart is one I rarely think about, being far more obsessed about Sun-Mercury-Saturn in the sixth house; i.e. the doing aspects of my chart. As a novice astrologer, however, I am also aware that we also have to be our charts. Sometimes, the natal chart is mistakenly treated as a chart of limitations — this is who you are — a set of characteristics written in stone. I much prefer to think of the chart as who one can become — that is, the task of the subject in this life is to manifest the chart’s potential.
Come out to view
the truth of flowers blooming
in poverty
— Basho (1644—1694)
Finally it feels like spring has come to the UK. After a dismal April of wintry showers and freezing temperatures, we’ve had some sunshine for the past two days. What struck me is how the tree blossoms seem to have taken full advantage of the situation — overnight the city is suddenly awash in whites and lovely pinks! Gives one such a sense of hope.
I moved house about a month ago, and have been noticing the toll it has had on my body. I no longer agitate about things I cannot control nor about those I think I can, the practice has helped me with that. But my body is still a wreck.
I feel the fatigue in my bones, from the weeks of physical and mental preparation, the move itself, the adjustment to the new flat, new city, new job, all within the compressed space of about six weeks.
‘Live in the moment!’ You impose this idea on me, again.
‘Live in the moment,’ I repeat. Why do I have to? ‘Live in the moment, or live for the moment? …’
‘Well, to live in or to live for the moment, that’s the same kind of concept.’
‘No. It is different,’ I say, strongly and angrily.
- Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Vintage 2008 )
This excerpt is taken from Guo’s novel, depicting the deteriorating relationship between a Chinese woman and an English man. The woman wants some certainty for the future, the man wants to ‘drift’ and see what happens. He attempts to stave off her increasing demands for commitment with the importance of living ‘in the moment’, and here, she deftly calls his bluff. What does it really mean to live in the moment? And how often to we substitute it with living for the moment instead? Continue Reading »
I woke up this morning with an inner agitation that began with yesterday’s encounter and I knew I’d taken the bait, against my better judgement, once again. It wasn’t enough to sit with, feel, and name my anger. It was necessary to act on it. I wasn’t sufficiently present.
This morning, I didn’t have to pull a card from the tarot to know that the card for the moment is the Knight of Swords (though I did). Biddy delineates the Knight of Swords as:
When we are possessed by a pure idea, and wish to manifest that idea in reality, we are often so blinded by the desire for its fulfillment that we fail to see the difficulties we may encounter or the consequences for which we may be responsible. The Knight of Swords is a powerful figure full of life and energy who needs to be balanced with a realization of responsibility and compassion. Pure intellectual energy is a double-edged sword which has the potential for either great good or great evil, and this power must be tempered with feeling and spirit so it doesn’t create pain for ourselves or others.
Writing something
To leave behind
Is yet another kind of dream.
When I awake I know that
There will be no one to read it.
About
This is not a blog about meditation techniques or lessons in spirituality. It reflects my efforts to understand my practice, and so will always be about reflection not prescription. Take something from it, leave something behind, or just pass through it in peace.
Every effort will be made to use images from free stock photography. However, in the event that you are the copyright owner of an image and would like it removed, please contact me and I will remove it. I have very little of value worth suing for.
. The result is a flash of amazement on my part — finally, my chart and my life are starting to make sense…
I had lunch with a friend today and discovered for the first time that she is one half of a
An astrologer friend casting a brief eye on my chart recently left me with this piece of advice:
