Pluto transits: Transform, or die

The effect of Pluto is like a stone-grinder, and as its movement through the zodiac is glacially slow, taking 246 years to pass through all 12 signs, its impact on the psyche is to transform it inside out. When it makes exact contact with sensitive points in an individual’s chart, its intensity (if not its effect) can only be described as atomic, or a call to ‘transform, or die’.

You ‘are’ who I project, but who am I?

The more I read about Venus retrograde and self-reassessment, the more my unconscious behaviour is starting to surface, and I’m using this blog, as ever, as a means of keeping it in the light.

As I summed up in a previous post, Venus retrograding in the self-centred sign of Aries is forcing us to come to terms with who that self is for each of us, or as Eric Francis put it, how to have a ‘relationship with ourselves’. Boots Hart’s article on the retrograde addresses how the self will need to engage, not just who it is or what it wants, but, crucially, what it also projects onto others:

Venus retrograde: Reassessing what you value II

Part I.

My list. Lest I forget.

What I value:

• Honesty
• Openness
• Reciprocation
• Mutuality
• Kindness

Retrieving lost parts of myself and keeping them

This happens to me from time to time. I think I’m whole. I share what I think is my whole self. It gets accepted for a time, then rejected in stages, and then (what feels like) it gets thrown back at me broken fragment after broken fragment, from which I have to find and fit the pieces back again, hoping I get the combination right the next time.

Today, after some help, I see I’ve got the metaphor wrong. The mosaic is what it is — a whole made up of fragments. What I can share are the different shapes and textures, the colours and the combinations, but the whole of fragments is mine and mine alone.

When I enter relationships, part of me dissolves, but I don’t notice it dissolving at first. (In fact, it is good to know that I’m not alone in this respect, but it is the form it takes in me that I want to explore.) I feel it a strengthening, like growing a new limb. What I don’t realise is actually part of my boundary collapses, like a broken levee, whether to let more of the other in, or more of me out, I don’t know. What I do know is the other spots the crack like a beacon, and then I’m chucked, for having lost the integrity of the shape they were originally drawn to.

As Venus continues her retrograde through Aries, highlighting the need to have healthier relationships with ourselves, I’m writing this just to bring it to my consciousness, to retrieve and keep parts of myself that I’ve lost, and to say thank you to the experience, and the people involved therewith, for the lesson I hope never to forget thereafter.

Venus retrograde: Reassessing what you value

These are tense times. Scanning the headlines on the Huffington Post makes me dizzy, anxious, and mildly depressed. Trying to fix the world is important, but perhaps the only way to do that is to look within and fix ourselves, if ‘fix’ is even the right word.