The Quiet

Drawing back the arrow...

In the silence of oneself dwells a mystery. A mystery matched only by the stars in the heavens as they spin and dance their eternal story across the skies.

'Of spinning spheres that slowly dance in quiet beauty
More bright than a million sequins
And humming a tinkling sound of eternal ecstasy
With the longing, not for it to start
But rather never to finish....'   *

It's a quiet knowing, a feeling of belonging to and communion with the stars and the planets and the songs they sing, the stories they tell, the longings they evoke in the human as they etch their way across the skies above us. This for me is what I do. It's what I feel when I look at a nativity and see the life described there. The potential, the pain, the joy, the understanding it holds, and the depths.

Botticelli: The Mystic Nativity

We emerge from darkness and we return to darkness. Life is the learning to rise, walk, dance or collapse in the light cast on this Earth by the Sun. We are not afraid of the shadows, of the darkness. For many of us it is the place to which we return often for sanctuary. To escape the harsh light of the world, this civilisation which places a weight of expectation upon us that cleaves us from the womb of our existence. To read a nativity, to trace the notes of the planets and the music they write for each individual life, is to behold the matrix from which that life emerged. The first imprint on the psyche is not of the parents. It is the shock of the light. It is of those spinning spheres that cast their spell as the life emerges crying into the light.

I don't write often about astrology itself. I just want to read charts. To untangle the threads of life and weave them into some kind of coherence, to find the patterns in the confusion. We don't see the point or the purpose sometimes, the light of the Sun is too bright for us creatures of the dark. To live your Sun takes a lifetime, lifetimes of acclimatisation to its beams.

 We are all the same, you and I, dancing to the end of time.

*Frown Strong

Mars Retrograde Reflections: Chiron in Aries

I wrote this article back in April when Chiron moved into Aries,  but didn't publish it mainly, I think, because I have a retrograde Mars and tend to retreat as soon as I've fired.  Direct use of martian energy makes me panic.  But this morning I've been dwelling on the whole notion of Mars retrograde, given the skies right now, so it seems apposite to post it. Always going back to go forward...:)


I found myself thinking about Mars this morning and had a sudden realisation about my own Mars, over which I've been puzzling for years. I'm not much of a doer, I have a retrograde Mars whose only aspect is a wide square to Neptune. I am full of great ideas  but the energy is rarely there to put them into action. I start things that never get finished, often because I get interested in something else, or the enthusiasm just fizzles out. So this morning I realised, well, that's who I am.  And that's how it's meant to be.

Even Ulving: Woman Reading

The problem is we live in a world where one is expected to be forever doing, moving, shaking, building career, blah, blah, and more blah. So those of us who are more internally focused end up with complexes about not being good enough; we feel judged for not being some kind of superwoman or superman. And I thought, how about just accepting ourselves and each other for how we are? You may be an outgoing world building gym bunny, and that's great for you (you probably have Mars conjunct your Sun) but to keep 'encouraging' me to join in because you think I'll be happier/healthier/more fun if I do, when all I want to do is study and think and dream, is really not helping. I've had an inferiority complex all my life because I haven't done what the world expects someone with my intellectual gifts to be able to do.  From a young age, in amongst the corporate jobs and social life, I used to yearn to live 500 years ago where I could be a solitary in a tower alone with my studies. And that's fine, because that is my nature. (And at my Saturn Return, that's the kind of life that presented itself, but thereby hangs another tale).

One of the reasons I've stepped back from astrology over the last few years is my frustration with the type of astrology that tries to advise you on how to be other than you are. I needed to step back and let some new understandings arise.  The planets are where they are for a reason, and accepting that fact and understanding what it means for you as a life seems to me to be the first step in working out how to live in this crazy world.  I've been studying art instead but found even there the virus of business and entrepreneurship. How many artists do you know that can be bothered with business and funding applications? We just want to paint!There are others far more suited to that kind of activity, that's why we have managers and agents. But no, somehow we are all expected to be 'entrepreneurs' now. God I hate that word.

 It seems I have a Mars which is about the power and energy of the imagination, which is spiritually driven and is geared to the development of the self (in Leo, ruled by the Sun). I'm never going to be climbing a corporate ladder because my energy is oriented to the inner light, not the outer. And then it occurred to me that these realisations are a result of Chiron moving into Aries. It's right on my descendant and aspecting all my angles. These are the gifts of my natal Mars, and these are the wounds imposed by a world which recognises only one direction of martian energy.

So I think that in trying to work the influence of Chiron in Aries in our own lives, we need to examine the condition of Mars in our own charts. Throw away the cookbook interpretations of Mars and Aries and examine the things that move us, what moved us as children - what did we really want for ourselves and how did we get blocked? Self-examination and strategic adjustment according to intuition and feeling. Removing the obstacles strewn in one's path. This is the way of the peaceful warrior.