personal healing

Sunday inspiration: Musings on aging and friendship

Last night I went to a birthday party for someone I have known for over 30 years, since I first moved to North Carolina.  A large group of us that were involved in the same meditation group relocated to North Carolina at the same time, but because I left that group in the mid-1980s there were quite a few people I haven’t seen for many years, so there were people at this party that I hadn’t seen for years.

As many of you know if you’ve been following this blog for some length of time, I like to say that I have one of the hardest charts I’ve ever seen.  Saturn and Neptune straddle my Sun and square Uranus.  My Moon conjoins Pluto and the South Node at the IC, the root of the chart, and the whole mess squares both Jupiter and Venus.  And I just discovered recently that the Black Moon Lilith, a new tool in my astrological arsenal, conjoins Pluto and sets off that whole configuration.

If all of that makes no sense to you it doesn’t matter: suffice it to say that I had an extremely challenging interior experience and a great deal of psychological pain for much of my early life.  Since my first Saturn Return I have been on a path of healing, and since I’m now in my second Saturn Return that path has lasted for the past 30 years.  During this time I am glad to say that the hard work has paid off and resulted in a much happier individual than the one that started out on this planet back in 1952.

Over the past couple of years I have reconnected with three of my very closest friends from whom I […]

Share this article...
By |2021-05-22T15:00:03-04:00December 11th, 2011|Astrology in my world, Inspiration, Saturn Return|14 Comments
Read More

Sunday inspiration: Take what you are and use it

At a ritual recently I learned of a wonderful book called Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron.  Each us of selected one of the remedios, and mine was Milk Thistle.  The story of Milk Thistle is very appropriate for the Virgo New Moon so I’d like to share it with you for this Sunday’s inspiration. (Image is Ancestor Spirits by Willow Arlenea.)

Willow Arlenea

Milk Thistle works with what is here: the yellow layers of toxins, the charcoal grit, the green bile slow as crude oil pooling in the liver’s reservoirs, waiting to learn to flow.  Milk Thistle says take what you are and use it.

She’s a junkyard artist, crafting beauty out of the broken. She’s a magician, melting scar tissue into silk. She’s a miner, fingering greasy lumps of river clay for emeralds. She can enter the damaged cells of your life and recreate your liver from a memory of health. She can pass her hands over this torn and stained tapestry of memory and show us beauty, make the threads gleam with the promise of something precious gained.

She will not flinch from anything you have done to keep yourself alive. Give it to me, she will say, I will make it into something new. She will show you your courage, hammered to a dappled sheen by use.  She will remind you that you took yourself over and over to the edge of what you knew. She will remind you that the world placed limits on your powers. That you were not omnipotent. That some of the choices you made were not choices.

Use what you are, she says again and again, insistent. You are every step of your journey; you are everything […]

Share this article...
By |2021-02-27T12:57:15-05:00August 28th, 2011|Inspiration|0 Comments
Read More

Sunday inspiration: This present moment

One of the passages in the Bible that is most interesting to me is the fact that during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as Lot’s wife was fleeing the city she looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.  There are many aspects of this story that can be debated, such as the hypothesis that the “burning sulfur” emitted when the cities were burning is actually evidence that a nuclear strike rather than God’s Wrath caused the destruction of the cities, and that ancient Sumerian translations of the pre-biblical story suggest that Lot’s wife actually turned into vapor rather than salt, since in those days salt was found in vapor-filled swamps.

But for my purposes today I’d like to stick with the idea of turning into a pillar of salt when we look back into our past.

In our lives we go through many planetary cycles.  Some are harmonious and create ease in our lives.  Some have the potential to be difficult and can create havoc or open a door to more painful experiences.  I have seen clients who, after a long slog through a challenging period, are afraid to look forward into a brighter future despite the fact that their current planetary cycles are filled with blessings and opportunity.

When we feel we are stuck in a cave after a huge storm, refusing to step outside, it doesn’t matter how rosy our astrology is or how beautiful – we won’t be able to move forward.  In today’s world there are real dangers that lurk everywhere, including the fear that the world will end in 2012.  If the world is ending, some ask why bother?

We can make that cave as comfortable as possible, but we will […]

Share this article...
By |2021-02-09T18:58:13-05:00June 26th, 2011|Inspiration|3 Comments
Read More