What My Dad Said

He said a lot of things but what comes to mind today is a remark he made about anticipating something you want.  The prom was coming up and a friend had come all the way from Northern Virginia to our little town in Brunswick County NC expecting to go to the prom with a young man she had met the previous summer. When our family moved to Holden Beach our new home became the vacation destination for friends from Virginia.  Her plans were unraveling; the guy backed out and would not be stuffed into a suit and dragged to the prom. 

I think my friend’s 2 weeks at the beach were enough to make her fall in love with a surfer but not enough to understand the surfers’ moral code.  Be kind to everyone but never let yourself get stuffed into a suit. 

I had secretly called another student from the neighboring school and invited him, so I had an escort.  

The night before the prom my dad was driving me home from work at the Surfside Pavilion and getting philosophical.  He said the real pleasure was in the anticipation of an event.  It was like bacon- which smelled really good but was gone in a few bites.  At the time I thought that was only because he rationed bacon and we never got more than 2 slices.

He was right on though, and I remembered that conversation.  I was a very confused teenager and my dad said things that squirreled a whole mess of contradictory thoughts away in a humble nutshell.

I’m thinking of Dad and his words about anticipating an event because I am watching myself get very worked up about worries of my future.  As I get meaner and meaner to my dog, my son and the children I help with schoolwork I watch Venus get closer and closer to Saturn.  I’m pushy and ill tempered until I check my bank account, the credit card balance, and the projected household income.  When I see that things are tight, but not as bad as I feared, I can relax enough to remember that it always seems worse before the shit hits the fan than the actual stinky event.

As a housecleaner I’m very familiar with this truism.  I’ve begun a thousand tasks that I dreaded.  I used to hate using furniture oils and polishes.  Just did not like the smell or the oily feeling.  Once I got started applying that stuff to the wood, I felt like I was restoring something that was alive and in better condition for the attention.  So many tasks that I’ve dreaded.  Going to clean a house that I knew was in need of much more attention than the customer realized.  “Oh, it will just take a couple of hours.”  Knowing I would charge through heavy tasks as fast as I could, to try to get as much as I could, because once I began the task I was driven.  When I finished I was happy.  The work I dreaded was complete. 

Saturn is necessity.  I love reading Plato’s Timeaus, he never says he is talking about astrology, but he understands it better than any astrologer I’ve ever read.  Maybe it’s the translators or because he was just writing before so many people got a hold of the language that used it to make facile predictions.  He doesn’t talk about karma.  He talks about necessity and the soul (psyche).  Saturn is necessity ruling over the soul.  As Venus approaches Saturn we are drawn into the vortex of what has to be done.  When we look ahead at the tasks they seem onerous, but once we are doing them it will feel much different.

Anticipation.  So much of the real wisdom of astrology is observing our reaction to life’s pushing and pulling; we look up at the sky and measure our jerky little lives down here against the movements of the bodies that were here long before we ever evolved.  Anticipation is a two way street, we can look forward to something with desire or dread.  Either way the actual experience is not the same as what it looks like before it comes to pass.  The purpose of astrology is to cultivate an awareness of that bigger picture and keep it in the front of our minds as much as possible.