This essay was originally posted on the Our Sky Face Book group page 5/19/2014 11:30am
My son is learning to sail
and even though I have only seen him sail once on a small craft, I’m learning a
bit about sailing from his accounts of other outings. I’m learning about the real actions that the
verbal phrases ‘rock the boat’ and ‘keel over’ describe. In figurative language the first phrase has
come to mean someone disturbing a situation and the second- someone falling
over. In sailing both actions are often
intentional, productive, and necessary skills for survival in high winds.
When the sail catches a
strong gust of wind the mast is pushed so far to one side that the boat keels
over- in other words the whole craft tips so far in one direction that the
bottom part running from front to back called the keel, almost comes out of the
water. Among photos and videos of
sailing I’m seeing a lot of boats tipped almost on their sides in high wind and
sailors hanging on the high side to keep them from overturning completely. As a shore hugger I could be wrong about
this, but it looks like sailors who want to get the most out of a high wind
learn to keel over and rock the boat.
In the western astrological
symbol system wind and sailing would usually come under Libra, the cardinal air
sign. For now we will ignore the irony
of the balanced scales as the symbol for a part of the ecliptic associated with
moving air. I want to keep today’s post
on the level of bedtime story to bring some balance to the many posts requiring
difficult visualizations of life on a revolving sphere.
So lets just stick with symbols
and stories and let the actual bodies and movements fade into the background
for awhile.
At the moment I was born
Uranus was in Leo in the 10th house of career. It was in Leo for everyone born between 1957
and 1960 and some people born in 1955, 56, 61 and 62- but only about 1/12th
of that group would have Uranus in the 10th house of career. Uranus (sorry I keep straying back and forth
between myth and reality here, it helps keep the story plausible) is the planet
that rolls around the solar system on its side, or keeled over like a ship in
high wind. It is named after one of the
first generation gods credited with creation of destructive monsters banished
to the bowels of the earth before humans could come into existence. Now there’s a story for you, the story of
Saturn taking his scythe and chopping Uranus into pieces to tame him. I’m told Uranus means sky. In Timeaus Plato said that the planets, since
they were created before humans, and need nothing to survive, and are perfectly
shaped in the form of revolving spheres, are demigods. Don’t quote me on that, I do my best to
understand these folks and sometimes I speak up before I quite get their
meaning.
Anyway, since Uranus was in
the 10th house, almost straight up in the sky (oops there’s reality
again!) when I was born, that’s a part of who I am. Is it logical to sort ourselves as
individuals by the order in which we began in the human race? If so, then part of my inheritance is the
planet, or demigod that created the monsters, in the house of career.
OK, here’s the story
part. Since I was a girl, like 12 years
old, babysitting for the neighbors, I have been cleaning houses. Not just cleaning houses, moving appliances,
big ones like refrigerators, washers and dryers and cleaning behind them. People paid me to take care of their kids and
I went in and moved stuff around to clean hidden dirt. We’ll save Pluto’s position and my Moon in
Scorpio across from the Sun in Taurus for another time. All those planets and Venus in Pisces in the house
of service could be associated with the way I approach a task-today I just want
to focus on the disturbing nature of Uranus.
It has taken me more than 50
years and a pill of radioactive Iodine to get just how disturbing my ‘work’ is
in the lives of people I ‘work’ for. I’m
facing the reality that I don’t so much work for people as turn their lives
upside down. It seems that the only
reason I’m able to accept that truth as a housecleaner is because I can no
longer physically do it. I no longer have
the energy to go into someone’s house and turn it inside out looking to banish
dirt. If I could I would be too busy
doing it to consider how disturbing it is when people come home and find the
dryer sticking out in a passageway and me huddled behind it, reconnecting the
vent to the wall.
But ….. I can still disturb
in other ways….In fact I have grown, as we all do, and my progressed Uranus is
now in the 9th house-funny how growing entails numerical
regression. What started out in the 10th
house of career is maturing in the 9th house of long journeys over
water; maybe this has something to do with those cruises people take in
retirement. The 9th house is
also associated with philosophy and publication. So there you have it, Mary Pat has graduated
from disturbing people for her career, to publishing disturbing content on the
internet.
I can’t just do horoscopes
like other respectable astrologers. I am
bound by the fault of my stars to upturn my readers’ notions of what philosophy
is. Taking the symbols and making a
story, predicting a future, giving advice is not enough for me. I’ve got to go all the way back to Plato and
Socrates and then even further, to Stone Henge and all the other ancient
megaliths and dig out the meaning of the symbols behind every shiny modern
psychological construct. I am aware that
the stories are easier to absorb, but like Plato and Socrates I find it is
worth the effort to dig and find the reality the symbols are meant to express.
So you won’t find a lot of
posts like this one coming from me. And
I do appreciate your patience as I struggle to find a way to take astrological
concepts apart and reconfigure them in a way that we can all understand. I used to do this cleaning refrigerators,
taking drawers and shelves apart with the fear that I could not figure out how
to put them back together. I don’t
recall ever failing. Sometimes it took a
lot of fiddling to find the trick of how a thing was constructed, but
determination and patience always paid off.
So stick with me if you dare,
if you care about the reality behind the symbols and stories, and we’ll rock
the boat in high winds. Together we’ll
take the incredible intellectual energy stirred up on the internet and use it
to explore just what people were trying to say thousands of years ago when they
came up with the idea of the zodiac.
Like any independent sailor you will want to have some idea of how to
read a chart, why take chances on always having a skipper to choose the heading?
That’s the end of this
bedtime story – next post we return to life on a three dimensional sphere
floating through darkness.
One more thing- I may be off
line for a while. Time for some
professional help with my trusty old lap top!
