At the bottom I will put a chart for the 2 or so days after the Passion essay. I don't remember why I did a chart for that moment. I think that's the day I looked up the word passion and was struck by the intimate relationship it has with patience. I do associate the Moon in Taurus with patience and I can recall trying to finish the essay on passion but feeling that I had lost courage. I remember writing that the urge to record my thoughts had dissipated and I felt like a dog wanting to retreat, tail between my legs, but that Taurus determination kept me from abandoning what I had begun.
Then, a few days later I tried again.
The only reason I can remember why I did the chart with the Moon in Cancer is I changed the title. I felt the whole process of completing this post slipping from my control and had the fore thought to name the chart for the moment that inspired me to get it from Astrodienst-I typed Parmenides in the box for the name. I had looked up the Greek word doxa which translates as opinion or judgment. I wanted to refresh my understanding of the term. All the concepts in these two posts, Passion and Patience, have been floating around in my thoughts since that night 9 days ago when the Moon in Aries was lining up with Uranus. Now that the Moon is in Leo I feel that a bouquet of language is finally ready to come from nature's magic hat.
I have a book from the local university library called Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon by F.E.Peters. It is only about 240 pages, but very useful in studying Plato, and other Greek philosophers from the same period. It is in fact organized as a lexicon, with Greek terms listed in alphabetical order and as little as a paragraph, for instance katalepsis: grasping, apprehension has only 5 lines; or as many as three pages as under the heading nous: intelligence, intellect, mind. Each word entry includes references to philosophers who defined the term in their works. So under doxa I found a reference to Parmenides a preSocratic philosopher. The problem with most Greek philosophers before Plato and Socrates is that we have very scanty samples of their writing, mostly through quotes from later writers. We do have at least several pages from Parmenides though, and I went surfing to find them.
That chart is for the moment I began reading the English translation of his On Nature, or at least fragments of what remains. It was much too short, but very satisfying to read what Plato had obviously studied and to relate it to his ideas as well as concepts outlined in old Vedic literature and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It was thrilling to be transported back almost 3,000 years to the ideas that people were sharing between various cultures.
I have come to anticipate these deeply satisfying moments of study whenever Mercury is slowing down to a station, not as a right, or something due to me, but as a gift that has come on such a regular basis that I can hardly help looking forward to it. I dare not expect it, but the hope is always present when I see the numbers getting smaller and smaller in the Mercury column of the ephemeris indicating that it is slowing down in its apparent motion compared to Earth. Customers will 'not be ready' and I will be happily engaged with my other work, becoming familiar with the roots of western astrology.
So the 2nd chart in this post with the Moon in Cancer goes with that thrill of finally reading the words of Parmenides. I won't talk more about that chart here, I am just including it as a reference for future studies of similar astrological moments.
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What was really important to me about the Aug 22 chart in the Passion post was the Moon just crossing the line from Venus's 7th house of partnership to its 8th house of intimacy. When that memory came it was like a thunderbolt from a blue sky. I had felt the rumblings all day but they were distant and more distracting than disturbing. The real storm had passed and I was focused on getting myself back on a balanced footing.
That memory of my customer leading me to the guest bed, and bringing a cold rag for my head transported me almost violently to a time when I had no understanding of what life meant to me, and in spite of all the study and searching felt as bereft of an answer as ever. I do remember very clearly, as I received the kindness and understanding I had longed for from Marlene, realizing what seemed like an awful truth, that it would not after all change a thing.
How many times I had read in astrology books, under the heading 'Scorpio' that here we learn only after we get what we want, that it will not satisfy. There it was. And Marlene is a Scorpio Sun. Over the years she was the one customer who did not erect barriers of polite conversation as a way of censoring my accounts of drug and sex adventures. She was then and still is one of my most intimate friends. She gave me the kindness my mother could not extend, understanding as only a mature Scorpio mother can, that we have to choose our family. Even with an adopted child that a mother has taken the trouble go out in the world and prove to the community she is responsible and worthy to care for as her own, even such a strong bond has to be chosen anew at every turn if the love is to be completely honest. Scorpio love is not Hallmark love. It is a fierce, conditional love.
As a child with a Scorpio Moon I had to choose my mother and I respected the ways my given mother chose to love me. I have understood this for many years now, but on the day that memory was created that understanding was not yet a part of my knowledge base. I still had intense shame for leaving my family and dreaded every family holiday. Mothers could spot me, mothers of friends especially- and reached out to me like an adorable kitten without a home. But I was skittish and avoided the generous overtures.
Marlene was different because she was a customer and she laughed at my misadventures. She fearlessly remarked on the underlying motives and we laughed at them together. Shame for her was a boogey monster that had to be exposed for its manipulative function. We had that in common. And as a member of my mother's generation she had first hand experience of the boogey monsters that my mother wrestled with. My mother was very much against ERA, and I really needed an example from her generation to balance my inherited view of the struggle for women's rights.
These are the themes, of daughters and mothers choosing one another, and how I did that with my customers, how I grew to womanhood in the homes of women from my mother's generation, that I expected to cover in this blog before my passion for astrology took it over. That memory and the planet of motherhood, the Moon, in feisty Aries just exactly crossing the line from fulfillment with Venus to intimate understanding of what comes after fulfillment, which is the truth that there is always a new desire on the other side, as well as something lost. We never have a desire fulfilled without losing the innocent opinion of what its fulfillment will mean to us. We reach for love and cannot know until we receive it, what love really is.
That memory was like a jolt of electricity from the Aries Moon.....a surface view of the chart would immediately pick up on the undercurrent of the Moon lining up with Uranus, the planet keeled over on its side like a hip hop dancer spinning on her back instead of using her feet as any traditional dancer should; but a closer Scorpio look, as an examination under a microscope, or through binoculars at the sky, because we are that curious, we don't want to miss a detail if there is a tool handy to help us get a closer look, or as with a language specifically developed to describe celestial mechanics, with that concentrated focus the Moon's momentary relationship with Venus in Virgo the sign of service and apprenticeship is clearly evident. It is a flash of just a few pivotal minutes captured in the memory and the chart.
"Yes," I thought to myself, "this is what I meant to write about and still intend to write about." And I opened the little Blogger app for androids. I typed Passion in the heading and now here I am 9 days later finishing what I began.
As I was working on this post I kept recalling the movie "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne", so I looked that up last night. I remember going to watch it with my old boyfriend, the one who was raging at his boss in the last post. It was so depressing, and horrifying the way I identified with Judith, especially when she went to visit with the family on Sunday that was her only social contact. It was strange for macho slut Moustache Mary to be secretly feeling her life was being played out in the character of a pious spinster. But there had been a time when my life circle was very limited and bound by Catholicism and those years will always be a part of me. I did feel thankful when I left the theater for having left that circle. I knew I would rather feel lost outside the circle than trapped within it. That urge to exit the circle can be associated with Uranus, the first modern planet to be acknowledged after hundreds of years with the longest recognized cycle in our solar system being limited to 28 year Saturn.
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