Once Upon a Time

Yesterday was kind of a weird day. i expected some sort of challenge, but the urge to take offense and put up a righteous defense still took me by surprise.  I drove 30 minutes to Zebulon with a friend.  we were visiting Billy Odom, an old friend from the Thursday Night Open Poetry Reading days.  He has been confined to a wheelchair for some years and was recently moved to a new rehab facility.  I was denied permission to take him for a ride in the car with us because the legal guardian did not know me.

the chart at the end of this post shows Mars today in the 5th house less than 18 degrees behind Saturn in the 6th house.  (the image looks very fuzzy on my android.  i'll check it out at the library tomorrow and see if i can fix it.)

Mars is slowing down these days.  it will stop and turn retrograde  in March.  Then we'll go back over yesterday's troubles and get a chance to review them with even more insight than what was gained under the soft gravity of the Moon lined up with the planet of heroism and will.

Now the Moon is moving toward conjunction with Saturn.  The ancients would make a story about Psyche lining up with the corrupted Hero yesterday and then advancing to line up with the philosophicFather today.  we say Saturn, the father figure of our nuclear planetary family, is philosophical because he is in the sign Sagittarius this year and next.  Any planet located in the sign Sagittarius is seen from Earth just as the earthling looking heavenward is rising to the tippity top of earth mountian in their daily revolution on the tilted sphere.

every day whether the sun is shining or we are looking away into the night, if Saturn is on the midheaven we are shooting to the top like arrows in graceful arcs.  at this time of year we are able to see Saturn climb the night time sky in the 4 hours before the Sun in Pisces comes up and washes the discerning darkness away.  that means during this month we are completing our daily ascension just as the Sun rises.

Get a tilted globe.  put your finger on the town where you live.  standing above the globe rotate that point counter clockwise alllmost to the top.  Imagine the Sun shining from the side where your point is about to go down.  imagine little you seeing its first rays of the day just over the great bulge of the sphere that carries you on its back from before birth till after death.

imagine you speak greek and philosophy is a compound word meaning love of wisdom. that the word gnosis refers to the ability to read a marker, or gnomon.

imagine you are a child without inherited notions of what astrology is.  you have nothing but curiosity about the sky above you.

last night as i was sitting in the darkness reflecting on the difficulties of the day.... i had already been out to admire Auriga high in the northern sky and Orion and Canis Major to the south. i knew by these markers inherited from before the time of Plato, that Raleigh was turning up toward the Olympian dome of the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way stretched from Auriga west of the pole star all the way across the top of the sky to Canis Major east of south; because earth's north pole points just 27 degrees above the plane of the galaxy.  i wasn't thinking about that though.  wasn't thinking about what i knew.  gnew...i had turned off the lamp and was sitting in the darkness breathing and thinking of that breath....which they called psyche....the greeks did, once upon a time.

and i heard the voices of the two neighbor boys approaching with their mother.  she was telling them i might be in bed.  i turned on the lamp, got up from the couch and went to the door. the wooden door was open.  i opened the storm door made of glass.  "pasale!"  (come in!)

"oh we thought you were asleep said my friend, in spanish.

I was meditating!

the younger boy hopped onto the couch with his legs crossed and each hand resting on its given knee "like this?!"

i gnew he would do that.  i was ready for him.

no i can't do it like you do.  i was just sitting straight with my eyes closed.

they had seen something in the sky.  "show me" i said and we ran across the street to the parking lot of the neighborhood park.  but it was gone.  some kind of line in the sky.  "maybe it was from an airplane"

i pointed to the belt of Orion "see those 3 stars?"   Yes yes they did!  that's the belt of Orion.

I remember Orion from on the compter.  said the older boy.

"and that  star is Sirius and that faint trinagle down there is the rest of......"

the older boy was following the dots and the younger one was facing east and jumping up and down and dancing around "what do you see?"

I don't remember what he called it, there were also lights from two planes.  "that one is Jupiter!"  ohh.  they love Jupiter.  i do too.  who doesn't?

let's go in and find Orion and Sirius on the star map.  yes!!  we went inside, looked at the star atlas, filled out forms for an upcoming field trip and the mom and i visited.  it was almost time to go.  the older boy pointed to Procyon hanging half way between floor and ceiling on the western wall.  "which star is that?"  and we went back outside to see the little dog just east of the big one while the younger brother played with Lego's.

today as the Moon advances from Mars to Saturn

link to better image (i hope!)
-the Warrior is slowly moving toward the meeting a soldier must have every couple of years with its high ranking officer-today as the Moon goes from the soldier to the limit setter, the philosophical general/father......i am pondering yesterday's difficult confrontations with offensive realities.  i am facing the things i can't change, because they are results of past revolutions on this tilted sphere, and also recalling signs of progress generated by that same cosmic motion.

if i remember correctly Plato called Psyche the nurse of becoming.  We associate the Moon with Psyche because it is the nurse of Earth, ensuring that water is always moving, massaging the planet gently, as it lines up with one planet after another in the solar system, keeping Earth apprised of the changing relationships.

so yesterday the Nurse of Becoming reminded us of the upcoming meeting between the evolving hero and the evolving father.  they are both in all of us.