Another week has passed since my latest installment of Desperately Seeking Arshad. Two days ago (Wed Jan 24) Mercury, the last in this year's extended parade of inner planets, passed between Earth and Pluto. I was visiting my neighbor and his old college friend at the moment of closest lineup, which is similar to the local school band striking up their signature tune as they pass the parade grandstands. Only this was the planet of communication instead of a school band, and the dignitary in the grandstands was the first planet spotted in the Kuiper Belt 88 years ago. Though I made a nuisance of myself by bringing up astrology multiple times in the conversation, I did not mention the lineup and that it was occuring on Raleigh's western horizon, as my mates did their best to politely dodge my efforts to hijack the conversation. The western horizon is the house of friendship. I wondered if they felt the same loneliness and distance that I felt. If they felt the inabilty to bridge some spiritual gap; maybe a gap between our respective individual indentities. But I guess I saved that question as a rhetorical platform for this post.
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When I got to my customer's house last Friday the wife was ironing in the kitchen with the radio tuned to NPR, and the husband was finishing lunch. Usually the wife is upstairs at her desk, maybe out for errands or meeting with a friend, and the husband is in the basement shop. His shop is a kind of diy fantasy land, and the house is replete with energy saving devices and various ingenius tweeks that they have come up with together. It looks like a fairly normal house until i turn on a light, or run the vacuum and experience the pleasure that comes from working in a home where so many unobtrusive technical details have been added.
I wasn't ready, after crawling so recently out the my blog writing tunnel of concentration, to be sociable. Not one, sometimes one or the other of them is in the middle of lunch when I show up, but two people in the kitchen and a radio discussion of the latest legislative wrangling in Washington. I grabbed the broom and went to sweep the front porch, after muttering something along the lines of hello.
I was off to a no nonsense work day. Not one of those days where I visit with the customer for 20 minutes before I even get started. It is not unusual to take an extra 40 minutes to an hour on a house because of enjoying conversation with a customer.
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It is now 10:05 Saturday morn. I left off writing yesterday around 11:30 to get ready to go clean my other Friday customer, the chair lady. She was a friend before she became a customer and now we are a good bit closer. But I need to push on to the account of searching for Arshad...
Now I remember what I keep meaning to say. And it came up at the previous Friday customer's house, the one with all the neat technical details: a couple of hours in to the afternoon, when the ironing board had been put away and the husband and wife had returned from some errand they had gone on together, the husband was on his way to the basement and said in his usual quiet voice, "Are you getting everything under control?" He never raises his voice, but there is often a barely detectable mischievous sparkle to it.
I took a few extra beats to respond. I sensed the challenge but could not come up with a riposte. Slow Taurus. "Yes, Smart Ass." That was the best I could do. Be he carried the flag for both of us and immediately slid back
"Good, Crabcake."
I laughed so hard as he closed the door behind him and headed down the basement steps. His wife missed the exchange, it was a very quiet one until I busted out laughing, so I had to repeat it to her.
Zz. Zz. Zz. Zz. Zz
It is now 12:50 am Feb 7. I have been back to the tech customers' house and then two more houses. Work-a-day life keeps carrying me on toward the ocean of oblivion. I have visited a bedbound friend, studied all kinds of fascinating things, but this story is not getting written.
What I meant to say when I started this post more than 2 weeks ago, is that the special quality of my search for Arshad was not just associated with where the planets were that day. Venus was meeting Saturn and Mars was meeting Jupiter. What made it so special for me was that Jupiter was lined up with my natal Moon. So it was more than a day of planets lining up; it was a day of good fortune for a Scorpio soul that comes once every 12 years.
It was recalling the conversation after the big laugh that reminded me.
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12:57pm Sat Feb 17. Mars is entering Neptune's 10th house today. It began with an amazing realization about how to meditate on houses for locations in or near the arctic circles. It was about 7am and Mars was "crossing" the midheaven when it occurred to me, "it is not whether the section of the ecliptic they are facing is visible, it is where they are in their daily revolution on the tilted planet, that houses indicate. The fact that certain sections of the ecliptic are under the horizon all day and night for locations near the pole does not mean those houses are smaller or do not exist."
Then there was a call from my mother in law. A relative in prison is dying. Discussion of family history naturally follows with my husband. Near the end of the long rambling recall of a troubled past he mentioned having bad dreams for years on a regular basis. We were talking over the phone, we do not live together, tears just sprung to my eyes like fresh drops of warm water from a quiet old hot spring. We said our goodbyes. I noted the moment he mentioned the bad dreams. Mars was in the house of partnership.
I have purchased a computer. I am working a bit more and finally out of nagging little debts. But this faster pace of life makes it difficult to write. Mars in Sagittarius- carrying life forward. The next insight, before the sad family news, was when I looked up the meaning of Volga. That river is so blue and wide on the map, i wondered about the meaning of its name. Wikipedia says it means moisture. They outlined the word's relationship to several other languages, including Sanskrit.
I have been thinking about the 9th sutra in the second pada. Sva rasa vahi vidhu shopi tadha rudho binivesha. In the Wikipedia article they said volga is related to Sanskrit rasa which means dew, liquid, juice, mythical river. Kofi Busia translates the sutra: the attachment-to-life-and-fear-of-death is like a well-worn river that flows even in the most wise. Swami-J says it is attachment to kleshas, or colorings; that even the most wise cling to keeping their lives moving forward as they are.
Now when I think of that sutra and the word for flowing, 'rasa,' I will think of the Volga River in Russia.
But now, here and now, I will hit the little arrow to publish these paragraphs and hope that soon I can finish telling the story of my search for Arshad.
The chart is for the moment my husband recalled the recurring bad dream of impending violence. His brother spent most of his life in prison. The dream stopped coming a few years ago. In one of the rare periods when he was outside, his brother made it to town for a visit with their sister. My husband got to visit with him for several hours. He said that's when the bad dreams stopped and never came back.
