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Welcome to Our Sky Astrology

My name is Mary Pat Kellagher and I have been writing this blog since Feb 14, 2010.  When I began the blog I was inspired by the blogs of my friends and wanted to join in the fun.  I did not have any idea it would turn into a blog about astrology.  I have always wanted to write about my career as a housecleaner and I really expected that to be the main theme.  I also wanted to write about the unusual friendships I have formed over the last 15 years with my immigrant neighbors.  But that’s not the way it turned out.

My passion for astrology has grown steadily since I was introduced to it by a customer in about 1983.  I knew the night Carolyn did my chart that I had found what I had been looking for since elementary school.  When she began naming planets and pointing to symbols, I asked if she was talking about the real planets; the answer was yes and she was telling me exactly where they were the moment I was born.  I had searched in high school for an astronomy book that would tell how to locate the planets.  I had learned about Newton in physics class and so thought there would be a book explaining the way to calculate their movements.  But every astronomy book I found gave a paragraph about Newton, a chapter about the basics of the solar system and then rocketed out of the galaxy within another chapter.  They lost me as soon as they left the solar system.

Until I encountered astrology in my 20’s I was kind of bummed about that.  Every time I would see something about stars light years away I got a little depressed because it seemed too big for my little brain to conceive, too vast.  I turned away feeling sad that I was missing out on something really really special and basic about the universe.

That night my world turned around.  I think Carolyn thought she had done a bad reading because she paid her teacher to record another reading for me.  The second reading I actually heard.  I wasn’t just thinking the whole time “This is too good to be true.  I have found what I have been looking for.  I can’t wait to learn more about this.”  I was listening to her say “You have the Moon in Scorpio…”.and describe the deep cave that Scorpio lives in.  And a world of depth psychology was also opened up to me.  I had been in psychotherapy and so was primed for a language perfectly suited to describing the vast and complex inner landscape of the individual mind.

  

Carolyn and I became very close.  She loaned me books, gave me books and we talked often about astrology.  But I was always on the fence because even though I had a chart with numbers that said where Saturn was, it still felt like a symbol and I needed to be able to make the connection between the symbols and what was in the sky.  Learning how to calculate a chart helped, I felt that I was handling time and really getting a feel for it.  It was confusing as hell but it was deeply satisfying.

By the time I was about 28 I knew I wanted to be an astrologer.  I tried a couple of times but always retreated after doing several readings.  I wanted it to be like translating a document, but the more I did it the more I realized I would have to be able to accompany people on their spiritual journeys.  I felt I lacked the maturity required for such a responsibility.  I wondered if I would ever reach the level of maturity I needed and how it would happen.  Other astrologers did yoga and other new agey things.  I just drank and smoked with friends, listened to music and read a lot. I fought with lovers, changed lovers and ‘engaged in risky behaviors ‘.   I could not see myself as a spiritual guide.

But I always loved astrology and I always loved people, especially the people that most other people seemed to like the least.  Astrology gave me a language for understanding difficult people and describing their very specific place in society.  It gave me a language for describing why someone who rubbed me the wrong way was actually doing me a favor.  It gave me a way to describe what attracted me to someone at the same time they drove me crazy.  And then it took me even deeper.  In fact I have learned that the depth is truly endless, that our mind, even my mind, really can conceive of vast complexities given enough quiet time to focus and a language with logarithmic layers of meaning.

In 2009 I was diagnosed and treated for Grave’s Disease, an autoimmune condition that generates a chronically overactive thyroid.  They can’t fix the endocrine problem that stimulates the thyroid so they just kill the thyroid or surgically remove it and then the patient takes synthetic hormones.  It sounds simple and the doctors think they have it all worked out.  They get the blood level of a hormone or two within their prescribed range and consider their work done.  Unfortunately many patients are left with unexplained excruciating pain and perfectly normal hormone levels.  I was one of those patients.  But I gained something much more important- a stable personality.

A person with a chronically hyperactive thyroid is chemically equivalent to a manic depressive or a coke addict.  I had Uranus transiting my natal Venus at 28 degrees Pisces when all this came to pass.  By the time they were exactly lined up I had taken the radioactive iodine pill, and realized it was not the fix I had hoped for.  I had really needed help.  I had been missing a lot of work, my heart had been racing in the middle of the night and on the days that I was bed ridden, I was completely worn out and thought that pill would fix what was wrong.   It took a year of anxiety attacks, intense flulike pain and the same exhaustion I had before the pill, before I started really digging into the facts about Grave’s Disease.  I learned a lot about the endocrine system and how important the thyroid hormone is to every cell in the body.

I also learned what it must feel like to be an addict.  I had been an addict for years supplied by my own body chemistry!  My body just naturally bathed my brain in a chemically induced euphoria for years!  I ate 24 hours a day for years!  No one believed how much I ate.  I couldn’t believe how much I ate.  I lived in shame because of my endless hunger, the sugar and carbo consumption was off the charts.  I cleaned at least 2, sometimes 3 houses a day 6 days a week; never less than a 10 hour work day.  Often more than 70 hours a week.  I ran at night.  Swam a mile at least twice a week.  I NEVER stopped until I crashed.  When my body was worn out I just dropped out for a few years until the energy came back.  I never knew why I was like this.  I only thought I was lucky to have a body built for work.  I only wondered why I was so happy except when I felt suicidal.  I wondered how every one else was so self disciplined and I was so out of control.  Grave’s Disease.  It is the best disease in the world until you crash. 

In fact, that’s the other subject I thought I would cover when I began this blog and I still hope to get back to it.  But that transit of Uranus on my natal Venus really knocked me off the fence about astrology.  Even though I still did not know exactly how it worked I knew it was the very real spiritual deal.  And I’ll tell you why.  Because I knew that transit was coming. 

 

I had kicked my husband out and was wondering why, why I could not seem to stick with one person.  Was I too eager for love?  Too idealistic and unable to live up to the ideals I set to love someone just as they were?  I had been doing Catholic stuff with my Mexican friends, even though I left the Catholic church years ago, I wanted to participate in their stuff, so there I was reciting the rosary in Spanish with these new friends.  “Virgin without a spot.  Virgin of Mercy.  Virgin pure.”  It made me gag.  It was worse than what I had walked away from.  But I was so in love with these people.  And I started talking to The Virgin.  They call her the Virgin of Guadalupe. 

I said:

Look, I think you can understand a woman who has been pretty crazy.  I think you can see I want to do right.  I am asking you, send me a man who I can stick with, that can look past my crazy past.  I trust you to understand what I need.

I was also talking to the universe.  I knew that transit of Uranus was coming on my natal Venus and that is romance with a super capital R.  I said “ok, I know this is the BIG lesson about true love.  I don’t see how you can do it but here I am ready for the big lesson.  I’ve chased it all my life and I reckon only the universe knows how to deal with a woman like me, I’m not seeing how you can turn me around but I see that’s what’s supposed to be on the way.”  Uranus is a once in a lifetime lesson.  A Uranus transit is as radical as it gets.

And there I was four years later reading about Grave’s Disease because the pain just kept coming.  It was really bad.  That’s when I found out about the connection between sexual appetite and Grave’s Disease.  I had to put the book down and leave the room.  It was that kind of physical reaction to this information about what I had been living with my whole adult life.  It was a staggering revelation.  My ‘risky behaviors’, including multiple sex partners, were associated with the disease.  I was reading accounts of broken marriages, because of spouses with unusually high sexual appetites.  I was finding the answer to the question of why I could not stick with one person, even though I continued to love that person as I was leaving them.

By the time I was reading about the hyper sexuality of advanced Grave’s Disease people my thyroid had been fried by the radioactive iodine pill.  It was done.  There was still a lot of pain, I may never reach ¼ the level of activity I once enjoyed, I spend a lot of time in bed, am very, very careful to get enough sleep and never work more than 18 hours a week, because if I do I will surely suffer the consequences; but my hunger for love is gone.  I don’t fantasize about that wonderful perfect person.  I don’t turn over in my mind possibilities of who would want to live with me that I would want to live with.  I don’t wish for hugs and caresses or the tender little magic moments that I used to think I could not live without.  I have been chemically castrated and though I would never have chosen this outcome I consider it to be a miraculous liberation.  And to think it came in a platinum cup from modern medicine, the one institution above all others that I most disrespected and avoided throughout my adult life.  STD’s- that was it.  Give me some penicillin or other antibiotic for those.  Other than that I could take care of my own damn health!

So it was in the spring of 2010, a year after the magic thyroid killing pill, that I had my big Uranus transiting natal Venus and became a true believer.  What I saw in my chart had given me hope for a miracle and I got a miracle.  In hindsight it was perfectly logical, but no one could have told me before 2010 that I would be free of that hunger for love without getting “Yeah.  Right.  THAT”S a fantasy that won’t come to pass.”

So I got down to business and advertised my services.  I was given a chance to write a monthly horoscope column.  It was a lot of work but I learned Soooo much.  I started making a chart for every day of the month before writing the column so I could pick out the most obvious events, stuff that people would have a chance of recognizing.  Then I thought, if the exact time a person is born is so important, every minute must be important and I started following time from one minute to the next. 

I also started digging for answers to any question I had about astrology, and there were many of them; questions that never got answered in all the astrology books I had read over the years.  The zodiac really bothered me.  I had never found a good reason for the four elements and 3 modes, even though it seemed a very purposeful and logical system.  To tell the truth I never dreamed I would find out why each sign had its particular mascot- that was an unexpected bonus.

Astrology became the center of my life.  My son told me about free planetarium software (Stellarium) that he had learned to use in his science class and encouraged me to download it.  I found interactive animations created by the University of Nebraska astronomy department that helped visualize the solar system.  I found a site that lists the number of minutes and seconds the Sun is up each day.  I dug and fiddled and wrote and did charts for any friends that would let me.  Last of all I found a site called Planets Today that is nothing less than my dream come true.  It shows a really good representation of the planets in the solar system moving virtually in real time. 

I read history with a purpose, trying to figure out when and why astrology had fallen to such a passionately disrespected pursuit.  In that area I discovered people like Richard of Wallingford who designed an amazing but impossible clock in the 1300’s and punished parishioners who did not want to pay the abbey’s mill to grind their flour by burying their hand mills in the concrete of the abbey floor!  The Duke of Berry’s book of Very Rich Hours was another neat discovery.

As you can see now, after 6 pages, I love to talk.  I love to write.  I love to read and dig for answers.  And it all centers on astrology.  That’s what you’ll find on this blog:  A lot about my life, a little about housecleaning, stuff about my neighbor friends and most importantly of all, my very personal explanation of HOW ASTROLOGY WORKS.