And Now We Are Forty

"But now I am Six,
I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."- A.A. Milne

Today is my fortieth birthday and I am, quite simply, happy. Last week I officially announced that I'm resigning from my job. I have known since late September that it was the end but I needed to keep it close to the vest until the right time. It has been an intense few months of planning and focusing inward, allowing things that are ready to die to do so. An appropriate experience for the balsamic (dark) moon phase of the lunation cycle that I am at the tail end of, perhaps, but not great for writing blogs. I'll be leaving finally by the end of April, soon after the start of the astrological new year- the beginning of the sign of Aries.

The snatch of poem at the beginning, from A.A. Milne's And Now We Are Six, came to me this morning. Not because I was ruminating on how long it's been since I was six, but because I realized that being clever is not enough for me anymore. I am no longer satisfied by simply accumulating knowledge. I've accumulated quite a bit already, and though I am occasionally clever with it, I am more and more aware of all that I don't know. Or rather, I am drawn forward by a desire to understand, to see patterns and connections, meaning and significance, and to make this quest the center of my life. Perhaps this desire for a deeper, more contemplative existence is a sign I'm growing up. They say it's inevitable, but having gotten this far I can say from experience that it is not. Growing old, yes. Growing up? Completely optional.

In order to further my quest I am quitting my job so I can start building my astrology practice, seeing clients a few days a week. I had put it off and put it off, thinking that if I couldn't walk from one full-time job into another that I shouldn't even start. Then I realized that I have 25 acres of land that I love being on and could allow us, if managed properly, to be largely self-sufficient. And I realized that I really want to make that happen. So, when I am not seeing clients I will be homesteading intensively, working to produce the vast majority of our food. Raising vegetables and chickens, maybe some rabbits. It will not make up completely for the temporary loss of half our family income, but it will help tremendously.

At the moment I am consumed with thoughts of planting schedules, root cellars, chicken tractors and frost-free water to the barn. It is exciting figuring out how to make it all work. And it will be lots of work, mental and physical, which is exciting, too. Did I mention that Saturn, the god of discipline, order, commitment and manifestation on earth, is conjunct my Mid-heaven by transit? If the Mid-heaven is the place that the Universe has memorized for us on this Earth, in this lifetime, then I am finally staking my claim. I have found my spot and I will do whatever is necessary to stand on it firmly.

I committed myself to this larger homesteading endeavor while building my practice not just because it will help us save money in the short-term but also because I realize that my practice will always be narrow in its scope so it may never grow beyond a certain point. I will only be seeing clients for in-person readings. I can't offer myself as a practitioner online in the way that has become increasingly popular for astrologers. I won't be selling readings on the cheap, looking at charts and sending off what I think of them in the absence of a conversation or a sense of context. Though I'm sure there are astrologers of long-standing who can offer tremendous insight simply by seeing the patterns on the paper, I think the vast majority of what is being offered is kind of like shooting with bird shot. It sprays a wide area and therefore is likely to hit something, but it may not be the important thing, and is as likely as not to cause unnecessary suffering by focusing our attention on bleeding in the wrong place. Though offered, I would assume, with the best of intention, it is more about the astrologer and less about the client, which seems wrong ways round to me.

Selfishly perhaps, as important for me is that this type of offering doesn't afford me the opportunity for deep listening beyond my own thoughts. Again, I'm sure that there are astrologers out there who can, while simply looking at a chart, quiet their own minds down enough to hear the Oracle, but I suspect they are few and far between. I am certainly not one of them. But in the open field of true conversation, when I take the risk to be vulnerable and listen, to step outside of my own mind sight, amazing things happen. It is like flying. And the moment when clarity dawns on a client's face, when they see something they hadn't seen before, when they feel a true sense of ownership of their own life...I won't be naive enough to say that I'd help that happen for free, but I will say I wish I could, because it seems too precious a thing to barter for money. But without it, for me, there is no point. It is the real payment.

I will share with you a video that helped me realize that this deep listening was essential for me, and thus would dictate the scope of my practice. It is Krista Tippet, the host of public radio's OnBeing, talking about the vulnerability of listening. She says more clearly than I could have imagined was possible why this is so important for me as an astrologer and for all of us. Truly it can change the world. It certainly has changed mine.



In order to allow for my practice to develop with this listening as it's foundation my life as a whole must become smaller, quieter and more intimate. To allow for the vastness of other people's true nature and interior life, my life has to become simpler, less full of unnecessary distractions and more focused on what really matters. And maybe, if I am very lucky, then whenever I leave this life I will have accumulated some wisdom, some measure of grace. I will be more than just clever. And I will be here, fully present, standing on my bit of Earth. What is the old zen saying?

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The Avalanche

It began when I almost cut off the end of my finger. That was a week after my last post. I was cutting herbs, preparing food for a friends' wedding, and I sliced right into the end of my finger. Having led a fairly active life I have broken a variety of bones but I have never, not even with two natural childbirths at home, needed a single stitch. It was shocking to me, the sense of invasion of my personal space, the vulnerability. It was the day before the new moon in Virgo and something about how material gets worked out in the realm of the body was seeded in that moment.

Within a couple of days I developed a head cold. Not a big deal for most folks, but unusual for me. We were also having childcare issues, so I was sick and trying to take my four year old to work with me or work from home with the sound of childrens movies insistently singing in my ears. Again, I felt shaky and vulnerable, at the mercy of things beyond my control and off my rhythm.

I went to class that weekend and spent three days blowing my nose and talking about the lunation cycle. I got a greater intellectual understanding of the mechanics of it and of where I am in my current cycle but the gut level knowing of it, of feeling the underlying pattern of it in my bones so that I don't have to "think" of the vocabulary, remember definitions, still escaped me.

Two days after class ended, just when my head had finally cleared the cold, I was sitting on the couch with Ruby and was all of a sudden seized with intense vertigo. For about half an hour I was so dizzy I couldn't walk across the room without listing into something and then the puking started. It has been 20 years, at least, since I have been that sick. I couldn't move, raise my head or open my eyes without heaving until I couldn't breathe. I couldn't even crawl out of the bathroom to get my cell phone to call Matthew and tell him to come home. Ruby had to bring the phone to me and, if I remember correctly, I managed to send Matthew one monosyllabic text and leave him a auditory record of me hurling because as soon as his voicemail picked up I was seized with another wave of wretching. After a couple of hours of seriously wondering if I might pass out and need hospitalization before he made it, Matthew got home and carried me to the couch where I passed out and slept the rest of the day.

It was the day after the full moon in Pisces and something was reaching a peak, some surrender was being forced upon me and some boundary between my singular body and the body of the world was thinning. I felt like my life had spiraled completely out of my control, my body was not my own, and I had no stable ground on which to stand. Transiting Pluto was also exactly square, within 3 minutes, of my natal Mars, but that has been true at various times since January of 2010. For almost two years now it has been forcing a conflict between my own personal will (Mars in Aries) and desire to strike out and effect the world in the way I see fit and the deep, chthonic wisdom of a higher Will (Pluto in Capricorn) calling me to submit to my true place in the world. Having it go exact at the same time as this particular Virgo/Pisces lunation cycle, however, which is so much about body/world, ordered practice/chaotic mess, service/sacrifice brought things to a particularly personal and dramatically physical head. The Moon will do that.

At 6 AM the next morning Matthew left for a week on business. Slowly I began to recover. I sent the girls to their grandparents for the weekend and spent 36 hours completely alone, largely in silence. I turned off the computer and the phone, walked in the neighborhood and on my land, imagined a life more in concert with the earth, a daily rhythm more mindful of the turn of the seasons. It was a peaceful, gorgeous, restful day. It was also just before last quarter, this cycle was ending so something new could begin and death is never easy. The kids came home, Matthew came back to town and almost immediately disappeared for two days of astrology class, and life came crashing back.

That Sunday, September 25th, our sheep got out of the fence and onto the road in front of our house four times. FOUR TIMES. Matthew was in class all day, it was inexplicably hot and sticky for September, and I had to chase the little stinkers back into the pasture all by myself. After the fourth time I was out clearing the fence of weeds that we had let grow up right over it, killing any possibility of it carrying a deterring electrical charge, and something shifted inside of me. Some sense of detachment from our land and from being responsible for and present to the daily ritual of maintaining our life fell away. Some fear of what terrible things would happen if I embodied fully the person I am meant to be, if I took the risk, disappeared and a commitment to manage our family's resources and my resources more sustainably took over. In a larger sense, my progressed Moon has moved into the balsamic, or dark moon, phase and I felt in my bones the inevitable winnowing of it, the necessity for everything to eventually die, and I gave in. It was unexpectedly freeing and a bit terrifying- like standing naked on the front lawn on a beautiful day.

Two days later Occupy Wall Street began at the new moon in Libra and a global conversation about our relationship to each other and how we manage and share our resources exploded. It felt like the personal conversation I had just been having with myself assumed a global face. Just before first quarter we saw the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. What started as a few people in a park, unlikely to truly challenge the status quo, began to manifest as something much larger. The confrontation with the powers-that-be was, from the perspective of the lunation cycle, inevitable. The full moon of that cycle, in Aries, came on October 12th- two days after police attacked and arrested many of the Occupy protestors in Boston and other cities and three days before the Global Day of Action when hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered all over the planet. What had been unthinkable just weeks previous, that tiny seed of a conversation, had flowered into something truly awe inspiring.

I cannot tell you both how exciting and unsettling these last two months have been. I have been drawn by my body through a transformation of my daily life. I have committed to something much larger than myself, to diving into the flow and trusting that it will carry me and I find that I have become more sensitive to the flow occurring all around me. It is as if I am walking through the world with no skin on, no separation between me and everything else, and I alternate between exhilaration and the most exquisite sense of intimacy and vulnerability. It is hard to tell at times where I stop and the world begins. Never has every moment that I encounter happening in the world felt so deeply personal and yet so far beyond me. Every protestor, every cop, every person on the street and every politician hiding behind their gilded door is a part of me and I feel obligated to see them, to hear them, to confront them mindfully. I also know that, in actual, daily fact, my life needs to get smaller and more intimate so that I have more space to see, hear and confront myself. The two do not feel like such very different paths in the end, though.

I began this two month period feeling like I was being swept away by an avalanche. Everything seemed to be changing faster and faster, careening towards something catastrophic. If I had written in the midst of all of it that's exactly what I would have written, but I think now that that vision is very narrow. It is based in the anxieties and fears of my ego, which abhors change and never wants anything to die. Yet everything does and I believe embracing that offers a way for all of us to dive into the flow. It will carry us forward and back around. It always does. I know it in my bones.

Best Birthday Ever

Last night I went to the best birthday party ever. There were no balloons, no wrapped packages, no popping out of hiding places to scream HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Instead, ten of us gathered to celebrate the 50th birthday of one of the assistants for my astrology class by working her chart. In advance we were assigned at random two planetary placements from her chart and were invited to bring anything- a poem, picture, song or rumination, that spoke to each placement based on it's degree symbol, planetary function or dignity by sign or house.

Starting at the Ascendant we worked our way around, house by house, planet by planet, offering to our friend the gift of holding the whole of her. It just so happens that her Sun degree is many little birds on the limb of a large tree, 28 Leo. She told me a story during a break from the chart work about her 49th birthday, one year ago, when she set the intention to finally find her tribe, those that could support her on the quest and, in turn, be supported by her. If the Sun is the essential core of our Spirit that we are bringing down to Earth slowly yet inexorably over the course of our life, then there was never a moment when she was not going to find her flock all gathered around her to talk and watch the view. Fifty years is a long time to wait, however, so she could be forgiven for thinking at times that she might never get here. And her sense of blessing and thankfulness for finally seeing her flock arrayed around her was beautiful to watch.

During this week leading up to the amazing birthday party I read an abridged version of an amazing commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon college in 2003. The part that moved me most strongly was this passage:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

I think David is right, but I also think that depending on how you conceive of divinity your spiritual practice can eat you alive as well. If you approach the Divine as the great Judge who made and seeks only that which is full of Light, then you will spend your whole life chasing the Light and fearing your own darkness and the darkness of the world around you. But if you can open yourself to the idea of holism, that all of manifest reality is part and parcel of a great Unity, then there is nothing in yourself you have to fear, nothing in the world you need that you do not have, and everything is holy. As Allen Ginsberg so aptly wrote in A Footnote to Howl:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!

Tribes are a cultural reality for some and, in that case, largely not consciously chosen. But a tribe can also be chosen based on a "common interest or activity" (according to Webster's). At the party yesterday I realized that my friend is not the only one who feels that she has found her tribe, that in fact that feeling in her would not be possible if we didn't all feel the same way. What draws this tribe (or flock, as the case may be) together is not that we all have the same Sun degree. We each are a unique, complicated manifestation of Spirit- but Spirit calls to Spirit. It is the One that shines in the heart of the many and inspires within each of us in our little tribe a deep desire to hold the whole of life, to see in the mess of the world and each other the manifestation of unified divinity.

As blissed out as we can get on each other we are not unaware or unconcerned about the many horrible, painful, dark things going on in the world today. Nor do I think any of us would give a pass in the name of "One-ness" to those who spread hatred, commit violence or justify injustice. Speaking for myself, I have simply stopped assuming that my goal is to fix the world and eradicate darkness, or that such a thing is even possible. In the whole span of human existence there has never been any one person who could. Instead there have been and are many who do what they can. What I can do is simply try to be present to what is and choose whatever will enhance my connection to Spirit in myself and others. There is nothing to fix, there is no end to suffering, there is simply mindfulness, compassion and love in the face of whatever comes.

I've heard it said that with the end of peak oil, which is upon us whether we acknowledge it or not, we need to re-envision what we think of as success, as the definition of a happy life. No longer will we be able to define happiness as the acquisition of more- more money, more stuff, bigger house, doing "better" than our parents. That ever expanding image of happiness that began with the Industrial Revolution is dead because it is driven by fossil fuels, which are disappearing even as you read this. Instead of only thinking of ourselves as successful if we amass "more" we have to begin to re-orient ourselves to the idea of happiness being, as my best friend so aptly puts it, having "just enough". "Just enough", it seems to me, is having a sound roof over your head, healthy food in your belly and a tribe that can hold the whole of you, enabling you to meet what is with an open heart.

Despite knowing intellectually that I have tremendous privilege, that I have more than enough, I have never felt that way. I have let my worship eat me alive. But David Foster Wallace and my tribe, which includes my astrology folks, Matthew and the girls, and old friends far and wide, have begun to re-orient me and I am awash in feelings of blessing for having just enough.

How lucky am I? And it wasn't even my birthday...