Pluto was too small, too distant, too insignificant to be a planet, astronomers said, so yesterday, after 76 years, they demoted it.
In astrology, the sun defines identity, and the constellation it was in at the time of your birth is what most of you know as your horoscope sign. Some of you read the horoscopes in the paper, and what they say will happen to you on a given day more often than not doesn’t happen, because it’s bull. Those things are based on one thing only – the position of the sun. There are seven other planets, a moon, and several other important factors influencing your life at every moment, none of which are taken into account by newspaper horoscopes. While working as a professional astrologer in Colorado, the horoscopes I typed out for my clients were generally between seventy-five and a hundred pages in length.
The position of each planet at the moment of your birth tells me something different about you. Venus, for example, tells me how you love, what you love, what you are attracted to, what you find beauty in, what is of value to you, including your financial situation. Saturn tells me what makes you sad, what hurts you, what will cause pain, suffering, guilt, insecurity; how responsible you are, how ambitious, the traditions or rituals you uphold. Uranus represents freedom and rebellion, and the United States was born under its influence. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were astrologers. Denotations and connotations of Uranus are hidden in many of our national documents and symbols.
But little “insignificant” Pluto is the most important planet of all. It tells me about the evolutionary journey of your soul, where it’s been, what you’ve learned through countless lives, your purpose for this life, your karma, and what you are here to learn. Regardless of what astronomers think, that’s not going to change. Pluto is the planet of the underworld, of crime, rape, kidnapping, death, dying, regeneration, reincarnation, renewal, and rebirth, all attributed to the myth of Hades, Persephone and Demeter. It rules the masses. The constellation Pluto is moving through at any given time affects us all. When it was in Aries, for instance, we underwent an industrial revolution. In Taurus, a financial one. In Gemini, communications became important. Radio, telegraph, telephones, and newspapers became mainstream. When in Cancer, the emphasis in our lives was on our families. Women, for the most part were homemakers and caregivers who didn’t have outside jobs. When Pluto moved into Scorpio, AIDS became an epidemic. History repeats itself. We know that. But we do not live long enough to fully understand all that Pluto renews because its cycle through our solar system is 248 years.
What’s most important is the house Pluto was in at the time of your birth, and the places in your chart it transits during your lifetime. It’s the planet of extremes. It can work so slowly, so subtly, you don’t notice the effect it has had on your life until you look back on it years later. If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve pointed out an important Pluto transit and heard the client say, “Yes! That was a turning point in my life!” On the other hand, if you are ignoring your inner voice (your soul), if you refuse your soul’s attempt at growth, Pluto becomes volcanic and atomic, and wreaks total devastation. It pulls the rug out from under you. It alters the landscape of your life completely and permanently.
If anyone wants to test this theory, I will point out an important Pluto transit in your life if you are willing to supply your birth information (which will be kept strictly confidential according to the Ethics of Astrologers) and are also willing to verify in this blog the event in your life that occurred at the time of that transit. You will be required to scan your birth certificate and send it to me. Everything on the certificate may be hidden except for the following information: name, date, place, and the exact time of birth. The offer is limited to the first three requests I receive, and my family is exempt.
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The tub, with its sloping back and claw feet, fills with all the words from all the books I have ever read. I immerse myself in them, separating alliterations and metaphors with the scissor-cut motion of my outstretched legs, leaving only their impressions in the wake. Lavender prose surges forward, then retreats, as I reach to add warmer words, or cooler ones, turning the faucet handle like a page. They gush in, rising above the overflow drain where the pipes gurgle and swallow them whole. They are clear words, tinged with blues, deep and thoughtful, scalding and soothing. Tears and laughter and lovely turns of phrase flow over the rounded edges and spill across the floor, going everywhere and getting into everything. They calm and incite, express love and bitterness, loss and hope. I impale one on the soft bar of soap with my pen, where I can examine it and maybe make something of it. I wash it away and make a stab at another. I raise my hands and let them drip through my fingers, searching for those that will make a splash on the page.
Flood and Fringes proposed an experiment based on the first thirty blogs listed on Sunday Scribblings' August 12th post. Thirty bloggers posted on the subject, "Who Can I Still Be?" Then participants in the experiment go to those blogs in the order they are numbered, read the posts, and choose one sentence from each post to create their own post on who they can still be. It was fun, and very interesting, and you should try it!
This is my post:
I like the road I've taken, even if it has had some hard turns. This has been an incredible struggle.
I stretch with the satisfaction of the blessed and thank the Goddess for my bounty, feeling like my problems should pale into insignificance when I hear/read/see other peoples problems.
I will live my life with eternity in mind. I think that would be an ok plan.
This land full of mystery, wonder galore. I wanted to have more faith, more passion, and less sadness. You see, I've always been a bit of a drifter, lacking clear direction and falling in and out of jobs, homes and loves as they came along. “Okay, maybe just a little longer,” I thought. There is not an ounce of political correctness in this old girl. And to realize how little I appreciated it when I had young skin of my own.
I've been lying in bed trying to get to sleep, but it's now 1.20 a.m. and I'm still struggling. Poor and starving, maybe, but true to myself.
Anyway. So many crossroads in my life, where had I chosen a different route, my destiny might have been forever changed. I’d be crying one more tear.
So even though I'm a little depressed, I cannot recapture my innocence or unlearn/unknow life's lessons. And I hate that I pine for this self, like the girl who can't forget she was prom queen. But, as usual, everything remains quiet. If God is here, he keeps it very quiet.
I think I would like to be a ghost for a while, to observe the living. It’s not enough to create a happy life for myself if there’s so much pain and suffering all around me. This is hard.
I can draw on experience and smooth rocky paths for those less fortunate, help refugees and displaced persons: the victims of an unbalanced world, navigating shifting sands.
Do not remember plotting out this sometimes ordinary life of mine, but I know I can't, in good conscience, place the blame anywhere else. I can still be someone who lives with love every moment of every day. Do it in a heartbeat.
Walking down my road has not been an easy one. Yes, there have been many blessings along the way that I will always be thankful for.
Trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. ~ St. Augustine
I was asked today what metaphysics means. The answer isn’t an easy one, and may depend on who answers. “Meta” means beyond, so it’s basically those things that lie beyond or outside the physical world. It’s a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the nature of the universe - the study of being, or reality. It attempts to answer such questions as: What is real? Is it natural or supernatural?
You can Google the word and find the mathematical and scientific hypotheses, but I won’t present them here because I don’t understand them. I leave that stuff to people whose IQ’s are much higher than mine. I think science divides metaphysics into two categories: mysticism and the occult. Before anyone freaks out on me, no, I’m not playing around with black magic. The word occult actually means “hidden,” or “esoteric,” which is why I don’t automatically shun people who tell me they are witches, practitioners of Wicca, or pagans, because in most cases, what they mean is that they are attempting to live in harmony with the universe. I suppose some of them delve into the black arts, which is why it’s not for me. I don’t even want to get close to that, or have people who don’t understand it lump me in that category.
Mysticism is the attempt to know God, or The Source of the Universe.
Occultism is the study and practice of things beyond our normal five senses, which is broken down further into knowing and doing.
In the knowing category, we have intuition, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, retrocognition, mediumship, déjà vu, and a priori knowledge. We don’t know how we know these things, but we know them.
In the doing category, we have psychokinesis, telekinesis, astral projection, remote viewing, lucid dreaming, ghost hunting, and the divining arts, such as astrology, numerology, palmistry, Tarot, and a host of others.
I believe in God for many reasons, but one of the big ones is that I can see order in the chaos of our lives. I see patterns which repeat themselves – shapes, numbers, cycles – and I can see how it all works together, how everything is dependent on another thing, how it’s all interrelated. To me, it only makes sense that if I am holding a book in my hand, that ultimately, there had to be a bookmaker. I cannot lie under the stars at night contemplating the vast infinity of the universe, compare it to the infinitesimal reproductive system of the damn gnat hovering around my head, and believe it’s all an accident. I didn’t come by my belief in God through church or organized religion. Two things slammed it home for me: being visited by the dead, and the study of astrology.
Those two things were enough to send me off on my own quest for the answers. I firmly believe, although I often find it difficult to accept when bad things happen to me, that there is a reason for everything. The Law of Karma makes it so. I have studied most of the major religions of the world: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, and a few of the primal religions. I have read their literature: The Holy Bible, the Kabbalah, the Bhagavad-Gita, and so on. I’ve read the obscure texts, too; the Gnostic Gospels, dead sea scrolls, Christian apocrypha, the Jewish pseudepigrapha, the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, and everything else I could get my hands on. The most interesting thing I’ve found is that there is one thing every single one of them agrees upon – the Law of Karma. They call it different things; the golden rule, an eye for an eye, do unto others, but they all mean the same thing. Even scientists who are skeptical of the existence of a Divine Being must admit it, because it’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What we do, say, and think comes back to us eventually. If you get right down to it, I think God wants one thing from us: to love each other and to help and be kind to one another. If we all did that, there would be no war, poverty, or illness in the world. Unfortunately, I think it will take massive destruction of not only the earth, but obliteration of Mars, Saturn, and Uranus before that will ever happen.
My search of the metaphysical did not end there. I have read most of the Greek philosophers, as well as enough of Aquinas, Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Comte, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, Kirkegaarde, Neitzshe, Rand, Foucault, Sartre, and Eliade, to get a decent overview of their beliefs. I’ve studied mythology, and astronomy. I have read about the Samadhi, reincarnation, the Secret Doctrine, the Rosicrucians, and teachings of the mystics. In order to know what I believed, I needed something with which to compare it.
As for the occult side of metaphysics, I’ve tried them all, with lesser and greater degrees of success. For me, astrology works best, but that’s just me. Your path may be different. Yep, I know I'm strange. But you like me anyway, right?
There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words, realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney
