posted February 01, 2005 09:01 PM              

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~*~ Cusp: Gemini/Cancer, Cancer rising, Taurus moon ~*~

posted February 02, 2005 12:09 AM            

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- W.B. Yeats

posted February 02, 2005 12:35 PM              

Hey Steve - something for the poet in your soul ...

Pluto is your shadow, that which you have not yet brought into the light. It is what you are compelled to forget, what you bury, what you refuse to see or feel. When you deny a part of your psyche to yourself, it becomes the devil to you. And you project it out onto others whom you then hate, despise and fear. But it is really the part of your humanity that you cannot let yourself have, for in order to embrace it, whom you know yourself to be would have to die. Yet this is an experience that you have to have, for otherwise your life is wrapped around it like a man wrapped in terror around his doom. If you do not let yourself have your primal fears -- the experiences you have lived through but could not feel, the nightmares that at one time you and you alone in the universe inhabited but could not be present for -- then there will be other things in life that you cannot receive or surrender to, that you will be unable to feel, to see, or to live. This is your shadow.

In the garden of paradise, so it is said, a rose bush once bloomed beneath the tree of knowledge. And within that plant’s first rose, a bird was born. A beauteous and miraculous creature, his song and plumage ever delighted Adam and Eve. However, when they were driven from the garden by the cherub’s flaming sword, an errant spark fell upon the bird’s nest and destroyed him. Yet from a single red egg in the nest a new, solitary Phoenix bird arose. The story goes on to say that the Phoenix now lives in Arabia, and that every hundred years he burns to death in his nest, and that each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises anew from the single red egg.

You are that Phoenix bird, and your immolation once a century is both your physical death and the catharses you embrace that help you become larger, to embrace more of your humanity and thus more of humanity - before you die. Pluto teaches us to enter our shadow, to descend into hell, to learn how to die in order to be reborn.

posted February 02, 2005 01:20 PM            

Thanx for that. Some interesting thoughts.

I'd like to protest, however, the suggestion that i hate or despise anyone. Perhaps this is exactly the part of myself which I refuse to admit into the light, but, I am pretty much distinguished by my ability to sympathize with others indiscriminantly. For better or worse. I'm like Dostoevsky's unfortunately named "Idiot", Prince Myshkin.
I'm The Fool in the Major Arcana.

I wrote a poem once, ostensibly, about Eva Braun; you know, Hitler's girlfriend. I knew nothing about her, as an individual. Evidently, she was as much of a b--- as one has any right to expect her to be, but I just imagined her as a morally wounded bird. As human.

SHE LOVES DEEPLY

SHE DREAMS IN HER SLEEP

AND WHEN SHE CRIES

HER CHEEKS GET WET

Thats the whole poem. It reminds me of something Dostoevsky said, about how the more he loved individuals, the less he loved humanity, but, and the more he loved humanity, the less he could love individuals.

Speaking of the shadow, that shadow squares my Ascendant from the 9th house. Maybe it makes me see myself as more or less spiritual than I really am. Maybe I can't see myself much at all. Not sure yet.

thanx for the words again,
take care,
Steve

posted February 02, 2005 01:54 PM              

I never intended to imply you carry hatred for any idea or person. I was just making an observation of how sometimes you (or anyone) seem to romanticize the world around you, not so much to a rose tinted wonderland but a land of grand ideals served with a fevered intensity. And when the curtain falls and all that is left is very mundane beliefs that need relentless, thankless effort just to stay alive – the myth breaks and your passion is turned to the hatred of disenchantment.

Its that wildly flaming, yet very passive torch of idealism that makes remarkable women like Frau Braun stay with misguided men, that hope that somehow, underneath the debris, there is still the pulse of a dreamer, though barely alive.

That romanticism can paint humanity as a Greek Goddess on a pedestal, so easy to worship and so hard to achieve. Im sorry, but Im a mere mortal, happy to tread the waters of life as they flow to me, forsaking the bigger dreams for the joy and sometimes intense pain of living in this flawed world full of misfits. I think that is the first step towards self-realization, which is ultimately the door towards spirituality. For when you are the most human – when you stand bare naked and ugly in front of the mirror – with all your faults and short-comings exposed, you are the closest to holiness.

posted February 02, 2005 03:06 PM            

So, I suppose I've been largely protected from having to encounter that disillusionment. I've flirted with it, like I've flirted with suicide. I don't know if what I truly need - to say nothing of my temporal wants - is to be disillusioned, or to have my "illusions" restored.

I've been thinking a lot about Neptune, and eastern philosophy, the past few days. Neptune is in the process of squaring my sun, venus, and uranus. Venus is getting the brunt of it right now. Poor, poor, lucky venus.

So, Neptune, like everything else, is what it is, regardless of how it appears. But, how it appears is also how it is. If you are willing to pay the piper when the time comes, then there is nothing illusory about the heaven it promises. Scorpios are prepared to make that leap - with their eyes closed, if need be. I try to close my eyes, to make the leap, but I can see the abyss reflected even more clearly on the skins of my eyelids.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

posted February 02, 2005 03:28 PM            

So its back once more
back up the slope
why do they always ruin my rope
with their cuts?

I felt so ready the other day
had a real foretaste of eternity in my guts

Spoonfeeding me yet another sip
from lifes cup
I dont wont it,
wont take any more of it,
let me throw up.

Life is medium-rare and good I see
And the world full of soup and bread
but it wont pass into the blood for me
just goes to my head
It makes me sick
though others it feeds
do see that i must deny it
for a thousand years from now, at least,
I'm keeping a diet.

posted February 02, 2005 03:31 PM              

I have discovered, to my great joy, that life is self-sustaining. Its strong, its tenacious and no matter how much we try to smote it with our fatalistic prophecies, it finds a way to bloom and flourish, to fight back with all the fragile promise of a better tomorrow. And the beauty it promises shines through and you can hear the echoes of its silvery bells in the peals of a child's laughter or the fragrance of the moist earth after the first rain ...
you can experience the passion of its delicate flame in the fluttering of a buttefly's wings, as it braves the miles and the elements to find its way back home ... how can you protect something that is more powerful, more ageless than you?

How can death ever be scary, how can the vision of regeneration be so terrifying, when life awaits on the other side, its arms wide open and its crazy pace ready to absorb you the very instance you think you are rescued by the oblivion of death?

posted February 02, 2005 03:55 PM            

It is easy to paint a pretty picture of the world, but its hard to live in a picture. Its easy to ask "what is there to fear", when you dont know; when you don;t fear.

I dont want to sit here picking apart all your lovely sentiments. Evidently, it just makes me look "pathetic".

But, you seem to think its about choice, and I seem to think its about destiny. You seem to suggest that evolution is predominantly creative, I think its purely organic.

posted February 03, 2005 01:44 PM            

First off, you used the word "pathetic" in reference to me and my life. I need you to see that this is not just an instance of me being a thin-skinned Scorpio. I feel things. It's what I do. When I read the word "pathetic", I FEEL that word. And a word like that, i feel it in the guts of my soul. That's how i know what it means.

I'm not saying you should censor yourself with me. But, I know that, if you could only feel the palpable self-disgust that I feel, when I come upon such a word directed at myself, i know you would instinctively think to find another word.

But, more important even than the discomfort occassioned by my immediate, emotional response to such a word, are the psychological effects. I dont know about you, but, I've found that negativity does not motivate me. On the contrary, it appeals to my instinct for self-destruction.

some thoughts for your consideration:

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life. - Sigmund Freud

Anyone can criticize. It takes a true believer to be compassionate. No greater burden can be borne by an individual than to know no one cares or understands. - Arthur H. Stainback

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. - Virginia Woolfe

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below. - Francis Bacon

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy. - Mark Twain

Optimism is cruel. - Arthur Schopenhauer

With the joyous and the free,
thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! that hast forgot
all but those who need thee not.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

I will repond on the topic of free will elsewhere.

posted February 03, 2005 01:56 PM              

I never used the word 'pathetic' to refer to you, your life or anything held close by you. I would never be soo boorish as to do that. That was just a generalisation of how the world sometimes seems to be - the exterior of you and your dreams can be such a let-down. It does not in any way refer to you, and would NEVER be meant to denigrate anything abt someone as profound and adorable as you ...

Inspite of the impression my sometimes less thought over words might convey, I am actually quite smitten by you and your confused yet passionate musings endear you all the more. But thats besides the point.

True, my Virgo rising sometimes makes me dole out sharp nitpicky barbs that might well be undeserved but I would never do that to someone like you. I am just trying to share a wonderful and sorta abstract idea I have with someone who, after a loooong time, appealed to my intellect and challenged me.

posted February 03, 2005 03:41 PM            

It's difficult for me to have faith in the possibility that somebody out there is actually reading my words and is able to get a fairly good bead on me. I tend to think of myself as that blip on your screen - oops, you just missed it.

Maybe, because of your strong earth qualities, you can read these words with more sense than I imagined they could possess, in my watery, only half-imagined imaginings. ((that sounded dumb))

I don't know,... its all Greek to me. I'm afraid I come off all wrong... or maybe i'm afraid I am all wrong.

posted February 03, 2005 03:45 PM              

What is it with you? Why cant you make up yur mind on the blacks and whites in me? For one minute I am the blackest of she-devils, out to injure your rather sensitive heart and the next I am a jester in your court, forced at the risk of my life to sing your praises ...

posted February 03, 2005 04:00 PM            

understand, I recognize how impressionable I am right now in my life.

you speak about people "taking your power",
and you can see the state I am in,
how i have placed my fate in the hands of my sisters, how i am nearly convinced of my powerlessness,... how i cling to consolations.

how i cannot risk believing in them;
how I cannot risk doubting them.

posted February 03, 2005 04:19 PM            

you're very kind and i believe in your sincerity, and it really is like food for my soul. its embarrassing, but im just gratified to think that my words really do have an effect, that someone can relate to them... that they are not as out of outrageously out of context as they seem in this century, in this country....

posted February 03, 2005 04:38 PM              

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~*~ Cusp: Gemini/Cancer, Cancer rising, Taurus moon ~*~