The following conversation came from an email with one of my favorite people. It’s a very different – if totally apropos - take on many of the influences we’re all going though now. I’ve edited out personal references and added in a few ‘bridge’ words, but otherwise, this is just me in conversation with my friend.
Such is life when you correspond with a metaphysical type, right?
- Boots Hart, CAP
There are two parts of this conversation. The first is this person. The second is how you feel about what’s going on with this person.
It’s one of my most favorite things...realizing how life mixes us together so that through others we experience everything we are supposed to learn. Or supposed to have ‘learned’ us!
Anyway....this person is in the middle of a long-term total and wholesale life transformation. Granting that there are eclipse ‘seasons’ twice a year (every year), I’m thumbing back through my ephemeris and I have to go all the way back to September 2007 before I find where the ‘life is changing’ pattern.
I feel their pain. Honestly.
I will also note that the eclipses on this chart began a relatively easy way with more stressful eclipses working in, ramping up season by season.
Here’s the lore: eclipses are a form of transit (evolutionary process) which lasts a full 3 years. When we have overlapping eclipses (as we do in this case) this both describes the magnitude of the life change and – in most cases – what it actually takes to get us to change.
Life is life – it’s not personal, it just is. If we refuse to cooperate and allow ourselves to be moved by gentler swells, life sends bigger waves...and eventually tsunamis...to get us to move.
We are, in essence, arrogant to think that we know better than Life.
We are, in essence, arrogant to think that we know better than Life.
We know that. We see that when we see people endlessly chase youth with how they dress or endless rounds of plastic surgery. We don’t see that as easily when we see someone devoted to some effort which we think of as ‘good.’ The lesson is that all things must change. Nothing is as consistent as change, and when we refuse to change, life changes us ...so that in essence, we change whether we want to or not.
At the crux of this is something we might refer to as actually being a form of personal arrogance. This person is vested in an internal conviction as to who they are ‘supposed to be.’ This is like as not, an inherited trait – one would guess it was taught them or bequeathed to them via the maternal side (which wasn’t all positive – that’s plain.)
In essence, this person doesn’t ‘know’ how to be anything other than who they have been being – which again sounds curiously familiar in the world of our various conversations. There is a startling unwillingness in today’s world to acknowledge what seemingly “functional” human beings may not know. This person doesn’t know how to have fun in the same way others don’t know how to react/interact with/around others - as we’ve discussed.
They have found an obviously successful set of compensatory occupations. But that’s what they are - compensations. So this person has become caught in a ‘functionality’ trap which does not give them sufficient internal nurturance-input-allowance to grow. And as I’m sure your learned friend the rabbi has said many times in many ways (paraphrasing others in the process), when we stop growing, we start dying.
This person is undergoing the cycling of their mentality, a process which has to start with a recognition that what 'was' is no longer. Nor are they going to return to ‘that’ ever again. There is still plenty they can do – and if they will start valuing themselves as a person and not just for their functionality as part of a system, they can possibly get to a place where they are not only truly functional but also get properly nourished and nurtured by what they do with their days.
This is a worldwide theme of this moment. There are some who are experiencing it more acutely than others, but we are all going through some form of it.
Now...on to the ‘you’ part. Since it's pretty obvious that you care about this person, this lesson is for you a two-fold dynamic.
One: that you should learn the limit of your personal ability to help and/or “rescue” someone else.
Two: that you should take your talents and intelligence and start aiming that at the greater problem: the world’s willingness to waste the greater potentials of people by not being willing to actually embrace our own wounded-ness.
We each have an area of 'not knowing.' Many, if not most of us learn to compensate exactly as this person has, exactly as you have, exactly as I have. That ‘we all have limits’ you are so fond of telling me has a great deal of validity, yes. But it also is merely an excuse for our unwillingness to see where we each need help, where we each need to be taken by the hand and gently led through learning how to do something unfamiliar to us.
The change this person need to go through is as painful as it is to you because what they are relearning touches on your un-knowingness. That’s how it works – we get drawn to people who will evoke and arouse in us things we need to learn about…as often through challenge as delight.
I hope that at some point you grasp the real point in your life – namely that when people say ‘I don’t know how to do that’ they are as honest and as earnest as you are being in saying you don’t know how to cope with this situation and how to help your friend.
Give it some thought: the thing you don’t want to believe is the truth here…that you most want to believe is the fallacy. This is the precept of Neptune, for which we are given the primal instruction: allow yourself not to know.
When the student is ready,
the teacher will come.
(And seeing that today I’m playing teacher, I’ll take pretzels instead of an apple – they're handy and no problem...you know how much I like pretzels!)
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