Astrologer’s Notebook: Trees, Times, Cycles

Eucalyptus Chapmaniana - two of which until just this morning

stood outside my window. Now there's just one. It looks lonely.

photo credit: Patche99z (Mar 2009)

I was woken up today by a cluster!%# of chainsaws igniting outside my window. Undoubtedly short on sleep this was not a great start.

At first I just lay there. But finally the noise would not be denied; I went to my window and looked outside to find that a whole gang of stubby workmen were cutting down trees.

I got upset. Those trees are my friends. They offer shade in a climate which can be brutally toasty and I don’t like living in a/c. When I open the window and even a bare bit of breeze stirs, the rustling leaves are nature’s music. More than once I have put a hand against those trees to help me balance as I got a pebble out of my shoe or sandal.

Those trees have even been safe harbor for the crickets I’ve learned how to take outside in a cup. Even on the rainiest nights, when puddles had become pools and the lawn was no place for something with teeny tiny legs, those trees have provided me with a place to put the crickets and the crickets with a place to hide out.

Locating my cell phone, I put in a call to the manager, not as surprised as she was to hear me start to cry.

Apparently the son who has inherited the building from his father thinks we need less trees, more…space (read: concrete). I’ve been patient, I’ve been supportive, I’ve even liked many of the workmen who have over the past 8 months interrupted peace on an unscheduled (as far as I knew) basis while work around here has gone along. It’s a big improvement that now there is both cold and hot water in all the units instead of some getting all of one and others getting mostly all of another.

But the trees? Like I say, trees are my friends. It’s not that I’m a ‘tree hugger,’ its that I grew up safe with my pets and safe with what was outdoors and not so safe with human beings. A tree…I learned long ago that a tree is a thing which will always be there for you to lean against. For you to sit under. For you to just look at.

Except if you cut them down.

The Maya had (and maybe still have) a wonderful thought that the trees are our cousins. They mean that in the life sense…however they knew, the Mayans seem to have understood the precept we call E=mc2’d really well.

We exist, we’re alive; the trees exist, they're alive. That makes us cousins.

Somewhere once long ago I read something about this…how if you’re ever in need, you can go to a tree. In their long slow pulsing of life there is reassurance and a calming effect which helps us to endure.

Except if you cut them down.

Lying back down on my bed, there was nothing to do but allow my desperate feelings of being human and mortal and doomed to certain kinds of helplessness escape. It took a while…the sobs were truly sorrowful and heartfelt and pitifully resigned. All the things I have loved and lost, that I have feared and been unable to do anything about…it all came spilling through my feelings, through my tears, through the heated breath of my scarcely muffled cries.

And in my continuing effort to try and explain all – not just to you, but to myself – I realized this was one of those moments which just prove that cycles work in a cyclic nature. Just under twelve years ago – one Jupiter cycle back – I was trying to reconcile myself to being disabled. I was beginning a journey through my past (Jupiter = understanding) which would ultimately allow me to break out of the emotional prison I had lived in for so very long because I was too afraid to feel. Because I didn’t know how to feel everything which had so overwhelmed me for so very, very long.

 Planet Jupiter

photo credit: NASA/JPL - Caltech

I still don’t know how to deal with it all. But I have learned there’s nothing else to do but try.

Roughly fourteen years ago – half a Saturn cycle ago – I was dealing with the death of my father. Now, just now, I’m realizing how for all that I feared him and adored him, I also truly, truly loved him.

And how much...how horribly I miss him, testiness and all.

 Saturn as photographed by Cassini

photo credit: NASA/JPL - Caltech

My natural mother died about nine months ago now. Facing her legacy is likely to be much harder and I’m not even tempted to push. First my father…then maybe I can begin solving the question of where my sister ‘went’ when she died when I was still so very young.

Apparently it’s time.

Over these next weeks and several months you’ll hear me talk a lot about solar eclipses and such. That post on Uranus/Black Moon Lilith...(LINK)...of a couple of days ago? The sudden breakage and social/societal aspects are apparent. To me, as an individual, my building management is my 'greater societal power.' Everything has levels.

But to thinks...we’re only just in the ‘breakdown’ period of the Gemini eclipse to take place on June the 1st.

(Big sigh....)

Gemini…thought. Yes, my thoughts – like everyone’s thoughts, our idea of life and this world…those mental barriers are definitely giving way. When I write this blog I try to put thoughts out there in a collected and unbiased way so that everyone can use them and yet…and yet what may not seem as apparent is how in my life they’re just as muddled, just as hard to get through.

Over these past days, entire flocks of tornados ravaged a swath of the eastern United States. Many – if not most of us - will not see tornados bearing down on us like something out of The Wizard of Oz.

But the effect of life catching us up and tossing us about like straws in a time storm…that we will surely experience.

 Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939

film version of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard Of Oz." What's odd is

that I hunted this image down for an entirely different reason just

yesterday - and now it seems so unexpectedly apt. The two sides
of anything is part of what we are always meant to recognize, I guess.

copyright: Turner Entertainment (source/Wikipedia)

The eclipse which will follow the June 1st Gemini eclipse is a July solar eclipse in Cancer. And all these issues about family and life having come to its inevitable end and my home…those are all typical Cancer things to be sure.

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While I was typing this, I got a phone call. When everything began to come crashing down this morning I called the physical therapy lab where I’m doing rehab and canceled my appointment for this afternoon.

No, I didn’t want to go outside. I didn’t want to confront the bleak reality out there – my world having been changed as if on a whim, with no regard to life or feelings or the little bit of security some of us have in times of overhanging, overwhelming stress. I’m not living in Japan or Libya, but in the past just-year-plus I've been through being flat out threatened...I’ve lost what I had come to think was my best friendship of all time. Then my primal early abuser – my mother – died. I’ve had incredibly tough financial moments (the ‘where’s the food bank?’ kind)...and I've been in a car accident, after which came not just the physical pain and struggle, but a truly, truly horrible experience with the insurance company (theirs) which apparently still thinks accepting liability for an accident doesn’t necessarily come with handling all manner of damage created by the accident.

Through it all, I’ve done my best to cope, and be there for others – including everyone here in blog-land. It’s all we can do…be here for each other.

Like trees are here for us.

We all need a little stability…a little upstanding-ness. And if there isn’t someone strong to lean on…let there at least be a tree.

So the phone rang. The voice on the other end was the truly kind soul who mans the front desk. He had gotten my message and more than that, he had heard my pain. Is there anything we can do to help? 

I told him it was ‘just’ something here at the complex. 

Oh…I’m sorry. If you need anything, we’re here, okay? It’s not silly. We all go through things. I wanted you to know we’re here for you if you need us. 

Maybe it’s time to learn to lean on people? I’m not sure. Do we, can we trust those whose initial action seem so hurtful and insensitive?

Whatever’s going on in my life, it’s an adjustment. I know – I get that. I’m feeling…eclipsed – yes, that too.

I still just wish this all didn’t have to come with the taking of a natural life. If I can learn not to kill crickets, then surely we can learn that a tree is more precious that another slab of concrete, no?

And if one life - any given life - doesn't have value, what does that say about the rest of life - including us? Human ego may say we're 'better' than what else exists on our planet, but in the greater realm of the universe, is that true? And if it isn't true, what is the cost of cladding ourselves in a cloak of self-important denial?

Today I know that part of that cost...one form of that cost is having life present us with what we are least able to handle in any given moment. My life has been filled with a sense of lack of safety, emotional security, feeling I belong somewhere and that there's somewhere to belong.

A tree was felled. With it went a 'wooden fence' with which I apparently tried to ward off the world by denying what my life has long been all about.

That's what eclipses do. So...be ready - not that it matters. When we are cut down, so we do fall.

The big trick is figuring how to...or finding the strength to want to...get back up. It's called growth. Growth doesn't come without challenge. It's why we call them 'growing pains'?

But there are times when I'm sure we all ask...how grow can I go?

From an Astrologer's Notebook: Venus' Planetary Station

 A digitally altered version of NASA/JPL's photo of Venus

Venus went retrograde last Friday - October 8th. It was an interesting week, listening to people. So much emotional and physical turbulence, confrontations, frustration and bouts with depression (or whatever one found personally 'depressing' to have to deal with).

Friday brought much to a head.

But as Venus actually went into retrograde, personally, I felt the mood begin to lighten. I noticed that my attitudes towards various matters had shifted into a more reflective, cautious mode. My focus turned more towards things in my life which needed preparing for, straightening out (or up) and that which needed to be pruned, repaired or let go of.

With the two-day planetary station "leeway" period ending as of Sunday, I was interested - not overjoyed, mind you, but intrigued by a series of events happening in the lives of people I know personally.  Those who had continued to focus on 'others' were taking the hardest 'hits' and finding life more sour.

Those who had shifted from the perspective of Venus as ruler of Libra and the relationship with 'the other' (where we tend to project the most) to a Venus as ruler of Taurus (as oppositional sign to Scorpio, where Venus is now retrograde) were doing better.

And those who by natural inclination are more of the Taurean type who recognizes all comes - first and foremost - from our own self worth, our values and how we utilize our native abilities or inclinations (Taurean resources)...they were already contemplating how to move ahead. Not instantly, but with a plan. By working through a process.

Some of my friends are into astrology, but not all of them. So that this 'trend' to shift towards consideration of personal values, abilities and how all could be worked on or reshaped or put/packaged differently in order to be better received (Scorpio) in the long run...

...As an astrologer, I just find it interesting to see trends and transits at work in the lives of people, companies and governments which plainly have no knowledge of astrology.

It says so much. But does it mean that by knowing you can go from inertia to going full guns with the flip of a mental switch? No! Yet it does suggest something of the 'going with the flow' nature. If you can figure out how to go with the flow in a direction which suits you, you'll expend less energy and get farther in less time, no?

Some of us will use this retrograde to figure out how to do that. Some of us will have life get sufficiently murky or sticky that in spite of our not wanting to change, we get forced to.

And some of us are inclined to realize that the old saw 'wherever you go, there you are' is really true. We can't be satisfied without being basically happy and secure - and it's that security part which is getting tested during this time.

Among other things, Venus retrograde in Scorpio puts us in situations which test our understanding of what 'security' really means to us. A couple of examples:

Some think that's all about money - and for them, maybe it is. But why? What would they feel if they didn't have money?

Some think having someone to love and be loved by is security. What would they feel if they were totally on their own?

Knowing who we would be if we were 'without' and how that affects us, what it suggests we are or aren't comfortable with about ourselves...that's ultimately what Venus retrograde is about.

I hope to help my friends, be there for anyone lost in some patch of personal darkness and do some work on myself. So far I've wrangled my insurance company into stepping up to get my car fixed after an accident over a month ago where I was not at fault. That's plainly their Scorpio-Venus job. But maybe more important to me is that in doing that, I recognized my ability to get one of these corporate megaliths to cooperate with me hasn't vanished just because I left the 9-to-5 workforce.

And that makes me more comfortable with me, setting the stage for me to feel capable to get other things done...wish me luck!

So here's to your Venus retrograde journey being enlightening and empowering, too. I'd also enjoy hearing hear your Venus retrograde stories - as would (I'm sure) other readers of this blog....which much to my surprise is, in less than six months, being read by people on every continent except Antarctica.

(Anyone know anyone working at one of the science stations in Antarctica?)