Hello Reader,

This one is really just a bit of a natter. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid all the talk about the choreography of the sky ballet right now or avoided feeling any of the energy shifts, then this might not land. I think it reads like a reflection made during mid-flight turbulence with the seatbelt sign on. You know how they say everyone believes in God on an aeroplane…

Cx

Stardust and clock poems

You may have heard me repeat the truism that, IMHO, you can’t believe in astrology any more than you can believe in a language. One does not simply ‘not believe in Spanish’. For the last seven years I’ve leaned heavily into the “language”. As I have moved between countries and cultural communities, the stars up in the sky have opened up dialogues about our shared heritage of looking to the stars for navigation and inspiration in equal measures. In each conversation, I learn how they are named, studied, calculated and codified in different parts of the world. The inherent geocentricity leads to anthropocentrism as we, the centre of our universe on this planet, look outwards. I have often taken comfort in this seemingly universal collective phenomenon. Even if we look to the sky to simply understand the earth a little better, our eyes, brains and mouths are connected to, and part of, the circuit. The myelinated tendrils of our nervous systems connect the floating debris of the universe with the stardust that makes up our bodies - our bones - dense celestial matter that gravity tethers to our mother, Earth.

Sundial and/or timekeeper

Astrology is complicated. Imagine looking at an expensive handmade Western, say Swiss, timepiece and thinking you’ll know how to fix it if it breaks. Or that you could take it apart and put it back together again. Most of us can tell the time, if we care to; sun, moon, rising - houses, trines, squares. But what of the craftsmanship of the expensive timepiece handmade on the Arabian Peninsula, or Greece, or India?! What of the “niche” handmade timepieces made by smaller but no less significant geographical and ethnic communities in other parts of the world? Ah…we do our best. We connect with the work and words of practitioners, scholars and scribes, swimming in the slipstreams of resonance. On some level we hope, trust, expect that those we follow refine their trade by practice and study. We in turn learn from them, perhaps by reflection, and our understanding expands.

Why am I rambling about the astrological lens? Well, it’s that for me – I am not an expert – I’m a jack of all trades with a bag full of lenses. Time isn’t linear, but we measure it on a straight line, a round face or a four-sided sheet of paper or screen, id est, a natal chart? You already know that your natal chart is a snapshot of the sky at the moment those who were present at your birth decided you had definitively arrived; a figurative screenshot of the clock face. A statement of celestial intent that, combined with subsequent chronological transits, forms a personal clock map of sorts…clock riddle, clock poem?! In translation, a series of imagined existential enjambments worthy of something in the style of William Carlos Williams?

Ethereal tools for self-awareness

All the ethereal ways that I know are rooted in my understanding of myself and the collective, through various lenses: cartomancy, clairvoyance, semiotics, psychology. The zodiacal is a lens too, one that I, you, we, can look through to explore self-awareness; look back and reflect. I concede, it doesn’t resonate with everyone, but what was happening (in the sky) when that happened (in my life)?

This is the section where I give you a little astro-info and show you how it relates to my personal ‘clock poem’ to encourage you to do the same, or not. For instance, Pluto, specifically, is digging deep right now. In astronomy, beyond the perishing frigidity of Neptune, the dwarf planet hangs, even icier, in the Kuiper Belt. In astrology, the archetype of transformation has been assigned to the former planet. I say transformation; what I really mean is the ‘subsoiler’ of all ploughs, tilling the earth of our ‘souls’, revealing the parameters of our deepest selves – to ourselves.

In the language of the sky, I arrived here at the last degree of Pluto in Libra (10H). Pluto in Libra, what a time to be born. Hot on the heels of ‘liberations’ of the 70s and inelegantly bumping into my, and the first year of, Pluto in Scorpio (11H) ...then Pluto in Sagittarius (12H) …Capricorn (1H) …now Aquarius (2H). The sum total of the activity of my sky-clock-poem, every planet I have – personal and generational. If that means little to you, the takeaway is that Pluto has been digging up dirt on me, on a karmic and personal level, at the behest of daddy Saturn (the father of time) for lesson after lesson, since day zero. So, when I pluck the astro-hindsight lens out of my bindle and view my last four decades through it, I can see that we might measure time linearly, but it isn’t incremental. There are folk out there that know what I mean when I say, I feel as though I’ve lived two or three times four lifetimes in forty years!

The value here is in the eye, in the use of the archetype as a lens. How you use it; how we use our lenses for each other and, perhaps, how we don’t.

What has this got to do with cards, ma’am?!

All this star talk, but didn't you subscribe to the cartomancer!? How does this relate to the cards…or the other stuff? Well, unlike the playing cards and the extensive gaming and gazing done with those, I bought my first tarot deck at age nineteen. To return to the expensive timepiece analogy, at that point in my life, the deck, like the natal chart, was just a facsimile of a watch. A glossy full-page advert in a magazine (remember those?!). Over the years, what I’ve found is that the cards and the natal chart might as well have been bones or dice. Even now, the medium varies, but what I’ve always had was the gift of seeing. The shining, if you will. For a quarter of my life, I rejected it, swore blind it was rubbish. For the rest of it, I’ve looked to the symbols and the signs to verify what I could see without them.

Back when I was just starting to really grasp and translate the complexity of natal charts, an acquaintance asked me to read her chart for her - she had a question. I did. Her feedback was that I had told her exactly what the medicine woman she had visited recently had said to her…You may have also heard me say that all roads lead to the same place or that the quality of the message depends on the clarity of the connection! Also, the message is what it is; sometimes you just need to hear it and no more.

There are times when I look at a birth chart (mine or someone else’s) and I just see it. I see the thing. It’s one of the reasons why I look at mine frequently, like a mindful traveller looking at their ticket or at a map or the street signs. It’s the same intuition that I can feel when the question is asked, and I look at the cards.

Slowly, but surely, as I have to sift through the dark, moist ‘soil’, pulled up by Pluto, my hand and breath steady as I look at my own cards for myself in circumstances when I would normally ask someone else to do so.

Breathe on, little sister, breathe on

It’s here, in this place, that I find the magic of my own quotient of stardust. It’s a place that I believe every single one of us has, inside ourselves. It’s messy; human, imperfect. Eternally my embodied flotsam, jetsam and lagan bob along on an ocean of all that is – for want of a better phrase – the dualism of love.

I hope that you hear your inner voice too. That your inner light shines bright and you allow it to burst through your material being. That you see your gift, your own version of seeing or shining, whatever that looks like, and you too recognise its magic.

In the past, or perhaps in more than a few parallel lifetimes, I like to think that maybe I live in a cottage in a nice part of the village and people stop by to chat, barter and bring news, and in return leave with an answer, an insight or ethereal news from a loved one crossed over.

For the moment though, it’s mostly all chits and pixels, so if you need me, you know where I am.

The bookend song at the end

Normally this is where I tap the Devourer of Books for a book recommendation. However, today is a song day. This one just really felt appropriate.

Johnny Cash's version of Satisfied Mind on American VI.

If you have one that resonates for this issue and would like to share, please do!

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