5 posts tagged “astrology”

Hey, didn't I already start a new job, last Saturday? Nooope!

Yesterday began my real job. Which is to say that the weekend buffet gig and job yesterday have only the employer in common. They sent me to an out-of-town location only to help with the  Mother's Day buffet.

So yesterday was Day One (hey, wasn't I writing that like three days ago?!) at the local hotel and on the schedule I'll be on from here on out. Nuthin' like back-to-back fresh job starts to keep things, what, interesting, hectic, lively, entertaining to all but me?

Man, it really been like starting two jobs in three days! Different set-ups, different sites, schedules, responsibilities, staff and flow. Most obvious is that the buffet gig was mornings and with people. My "real" job is evenings and working alone. This I did not want; in fact, there's a number of elements about this job that are the opposite of what I'd been praying for, visualizing and affirming during the nine months of looking. It's distressing and troubling but that's a posting better saved for another day if at all.

So Day One, here we are again. Wasn't a bad day; definitely didn't start with the same glow, flow and ease of the false Day One (at the buffet), I'm gonna call it. How do I put it. On several occasions I restrained the urge to leave; that would've been dumb. There was a moment when I ducked into the restroom to cry and splash cold water on my face. Then I bucked up and reapproached the problem with a creative solution.

Mercury retrograde. (For anyone who's interested, the planet reversed course for its three-week period last Thursday.)

Go with the reverse flows, says a retrograding Mercury. Things don't occur as they normally would (and you learned that fo' real with the driving job). Miscommunications and misunderstandings and crossed wires are common; emotions run high and on edge; things and people are out of sync and wacky. It's hard to relax in the haywire but try.}

Whereas after the buffet gig I felt energized (when separating out the effects of a radical sleep shift) and eager to blog the news, after yesterday, I feel hesitant, apprehensive. Again, not that things went badly (it ain't loathsome warehouse job with the dick of a boss!) ... just, not in ease.

Then in my contemplations earlier, the connection struck. There's something very familiar in the essence and whole of this job ... like old territory ... that profound sense of "been here, done that and I've moved on so how the heck did I end up here again?"

Then the synapses fired and with it the cosmic connection. Among other things, Mercury retrograde (which began Thursday past for anyone interested) is about the past. It's common for former issues to reappear as the planet routes its backward journey.

These can be of emotions, thought and action. Unfinished business presents itself. People of the past reappear, in actuality, thought or dreamtime. Merc retro is about the re: re-doing, re-thinking, revisiting, re-negotiating, re-vamping, re-structuring. It's not about launching new endeavors (if done, they'll come with certain challenges that otherwise wouldn't be present). Retro is about matters with former connections and tasks undone. This isn't a bad period, if you know or learn (as I did, from experience) how to flow with the upward stream. It offers a constructive opportunity to clean out cupboards and closets, to tend to matters you've set aside, procrastinated on, failed to do or overlooked. It's the time to go over old stuff and right it, one of repairs, redoing and reappearances.

Now, back to the job. Signs and intuition tell me this job, by its nature, will draw forth for re-examination important and intimate life matters and decisions on my private plate. Uncanny how familiar the job feels (no relation to the actual work). Too often people associate familiar with positive, when in truth it's a comfort zone, one that impedes growth and change. I'm guilty of this myself in certain areas of my life because I can be stubborn and way overly independent for my own good.

That's it. Today I did a thoughts free flow and the door to public access just shut, signaling time to sign out. Today starts my weekend. Due to the whacked-out schedule of radically shifting from nights to mornings then back to nights in a matter of days and the start of not one but two jobs (!!!), life's unbalanced and I've missed the time, space and energy to write my book. My destiny beckons and for that fact the characters. So on this dandy afternoon of hit-and-miss sunshine, I'm gonna keep the music rolling, pour a shot of rye whiskey and get back to what I came to earth to do. So toodles, all.

... and the reel rolls in the film starring Sean Penn as Mars conjunct Pluto.

Enter Saturn square Mars (in 3rd & 11th houses, respectively). Played by Kathy Bates.

Kathy’s a driven workaholic. The glue that holds together the social agency where she works. An underling of two or three but you’d never know it by the workload she carries or the responsibilities she ticks off hoisted her way by her superiors and most of the staff. She’s extremely capable and everyone knows it. When there’s a last-minute assignment to process, paper to file or administrative task to complete, they know Kathy’s their man, the oxen of the bunch who tills the soil for five and pulls the cart to boot.

To her, relaxation means a Sunday off. Most Saturdays she can be found at the office for at least half the day. “Best day of the week to get things accomplished,” she says. “No ringing phones, no interruptions, no harried clients or panicking parents screaming at the top of their lungs ‘you have no right to take my child!’ ”

“Yes we do, when the parent’s too hooked on crank to notice that there’s no been milk in the fridge for a week. Dumb-ass doped-up parents.”

Born to a set of military parents, Kathy’s familiar with instability, transitions and a new school every year, if not six months. The only girl in a clan of four kids, the parents paid her gender no nevermind. “Everyone’s created equal,” they’d say, instilling in her a drive, pledge and devotion to achieve and do her best. Anything less than that was not allowed to take root.

So when the top-level administrative position on paper -- agency assistant director off paper -- came available, she had to go for it. She couldn’t not go for it. The jump in salary was incentive too. She’s built a nest egg for the condo this side of the Jersey line. A home means security and achievement, even if she’s never there to enjoy it.

In her home, plants die from lack of water. She tried an acquarium once, thinking of fish as low-maintenace. She was wrong. Within a few weeks, two were sick; within four, all were dead. There was more to tending an acquarium than sprinkling granules into a tank, she reckoned, like temperature, algae control, the right acquatic plants.

Sighing as she flushes the last lifeless critter down the toilet, she concludes that with the hours she keeps, tending an animal or plant isn't in their best interest and renews her subscription to two magazines and adds a third.

Like Clydesdales wearing blinders, Kathy knows she's ambitious, even driven, but can’t see past the sphere of serving the needs of her group, the families and kids, god the kids who so need the help.

Her social life suffers, becomes the occasional meeting for drinks after work with the clan at the insistence of a coworker who compassionately scolds, “You spend way too much time here, you know.” About half the time Kathy accepts the invitation, usually only after the coworker physically takes the paperwork out of Kathy’s hands, wheels her seated self back from the desk and yanks her into standing position under the armpits. “You're coming with us. End of discussion.”

Kathy’s trapped by her own skills, her capacity to produce like a workhorse and manage with high-level yang energy a ship singlehandedly if need be. Because Mars square Saturn gets things done. It comes with a price.

The price for her is happiness and a balanced, well-rounded life. She knows little of life outside the office anymore with her efforts, focus and constructive, productive energies poured the needs of the collective and the kids.

One night she senses something amiss. Unable to sleep, which is rare, usually she's out like a light on exhaustion, she climbs out of bed robed in her practical nightgown and seats herself in a padded chair by the window of her fifth-story apartment overlooking the streets of New York. Sipping branding to soft classical tunes, she catches sight across the way of a couple silhouetted by a low lamp intimately slow dancing. With a twang of pain played by her heart, she asks herself when she last had  a date.

One ... two ... three ... three and a half years ago, she counts. Not that it was much of a date. It was a fruitless effort on the part of the compassionate coworker to play matchmaker. Turns out it was a work-mate lothario with another notch on the bedpost in mind despite his liquored-up lies promising otherwise. Kathy said bye-bye with a firm handshake. Within a week, her output doubled, and there it's remained since.

She swallows the last of the brandy, shifts her eyes from the lovers to red digits on a clock reading 2:45 a.m. Wide awake, she rises from her chair, slips out of the nightgown into loose-fitting trousers, a long-sleeved buttoned classic shirt and jacket and heads out the door in the very direction, coincidentally, of an all-night meat market, where a man (Sean Penn) is with teary eyes being reminded of his dream.

Astrology’s like a fine and elegant European chocolate torte. Each step, every detail, from melting of the butter at the proper temperature to the tempering of the chocolate, combine to form the complex and creative union that is the torte.

Astrologically, a few planetary configurations under way have not escaped my detection. Specifically, for those who are astro-friendly or curious, transiting Saturn’s sitting smack on my natal Pluto AND concurrently squaring my Mars.

That certainly explains a lot, to me. Probably not to you, though, which is perfectly understandable.

So, the other day when Saturn was at the exact degree of conjunction and square, I was contemplating the aspects individually and holistically and wishing to blog on it yet realizing the complexities did not lend themselves to a single posting. Then it occurred to me. The planetary energies and aspects could be captured and expressed in a story, a movie. So as the camera rolls in my head, I invite you to roll along. The first character you'll meet is:

Saturn conjunct Pluto

Played by Sean Penn. Intense, brooding, dark, sexual, passionate. Frustrated by constraints and limitations, rigidities and habits of the past and present.

The son of a southern European immigrant family. He works in the family bakery in New York (i.e., Little Italy?) started by his great-grandfather as have all generations of men, along with some of their women and children.

He dislikes baking. Has grown increasingly edgy, frustrated, bored by loaves and loaves by the gazillions all day. His dream since boyhood was to open a meat market. He loves the textures, smells, sights. He closes his eyes and the visions and smells dance before him. Dreamt of creating the best meat market in the neighborhood and the best sandwiches too, especially pastrami and ham.

Any time he mentions a meat market, the family slams the door shut. Reminds him of grandfather so-and-so leaving the homeland and traveling the great seas in a shaky vessel to provide a better future for his sons and his sons’ sons. The bakery is the pride of the family and ticket to guilt land.

Insert flashback: Sean as a boy (about 7) on the ritual weekend neighborhood stroll with family, his hand tucked into a relative’s. He stops at the window of a meat market, magnetized, eyes opened wide. Tugged by the hand, he jogs back the adult’s side. “I wanna be that!” he exclaims, eyes lit up, turning and pointing back to the window.

“A butcher?! Don’t be silly,” responds the relative. “We’re bakers. You’ll one day you’ll grow up to be a baker too just like your papa and uncle so-and-so and grandpa so-and-so ...” Then a gentle reminder of history and the great-grandfather and how he journeyed across the seas on a ship to provide a better future and how the bakery was started from loose change in a pocket, blah blah.

He files his passions, dreams away and bakes to the wild support and applause of family and neighborhood. “Best bread in the district,” customers agree. “In all of New York,” another chimes in. Wide grins everywhere. Even Sean smiles when handing loaves over; everyone knows one another. “There you go, Mrs. So and So.” Pause. “And you too have a glorious afternoon, Mrs. So-and-So. Don’t overtoast that pumpernickel now,” he quips with a bye-bye wave of a hand, referencing the tale she still likes to tell about her toaster "without rhyme or reason" shooting off sparks and turning bread to blackened smithereens. (The reason of which she's never informed is the rewiring handiwork of two curious prankster sons.)

Deep down he’d rather be punching dough in the back. Or a bag in the ring where the boxers practice.

He begins suffering sleepless nights that erupt into full-on insomnia. He takes up liquor; not strong enough so he turns to drugs. Loses weight, looks scrawny, malnourished, underfed. “How can that be so with all the bread around!?” his family exclaims, concerned and shocked at his gradual demise.

“Eat eat!” the family encourages, shoving plates of their best breads toward him. He can’t stand the sight. Someone might as well be handing him a gun with a single bullet in a game of Russian roulette.

Sean becomes irritable, short-tempered, raging. Can’t drop the drugs but can’t cope without ‘em either. Frustration eats away at him.

Kept awake by insomnia and the reduced effect of the Ambien on up and unable to stomach one more bad B movie or offers of useless gadgets on the Shopping Network, he dresses and strolls the streets of New York with the weirdos, hookers, pimps and passes an all-night meat market. Looks through the window. Sees the butcher laughing, smiling while handing a white papered bundle to a female over the counter, who receives it with both hands outstretched, a cheerful comment and small laugh. Tears rise in Sean’s eyes.

He knows in that tender momentary flash that his dream is still alive inside.

Change scene.

Enter Saturn square Mars.

Played by Kathy Bates.

To be continued.

I’ve had to do a double take, no, triple, at the uncanny accuracy of the stars and moon as they aligned in a massive dose of energy this past March 3. Astrological circles were agog over the alignment involving Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune -- no worries, folks, I won’t be delving into that minutiae.

What really caused ‘em to sit up and take notice was the full moon and lunar eclipse involving Virgo/Pisces -- an aspect to cause certain folks, myself included, according to astro particulars, to feel edgy and outside their skins -- in simultaneous intimate involvement with the good ol’ shaker-upper planet, Uranus.

In a nutshell, brace for the unexpected, it shouted.

And it sure as hell did, straight into my ear. My full hearing still hasn’t been restored.  

Again, sparing everyone Astrology Lessons 1A, 1B and 1C, the uncanniness is that the aspects played out exactly as one looking at my natal chart could've predicted:

Areas subject to be affected, or, put another way, in the line of fire:
Immediate environment, siblings, neighbors
Matters involving long-distance journeys, travel, places afar

Key planetary players:
Sun - a male, possibly
Moon - a female, probably me
Uranus - Harbinger of sudden surprises, quick-changing conditions, revolts, uprisings.

How these collectively played out:

My roommate, in an abrupt decision, up and moved to Alaska. You can't get more Uranian-lunar eclipse-y than that.

Well, he hasn’t actually moved yet, but he will, when he returns in late April to pick up his stuff, basically all the furnishings in the apartment, that he’s entrusted to my care. He himself experienced his own rush of developments -- that Uranus really knows how to rock a world! -- which is why he hurried to Alaska. In the meantime, I’m sitting in my apartment lonely as hell ‘cause despite the  occasional stress of tight quarters shared by two and his lethargy in tidying up, he’s been a helluva good roommate, a pleasure to get to know and spend time with. He’s a good guy, and it’s because of him, and the way we meshed, that I can actually say it’s been a happy home. And I can say that extremely rarely.

And so it is that a good situation comes to an end. Abruptly. A part of me wants to raise my little fist into the air and shake it and shout: “Damn you, Uranus! Darn you for shakin’ it all up!” But, like the scorpion who stings the frog as he's being transported on its back across the river, Uranus would shrug and reply: “It's my nature.”

And I know that so I’m not really angry as much as perturbed that a really good thing is coming to an end, and against my desires and wishes.

The Uranian/eclipse fallout presents me with decisions, unwelcomed and uninvited guests that they are, involving home and moves -- AGAIN! -- but that’s a big ball of wax I’m not ready to deal with yet. First the grieving. And the gratitude. Then the moving.

And the deeply strange element in all this? This is how it’s always been, I realized, from the day of my earthly debut. Uprootings and upheavals directed first by my family, then me or external conditions. The longest I’ve lived in one place in my long adulthood is five years; most have ranged between a couple weeks and 1-1/2 years. I simply have no concept of or experience with roots.

It’s said home is where the heart is. Mine is my Subaru. But I’m doin’ my damn best to learn about rooting and expand the home to actual living quarters and unstable Uranus ain’t helping my cause. Or maybe it is, in ways I can’t see yet. Whatever’s being orchestrated behind cosmic closed doors, I’ll keep exercising my infant muscle, faith, and forever hold warm thoughts about Jamie and our shared living situation for it has truly been a blessing.