"What is the future? What is the past? What are we?
What is the magic fluid that surrounds us and conceals the things we most need to know?
We live and die in the midst of marvels." Napoleon Bonaparte
It is in the early morning hours of the summer solstice. A late-night thunderstorm has just moved through, the darkness filling with flashes of lightning. The sky is clearing and stars shine through the ragged threads of retreating storm clouds. Drops of water cling to the leaves of trees. Cricket songs rise like mist among the scents of honeysuckle and rose. Venus has just risen in the east with her lover Mars. Later, the Moon will rise with the Sun in the sign of Cancer, a time of auspicious new beginnings. From deep within the constellations of the Fishes and the River of Night they swim in, three strange angels and a trickster work their magic, conspiring to create a new dream from the worn fragments of old childhood memories. From the depths of sleep, I wake to this mystical other world which is as strange to me as the dreams I just left. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM to be exact.
"Shakespeare's moon-drenched fairy world is a symbolic dreamscape where traditional distinctions blur and disappear. By entering an enchanted woods at nightfall, lovers abandon the familiar daylight world and enter a covert realm within the unconscious, a place of fearsome transformations and self-discovery. Just as insanity, poetry and dreams possess their own fantastic logic, revealing an unsettling yet truthful vision of ordinary life, so the dark woodlands -as seen in countless myths and fairy tales - expose the flip side of civilization, revealing the tenuous boundry that distinguishes reason and madness, lust and love."
Norrie Epstein
THE FRIENDLY SHAKESPEARE
For many years now, I've run astrology charts to get a feel for the energetic or story of a particular season. And the story the chart tells about this summer is ..... oooh.....whee.... wonderful, weird and strange, just like the action in Shakespeare's play. Three couplings or 'conjunctions'. Three weddings and a strange love triangle. There is a moody, shape-shifting, fantasy quality that speaks to the way information is telegraphed by image, inuendo and intrigue - just the stuff that dreams are made of.
Under the influence of Neptune, Jupiter, and Chiron, (3 strange angels), we will have access to startling truths hidden deep in our emotional lives. These revelations may come through stunning reversals in our relationships, where despised parts of ourselves that we've hidden in shame may become the very thing that is loved by another. They may come through courageous efforts to work creatively with old wounds and thereby turn grief into something beautiful; a work of art. They may speak to a transformation brought on by an exquisite vulnerability that opens us up to the many ways we deeply and truly need each other.
Neptune is a god of dreams and oceanic consciousness, so our relationship to time may seem dreamy, out-of-sync, or altogether strange. It may be very dificult to get anything done; there is a wistful lethargy that often accompanies the visitations of Neptune. Best to take your vacations near large bodies of water and chill out. You may find yourself in situations where the past, present and future seem to meld into one another. Like Shakespeare's play where the characters confuse their love interests, first loving one, then hating, then loving again, watch for inexplicable shifts in feeling during intensely emotional times. It may not be clear whose emotions you are feeling or from what time in your life these arise.
Uranus in Pisces plays the trickster and will conspire to create sudden, unexpected situations that may point to revelations about yourself and those you are intimately involved with. And you can't be entirely sure of who or where those people are. (I'm thinking about 'internet dating' here.) The usual '6 degrees of separation' almost never applies when this god of surprising synchronicity, coincidence and chance begins to play with the very fabric of Fate.
The Sun and Moon conjunct in Cancer say that to begin to understand the mystery of our inner life, we must trace its roots to our families of origin and to the stories of what happened in our childhood. This is not an exercise in blame or regret, but rather one that cultivates compassion for the fragile child we once were, and in many ways still are.
Linda Pastan describes this in her poem entitled "Dreams":
Dreams are the only afterlife we know
the place where the children
we were
rock in the arms of the children
we have become.
When we get into adult relationships, childhood patterns can be triggered in the most destructive ways, ie. "the scars of childhood". As frightening as it was to be a child struggling to understand the adult world, it can be equally as frightening as an adult trying to navigate the world of relationships. This is primary experience; the same issues, the same responses. Ask any theraputic healer.
Now the way in which human beings have always metabolized this primary experience is through stories. Stories help us navigate reality by turning it into something that is emotionally tolerable and meaningful. Stories are the alchemy that transforms our bodily awareness of the world (perception) into something meaningful, memorable and communicable (experience).
This understanding is beautifully portrayed in a short story by Simon Van Booy, "Tiger, Tiger".
(this is an excerpt from the fictive journal of child psychologist, Dr. Felixson:)
December 23, 1977
For infants, discomfort in any measure is hopefully met with physical and emotional contact with a parent or caregiver. Could it be then, in the silence and confusion after we falsely perceive childhood has ended, that our experience of discomfort is met with an instinct to seek solace through the same end? An emotional reassurance from another human being bound up with physical embrace? So then, in adulthood, could it be possible that we spend the majority of our lives looking for this comfort from strangers?"
Ah....and it's so true!! When I read this story, I didn't speak to anyone for days - I love this man's writing! Van Booy's stories are wise and brilliant simply because of his ability to imagine and articulate tricky and complex emotional terrain. Just like the Bard, in "a midsummer
night's dream." Re-visit that dark, enchanted wood this summer and who knows what you may find.....love? intrigue? a real relationship? or a dream?
Which brings us to the last pair, Venus and Mars, the goddess of love and the god of war. You know the proverbial dance; those that have a relationship want out, those who don't - want in. Who knows how to make love stay? A sobering contact from the planet Saturn says that working on relationships can be very fruitful this summer - whether you are in a romantic one or not. The biggest part of that work will be seeing if the illusions you have about yourself can withstand repeated confrontations with the reality of who you truly are. Other people, significant or strangers, may be very shiny mirrors for this process.
One thing is certain: learning about the mysteries of love will be at the heart of it all
We truly live and die in the midst of marvels.
Let the summer revels begin!!
Back to website at www.katesgaze.com
that is brilliant!
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