the weather inside me

a healthy skepticism: you choose your calories

One more word before I'm back to my research: skepticism.

My last client had just enough of it for our sessions to benefit from really good discussion. I could write all morning about why people come to astrologers, physics, tarot readers, their priest, their therapist, their favorite economic analyst...but the long and short of it is we want assurances, we want to mitigate our fears.

While astrology is based on non-deviating patterns, people's behavior isn't. So I think whenever you approach something like astrology --hell, even the daily news is full of confident prognostications; how else would they fill their 24 hour news formats, if not with fortune tellers of politics and economics, football and film?-- you've got to figure irrational human behavior into the equation. This is why I like a client who asks questions about the astrology and demands that I dig deeper.

What I dislike most about client work? The client that comes back with a "she said I'd [insert event here]" when I said no such thing. We have options, I believe this. So often we don't want to see out options. But we come to people like astrologers with an agenda looking for a justification for our desires. True, sometimes these desires are long-suppressed needs that want acknowledgment and permission to express themselves. But sometimes we're only looking for an easy out from our pain.

I like a client who asks questions and doesn't look for easy answers.

I can guide you to themes and introduce you to new ideas about your life and yourself, but I cannot predict your future in specific terms. Furthermore I don't WANT to predict your future in specific terms. Do I know everything that's going to happen to you? No. No no no no. Your today and your tomorrow is a dialogue between you and fate, or God, or your psyche, or all three. Yes, there are themes and threads. But just as you will continue to eat meals for the rest of your life (a thematic thread) I cannot tell you which restaurants and homes and companions will join you at each of these meals. That's a discussion between your brain, your stomach, and your gastronomic experience. I can guess at what kind of food you'd prefer and the companionship you'd likely seek at these meals, but the meals themselves? That's off the chart. You pick your food. You choose your calories.

Capice?

Temporal context, or how astrology (almost) saved my sanity

"Do you believe in astrology?" I get this question a lot. The answer is, there's nothing to believe in. Like Eric Francis tells folks, "I just work with the system."

And that's what it is, a system. And that's why I like it. Unlike people who are unpredictable and strange, planets don't suddenly go veering off into a different orbit because it's Thursday and their favorite barista just quit. They do what they do and we can expect them to hang around in the sign of whatever for exactly as long as predicted. There are even books that spell this all out to us in precise detail for the next fifty years.

It's also a system that lets us learn from experience. The question "but what does it mean?" is answered through the collective experiences of thousands of years and millions of stories passed from person to person. Through experience we learn the range of expression within certain moments in the system. We learn how similar moments have messages and themes that we can understand and apply to our own lives. So it's a system that is flexible and human-sized, too.

Astrology does not prove or disprove any sort of God; it struggles with the same chaos v. order and free will v. fate paradoxes that challenge all great religions and religious thinkers.

BUT.

Astrology, in its way, also sort of saved my sanity. I say this because astrology's great gift to mankind is TEMPORAL CONTEXT. This gift is split in two parts: one, it tells us what time or season we're experiencing; and two, it assures us it will not last forever --in fact we are promised when the season will end. And where I was a couple of years ago, was a place where I desperately needed a sense of what I'd fallen into. (More about that later.) Astrology gave me perspective.

However, while astrology can give us the time, astrology does not promise  how we will respond to the time. It also does not promise how other parties (if there are other parties) will respond to your time. For instance, we get to choose how to handle that upcoming Saturn-Pluto square next week. Are we gonna buckle down, get serious and be open to reworking our relationship agreements? Or are we gonna let it degenerate into he said/she said power trips?

Back to my sanity.

I came to astrology just about two years ago. Actually, I've always been into astrology (even as a kid), but when I was a kid, my home was pretty much a 700 Club/Pat Robertson household and that sort of thing didn't fly.

So around 2007 I picked it up again in a serious way. For those of you astro-savvy, this would be around the time Saturn moved into Virgo --in my chart, moving through my religion/philosophy/what's it all about sector. So there you go. And, as befitting Virgo's intense nature, I got a little obsessive about it. In fact, by last fall I thought I'd completely burnt myself out on the business.

But it saved my sanity because beginning in 2007 I came under three intense and life-changing transits. I did not respond well to this stuff. Some of it began before I understood what was happening, and even when I began to get educated I didn't always get the best advice about how to respond. Even now I'm still sorting out the effects of those years. Knowledge did not help me evade poor decisions or pain, but knowledge did give me some signpost around which I could orient my pain and confusion.

In another post I'll begin to explain these transits, beginning with the Pluto transit to the Moon. My story may not help you, but then again, it might. No one's transit story is exactly the same as another's, but they do have similar themes, a similar sort of tone. My story might be a lot like your story. Who knows?

Image: Schema of the great Astronomical Clock of Prague, created in 1410.