Beloved

Between Star and Stone

Summer Solstice, 21^st June 2018, 10:08

Rabindranath Tagore

Source: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com

(Verse: Rabindranath Tagore.  Image: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com)

The beloved Sun, source of all life, source of all consciousness, stands at the peak of its power, its northernmost point, bathing us in its vitalising rays. We are livingly aware of the dance between Earth and Sun of which we are a crucial part. We channel the Sun’s etheric force into the body of the Earth and the Earth’s etheric force out into the cosmos. Human beings are a significant means of interchange in this cosmic dance of star and stone, of Sun and planet. This interchange is necessary, not optional. We are capable of conscious participation in this process – we can assist and co-operate in it. Our assistance is richly rewarded with increased vitality and deep understanding, arising both inwardly and outwardly. Power and purpose pour from the Sun into our human lives. Go outside and breathe it in!

Stand barefoot on the Earth, under the Sun. Breathe deeply in the golden cosmic light of our star, all the way through your body. Your hands can help you direct this flow of energy. Then gently exhale the vibrant light of the Earth out towards the Sun. Feel the interchange of Sun and Earth in your body.

Through the light and warmth of the life-giving Sun we are changing and we are changed. The Sun makes available power beyond our imagining. It is wild and free and exceeds all the petty oppressions of the mean shadow of power that forms the basis of the ‘systems’ that seek to govern us. The Sun offers us life and power in abundance, it gives to us unfailingly – all we need to do is stand upright on the Earth.

Perhaps we can make a meaningful distinction between the Earth and the World, where the Earth is Gaia, a being made up of physical and refined substance, and the world is all that human culture lays over Gaia, good and bad. Our World stands in sore need of real, meaningful connection to the source of all vitality, the Sun. At the time of solstice we are under the eye of the Sun, and it is a time of reckoning. When the light is strong so are the shadows.

The solstice Sun shows the reckoning to be painful (Sun square Chiron) – we see that the force that is used to get things done in the world can be cruel. How can the human heart tolerate the abuses we are witnessing? How can the human heart deal out such abuses? Through the expedience of needing to manage situations, achieve outcomes, comply with procedure, safeguard profits, keep my job, feed my children… We harden our hearts and close our eyes. The world’s not perfect after all. And we can’t be open to all the suffering we are part of twenty-four hours a day; can we? How to be with this?

The Sun’s principle is consciousness. The power and purpose it bestows come through its primary gift of consciousness. Can we say we want to live lives of power and purpose while remaining unconscious of the manner of our participation in the world? The Sun wants us to wake up; Gaia absolutely requires it. But the world encourages a weary, anaesthetised, broken-hearted kind of somnambulism that allows our vitality, power, energy and attention to be syphoned off for private profit. We yield readily. We are such obedient servants.

Pluto through Capricorn is revealing the dark underside of the culture we call the world or public life. The revelations of corruption and toxicity have been oozing out thickly since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008. The latest scandal is the final coming to light after many years of patients being killed in their hundreds in an NHS hospital: managed to death. There is more of this to come, have no doubt. This is what happens when the expedience of status and bureaucracy are interposed between human beings and considered a higher value. When an algorithmic bureaucratic system governs the place where human relating should live and breathe there is already an abuse of power. Be aware: these spaces are broadening and becoming ubiquitous in our lives. Learn to spot them. Where we confront such abuses – and we all do – we have to call them out. We have to come into relationship with each other, to talk and share, to gather our forces to resist the bureaucratic paradigm. We cannot at this point, racing towards the meeting of Saturn and Pluto in 2020, afford to stand down. Bureaucracy and technology in combination have totalitarian instincts to which human energy is simply fodder (income).

Certain organisational grids overlay earthly resources. Its a feature of modernity: management, distribution and, of course, commodification and monetisation of resources is effected through creating grids. And we are all authoritatively pressured to be dependent on these grids. Think of water, sanitation, gas, electricity – we are dependent on grids of service and supply, and profits are made out of our dependency. There are other resource grids too that it is hard to opt out of: transportation, health and education services, internet, money and financial services, media. These grids govern flows of power back and forth between individuals and the public culture. They are modelled on the fundamental grid of energy which runs through all things (which we might call prana or qi, lifeforce, tao or the way it is) and represent attempts to tap into, warp and profit out of this ineluctably wild and free fundamental grid, to which we all are connected all the time, totally free of charge. The fundamental grid is created from the interchange of Sun and Gaia. We need to be aligned with the fundamental grid for its power to flow optimally into our beings. We Our standing between heaven and earth is what energises this grid: we complete the relationship between star and stone (Sun and Earth). The birth chart describes the unique alignments for which we are designed.

Uranus in Taurus sextiles the solstice Sun; Taurus rules resources and thus refers to this matter of grids. Uranus here is bringing a radically new perception to the matter of physical resources and their modes of organisation. Your ultimate resource is your body. It is the vehicle of your thought, feeling, consciousness, soul and spirit. It is plugged into Gaia’s fundamental grid, and fed by the light of the Sun. Corporations are seeking to plug it into grids of their own making. The energy and attention we give to the fundamental grid increases our vitality and power. There is no alternative source of vitality for earthly beings. The time between now and the equinox offers a particular opportunity to work with Uranus in Taurus – to enter into exploration of a new indigeneity, a natural belonging to the Earth, one that truly belongs to you and the land you walk.

Don’t let your path be perplexed by the idle dust of days!

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

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To Heed & to Thrive: Uranus in Taurus

Taurus deals with the manifest reality of our physical bodies and the physical environment, the defining basis for life on Planet Earth, whose principle is manifestation.  Attuning us to sensation and wellbeing, Taurus seeks the resources and conditions that assure thriving life.[i]  What is it to thrive?  Thriving requires stability, the organised consolidation of resources to optimise growth and a sense of connection to the protective forces (seen and unseen) that cluster around living things (and all things have life).  This is a falling into line with the energetic patterns of physical reality that instinct tends to serve.  There is a natural relationship between physical life and the sign of the Bull.  At an individual level this pertains to our bodily experience, and the possessions, resources and material conditions that we have at our disposal.  At a general level we can extend these concerns to include our relationship to the ‘land’, agricultural processes, use of planetary resources and environmental concerns.

As Uranus, disruptor of certainties, moves into Taurus on 15^th May 2018, we can expect material conditions and physical resources to be thrown into radical review.  This presents an unsurpassed opportunity to become familiar with what thriving life might really mean for us and require of us.  Uranus brings awakening – forcibly, when we didn’t even know we were sleeping.  It illuminates us with bolts of lightning to allow us to glimpse that things are not as we were led to believe.  Uranus is cerebral and radical and will bring brilliant insights into taurean matters: physical conditions, bodily reality, land and resources.

 

The issue of plastics is finally becoming subject to policy in Britain due to the Chinese refusal to continue receiving our exports of rubbish. The vision of fields full of plastic waste tarped down across this green and pleasant land focuses the mind wonderfully well.  This is the very beginning of a journey that will entirely reframe our very understanding of the words ‘resource’ and ‘waste’ as Uranus moves through Taurus over the next eight years.  Uranus is associated with technology and we can hope that the next few years will promote the pioneering engagement of engineers and scientists with the challenges of assuring thriving life for all beings.  Our resources need to be honoured and protected – this is a requirement of all of us, but it is not a feature of capitalistic obsession with profit.  We will have to see our relationship to resources and our coercion into behaviours of consumption as being deeply pathological and damaging.  Waking up to this is hard already.  After all, what can we do?

Virtual reality and cybernetics will be used in ways both pioneering and pathological to re-order and extend human sensual and sexual capacity. The harvest of this is likely to be awesome: both brilliant and stomach-churningly appalling (I don’t need to spell it out).  At the outset I referred to the principle of Earth being physical manifestation; I believe this to be true.  It does not incorporate the mimicry, however technologically accomplished, of physicality.  VR, to the extent that it takes us away from the conditions of thriving, is not essentially supported in this place.

Which raises the following question: if human energy and attention are increasingly consumed by non-physical, fictive realities what happens to Planet Earth for whom they are essential to thriving? Our energy and attention have to remain rooted in physicality or else we begin to die.  At the moment human energy and attention are being harvested on a massive scale in an entirely unprecedented way by big business for profit (and we don’t yet know what else).  Obviously this will intensify and it is strange new territory.  We need insight into the underlying nature of this dilemma.  In her wise Guide to the I Ching, Carol K. Anthony suggests that the inner truth of a situation is itself the vehicle for change.  This is an oblique and very fertile way forward.  Our energy and attention are being harvested for someone else’s capital.  These are our fundamental resources and we are divesting ourselves of them, in return for what?  Netflix?  Instagram?  God knows.  It puts the Opium Wars into deep shade.

Our more or less global online addiction comes at a great cost not only to personal liberty and quality of energy and attention, but increasingly to the environment: data processing long ago exceeded aviation in energy consumption. Five years ago it was estimated that we used 50 per cent more energy to move digital information than was used to move aircraft in global aviation.[ii]  You can opt out of air travel, but there is no meaningful way to opt-out of the digital economy.  So what happens?  The inherent limitations of physical reality become apparent, that’s what happens.  Anthony remarks, ‘Limitation has to do with accepting that it is our Fate to learn how to respond correctly to challenges and adversities.’[iii]  And humans will respond by pioneering and innovating, by raging, grabbing and warring, and by realising, in some cases, what a profound responsibility it is to interact with fire, earth, air and water.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

 

[i] I am borrowing this term, ‘thriving life’, from Pat McCabe (www.thrivinglife.weebly.com).

[ii] Mark Mills, ‘The cloud begins with coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, big power’, Aug. 2013, www.tech-pundit.com.  Accessed May 2018.

[iii] Hexagram 60 in Carol K. Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching, 3^rd edn, 1988.

Fixing the Spirit

‘Don’t turn away your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.’¹

There is a curious medical condition that manifests as the loss of sensation in the skin: the nerves of the skin are unreceptive to stimuli. Interestingly, this results in a condition that we tend, in our mental, emotional and bodily lives, to strive towards: painlessness. We often consider comfort and painlessness to be the markers of wellbeing. They could well be the markers of closure, stagnation and imminent danger. The child suffering from loss of sensation in the skin is in danger of serious physical damage; the warnings, experienced as pain, are not registered, so the child can get into threatening situations very readily. Pain is not the problem in our lives; suffering is not the problem. The problem is the disconnection between sensations and awareness that results in unconsciousness.

Chiron into Aries

Chiron, wounded healer, leader of centaurs, is moving into Aries today, breaking over the celestial horizon and entering the very first degree of the zodiac. It was last here in 1968, except then of course it was undiscovered (discovery came in 1977). Chiron was the teacher and mentor to the solar heroes: it was one of Hercules’ deadly poisoned arrows that wounded Chiron’s thigh in an accident, leaving him unable to recover and yet unable, being the son of Saturn, to die. He has to learn to live with the wound.

From celtic legend we inherit the Fisher King, charged with keeping the Holy Grail, who has also been wounded in the thigh, too sick to live and to sick to die. He is forever growing weaker and is unable to father a child to whom to pass on the duty of keeping the Grail; as he weakens his realm becomes increasingly arid, until it is a wasteland. His palace, full of riches, can no longer even be found.

a new cycle of Soulwork begins

I’m really interested in feeling into the energy of the planetary archetypes as we experience them in our lives and in our bodies.  Astrology is a brilliant tool for investigating all aspects of our experience – and to do that through attuning to the distinctive energies of the planets in meditation (rather than generating lots of ideas about them) can be powerful.

These are stand-alone workshops.  You can sign up for all of them for £120 – payment can be made in instalments – or pick and choose.  Book in advance – limited space.

New Light

Spring Equinox, 20th March 2018, 16:17

(Image: Lisa Michaels)

The equinoxes and solstices are gateway moments. Unfolding their resonance describes the spirit of the time, like a passage of music, that will continue over the next quarter of the year until the next astronomical gateway is reached. That is why they are worth thinking about. They reward our attention.

Capricorn Kaput? Re-dreaming authority

“When the Grandmothers from the four directions come to speak, a new time is coming.”

It is amazing to my ears to hear discussions of patriarchy being aired in mainstream culture: for so many years these were confined to ‘radical feminism’! The generalised denigration and abuse of women was just the way it was. And then Jupiter went into Scorpio and Weinstein came tumbling down. Scorpio’s ruler, Pluto (dispositing Jupiter in Scorpio), has been travelling through Capricorn since 2008 and is at the bottom of this unravelling of the fabric of power and of a certain register of Capricorn that is right at the forefront of our collective mind at the moment: authoritarian, patriarchal, status-seeking, exploitative and ruthlessly materialistic.

Pluto’s journey through Capricorn is taking a demolition ball to defunct expressions of the sign’s energy.