Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

— David Whyte

The ongoing Saturn Uranus opposition is a cosmic reminder that the biosphere still remains wickedly dichotomized, despite Barack Obama’s triumph on election night.

I’ve been calling this recent post-election phase Civil War Reconstruction v2.0. Meaning, once again the South has ‘fallen’ — has lost favor as a participating unit within our democracy. The New York Times recently reported: “What may have ended on Election Day … is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come…”

So, how will we meet the fallout? Follow Gandhi’s advice: “We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right.”

On a personal note, tonight’s full moon deserves careful consideration, given the exact square from Neptune that is setting off a fixed sign arabesque. By signs, the full moon activates the Taurus and Scorpio polarity and foments roiling emotional intensity. No two signs of the zodiac are more aligned with the deeper passions of the body and the heart. With Neptune involved we might be putting too much emphasis on fantasy and not enough on the pragmatic. We’re calling the airline to book a trip to Bali but can barely make the mortgage next month. Reality checks are in order.

Not that fantasy is to be shunned. With Neptune, if the rational mind attempts to deny his otherworldly spells and callings, he’ll come through a back door upsetting your sleep with epic dreams or, worse, set you off on a drinking binge. Rituals are in order to honor this burgeoning autumnal passion-fest. Bring it all down a level without dishonoring the impulse. Write a wildly erotic love poem. Take a sick day from work and daydream throughout the afternoon, watching the full moon later in the evening from your back porch. Give Neptune his due. Here’s a wonderful poem by the Norwegian writer Olav H. Hauge to help ease our mind into the different possibilities Neptune communicates:

During this lunation we want the sensual security that Taurus’ garden of delights connotes, that feeling that we’ve found a safe, earthy haven for ourselves — but we are tempted to also engage with the serpent, and enter a more visceral, less “domestic” world of consummation with the mysterious Other. We want the comfort of romance, but also long to experience that which is forbidden, to take a romp in the wild world of taboo. Loyalty vs. licentiousness. How will it all play out?

This is a full moon that opens the floodgates. Passions feel almost irrepressible, off the scale actually, so any mood, be it light or dark, will be amplified and inch towards melodrama. The Taurus Scorpio polarity moves us back and forth between feelings of possession and attachment, to envy, jealousy and sometimes paranoia. The issue is emotional control. Holding the power, or surrendering to it. Try to find a middle path and set the pace slow but sure.

Venus’ out-of-sign conjunction to Pluto telegraphs relationship difficulties. Or at least a challenge to our notions about what makes for a successful relationship. If we have a conventional idea about romance, say from the latest issue of Bride’s magazine, this Venus Pluto co-mingling will show us the darker face of love. For the uninitiated, what appears to be simple on the surface is actually seething and twirling with intrigues and possible betrayals. Planets passing through Pluto’s realm are always taken down, like Persephone’s abduction into Hades, and put through the endurance tests. Trials by fire.

Remind yourself of the following axiom: That which is hidden is often more powerful than that which is visible. We have ideas about how things should be, operate, unfold in our intimate relationships. But Venus married to Pluto says we must learn the following: Beauty is much more than an idyl, pleasing lines, shapes and contours. And love involves a kind of vulnerability that can be devastating should it be double-crossed. And yet that is always the challenge of fully opening to love, that we’ll be taken down, forced to encounter our more regressed emotions: jealousy and rage. Venus with Pluto says: Love and beauty are beguiling and fierce. Not for sissies or the faint-of-heart.

Think fondly of today. You might recall this as the last date where the world as you knew it was like the world that you always knew. “That chef made my eggs just the way I like them.” Happy day!

Tomorrow opens a crack in time. Wild card days. The optometrist advising for the removal of the cataracts. The bank is now closed (again) on Saturdays (and maybe Fridays too). Oh, and dad died suddenly, while getting out of the shower, and you never got to say goodbye.

Tomorrow heralds the exact opposition between Saturn and Uranus, the start of a long two-year match between titans. Father Sky trounces Father Time. But this is also a mirroring dance, a commingling of their seed and shadows. They’re the oddest of lovers, the harshest of enemies (what father and son are not?) Yes, people — it’s the birth of a new world order.

Or put another way, as the gadfly historian Gore Vidal recently commented: “This country is finished. But, with a new republic like this, if you missed being here at the beginning, the next best thing is to be here at the end.”

So, consider your life at this moment. Your soul feels distinctly divided into dueling factions. Do you notice a grip in the gut? The fist down there, the one you’ve been carrying about on your rounds for the last couple of months. That’s the rub! The big sky fight. Saturn dutifully pressing your feet into the earth (just one more day of working hard and praying everything is “OK”!) while Uranus takes off the top and attempts to fill your head with vivid images of your unlived life, narratives that well-up while you sleep but then, often, mist-out during the grind of Saturn’s day-to-day tasks of acquiring.

Uranus, as Promethean awakener, reminds the individual that reality is teeming with the dynamism of change; a flow that can’t be tethered to the movement of consensual time — for that would be too slow a representation. But, killjoy Saturn declares that we come to the lip of change like the Ghost of Christmas Past, dragging a ball and chain. Breathing barely. This does not make for an easy jumping.

This stalemate and ambivalent torsion is the blur of the moment, the atmosphere we’re all breathing right now. But as Rumi puts it, there is “another way of expiring.” Exhaling consciously. Letting go, consciously. And yes, a little bit of dying, too. So, what are we willing to sacrifice or, worse, have wrestled away from us to connect with our unlived life? The poet Mary Oliver asks this too:

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

Saturn gives us time, to keep it all together by — to do our scrapbooking and build our portfolios. That’s good. And bones so that we aren’t just flesh sacks glopping about. Need bones, good. Discipline too, and melancholy so we don’t get too preposterous about this life. Balance makes sense. But Saturn also keeps disruption at bay. And that’s problematic. In mythology Saturn was always blocking or hindering — forever eating his progeny lest any of them disturb his hegemony at the edge of the known world — the solar system’s demarcation, before the discovery of the trans-Saturn planets: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Each of us, in our own way, support Saturn — for we too fear change and eat our future-vision offspring. We move lockstep, adhering to the orthodoxy of titillation — Saturn’s shadow side. The impulse of Uranian free-thinking, the cost of it at least, doesn’t have a place within the orthodoxy of titillation because it disrupts our methodologies — ways that we’ve devised to have our pleasure needs met despite feeling trapped, hedged in by the status quo. And when our pleasure needs are met we’re “happy” people. Dulled, but happy.

But there are worlds beyond the ego’s careful, cautious accretion. There are progeny that live beyond Saturn’s boundary. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto symbolize the transcendent elements within the psyche. Each with their own unique gift of undoing: Uranus shatters, goading accelerated growth, electric visions — libertine and paradoxical impulses. Neptune dissolves and errodes the ego’s boundaries — through mystical yearnings or debilitating betrayals, inflating the urge to partake of the divine. And Pluto eviscerates, does the chemistry of death and takes us to the blackest of the black spaces.

No wonder Saturn kept trying to eat his young. You can feel these dichotomies within your soul, too. The staunch Saturnian instinct for preservation pitted against your desire for radical conversion, spiritual union and finally, as Freud called it, the death wish: a relentless longing for peace and cessation. Society confronts these impulses for undoing as well. The transcendent urge plays out in politics, religion and art. Saturn always balks. But the form builder always compromises, succumbs to the formless. And usually there is hell to pay.

Think recent history. Saturn’s 2001 opposition to Pluto — “the little castrater that could” — concluded with September 11 and the hell-maw of Ground Zero. Against Neptune, during the Saturn opposition in 2005 — we lost a city and a culture during hurricane Katrina. Now, with an African American president likely to take the reigns, we have two factions of the country worked into a fervid, rabid clarion call for change. Or not change. What will the fallout bring?

Of course all oppositions are alchemical dances within reality. Planets in opposition mirror each other. Ostensibly they are at odds, but secretly they siphon qualities and powers back and forth between them. It’s a kind of magic, veiled as tragedy. Countries go to war and many of the soldiers fall in love with enemy soldiers or meet their future wives in the invaded countries. They marry, have children and something hybrid and wonderful is born of the destruction. And life goes on.

For us, on the eve of a new election, we need to consider that when Saturn brings his weight and force to oppose Uranus’ wild-card eccentricities we’ll end up with a kind of mutated government. What might this look like? Charles Carter described it as such: “…democratic in spirit and autocratic in method.” I’ll leave it to each of you to spin this axiom whichever way you like. (At least he didn’t say anything about fascism.)

Regardless the portents, the post-election world will shock us. You don’t get Uranus and Saturn together without some kind of earthquake. If you think you understand a narrative as it is unfolding, you’ve read the augers and pundits and nuzzled your ass deep into a comfy chair feeling like you’ve got your finger on the pulse — that is the moment Uranus does that thing he does with the trap door lever.

There is a quality about Uranus, his shadow side, that runs amok over the individual in an attempt to make life better for the mass. It’s a paradox — which of course is the nature of Uranus — and this is where some element of Saturn is necessary to counter the accelerated ascension of “change for change’s sake”. In introducing a new regime or a new order, Uranus may be as tyrannical and controlling as whatever he is trying to overthrow. Consider the days following the French revolution, a very Uranian moment in history. How is a balance found? Perhaps there isn’t. As Nietzsche said: “Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Oh well…

But hard times for the group might mean opportunities for the individual. This is how Saturn and Uranus work on a personal level.

So, forget Obama for a spell and consider your own life. The good news? Life post a bout of Uranian upheaval is sobering, in a bright and pristine kind of way — there are horizons revealing and beckoning. There’s a quality of freshness and freedom combined, despite the rubble one might be standing in. Walls have come down. Wow! other people are out there! Contacts are forged. This is the real beauty of a Saturn Uranus gridlock. Breakdown shifts to breakthrough. We step beyond the ego’s boundaries and see “other.” Perhaps in an entirely new way. Many good things can come from this insight. Like sharing a sandwich. Telling a story. Finding one’s heart.

Here’s another way to think of the the quality of freshness related to the fallout from a Saturn Uranus clash: You go on a hike and arrive at the hightest point you can climb. You pause, survey. And there is a stillness — a silence that is almost unnerving. Are you alone. Or all one? And the air, opening out to infinity, as Rumi describes it, promises much.

The Norwegian writer Rolf Jacobsen wrote a poem called The Silence Afterwards, and this can give us clues, pointers, nudges — a way to support our newly discovered unlived lives.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.




Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.




Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.




Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out in the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

–Naomi Shihab Nye

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d
with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for
me that follow’d,
And else, when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still
I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in
the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way
coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening
came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly
continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me
whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in
the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast — and that night I was
happy.

– Walt Whitman

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and, finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

– Goethe

Today I visited the Japanese maple that is in my front yard. I stood alongside it for a good ten minutes. I wanted the tree to sense how much I appreciated its radiance, the incendiary tinge of the red and orange leaves. And with a clear sky, like today’s, the backdrop set the tree’s beauty into high relief.

Earlier I’d been with sheeny black creatures. Coming home from a walk I spied on a gathering of crows, about eight of them, swooping from their spot on a pine branch to take prime pickings from the neighbor’s recycling pile. One of the birds was so huge it resembled an infant, in a way — pitch black and hopping on all fours — with wings. Very disconcerting.

The crow’s coloring is so deep, it’s slightly metallic black and hypnotic. The blackness is as deep as their persistence. And I thought of a poem by the Hindi poet Mirabai that talks about her love for the Beloved’s black hair. She’s always writing about his hair. The vivid blackness — the sheen of it, and her getting lost in it.

The birds would argue about who got the choice bits from the bin, with the victor flying off to stash the picking in her nest. Eventually they got angry at my staring and started cawing aggressively. I laughed and walked down to see my maple and snapped the photo above. I hadn’t dressed warm enough so I finally went back into the house.

Perhaps because Pluto sits near my ascendant and with the moon and Saturn in Scorpio in my natal chart, I become vitalized as the season shifts towards the death space that typifies mid-Autumn. The Sun’s ingress into Scorpio.

Summer for me was like fathoms of void. Was there sun? And when the equinox came in September I hardly took notice. My heart was burgled and cut in June — and when the heart’s sore and shuttered there can be such an eerie disconnect from beauty. Dry. I could lean towards beauty, but beauty didn’t, wouldn’t, lean towards me. I think beauty could sense the veil and felt unwelcome. Or so the mind says — in reality when the heart, the eye of beauty is shut, beauty simply is not. Is asleep.

There’s a great Leonard Cohen song that tells about the frustration of trying to contrive one’s way towards beauty. Making beauty an object rather than seeing it as an essential expression of the Self.

I came so far for beauty.
I left so much behind.
My patience and my family.
My masterpiece unsigned.
I thought I’d be rewarded.
For such a lonely choice.
And surely she would answer
To such a very hopeless voice.
I practiced all my sainthood.
I gave to one and all.
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all.

The Sufis talk about reaching a place, after long pining and making efforts toward the Beloved, where the Beloved actually makes a turning — and suddenly the seeker becomes the sought. The notion is lovely except this process, where the Beloved comes after the seeker, is painful. Barren. Disorienting. One is dropped into a wasteland. The Sufis’ term for this phase, this displacement is called: constraint.

Al-Hallāj, the 10th-century Persian mystic, cataloged carefully and described in detail three phases of the path to God. In the first aspect one is in a phase of “novicehood.” This is a phase where one is making efforts. Which is to say the ego has a sense, like the Leonard Cohen song, of wanting beauty and going through various contortions to make the marriage happen. And of course it doesn’t. But there is the efforting, the seeking. It’s part of this recipe that Al-Hallāj detailed.

The second phase is that of constraint, what he called “passive purification.” Here, once one has abandoned his will, the seeker becomes the one who is aspired after. Here one loses all desires. The Beloved, being jealous, doesn’t tolerate hankerings that move the eye to other objects or people. Here one discovers how much desire dominates his life. Again, the notion is romantic, but with desire unplugged the upwelling of meaninglessness can be debilitating. This state of being cannot be attained by design; which is the entire point — one is being shown who is really in control. Restraint is purely given, is pure Grace.

The third phase is called the core of union. Oneness is experienced as an immutable state of being. In her amazing book The Taste of Hidden Things, Sufi writer Sara Sviri describes it as such: “…as a centered point of stillness where fluctuation ceases, where the “impulsive self” becomes the “serene self”.”

Reading about these states seems romantic, but to enter the second state, the phase of constraint which Al-Hallāj called idtirar, involves the deeper mysteries of suffering. Why suffering? Sviri writes:

So there’s a lot of waiting once one is in the second state. With desire on hold it takes powerful trust and a love of the truth to allow for the divestments. Ineffable things can help. Like music, learning to accept stillness, the phone not ringing much. No one “home”. And poetry is very good.

I suppose because I’m a gay man, I revel in Mirabai’s poems. Her descriptions of the Beloved are always rife with sinew, just reading a couple can move the force from my lower chakras directly up into my heart. As Robert Bly wrote: “When Mirabai comes to meet you, you’ll have to be prepared for excess.” I’m a drama queen, so I can dig it. He continues, “Her religious passion carried her into intensities that make most people turn pale.”

Consider:

I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and
sandalwood and you set a torch to it.
When I’ve fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders
and chest.

Do.

But the poem I’d read this morning, before visiting the tree and the crows was this one called His Hair:

You play the flute well; I love your swing curls and your earlocks.
Jusumati, your mother, wasn’t she the one
Who washed and combed your beautiful hair?
If you come anywhere near my house,
I will close my sandalwood doors, and lock you in.

Mira’s lord is half lion and half man.
She turns her life over to the midnight of his hair.

Me too.

Relationship persists so long as subsidiary cause persists,
and subsidiary cause persists so long as quest persists,
and quest persists so long as thou persistest,
and thou persistest so long as thou sees Me not;
but when thou seest Me, thou art no more,
and when thou art no more,
quest is no more, and when quest is no more,
subsidiary cause is no more, and when subsidiary cause is no more,
relationship is no more, and when relationship is no more,
limit is no more, and when limit is no more, veils are no more.

– Niffari

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing … Silence …Waves…

— Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

–Juan Ramón Jiménez

These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, How much is that? Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want, buy something,
to be part of the general exchange.

Start a huge, foolish, project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

– Rumi