there is NO hiding
(Trigger Warning—this post gets heavy on the astrologese in the middle, so feel free to skip over if/when your eyes glaze over! But it does give some sense of how stickily complex it is to untangle karmic patterns in real time.)
I reckon reality tv is popular because we crave training and commiseration in the crapshoot of loving the living of this mortal coil.
Not that I think reality tv is the best place to get such essential schooling and support, but it does tickle a prurient curiosity and, in the entertainment of it, provides some semblance of learning something about humans. Though, really, let’s be honest here in this space where there’s nowhere to hide — we continue to delude ourselves with the myth that Others have “it” all together.
As my essence steeps in the melange of mulling spices that is this Full Gemini Moon, I search for meaning like a drowning critter reaching for a line to follow out to easy breathability again. My primal brain latches onto the most readily available and reliable triggers of past pain patterns, which only exacerbates the sense that I’m drowning. Yet, miraculously, and only thanks to years of practice taking a wider view, I find myself simultaneously mapping the terrain and trajectories of the triggers, even as I feel them ignite furious fires inside me.
I call astrology a language of human weather patterns. For me it’s been a lifeline of mythologies and meaning that have pulled me out of the self-pity parties I can tend to drop into when I imagine I’m trapped in a pinball machine of passed-down pain.
Right now, literally, there is no hiding. I do not “own” or even rent my sacred home space. As fortune has it at the moment, I am house and critter sitting for others, which means learning their ways and means of keeping house and of feeding those they love. I follow suit as best I can, though inevitably I’ll never get it just right. On top of this removed home situation, my mother is visiting and the place we were meant to watch that would have at least afforded us some solitude, has changed last minute. We are, instead, gratefully housed in a lovely family’s home (no complaints there!) but it means that there is no hiding. Literally, even when I go off on my own, there are other eyes, other minds, other needs and demands from other beings.
For an introvert this is hell delivered in a handbasket.
Or, as Pema Chödrön more wisely says, this is The Wisdom of No Escape.
If you think you’ve evolved, go home for the holidays.
The reason our people push our buttons is because they installed them in childhood (as one of my first yoga teachers, Ravi Singh, taught me)!
The more I learn the language of human weather patterns, the more subtle my awareness becomes of the energetic shifts all around me, and within me. I become better able to see my own predilections, patterns and potentialities, and how they’re stimulated or thwarted by the weather around me. However, if you’ve never looked into this language, it will sound like any other foreign language does—gobbledygook.
To help, here’s a visual to latch the words below into. I have been feeling this full moon’s energy as light bouncing off mirrors at key points in my being, which is super-instantaneous, so conveying it in words and a 2D image feels super-clunky, but here goes...
From its illumination point at 16 Gemini (on top of my Saturn and Vesta), the full Moon in the sky ricochets obliquely (150 degree angle) to my own natal Scorpio Moon in the 12th House, where I feel it not only deeply in myself (Scorpio Moon) but also in the wider unconscious collective (12th House).
To get some sense of a 12th House Scorpio Moon, imagine a sponge that absorbs everything, not just liquids, but vapours, solids, and even energetics that extend beyond current spacetime. All the levels get soaked up and, in such a state, learning to be like mycellium has been a monumental task for most of my life. Generally hidden, the mycellial networks undergird the visible mushrooms and transmute poison into potion. Or simply convert everyday detritus into food/fodder for growth and flourishing. That's what the emotional skills of having this Moon sign and placement supply me with, and also require of me, in this incarnation.
I’ve come to trust that —
Always, and in all-ways, some gem emerges from the emotional eject pile and that the intense emotional re-lease will inevitably provide a new energetic lease on life.
The ricocheting reflections continue on from my deep Moon via another oblique angle to light up my Chiron in Aries in the 4th House, stirring up my most essential this-life wounds (Chiron) of self-hood (Aries) in my sacred space, or what was the childhood home, and also with my mother (4th House).
Who is visiting.
Who is living in the same space with me, a space that is not my own.
All I own is very little--an electronic bicycle and some other electronics that help me travel farther than my bike will take me. Always I was running away as a child, in the forms I had then. And angered very early on as well, when I felt caged in my crib and smeared poo on the walls in protest of being locked up and/or left out. My Chiron (the symbol that looks like a key) is conjunct Eris, Mars’ warrior sister whose battles centre on setting aright disharmony and exclusivity.
Of course, it all goes deeper back, with the inheritance of ancestral pain and patterns. Or, as I tend to imagine it, the slinky lurching down the stairs of my family’s generations. Which reminds me of some respite a friend sent today — this poem by adrienne maree brown:
this is the only moment (species love poetry)
i can’t stop being in the present
noticing how the past tells me what i should care about and the future tells me what i should fear
and the past tells me what we forgot
and the future tells me what we must dream
but here
i breathe in
noticing the gift i too often take for granted
not knowing how many breaths i have left
i want to spend them
being
love
i have done so much, so many tasks
but what has mattered most
has been the listening
to the thirsting dirt
to the spiraling wind in the wake of
murmuration
to the drumbeat of ant feet moving abundance with a million hands
the sacred erotic of pollination
the orgasmic opening of mushrooms
pulling the yes for miles underground
the innocent violence of predators
feeding their children
the way the wild wastes nothing
the way the cedar gives me permission
to pray
i thought someone else
had all the instructions
and i, stumbling and following,
praying to become worthy,
must admit i have been grieving and grieving
all i don’t know and don’t trust
and grieving so deeply
a world that is still breathing
anticipating failure
in spite of my visions
but when i listen
the universe is reminding me
i cannot be taken from her
i am never untethered from her roots
never beyond the whole
and nothing is lost, it is lived
and we are not here to win
but to experience love
and those who do not know love
are missing life in spite of all other accumulation
and when i listen
the universe is teaching me
that control is impossible
and the season will change
and enough is a feeling that cannot be measured
and the small circle is the deepest
and i cannot teach anyone what i have not practiced
and i cannot change anyone but myself
and i will never feel free in a position of demand
and i am already free
and we all are, and when we realize it
we cannot be contained
and we are never i
even when we are lonely
even when we distinctly suffer
even when we distinctly succeed
we are of lineage
of collective
of era
of farmers’ hands and strangers’ prayers
of singers with their heads thrown back
we are always dancing with our ghosts
and praying for our great great grandchildren
we are always the harvest
and the future is being decided
the future is being practiced
the future is being planted
in this breath
and this breath
and this breath
so i breathe in
noticing the gift i too often take for granted
not knowing how many breaths i have left
i want to spend them
being
love
Being Love is another way of saying Eris on a higher level. Eris holding hands with the growth potential shaman healer in me, Chiron.
Yet, as often happens when I'm rolling uncontrollably down a hill, I feel like a hedgehog or a porcupine with all my spines triggered in fast vertiginous succession and repetition.
All my stories of pain and woe get pulled into the undertow.
That blinding reflection of being left out (Eris) cuts a hole in any sense of self (Chiron in Aries), which ricochets back to my Moon, the part of me that feels the deep deep depths of my own pain, holds it, and then measures it up against the simultaneous sensing of everyone else's pain. Because it pains me to feel their pain, I then want to be the balm that each person needs. And even as I heal myself, the healing demand widens, because mySelf widens and loses boundaries (12H Scorpio Moon).
From my Moon extends not only the wounded leg but also the doubtful leg, the is-this-a-leg-to-even-stand-on-leg (Saturn in Gemini), where I'm dedicated (Vesta) to communicating (Gemini) to the Other (7th House). It is here that the Full Moon illuminates my devotion to structuring the influx of innocent intellectual energy, the ideas from the hood, and to parsing it all out into something we can wrangle with. Yet I all-ways have doubts and fears about it, and it all-ways feels like work (Saturn).
All this to contend with, while what I really crave is to be held and met and lightened up. To be given solitude to re-lease these lines of stickiness, to free myself as mySelf in order to re-enter union fully. The union with all-that-is, with all y'all, and with a singular Other. The Other of each and every other person I meet, yet also a specific special Other who meets me in a full and fun way—who I want to lay with and play with.
Because what we also have coming off that battle inside me between fear/doubt and hoped-for assurance of mental acuity, is a Grand Air Trine (the orange arrowed triangle) between Saturn/Vesta (7th House) and Mars/Gonggong (3rd House) and Uranus in Libra in the 10th House. Which translates to mean that once I can parse the particulars into structures (Saturn) and do something with them to channel (Gonggong) the many tendrils of spiritual susurration (Scorpio Moon 12th House) and mental murmuration (Gemini) into some thing tangible and make-able and even mate-able (Mars), then the offering to the public may be revolutionary, sudden, innovative and all-inclusive (Uranus).
The coordination of those legs to my moon, receiving an oblique light from today’s moon that ricochets and refracts, such as I’ve just detailed, points to the Part Of Fortune (follow that biggest red arrow to the X in the circle). The POF is the sense of ease and it lives, for me, in Taurus, the sign of stability and the sensuous. Funny that, since these are not what seem ready at hand just now.
For there’s another Grand Trine (the purple arrowed triangle), but this one is Fire and it’s dire in so many degrees. The wounding and growth in the home life and selfhood (Chiron/Eris 4th House) triggers the grief of loss (Ceres) and the pattern of blame (Lilith) in my behaviour and appearance (1st House). All this dense, difficult, and often demonized, detritus has the light of old wounding shon on it, which then ricochets off to Makemake in Leo, hovering on the threshold of the 8th House and heading into the 9th House of philosophy and the bigger, funnier communications.
So, when not weighed down, when not absorbed into the laden sponge of the lower half of my chart that carries the grief, the wounding, the one left out, the anger, the enfant terrible, the demon, the jilted lover, the griever, the keener. All that. All that and more! When the light can make it through all that density, as it has done in this lunar line-up of billards, it illuminates my developing vision of tetrachromatic fractalization, the technicolor hologram that details the smallest iteration of the overall pattern—the body of widest vision (Makemake) residing in the place of widest seeing (9th House). Philosophy. And a philosophy of fire, of royalty, at that (Leo).
Which brings to mind my response to an overture from a married man:
You may call your wife a princess and want to share your royal bed with me.
But I am a queen in my own right.
And Queens don't stoop.
Unless they’re 103 and forget their girdle.
Otherwise, you come to me.
So, there is no hiding after all. Not ultimately. Not from your conscience!! Even though you might be unconscious. Even when unconscious, I warrant you still know, deep down. That’s what guilt is after all.
This denial and the need it breeds to make a game of being seen, or found out, or of hiding—as though you could—is growing tiresome. Hide and seek is a child's game that relies on rules, one of which is that the seeker covers her eyes while the hiders hide. Well I refuse to blindfold myself anymore.
I see you.
You see you.
You see me.
I see me.
We see we.
We're all here together. Nowhere to hide, ultimately.
Time to
Be
LOVE.
PS—I’m so sorry to have been AWOL of late. This post has been a detailing of only a few hours of one day! Well, it’s been many days and even months of this sort of wrangling for me lately. All going well, I’m back on board now. So please sing out if there’s a topic you’d like me to riff on. Sending you all the ludicrous illuminations you need to make it through to greater ease of breathability. Much love, Mox
