This blog is backdated.. I was working on it last week and with Mercury going retrograde my energies were drawn so deeply “in” so I am posting it eight days following my birthday.
Sometimes the dull weight of your life hits you, or it is as if a dam that held all the banked up energy surrounding a lifetime of feelings that have been pressed down into the subconscious rises up like a tide and bursts through the membrane of consciousness, like a baby crowning and thrusting its full body weight through the birth canal to life.
That is how it is feeling this morning on my 52nd birthday. I had this instant profound moment of seeing my life and my limitations and realising that it has all been meant to be. Nothing that happened, so called good or bad, could be changed and I also realised that at times I’ve had an argument with reality or attempted to analyse every single in and out in order to understand why things happened as they did. However, today the realisation has dawned that, in the end, the full weight of what it is, beyond all the thought about it lives as an energy mass within me and must be experienced deep in my soul. Within the acceptance of that lies a deep peace. And so this morning I am allowing the dam to burst and the tears to fall. Is this the resolution of my Chiron return, I wonder, the integration of the full ramifications of my Chiron in the 7th?
Sometimes the depth of this journey seems to have been as fathomless as an ocean. And when I have felt that I have come close to the bottom, the crust of the ocean floor has fallen away and I have dropped even deeper. I have become the deep sea diver, exploring not only deeper layers of my personal unconscious but the collective one as well.
Under the weight of all this water, of all the tears I have shed and continue to shed, which I know are not just my tears, I have laboured. And yet, at times over this past year, I have felt myself slowly making my way back to the surface, glimpsing a shard of light piercing through the indigo dark of the ocean to let me know that new life and possibility is dawning. Ever so slowly I am (in the words of this blog) emerging from the dark night that began to descend upon me 12 years ago.
In the next few days, in the annual transit of my astrological cycle, the sun will rise over the surface of the horizon of my chart and make its way, over the next four months, to the midheaven. And when the Moon has passed over and reaches its fullness close to the North Node this week I feel some kind of birth will occur, complex issues thrown into relief and sunbeamed to life across the first house/seventh house axis.
At the time of my birth, 52 years ago the sun was setting below the horizon and the Moon was soon to be eclipsed as it travelled forward to meet the Sun. I was born during a balsamic moon the final stages before the dawning of a New Moon. And although I have never really been able to pierce the deeper meaning of this entirely, it seems particularly significant on a spiritual and emotional level. One of the things I have read on the balsamic moon speaks of a soul who is destined to encounter many, many relationships which pass in and out of one’s life. I was born during a South Node Solar Eclipse, which speaks of a strong pull back to a fixed groove or comfort zone represented by my Aquarian ruled and fully tenanted seventh house.
When I have tried to move away from the family or the collective of which I am a part there has always been a strong pull back. I would equate that too with my Saturn Moon which I understand to represent a strong pull to heal or understand the collective legacy of the multi-generational maternal line.
This made some sense to me when at about 39 years of age I found out after six years of sobriety that my maternal great great grandfather had suffered addiction problems, just like me. The situation was so severe that the last part of the 19th century our maternal great great grandmother left him and sought a divorce and he ended his life in an institution. Thomas and his wife, Eliza Solomon had sixteen children. Two female babies died in the years before their marriage ended. The first died a few short weeks after they dis-embarked from the ship the Dilharee in New Zealand which had carried them and their two children on a three month sea passage from Cornwall. The second baby died a few years later. Both dead babies bore the name of my maternal great grandmother Eliza Jane. One of my nephews recently married another Eliza Jane, synchronicity or???? My sister was born on the date of one of these deaths. 19th February. Another interesting note of synchronicity is that the mother of this nephew, my eldest sister Jude was about the same age as the first baby Eliza Jane, when my mother travelled on a ship from Australia to Java to meet my father who was stationed in the Dutch East Indies.
I have digressed. Today on my birthday I feel the sun rise and move closer towards my seventh house of relationships as Mercury draws closer to my Chiron in Pisces there. It may be not surprise that I am turning to liquid as Mercury is meeting Neptune there and for me Neptune makes things waterlogged.. Its one of the ways in which I feel it releases trapped pain or grief that may not be just personal but also collective and multi-generational.
On this day I am conscious of the absences and curiously and perhaps paradoxically also strongly aware of the ghostly presences of those who represented the Sun in my life, particularly the males.. my father and all my significant partners.. These souls have passed through my life and travelled on to another realm either elsewhere in this world or in the next. And I wonder, do they remember me, as I remember them? In my mind and heart too are my maternal ancestors, especially TWT (Thomas Watts Trudgeon).
I remember as I write the sadness of a longing with in me that made it difficult to be in relationship without the ghost of fear causing problems, due to earlier losses, endings and disappointments gone to ground. The tangled loom of the Fates pushing or pulling us away from each other. It was hard to trust and open to love, and yet I am grateful, too for the opportunity to try because along the way I learned important lessons.
Beyond the sharp edges of this pain and sadness arising to consciousness I am empowered by this realisation : until we really feel our deep love for ourselves, and deep and calm acceptance within ourselves for all or experiences, questioning, struggle, failed attempts and losses, we are in some way lost. Until we find the courage to understand our fear and have the courage to experience it and feel all our feelings fully, nothing we seek from outside can fully fill or soothe that hurting place. We become full from within, through a full acceptance of all our joys, pains and trails. We may loose ourselves and loose things of great value to us over the years, however I do believe that the experience of being lost sets us on a journey to find what we need to in order to fill ourselves from within, at least this has been my experience and life path. Keats wrote that we should see this earthly life as a place of soul-making. To the extent that we can make sense of our experiences we come to birth as souls and into harmony with our fate or individual destiny which has both collective and person elements.
This does not mean that we need to remain alone, nor need not reach out for love, but when we do, it is from a full and not a desperately empty place. Today I recognise that this wisdom I am feeling could not have come in any other way than through loss and pain. I think of Liz Greene’s words for Saturn Pluto, (Mars Moon Saturn in my chart is inconjunct Pluto) that it represents “purification through suffering and wisdom through the ordeal by fire”
I can’t help identifying with my great. great, grandfather Thomas Watts Trudgeon and I wonder what went on in his heart and soul as he faced those years alone in an institution following the loss of his wife and sixteen children.
On the afternoon of my birthday I go to visit my eldest sister at the home where she lives with others with acquired brain injury. She looks beautiful to me, laying back in bed, her hair now long and returned to its natural silvery grey. She wears a shirt with grey and red hearts and sequins. As I look into her eyes and she wishes me a Happy Birthday a trickle of rain falls again from my eyes.
I know and feel her as a kind of home or resting place in a way which I don’t experience with any other member of my family. In my imagination I see two circles, one with Thomas Watts chart and the second with hers superimposed, a circle within a circle. There are no words for the realisations that grow. I just feel them. Words would prove inadequate.
As we hold hands the quiet of her room envelops us in peace. Its a fitting end to a birthday with transiting Mercury turning retrograde conjunct Chiron in my seventh..it makes some harmonious aspects to her Venus and Sun in Capricorn. We have both known pain and loss and have a deep love for each other. Tonight I know I will sleep well.
When tomorrow dawns my tears are spent. The grey clouds that littered the sky on my birthday have moved away and the sun shines brightly returning us to summer after a curiously cold day, so reminiscent of winter on February the 4th. There was even some rain that fell in the midst of a drought. This has some deep meaning for me, I was glad of the relief from the days of heat that were so punishing. A beautiful gift and a reflection of the wateriness and softening for me.
Emerging From The Dark Night 