Swimming Back to Shore

5.8.06


We're still wading through the puddles and ponds, waist-deep at least… though the tides of the grand water trine have started to subside.

Mars met the peak of both its trines to Jupiter and Uranus yesterday (Sun May 7). But even as the highest fullness of this magic begins to wane, we continue to float on the waves. Mars, after all, continues its cruise through Cancer.

Ask: Are you trusting the currents to carry you near or far to safety, like a message cozily nestled in a bottle? Or are you fighting against the threatening undertow, afraid to surrender to its power, as though you might sputter and drown if you dare to let go?

Maybe it's unclear how much each of trust and fear, and in what particular combination, are mingling inside you. Who's had the wherewithal to stop, think, and figure it out? The currents have no brakes.

I myself battled the urge to verbalize last week, since the auto-instinctual fluctuations of my auric field did pretty well in carrying me, without cause for too much conversation. See how utterly ridiculous 'the auto-instinctual fluctuations of my auric field' sounds? Who needs the words when everything is always perfect just as is—when the mind allows it, of course? The less I pushed for commentary, the more I gave in to experience. And flow I did.

But when I felt my neediest, I let the talking commence… and honestly, it didn't serve me especially well. I sounded whinier than I wanted. I couldn't necessarily get my point across, or else recognized the uselessness in bothering. My mood is just about to change, I told myself each time. What I was about to say, maybe it wouldn't be true anymore, by the time the phrases left my lips and hovered out in spoken space to absorb others' meanings, out of my control.

Do you ever question yourself on why you feel the need to say everything that comes into your head? I do. Considering the profession I'm in, I often move myself to offer feedback—even when I'm not asked. Usually, my intentions are pure. But not everyone wants to hear my truth on certain matters. They haven't asked to grow or heal at the sound of my brutal honesty… and maybe I'm not the right one to spell it out. Maybe my ideas are just that—mine—and don't fit somebody else's situation quite as well as I'd thought. Self-help sways dangerously into self-righteousness, without good boundaries.

Oftentimes, all we require is some lag time between experience and understanding… to permit the waves to soften and the tides to flow back out.

This week, Mercury, now in earthy-as-all-hell Taurus, extends his helping hand to pull us back to shore—or at least give us some practical knowledge on how to make sense of our recent aquatic journeys. Mercury in Taurus is the premier pragmatist, without much use for overly sentimental explanations, airy-fairy abstractions, or mystical metaphors. It wants the basics, simple equations and no more… and is patient enough to methodically mull the matter over until it's sure of its conclusion. Mercury in Taurus makes it real.

Throughout the week, Mercury makes integrative aspects to all three points of our recent grand water trine—sextiling Mars and Uranus, and opposing Jupiter. Think of this as Mercury maneuvering to connect the dots, slowly and carefully, to bring the torrent of non-verbal, non-logical emotional wisdom into material reality. By week's end, we'll be able to attach words where previously there were none.

In particular, Mercury's opposition to Jupiter creates a dialectic between (1) intensely deep psychological growth, which often defies rational articulation and (2) the narrow confines of real-world thinking, designed to get actual tasks (rather than esoteric deeds) accomplished. At the same time we broaden our minds, we also consent to returning to earth from whatever peculiar soul-destinations we've been visiting.

Like any astrological aspects, this Mercury-Jupiter opposition bears the possibility of playing out through externalized projection, or a 'real-life opposition'… with one individual playing the dizzy feeler, rapt in the powerful emotional energies of this water world, and the other, the unyielding logician with little patience for the 'woo-woo' of spiritual or transpersonal blather. In such a case, the dialectic becomes a literal discussion. And hopefully, both parties give and take, so the feeler receives some grounding, while the logician opens his mind a bit.

The joy of attributing mental understanding retroactively, rather than rushing to apply words while still in the pool, comes from the free will to write the story as it suits you. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that a situation or event is 'good' or 'bad' (how terribly simplistic!), we can explore the lesson it holds for us. We can define it as a breakthrough, an initiation, or the last time. It might prove to strengthen our faith, or convince us to quit forcing an issue.

Or it might just fade into insignificance, and, boy, won't we be glad not to have made such a big deal. That's not to say it wasn't meaningful in the moment… while it lasted.