I couldn't tell you...what has happened to me, this person I don't recognize even from a few years ago, this person whose heart was stabbed by an Angel's sword and who then caught fire...
this person who has now sunk, or risen, to the point that he dabbles in astrology... wondering at the stars' soft caress...I had an acquaintance who was an accomplished and very knowledgeable astrologer, and since he was also a grad student in philosophy he was able to treat his art with an appealing combination of belief and skepticism. I asked him once how in the hell he could take this stuff seriously, and he laughed and said, "Think about it. You know that every particle in the universe, in some infinitesimal way, influences every other particle. You know about the moon and the tides. Can you honestly say that planets and stars wouldn't have some kind of influence?"
I honestly couldn't, but I honestly could say that his computer program for casting charts was no better a guide to that influence than tea leaves or oneiromancy...but it nagged at me how closely, in some ways, the description of Taurus always fit my personality, and how closely Capricorn and Scorpio fit the personalities of people I knew...it nagged at me how, a thousand centuries ago, Athena Starwoman seemed to always know what was up with me...and it nags me now that this happens on tarot.com...
it's all a coincidence, I used to be able to say. It's all a trick of perception, like how, when you look up in the sky and see the Big Dipper, you see it because someone long ago connected some random dots and then someone told you about it and now you can't help seeing them in that shape. But it may be deeper than that, and given my experience with the play of Kali, it probably is...because--why a Dipper? Why Orion? And not Actaeon? Why Cassiopeia, and not Cassandra?
If these underlying patterns are really just mythological artifacts, then why do so many myths agree on so many points? And if the myths agree because they are correlates of internal perceptual structures, then why do they have such power to change our lives, our selves? You'd think we'd all stay the same...
but I haven't. Nor, probably, have you. Kali has led me to a window in Her mansion, a window looking out on a wild, blossoming grove, and She has shoved me out, lovingly, and I am falling up, into stars that dot Her sky like pollen...
Saturday, March 24, 2007
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No, nothing stays the same. It’s not the signs that change us, though, but we who change ourselves. Astrology, tarot cards, myths—somehow we see in those what we want or need—especially when they are fortunes cast for us . . . I know that I have seen something as ordinary as sunshine on the velvety fabric of my couch this morning and thought that in that light I could see my future, a future that wasn’t in that cloth yesterday, and one that may be different again tomorrow. And the fall of petals in the wind . . . did the stars brush the wind into motion, at just that moment, sending that white snow down to dust us into understanding that we are loved? I don’t know. But I know the tides run deep, the stars shine even when clouds hide them, that spring is finally here . . .
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