All changed, changed utterly April 24, 2009
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Yellow , trackbackVenus disappears now and then.
Astrologically speaking, she’s retrograde – going nowhere fast!
Normally I’d “pah!” or “humbug” such news, but I’m starting to think there might be something in it. My life’s going nowhere fast, and as a Libran – ruled by Venus – I could well have fallen under her invisible, directionless sway.
To add “pish” to that “humbug” I’m wondering if disappearing or withdrawing isn’t totally appropriate right now, that is for someone who had a ‘fall’ and who needed to regroup and recover.
The only problem is that sooner or later you have to re-emerge or re-appear and the environment more often than not – has changed in the meantime.
I’m in the process of re-entering my atmosphere – parts of which have significantly changed whilst I was away. The most notable change is the nature and extent of my social network, and to a lesser degree my own preference for maintaining such a network.
This last fortnight, I wanted to fill a table at a charity ball. Everyone I asked was either too busy, or away or just unwilling. I felt a social failure and took it personally. My sister reminded me, rightly, that one can’t expect “to pick a bunch of flowers if you haven’t been tending the garden”.
One of the greatest losses in my garden though, was a dear friend who is just unattainable to me. Not just for the ball – but on a regular basis. She’s always too busy or moving too fast for me. She has nowhere to put me and those talks that I want to have with her. And as I don’t want to move at that frantic pace she undertakes, I think the friendship – as we know it- is doomed to fail. I hope she will always be in my life, as we have shared many stories, but I’ve changed as much as she, as our flight plans and preferences are different.
So thrown back on my own resources and lack of social network – I did what I normally do, 
I painted. I completed a painting that has been a focus for several weeks. The painting is of a Monarch butterfly emerging from a cocoon as a metaphor for my own process. The Monarch the only butterfly to make the Transatlantic crossing and resides in USA and Australia. It sits on my bedroom wall and I keep one eye on it as I fall asleep into my flights of fancy, and dreamscapes. The other eye I keep firmly fixed on Venus – awaiting her return each morning.
Like the painting and the loss of friends, things appear to happen from the outside-in, rather than from inside-out. The butterfly reminds me to take responsibility for my own changes – to friendships, directions, and choices.
I’m out of the cocoon now and I can’t return to it, no matter how much I wish I could, or how cold it gets out there on my own. I have to decide whether I’ll make a transatlantic crossing of my own – into the future or back to the memories from my past. Either way, I’ve got to fly – and life has to be lived.
In Esoteric writings, Venus is also the name given to Lucifer Morningstar – the brightest most beautiful, most loved angel before “the fall”. Now the name is associated with darkness, shadows, fear and the devil– which is “lived” spelt backwards. A sort of retrograde all its own.
The point of these ruminations is that each life has a myriad of splendid, brilliant moments and colours – from our past and surely into our future. With each breath we’ll unfurl just a little bit more of the colour, brilliance and splendour of our nature. With each retrograde we take stock and try to see things back-to- front for that new perspective.
For all of this – some of those moments, insights, gardens, and landscapes have to be left behind and to be let go of. We can leave them wrapped up in the cocoon of our history of what led us here. They’ve served us well. It is enough.
And in doing so – we accept that we’ve changed, as Yeats wrote so succinctly,“ changed utterly – a terrible beauty is born.”
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?