A Natal chart shows the planets in each of the 12 houses governing our relationships, our careers, our family and our home etc. As a Libran coming up to a birthday this month, it was like listening to a report card at the end of term.

Am I doing well? Meeting my potential? Have things happened the way they should, the way he said they might? Is there anything in this science of the stars?

My own proclivity for things “other worldly” apparantly grows out of some innate skills I was born with – psychic and intuitive skills and a strong connection to higher learning or arcane wisdom. I believe these skills get a “kick along” as a result of events in life that skew, threaten or validate our belief system. Transforming events like marriages, like deaths, like separations, or fortuitous events that guide or help us further along the path and push us up or out to another level. Events that align us to a truer purpose or message.

Librans are all into alignment – we like to balance, straighten, organise and collaborate to get things right. There’s a bunch of us at work, all coming up for birthdays this month ( proof  that the traditional Christmas holidays, occuring 9 months before, are an annual festival of baby making across all generations).

Yesterday, I met with one of my fellow librans and 2 librarians to talk about a collaborative knowledge and research program using Wiki technology Our aim is to build on the information associated with one person and one event, so that the organisation creates a storehouse of connected ideas and stories, threaded together as knowledge.

Some spiritual practitioners believe there is compendium of arcane wisdom referred to as the Akashic Records. It is a warehouse of wisdom, life purpose, lessons and stories lived by the brave souls who trod the earth one day light years before and after us Yet, we get to tap into that shared wisdom through our dreams, through divination; they appear as flashes of insight, archetypal art and myth or random co-incidences and events of synchronicty.

I’ve always found Librarians to be a “higher form” in the workplace. I find them gentle, clever, kind, insightful and generous, in pursuit of truth and knowledge. There’s something noble about that pursuit.

Our librarians live in a glass library. Above the library a void reaches skyward, passing through, and surrounded by 3 floors of open-space-workstations, in other words, there are no walls anywhere.  Central to the building, the library is a testament to learning and education. In reality, these poor darlings who work beneath the void, are battling noise overload, as they sift  through the  brittle static and crackle that comes with worker conversations in the air above and around them.

So as I listened to the whirring crackling noises emanating from my car tape deck this morning, I sifted through the  information housed in this astrological reading. David, although a young man, has also died  in the ntervening years. And as his voice reached me over the air waves, making predictions based on my natal chart, I got a chill. Yes, he portentiously predicted the inevitable separation of a significant man in my life 11 years from the date of the recording. 

But in that whirring and crackling noise that accompanied this kind and encouraging reading, I realised we’re all connected in cycles, waves, sound, light, learning, truth and knowledge. The wisdom plays out through us, around us, in us and over us, again and again and again.

So to all my libran companians and all the splendid teachers and wise librarians in the world, may your road be wide and long and bring you home safely and wiser for the journey you’re on.

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Just as a picture records seminal moments like these, those same moments highlight the essence of who we are.

I believe those moments of death, birth and marriage highlight a hunger for certainty and meaning.  We make meaning of things with the head and the heart, and for want of a better word, with the spirit.

How much of our spiritual skills are handed down and how much do we acquire? Can we acquire any after a certain age? And do seminal moments up the ante at all?

My own seminal moments include:

• The death of my mother when I was four years old
• The death of my father when I was 30 years old
• My marriage when I was 37
• The death of my husband when I was 48 years old
• The death of my stepmother when I was 48 years old

The primary death of my mother was the defining one.  As one of four siblings we each had a different way of responding to that event. These responses set in motion an entire approach to the way we live our lives.  And this approach is well explained by a particular spiritual system.

The Enneagram has gone the farthest to explaining what these responses were. All of the family is into the Enneagram. So much so, that we’ll describe the behaviour of a family member as a typical 6 or that’s a 3 for you!

The Enneagram is based in a Sufi practice and is a dynamic program to define the spiritual self in relation to others and the world. The system went through a number of iterations to become what it is today.

The system is good for our family for a number of reasons: it is dynamic and inter-related. In other words, we are who we are, in relation to ourselves, to others and to the world. And the best part is that each type is in the process of change and growth. It perfects itself in movement towards or away from other types. 

There are nine types. And each type is defined by a reaction to an impulse (in our case this was pain and fear). No type is any better than another. There are ways to find out what your type is, but I always believe that when you find out your type, you are invariably embarrassed and or humbled by the insight.

We four sit together. We have a 5, two 6s and a 7. Each one of us reacted to the pain of losing our mother in a slightly different – though connected – way. One retreated to the head (5) to find an intellectual explanation; two joined a bigger system (6) to offset the anxiety and belong somewhere and the last one chose the path of sensation to feel alive and to avoid pain (7).

I wanted to write a book with my sisters. Gab was to write the path of epicurean delight – food and pleasure; Cate was to write a dissertation on sense-making and intellectual control and I was to write the third path on myth making and imagination. In the middle of the story, a fairy tale would link and explain the three types. We got so far but no farther.  As it matters more to me, I will pick it up again one day.

The dynamic process of the Enneagram means that as a 6 I have the potential to move towards a number 9. I am not changing types but, if I continue to grow, I can develop a new set of spiritual skills, represented by the number 9.

When I am at my best as a 6, I am self-affirming, trusting of self and others, independent yet symbiotically interdependent and cooperative as an equal. A belief in self leads to true courage, positive thinking, leadership, and rich self-expression.

Number 9, at their best are self-possessed, feel autonomous and fulfilled: have great equanimity and contentment because they are present to themselves. They are intensely alive and fully connected to self and others.

One of my nieces is a 9 so I can learn from her what it feels like to live like a 9. Another one of my nieces is like me, a 6. So if I can live well and fully, I might assist her in understanding herself a bit better.

We are attracted to other types and can understand them. I have a penchant for 5s (given that my twin sister and husband were both 5s). I certainly understand them and I lean on them to make sense of the world inside my head. I also ‘get’ 7s and lean on them when I nudge the bottle or cook up a feast to comfort myself.

So way back when I was 4 years old and the worst thing in the world that could happen did happen; I assumed the mantle of the fearful loyalist. To face whatever it was I had to face, front-on; counter-phobic and confrontational. Confined by and in this awful situation, I was wrapped in a straight-jacket of anxiety. My twin sister, also 4 years old followed another path – one of the eremitic Investigator; equally valid, but different to mine.

Neither of us could tell where the paths would lead. But they were set in motion by this momentous event, and they would diverge many times in the years that followed.

A picture does indeed tells of a thousand worlds still to be lived.  

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For me it was bumping out out a show, often at 3 a.m, doubtless tired and pissed, but so happy – in the smells, the dust,  the wonder and the satisfaction.

When I was starting school, my stage, cast and lead character was Mighty Mouse  a cartoon character from the sixties (who years later was disbarred from Comic Valhalla due to a perceived opium addiction!) Mighty Mouse was everything to me, my scene, my rising star, my metaphor and script for surviving the school yard. He was my Raison d’être.

He may have been small, but he was power-packed. “Here I come to save the day, that means that Mighty Mouse is on the way.”At that time in my life I was hanging out for a miracle and a saviour. And in the process, that wonderful alchemistical theatrical process, I rescued my self.

Notwithstanding the blatant fantasy fixation, the game provided me a rich vein of coping strategies. It  gave me the ‘pretend until it feels better’ mentality and the  ’practice until you get it right’ strategy. Both of which I’ve maintained to this day.  All through high school and through my working life I’ve cast the play, the characters, the scenery and style. So as to make my world interesting enough for me to be a part of.  If I found things boring I changed it. If the the colour was drab I’d enliven it. Sort of Steven Covey meets Colour by numbers.

• “Adventures in Paradise” became 2 years teaching in PNG.
• “The Little Princess” became 2 years in Government House
• “The Sound of Music” turned into the Australian Opera
• “Hawaii Five-O” translated into 5 fabulous years working in Television and
• “Disneyland”  morphed into the Public Service with its rich seam of fantasy.

But here’s something for nothing – the technique is exhausting. So I’m bumping out the show. No not suicide – just changing roles. A mid-life trauma has forced me to reconvene my cast of creative thousands into a new show altogether. But how?

In a recent documentary on the making of the Australian Hedda Gabler, the fabulous Cate Blanchett commented on the exchange between actor and audience. She ruminated that each production is forged in the exchange between actor and audience and each interpretation therefore is ”right”.

I’m not sure about this new theatre I’m engaging in. Not sure about the cast, or the role, or the plot. But I’ve settled at least on the audience. They’ll be explorative, faith-filled, imaginative, forgiving and kind (as much UNLIKE Hillsong as possible). This is theatre of the soul, not the masses.

And of the show itself? It won’t be outside the self,  it will be within. I’m happy to bump it in anytime.

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