Einstein said “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.”
Pisces Season begins next Saturday, February 18th.. Einstein was an ultimate Pisces, giving primacy to wonder and awe over knowledge and understanding. Like the fish, he could in a sense breathe underwater, that is to say he could rely on his creative imagination to nourish and sustain himself and his pursuits.
The imagination does something very strange. It makes whatever you imagine an ‘other’ to which you can relate. Just as the words you read right now are something ‘other’ to which you relate and try to make sense of, the images in your imagination are an ‘other’. Just as the person who rang up your coffee this morning is an ‘other’, so is the heroine you aspire and imagine yourself to become.
With every varying ‘other’ there is a potential for renewed wholeness. A certain phrase or melody, a person’s charm, a place, even a flavor can evoke a ‘thou’ experience; where whatever you are relating to makes everything bigger and more real. This is because you are enough of an artist to let your skills of relating generate a certain amount of awe and undeniable resonance.
It’s easy to picture a “thou” experience while standing before the Grand Canyon. Less intuitive is seeing the potential of generating such reverence for your own archetypes that swim about in potentia. With an active imagination, pertinent narratives and myths take shape and offer guidance. Not only do they offer guidance, they offer energy through their archetypal charges. One gets a taste for something; a way of living, a way of getting something accomplished, or in Einstein’s case, a way of solving seemingly impossible abstract problems.
Imagination is free, as are you to use it well. That is, if you are enough of an artist.
Libra and Saturn introduce the seasons of Fall and Winter. The leaves on the trees turn red, orange and yellow. they no longer recede into the distance like they did while green in the summer. They come forth, into our focus. We are inspired to pick up a fallen leaf and look closer at it. Winter is cold. We draw our energies in, stay inside, cook hot food and hunker down. Winter is a time of collecting our vital energies inward.
The Seasons and the wheel of the zodiac introduce a ‘time that turns’. In knowing the seasons we come to better know ourselves.
But there is another kind of time. A ‘time that burns’. A metabolism, so to speak. By transforming the zodiac wheel into a torus shape, we convert cyclic time into metabolism.
What does the Fall and Winter show us in terms of ‘time metabolism’. What happens when we draw our energies in? What kinds of things come forth, and prompt us to bring them closer yet?
What happens when we focus our energies into something we deem very worthy of our focus. With the brilliant colors of Fall and the sobering chill of Winter we peer into a beautiful relationship: the beckoning of beauty and the endeavor of effort.
Have you picked up a leaf this year to get a closer look?
Nature is capable of displaying great works of beauty. The complex design of a butterfly wing is also simple with divine laws of proportion. It is not a ‘loud shirt’ with random color schemes and mechanical patterning. It is ordered. Ordered by something wonderful that underlies all creation. The beauty of the butterfly wing is like the beauty of our own bodies with our seashell-like ears and our galaxy-like eyes. Artists were quick to recognize a kind of sacred pattern to nature in its beautiful expression. It became known as the golden ratio; nature’s divine signature of proportion.
Artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo would work the precision of nature’s mathematics into their masterpieces. The divine beauty that emerged was rooted in natural law. Heaven, as they could prove, is here on earth, by grace of these sacred proportions and relations. In knowing the formula of nature, with all of its divinity, one has the capacity to create natural divinity, or real beauty.
The golden ratio, otherwise known as phi or the fibonacci sequence, shows the pattern of nature as it grows. One plus one brings us to two. Two plus one to three. Three plus two to five and so on. The relation between each step is one of accumulation. The next step marries itself to what has come before it. The growth pattern is a spiral. Nothing is wasted, it all is incorporated into the design.
For a rose, there is no doubt about a ‘decision’ to continue growing and expanding. There is no confusion of a sense of self. The result is nothing short of a visible and tangible divinity.
Human beings are sometimes blessed with plenty of beauty. For some of us, the ratios are Boticelli-like, and we can thank the mysteries of our genetics. But a pretty face will soon disappoint if an attitude non-supportive to growth reveals itself, such as cynism and shallowness.
Before birth, we are perfect little seashell swirls in our mother’s womb. After we are born our bodies continue to grow, in the divine spirit of nature. And then they stop growing. What does this mean in terms of this divine process? Do our own ‘masterpieces’, the sublime work of our living bodies stop dancing to this catchy mathematical beat?
What does growth become when it is no longer the growth of the body?
Michelangelo studied the laws of growing in order to produce beauty. If we want to produce beauty in our lives we too must learn these laws of growth. This is the essence of Libra and Capricorn. This spiral deals with learning nature’s laws, so that you can produce more nature, more beauty and more bounty.
We are the rose that grows by ‘marrying itself to what has come before.’ The rose delights in the full affirmation of the sun. Within the unity of nature there is no ‘agency of future’. Future is only biological growing. The future of the rose is the same thing as its growingness, or its health.
“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” Gertrude Stein
But we are free agents in a world that includes a vision of the future. We can envision ourselves in this future and we can reflect on ourselves in the past. This is how we are infinitely more related to our own capacity to grow. We share the same laws of the rose, but our world is wider and deeper. We can apply these laws to vision, reflection, and planning. We can encourage a healthy fibonacci pattern by being honest enough with what came before so we can consciously marry some freedom into something new.
Sealed with a kiss, it is time to say goodbye to the summer. Tuesday marks the first day of fall. The Sun goes into Libra the lover, with all the mystery of the other. The equinox brings the phenomenon of equal day and night- will you try to stand an egg? 9:30 am is the official time for here in the Eastern part of the US, if you care to give it a go. Only during the equinox is the Earth’s axis not tilting toward or away from the Sun. It is very bizarre to think of this only coming down to two moments of each passing year. Egg or not it’s worth a pause of receptivity. What will you notice during this rare World event? Every other moment we stand upon a tilted Earth. In her style of leaning, she blesses us with the Seasons! In her spirit of duality she is leaning. Instead of perfection there is a striving.
Fall has begun! That “Second Spring” in the words of Albert Camus, “where every leaf is a flower.” People are drawn from all over to get a literal peep. Better get out those sweaters, and favor those flavors, of cinnamon, clove, apple and spice! After all the primordial apple is wrapped up in the Fall-be it the fall of gravity on Newton’s dozing head, or the fall of innocence in a paradise garden. Snow white took a fall when she bit her apple, into a deep slumber, only to be awakened by true loves kiss. The crisp snap of an apple is the bold outline of Romantic Reality. To acknowledge a Fall, and rise from it. Falling down on the ground? Well you must rise up again. Falling asleep? Well you must rise in the morning. Falling in love? Well, you must rise to cultivate that love and help it grow. To Fall is to anticipate a rise. Choose a course of action. Make distinctions about what will and won’t work. This is the esoteric root of Libra’s freedom in decision-making. Decision which means to “cut off” one route from another. Perhaps that’s why King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged in Avalon, the island of apples.
Mercury the planet of perception in it’s final week of Libra- the apple of the eye used to mean the pupil; the zero-index blackness of in-drawing images. A place where the world is translated upside-down. Cutting-edge and romantic. Apples have always had a knack for being cutting edge, whether of the eye or the iphone. As Cezanne declared, “give me an apple, and I will astonish Paris!”
Venus, the love Goddess, who makes pretty pentagrams in the sky, like the ones found in apples. Wouldn’t it be she who took the first forbidden bite. Now in Leo, the sign of the Sun, she imitates as a Morning Star. Rising like a true Romantic, who first had to acknowledge a fall.
Mars, the red hot planet in red hot aries and retrograde. Fire. The terror and the power. Days of hazy skies. The fire behind our appled eyes. The principal of action, behind every moment of perception.
Jupiter, the planet of heights, stationed direc in Capricorn, the sign of the world. Serious-Saturn and Metamorphosis-Pluto also in Capricorn, its easy to feel as though the world really is upside-down. Good thing the Fall favors Romance, which lives on heights, and chooses hope in spite of despair. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Teach hope to all, despair to none.”
Uranus, the most leaning of all planets, in bountiful Taurus. Leaning with awareness, and learning from the seasons of your own life.
Neptune in Pisces, the low-dose poison in the center of the apple rendering its beauty all the more sublime.
The Moon
The Moon will be in Scorpio for half of Monday the last day of Summer, sprinkling some last bit of secrets into the wide open air. Look for mist and nature winking back at you.
By 3:30 and through most of Wednesday she will be waxing crescent in Sagittarius- the high flying horse. Fond of apples, the Horsey Moon welcomes in the Autumn Equinox on Tuesday and the air contains the potential for major lift off. Lift off of spirits that is, if the right perspective is gleaned. Fall, with all of it’s associations with melancholy challenge our powers of optimism. As Emerson said “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
By 7pm Wednesday and a new Season in full swing, the Moon waxes into it’s first quarter in Capricorn through Friday. Learn to love those bold outlines of your life. Those boundaries that allow you to create more freedom. The crisp snap of apple otherness– that keeps you from sinking into too much subjective seawater!
The weekend hosts a waxing gibbous Aquarius Moon, always potent for breakthrough as it is the sign of the times. Strong winds are likely- crescendoing the song of the trees. Changing in color, escalating in song, what can trees tell us that we’ve known all along, about our true nature, as artist and seer, evolving this way to be ever more freer.
Toroidal Zodiac 