The Pages Turn, The Fire Burns

“My World” is a children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. My son and I read this at night under a cactus light with a symphony of crickets out our window. The opening page shows a mother reading to her child by a fire. The words are “The pages turn, the fire burns.”

Maybe this is what got me thinking about the nature of time. Some time seems to turn, but some time seems to burn. Some time comes back around and some time trailblazes the future and celebrates the spirit. These two kinds of times blend together yet they are inherently different. One is bound to law and one is free. One is used to gain more control and one is lived to live as lively as possible. One is a clock and one is a flower. One is a wheel. What is the shape of the other? What is the shape of the spirited time that burns meaning deep into one’s soul? What is the shape of living?

The wheel of the zodiac turns. Its twelve archetypes carry the meaning of the seasons that turn. The meaning of the seasons is so charged that it goes beyond the snow and heat. It extends into the mystery of the seasons of life, and all the relations of living. The wheel turns and time folds in on itself. What emerges from this motion is the potential for more and more meaning. New meaning. Fresh meaning. Fresh light.

The wheel is really a generator. A maker of more light. The pages turn but the fire burns.

I began to think about the existential side of time. Some time is “heights” and some time is “depths”. Some time is more middle ground. The heights of time are the joys, the unbridled laughter, the perfection of a day. This time rushes over the body like a shower of effervescence. There is no possible way to deny the body’s ownership of such time. It is embedded. It isn’t turning on an abstract clock. It is burning in the heights of one’s heart.

“Depth” time carries a force of memory and a sense of belonging. Depth time can anchor you “home” or polarize you to “true north”. It can also sink you with despair. Depth time carries the echoes of your ancestors, and the echoes of your most desired dreams. Its gravity is also undeniably in the body. It can easily smolder with the blend of heights. It can threaten to dampen the fires of joy. It does best when feelings are interpreted truthfully, and handed off to the logic of the middle ground.

“Middle ground” time is for managing the business of living. Our bodies are blessed with the genius of nervous systems. All of the information and interaction that we encounter gets integrated into the “system” of the body. The world is wide and full of information. The body is deep and full of mystery. The middle ground is where these places meet. Biofeedback has evolved for centuries. Our systems are cutting edge. The middle ground time is the coolness of logic, the sureness of morality, the sensations of physicality.

My new question was: if time is a wheel that turns, how does this other “time” move? Is there any order to it? My instinct said yes.

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In Search of Certainty. Taurus Season Begins.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell said “What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.”  

Taurus is the sturdiest sign in the zodiac.  It is life’s way of building upon something certain.  As inventor, cosmologist Arthur M. Young says, “life can only start at the molecular level” because “molecules obey laws.”  

A new Season begins on Monday, April 19th, with the Sun and Mercury moving into sturdy Taurus.

Have you ever asked yourself, in a good grand sweep of a way, what it is that you are building?

Young sees purpose to be synonymous with light and absolute freedom.  The problem is, with absolute freedom it can’t fulfill any goals.  It must then descend into matter where it loses its freedoms in various stages until, at the molecular level it has none.  Having no freedoms it responds perfectly to natural laws, and therefore becomes something one can count on.  It becomes certain and definite in a universe built on uncertainty (freedom).  It becomes the means in which a goal can be carried out.

He talks about the particular point, when light’s involution becomes life’s evolution.  This happens at the molecular level right before plants learn to grow.  Rocks can’t grow.  The plants have managed to recapture a freedom.  Young calls this transition “the turn”, and says it is essentially a remembering of purpose.  

 Colin Wilson said, “We all instinctively turn towards meaning, towards situations that will stimulate us, as a flower turns to the sun.”

Just like these daydreaming sunflowers we must turn our heads towards the “sun” this Season, towards the stable nucleus of a sense of purpose.  If we can’t do this, we will be building something anyway, but our blueprints are vulnerable to the secret ownerships of others whose opinions we deem way too valuable.   

The Lyra meteor shower will also occur this week with its peak activity on the 22nd and 23rd.  The shooting stars will have to compete with some bright moonlight, and will emanate from the constellation Lyra, which represents Orpheus’ lyre of Greek mythology.  The most famous myth of Orpheus is his descent to the underworld to free his lover Eurydice.  After charming Hades and Persephone with his music, they allowed them to leave together, back up to the world of the living on one condition: that he not look back until they were in the full daylight.  Of course, moments before they reached the light he did look back, and she disappeared forever.  Orpheus, in his doubt, lost everything he had worked so hard for.  

Voltaire said “Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.”  Heisenberg eradicated certainty from the measurable world.  Yet, at some level, certainty is needed.  Just as life builds on the law-abiding molecules, people build upon the certainties of meaning.  

Do you know what you are building?

Happy building and happy astro pondering!

Astro Art by Johnnie Day Durand

https://www.happyastropondering.com/