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astrological Tag

Stand by me

“Everyone wants to be in a relationship,” declares my vivacious friend, Julie, as we supped on smoky noodles at Saigon. Does everyone yearn to be an us? Cosily coupled, snugly secure in a twosome, I wonder?

“We’re relational creatures,” she continued, as we finished off the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, “which is why we all keep on searching for our soul mate.” We do?

The astrological birth chart, which is the acorn of our life’s potential, the daemon of our fate, suggests otherwise.  Not everyone wants to be in a relationship. Many of us pay lip service to love, and choose to end it with the well worn “you’re too good for me” exit line when intimacy beckons. Like Pandora, we open the box and release a screeching swarm of demons that devour us with fear, turn us to pillars of stone.

Many of us hunger for Love with an appetite so voracious that we gorge on empty encounters that leave us starving and malnourished. Many of us fasten our hearts with love-proof padlocks and swear to never love again. Like the poet W.B. Yeats, who loved an Irish beauty for 30 years with a passion that was never consummated or returned, “we fed our hearts on fantasies” and ache with the memory of broken promises, still-born dreams.

Intimate relationships can be messy and convoluted, often disappointing. Relationships with friends, colleagues, a beloved cat or dog, are often far less rigorous in their demands. To form a committed bond with another, to take the necessary actions to set up home or parent children demands courage, endurance and a sense of safety as we rest in one another’s arms, for better or for worse. Real relationships require the ingredients of two willing people who love each other enough to stand strong as the cruel winds of doubt, fear and hopelessness buffet the bond of commitment.

But, if you have the soul of a gypsy, or the heart of a hermit, you may choose, consciously or unconsciously, to defy social convention and never become “an us”. As the years pass by, the thought of sharing your home with another person, of stretching wide to accommodate differences that jostle you from your routine and entrenched beliefs becomes too big a stretch. So, you stay safe, eschewing the tantrums, the misunderstandings and compromises that polish us smooth in intimate relationship. It’s easier to stay contained, to shop for one, to keep things neat and simple – uncomplicated. Many of us have loved boy-men, or girl-women who fell asleep when we beckoned them to enter the fragrant Garden of Love. They did not – could not – love us enough to make space in their orderly lives for fierce love, for the chaos of the Feminine or the pointed vision of the Masculine.  They turned their heads away and walked towards another destiny.

It is when we nurture, trust, encourage, and truly value ourselves, with all our complexity and contradictions, that we begin to dance deeper and deeper into Being. It is then, if we are willing to lower the red flags of fear and judgement, that we will invite The Beloved into the sanctum of our passionate heart. It is then that we discover the comfort and the joy of saying, darling, Stand By Me. And we just know that the answer will be OH YES!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4_ghOG9JQM

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

John Lennon.

10

I Wonder

 “I know he still loves me,” my friend with the luminous green eyes declares, deftly lifting her sashimi with ebony-varnished chopsticks.

We can never know what is going on inside someone’s head. We can wonder. We can make up stories, soothe, or torment ourselves with assumptions and lies. The best we can do is to visit their world, invite them to share their thoughts and perceptions with us. Listen with our hearts; even though we may not agree with what they are saying, we can imagine what it must be like, living in their world. We can savour the fragrant dishes of their experiences, vicariously visit the library of their memories, and embrace the wonder of our uniqueness as human beings. Rupert Sheldrake, Lynne McTaggart, Bruce Lipton, Greg Braden, and other prophets of new consciousness talk of a new science of Life. Sheldrake talks of Morphic Resonance, Gregg Braden refers to a  “Divine Matrix” that surrounds us all. A  matrix of energy without beginning or end, no cause or effect.  On some level we all sense that field of energy when we enter a home, walk into an office or visit a sacred site. You may feel it between the couple you invite to share a meal with you. A field of energy that lies between them – warm and connected, or heavy with unshed tears, or seething with anger and the bitterness of betrayal.

So, if we come from a lineage of ancestors who lived in dire poverty in a war ravaged valley, we have a blueprint, a template, that life is hard and dangerous. Our sponsoring thought, as Neale Donald Walsch calls it, may be that money is scarce, strangers are not to be trusted, and we are unworthy of being loved in our totality. If we are unwilling to consciously shift this consciousness, we will keep doing what we’re doing, and keep getting what we’re getting. The story my friend tells herself (unconsciously) is that she is not worthy of Love. She seeks out the married man, the boy-man with Will Never Commit invisibly tattooed on his forehead.

I do not believe in the old model of Nature/ Nurture any longer. Too simplistic, as we cross the threshold into this new paradigm, this new awareness of our unlimited potential to change our perception of what we see around us. The Field where we meet each other on our journey through this life time is the Universal hammock where we writhe or lie, enraptured by the magnificence and Divine potential of each human being to Greatness. Says Neale Donald Walsch, “It’s time, in fact, to re-create ourselves anew – in the next grandest version of the greatest vision we ever held about who we are.” The astrological birth chart depicts The Field, and the transits and progressions, our evolving consciousness, if we choose to meet each other there, to truly listen, and take action.

As science converges with the wisdom of the shamans and sages, we now know that what we think is “true” is seen through a glass, darkly.

If we believe that all our relationships are simply our perceptions, that the stories we tell ourselves about the Other, and the thoughts that torment, or soothe, are our own imaginings, and that “life is but a dream”, then we can exhale. What we think about the other person may not be their truth at all.  

The Trompe-l’œil of relationships, the subtle ambiguities, the mystery of the human heart, continues to intrigue me.  What is real? It depends upon our perception. Did those doomed men and women of the Americas really not see the tall death ships of the Conquistadors as they sailed close to shore? Or were they great butterflies, harbingers of a new Messiah? We can wonder.  And we will never know what they were thinking, and like all of his-story, we can make up the stories that suit our perceptions, as well as those of the place and time we’re living in.

My beautiful friend knows he still loves her. I wonder, don’t you?

Sixto RodriguezI Wonder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMHdq4jm0oQ

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