"Is Where You Find It" by Via | Studio Psychereotica Confessions of a Gen-Exhibitionist Get out your binoculars, folks --
its time for a little spiritual voyeurism.By Maya Dexter
Planet Waves Digital MediaIF YOU'RE READING THIS, you're probably into astrology. If you've ever lived your life, you know which one's more interesting. Staring at charts is confusing. It brings up all my math anxieties. I start conjugating constellations in my sleep. The great expanse of life doesn't usually fit into tidy little sentences structured around keywords for each planetary moment in your chart. Life is messy. It interrupts civility like an infant at the opera. But added to life, astrology gives a clue as to why we do what we do. If you ever wake up and you're running naked in a field at 2 am and you don't know why, astrology is a good place to look through it, we are allowed to be our own therapists.
.......I'm a big proponent of self-therapy. Therapists are like most individuals in that they tend (in my experience) to work out your issues through their own filter. My last therapist screamed at me for showing up to an appointment she forgot to write down and now had a plane to catch. Now who really had the issues there? No, I trust myself a lot more with my delicate psyche. I already know my stories and I don't charge forty bucks an hour.
.......For the last year I have undertaken a complete reinvention of myself. I have logged many hours of self-evaluation. If I paid myself forty dollars an hour I could retire next month. Without boring you with details, a long series of events led to the realization about six months ago that somewhere my soul got lost in the forest of my mind. I set out on the epic journey of trying to find myself. I wandered through each house discovering who I am, what I value in me and in others, what is important, what makes my skin crawl, and so on. Astrology has been a wonderful new tool for me on this journey, it has offered me explanations and choices when I felt I was at a dead end, and it has opened up the infinite possibilities that lie within me. My newfound passion for astrology led me, through another bunny hop of synchronicity, to this Pluto-Chiron conjunct natal Neptune thing that all us mid-twenties are going through right now. Mine is in the seventh house of relationships. Wouldn't you know it, it sums up exactly the sort of ideological renovations I've been engaged in.
.......So here's the deal: Because I like to talk, and I like to be the center of attention, I have agreed to be your personal specimen. What does a novice astrologer go through when her universe is shaken up like a snow globe? Take notes, interns, place bets on your hypotheses. This ain't no zoo; this is field astrology, so wear your pith helmets. We're going on a soul hunt........ "Soul searching" is one of those subtle cliches our society uses to define those things that are not easily answered. If you cannot decide whether you want a job, you do some "soul searching". If you cannot choose between a vacation in Costa Rica or an Alaskan Cruise, you do some "soul searching". It calls up visions of running a query on some sort of internal database, and it implies indecision. The problem is, when one decides to really dig into matters of the soul, or spirit, the importance is weakened by the expectation of outcome, rather like watching a movie to see how it ends. If you ask me, that's a great way to diminish the experience. Real soul searching is a result of a decision, not an indecision.
.......According to this conjunction, a lot of us kids at the end of "generation x" have decided to start the grand search. As I watch what my friends my age are going through, I have no doubt that this is an awesomely formative moment for my sub-generation. My friend Barb focused her energies into starting a marine biology degree this year, and then bravely flaunted her love of peace and justice in Seattle last month. A neuroscientist friend of mine has gone back to school to explore jazz as a path to nirvana. As I look around at the lot of us, I see many waking up from the drug-induced stupor of young-adulthood and looking around to see how full of colorful possibility this world is, even when you're naked against the world with no pot or vodka or conformity to protect you.
.......I think part of it is because we're running out of outer stimulation. The internet isn't a brand new toy anymore, TV is losing its glamour, and we're running out of ways to avoid ourselves. And we're discovering that, due to the smallness of the world today, we know an awful lot. So what can we do with all this information? Watch and see. The WTO protest in Seattle showed just how much passion is stirring in a group that was told for a decade that it was ambivalent. I think our passion has been taken for granted. Our generation has pushed for recycling, for an end to hate, for awareness as a tool to ending suffering. All of these ideas began with our parents and our older siblings, but we are combining our energies with those of our more experienced elders and infusing it with the energy only granted to the young. We are dragging ideas out of the dusty corners of awareness, wiping them down and setting them, shiny and beautiful, into the center of the mainstream.
.......I believe that therein lies a big chunk of the legacy of Chiron in this transition. Everyone before us, born in this century, has dealt with Pluto conjunct their natal Neptune. I have been told that this is the transit where most people learn to be cynical. If you look around, most people are cynics and they flaunt it like a Purple Heart. Of course nothing ever gets fixed, very few people have faith that it can be; they're too cynical to welcome it into their realities. But I hypothesize that adding Chiron to the mix affords us a different kind of cynicism, a why-should-I-take-your-cynicism sort of cynicism. Chiron is the gas in the car for this lifetime road-trip. In the back seat sits sober breakthrough Pluto and psychic comfort-object Neptune. With way-out cosmic professor Sagittarius at the wheel, we're paving the road as we go. It's only when we go down someone else's road and wind up in Nebraska instead of your own great big somewhere that we get cynical.
.......I feel in the deepest midnight blue of my intuition that this is the moment we come into ourselves and recognize all the raw potential that lies within us and within this rusty planet of ours. I see that with Chiron whispering in our collective ears, we have the potential to begin to heal some of the sickness that has sent us down such a scary road. If only we can remember how loud our voices are when combined, and how much we can learn when we teach each other, we can't fail. So many of us are becoming concerned with our inner lives, and when that happens we can't help but affect our outer world. If that's to be the new status quo, then sign me up.
.......Of course there is always the possibility that we will ignore our potential and cram our livable planet the rest of the way down the toilet with a great big cosmic plunger. In the myth, Chiron is immortal and has a painful wound he, the healer, cannot heal. He ultimately gives up his physical immortality to escape it. So there is the other possibility that we could all just sit down in the easy chair of cynicism and give up hope and wallow in that hopelessness until we drown, giving up on the future entirely. But I'm not putting much cash on that one. All we can do is make our choices, hold on loosely to our ideals and wait and see.
.......As for me.
.......If you read tarot you are probably familiar with the Tower card, which usually depicts lightning striking a solid-looking structure that crumbles under the shock and sends its inhabitants diving toward the ground. That is what it felt like when I stumbled over the first major clue that somehow I had become separated at birth: my marriage. See, once we got all the life stories and personal preference intricacies out of the way, I found myself at the end of my relationship knowledge. So there we were, just staring at each other and wondering what to do next. This was not my happily ever after fantasy, I felt stuck and I was very irritable about it. I was clingy and needy, trying to drown myself in my relationship to avoid the dehydration of my spirit. I started a lot of fights in an attempt to become unstuck. Kevin, my husband, suggested I try to meet some people in town since we were new, or finding things here that I like to do. Kevin couldn't be my everything, he didn't want to, and besides he was smack in the middle of his Saturn return. He was busy being responsible, and suddenly I couldn't anchor myself to him any more because he was gone working so much.
.......Well, because I was so very codependent, I set out to get a life in order to please him. Not the noblest beginnings of a soul search, but at least I started. All these accusations of imperfection sent me through a personal inventory. I discovered that in most of my relationships I have been a mirror of others' personalities not the creator of my own. I realized that I had taken this Mae West big-boobs-and-charm free ride through life, and it wasn't serving me very well anymore. As the old saying goes, you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes; then you'd better know something (that explains all the brief relationships in my past). That little cliché was never more glaringly obvious than at the genesis of my marriage. I finally acknowledged that to have a growing, changing, healthy relationship in with someone else you first have to have one with yourself. Tail between my legs, I was ready to begin the search for who I am.
.......Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a complete droid for the first twenty-some years of my life. My higher self popped up and said hello at certain points in my lifetime, but it was more like an obligation to being Pisces than a welcome friend. But finally I was ready to welcome all of me, and all that I had pushed away rushed toward me like an unrequited lover.
.......As began to know myself, I concluded that it didn't make sense to be a product of my experience anymore; it seemed more logical to make my experiences an extension of myself. So at dawn on August 11, 1999, the day of the eclipse/grand cross, I pitched the whole damn thing; actually I wrote it all down and burned it. I sent all the things that made me sad and scared and lonely into the atmosphere, and wrote down all the things that I wanted to replace them with to keep in my notebook. When I was all finished I found myself naked under my dress, barefoot, and locked out of the house for three hours. It was a frustrating metaphor for my life: to miss my regularly scheduled morning by being kept from my home with my daughter locked inside sleeping. When I came back inside it was a rebirth. All my points of reference had burned and I've had to completely redecorate my headspace. One renovation always seems to lead to another.
.......Now I stand in an empty room, trying to imagine what it will look like with my things in it. All of my dreams are packed in boxes, waiting to move in. I'm not ready to put anything up until I have given away all of the stuff I don't use anymore. I packed up a job that was killing me, and a need to fix everything (especially things that are not mine to fix), and brought them back to the store in exchange for some top-quality selfishness, some cashmere compassion and some really exquisite goals. I have no illusions that this project is through; I'm still picking my color schemes and chipping away at old plaster. The structure is good; it's just that nobody lived there for a really long time. There's plenty of room to add on, so I'm hoping I'll never be finished.
.......I tried to explain all of this to my husband last week. He looked at me like I had six heads. I imagine that it would be hard to suddenly be married to someone else. Even though his gentle urging (and my desperate need to please) brought about this whole process, I think the paths I've chosen have confused him. A Capricorn dealing in his home planet of Saturn is not in a place to comprehend all this airy-fairy metaphysical stuff. But he's encouraging me to push it as far as I can to wherever it takes me anyway. Our relationship has come a long way, and it turns out we have a lot of fun together. I'm still at the beginning of this transit, so I figure there must still be some strange turns ahead, but I'm enjoying the scenery and I've learned a lot about this great landscape of relationships. I have learned that you cannot squeeze two objects together to make one. When you do, the laws of physics slap you on the wrist. The more freedom we allow ourselves, the closer we have become, and the more I feel like part of the one in the flow of the universe. That seems like a good sign.
.......As for the cynicism, I can tell you I don't feel cynical yet. I feel excited, I feel energized, I feel like all the answers I have been looking for in other people have been sitting there staring me in the face for a long time and I'm finally noticing that it's not just part of the scenery. I'll check back in a few weeks and let you know if I'm still feeling so wide-eyed.
Tune in for further developments in the second coming of Maya, the Gen-exhibitionist.Planet Waves Digital Media Planet Waves 2000 Horoscopes | Contents | Compersion
