More of this story is told on Book of Blue.
Good Morning,
The Moon conjunct Mars: that was an intense night.
I was very happy to wake up to the light streaming into my studio. I didn’t remember that the Moon had just gone rolling over Mars until I looked at the chart this morning, and I understood a little better my experiences of the past eight hours: this mix of ripping fear, passion, sadness, loneliness and plenty of erotic energy.
After spending the past two days at a funeral for a 20-year-old who overdosed, I was in a pretty strange mood. It was cold, that is, too cold to feel like bundling up, warming up my car, and going home. The wind was howling past my windows. So I decided to lock the hatches and stay in my studio…and before I knew what was happening was creating these images that I had never seen. Very Mars-Moon-Pisces.
Then I started looking at the photos of Kaila’s funeral and could not believe the visual beauty that was pouring off of them, despite the obviously horrific nature of what happened, this stark quality they have. I will post a few of them later.
What I do like about funerals is that for the most part, they are get-real experiences. Not entirely so; but a community acts like a community, people express care for one another openly, and we get a window into how life might be on Earth if we took life seriously. Apparently actual death, in our faces, is one of the few things that temporarily snaps us out of the trance.
The other thing I noticed last night was feeling like I was psychically slimed by being in the presence of some of Kaila’s heroin people, who were at the wake and the funeral. There is a vibe of desperation that stuff has that erodes any possible ethics or morals. This is a drug that takes on a life of its own and I think acts as a kind of demonic possession. True, I have not spent a lot of time around cokeheads, but even cocaine seems more civilized than heroin (perhaps because it has a productive quality, to a point), which energetically resembles a fast tug into the underworld.
Her story resembles Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (in astrology, Ceres), who ends up kidnapped by Hades (in astrology, Pluto) and ends up the queen of the underworld. Kaila does indeed have a rough Ceres aspect: Mars conjunct Ceres, on the Aries Point. For the days of her funeral, the Sun was going right over those two points. This is the eternal grief of her mother, most of it public; the heart surgeries were indeed a public event and Kaila is a �famous person’ as a result of them — and now, as a result of her death.
Throughout Kaila’s whole life, her mother, Tobi, was threatened with losing her: first to the multiple heart surgeries and then to a two-year spell of severe drug use, though it was on and off; so it was another one of those roller coasters. When I would see Tobi (usually when I was placing a classified at in Woodstock Times) she was as calm as she could be about it: calm, but edgy. Then one day I figured out what was really going on for her when she suggested that doing more photos with her daughter would be a good influence on her. You don’t usually think of a mom (even one you’ve known for a while) being totally encouraging and positive that an older guy should photograph her 20-year-old daughter nude. Then I got it.