“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
-Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Apologies in advance, but this blog entry may prove awkward for both of us. Although I draw from my personal experience often when writing this blog, it’s rare for me to talk much about my personal life. My Moon in Cancer values its emotional privacy, and the Sagittarius, Aquarius, and Gemini in my birth chart would rather distract you from my personal issues with my juggling-chainsaws-while-riding-a-unicycle act. It’s good entertainment, and I’d rather risk accidental decapitation than accidentally exposing my personal life.
But — largely for your sake Dear Reader and not my own — I’m going to go out on that limb, just this once.
***
I have been undergoing an unusual set of bad transits lately. We as astrologers aren’t really supposed to say “bad” transits… we’re supposed to say they are “challenging.” I generally agree with that, except we are talking about my transits, and frankly they are bad. Horrible terrible very bad no good transits. How bad? I am just finishing my Saturn Square, and Saturn is approaching the conjunction to my natal Sun and the square to my Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Transiting Uranus is approaching the square to my Moon and Ascendant and Mars. Transiting Neptune is close to conjuncting my Saturn. And Pluto? Yeah… transiting Pluto is going to land on my Mars and oppose my Moon.
(Excuse me for a moment while I crawl under a table and make some wounded-animal sounds.)
This whole dog-pile of badness has manifested itself in two distinct ways. First of all, there is a cold/flu/Ebola of some sort going around here, that I’ve found impossible to shake, that has made it very difficult to work. Spending two hours on the couch followed by two hours in bed every day makes it hard to work, and I can barely concentrate (which is something one needs to do when writing) or speak (which is sort of mandatory for doing readings). Also: I’m not sure if the chills, lack of appetite, and nausea I’m experiencing are due to my illness… or contemplating the huge pile of unanswered e-mails I have to deal with.
With a regular job, I could just call in sick… or put in a minimal effort when my sick days ran out… and still pay the bills. Remember this when you’re pining for the freedom of being self-employed. Freedom, as it turns out, isn’t “free.”
Secondly… and this is something most of you don’t know… but about six months ago I extracted myself from a very difficult place in my personal life that I had been in for about two years. Yet it’s only now that I am fully experiencing the emotional effects of that two-year stretch of time. You know how a sonic boom works? If an airplane travels fast enough to outrun its own noise, the sound piles up behind it and creates a shockwave of sound much louder than an airplane normally would.
In a sense, even though I am half a year out of that very bad place, the sonic boom of depression is hitting now.
***
So now: why am I going on about this when I claim to be highly allergic to exposing my personal life? Because for all the bad I’ve been through and may be facing now… many of you are experiencing difficult times yourselves. And I want to remind you — and me — that things can and do get better.
Also: whether you’re heavily into astrology or not, in difficult times it’s easy to dwell on the darkness and forget that there’s a light on somewhere. A good example: that pile of lousy transits I’m having now I mentioned earlier? I totally skipped over the fact that transiting Uranus will be trine my Sun for the next two years, and Pluto will be trine my Uranus-Pluto and sextile my Neptune. So despite all the crap, the slowest and most powerful of these transits are more on my side than against me.
The gist of it is this: if I can survive this and come out the other side of it better, then so can you. Those of you born in the mid 1960s and/or with prominent placements in Virgo or Pisces are facing a lot of the same things. Yes, I know how much things might stink right now. But: I’m here for you if you need me, and we’re going to get through this just fine. Honest.
Oh… and our friend Dante? He may have been lost in that Dark Forest, but (three volumes later) he ended up in Heaven with his One True Love. See? It gets better.
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