Humble, grounded, of the earth.
Just a few words that come to mind as I contemplate the concept of humility. It strikes me that we should always remain aware we are fashioned of earthly stuff, but there is also magic in the starry unearthly part of us as well which I believe is more our spiritual airy side. On the path of recovery need to beware inflation which is a state of being within which we feel we are bulletproof or inpervious to things, but at the same time a feeling of connecting ever so deeply to the spiritual, meaning infused light filled spaces full of enthusiasm (which I believe translates to be equated with a condition of feeling our spirits to be full of the theos -breath of God) is also essential to the life experience of many us, most especially those of us with a deeply mystical bent.
To my mind there is a powerful duality associated with this human experience, we are part of the earth and part of the stars, so our humility and earthly qualities remind us to remember that we are comprised of sinew, flesh, tissue and bone and that what we suffer other humans suffer as well. Nothing separates us from our humanity except our belief in a kind of mistaken grandiosity or state of separation or spiritual isolation, or an association with a state of imperviousness or psychic inflation that is beyond us. Yet as humans we also have the need to believe in a part of us, our spiritual selves that thirsts at times to be airborne, to imagine, dream and feel free to fly above the human limitations and heaviness of matter, to escape the bounds of the primitive survival brain dominated by thoughts of lack, fear and separation. So many times we may try to escape from those experiences of the flesh we need to truly embrace in order for us to feel the spirit in us come alive, but grounding into those experiences may actually end up awakening and liberating us more, if we can stay humble and grounded too embracing the part of us that suffers, and desires, aches and burns.
When we surrender to what Ernest Becker called our creatureliness then we realise we are a suffering human we have a heart that is wired for connection and will feel literally like it is being squeezed when meaningful attachments break but we also have a spiritual side of us that on some level knows that anyone we truly loved is never fully gone from us in the spiritual dimension, they have just moved away from earthliness and onto another plane of existence. And so our relationship to the essence of who they are and what they meant to our soul changes or deepens on some level when they move off from earth. If we are humble enough to recognise there is more to life than just the material then we get to have a spiritual relationship as well with all of life as it changes form.
To me it would be lacking in true humility to say that spirit is not real, that relationships don’t change form and cannot be just as meaningful on a etheric level as on an earthly one but this depends upon how much our soul has been able to encompass the power of the letting go and transmutation process that occurs as things take their leave of us.
I experienced this most powerfully over the first 40 days of my mother’s death. I grieved so much in the early weeks and went through so much guilt and sadness. It was around the 40 day mark when some spiritual traditions say the spirit moves further away from connection to us on the earthly plane that I felt a kind of tearing, I remember I fell to the floor crying as Jasper sat beside me and then poems just poured out of me along with a torrent of emotion. My relationship with my mother was changing form and my relationship with my inner mother was changing form too.
Its interesting to contemplate this as Mars has recently moved over the position of my Mum’s Pluto in Cancer. The Sun will ingress into Cancer in a few days and Mercury is in Cancer at present too in fact Mars and Mercury have recently joined up at 22 degrees of Cancer aligned with the transiting North Node opposing Natal Pluto. My Mum got to live through her Pluto return (she was 93 when she died) and we carry the energy of her cells in ours, my sister has her South Node here so is facing those transits at present.
For me astrology gives me a window into these spiritual worlds, to understand the place where the personal, collective and spiritual and transpersonal meet and meld. We bathe in a sea of energies which have collective universal archetypal themes, mother is our body, represents our relationship to matter and to lunar and emotions. All these things are especially poignant right now as Cancer becomes lit up in the starry skies and inside of our tissues. Mother is also the earth even though Cancer is a water sign. Its polar opposite or shadow reflection = Capricorn/earth where Pluto is now placed. For psychic balance we need a relationship with all the elements and psychic dimensions within us. Feeling, thought, inspiriation/spirit and grounded matter/body, all are interwoven in a cosmic dance that is about shifting polarities of opposites, sun and moon, earth and stars, spirit and matter.
There is yet more to write on this but my tummy is rumbling so I better honour my creaturely side by getting myself some lunch. 🙂
Emerging From The Dark Night 