Born for love

If we were born for love, how sad that so many of us lose the way. We get taught to shut down on our pain, we get versed in the language of denial and in the mechanical age it seems as though the soul at times had to be put entirely away. I was moved in watching the film Fisherman’s Friends on the weekend in the scene where one of the characters sings a most moving ballad or lament of a sea fisher’s widow for her love lost in high seas, it made me realise what harsh conditions so many of our ancestors survived. I know my own great great grandfather had to leave Cornwall when the bottom fell out of the tin mining industry but they were saying in the movie that many fishermen were forced into the tin mines in Cornwall and if you have seen how these hug the edge of precarious cliffs that dot the coast line you will realise what a tough call of a job that was.

There has been a lot of programs too on radio on the subject of the First World War it being the centenary of Armistice day last week. One commentator was saying how the deep pain of loss, devastation and trauma endured is so often glossed over. Shell shock was a more descriptive word for what so many of these very young men suffered and then returned with, in later days we know this kind of trauma by the moniker Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This stress and trauma that is not spoken of or acknowledged cannot be released and it goes mute and often into alcoholism or drug addiction or other kinds of acting out violence. The grief goes silent and changes its form into something ugly.

I didn’t get to see it but the movie Official Secrets aired at the British Film Festival here the other week and it concerned how Blair and Bush lied about the Iraqis having weapons of mass destruction. This was used as an excuse for invasion and a war that ended up killing about 460,000 armed solidiers as well as affecting so many Iraqi people. This war all started on the back of the Saturn Pluto opposition of 2001 and the resolution of this comes when Saturn and Pluto meet again next year in the sign of Capricorn for the first of several conjunctions on the 13th of January. Saturn and Pluto according to Liz Greene concern “purification through suffering and wisdom through the ordeal by fire.” Pluto is both destructor and regenerator. He rules the suffering which awakens the soul. Pluto may be vengeful and jealous when thwarted, more likely to strike out of the wound in the heart than take time to stop and think or feel the hidden grief and frustration that is propelling the violence, but Pluto is also about survival and the fight to be authentic especially when placed in the Saturn ruled sign of Capricorn. Saturn will be in its own sign (and has been since December 2017) Saturn and Pluto are majorly affecting all of those with planets placed in cardinal signs : Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.

The capacity to grieve and be able to feel the wound without retaliating senselessly or destructively is a difficult one. The struggle to survive may have us killing off certain things. I think deep grief must be strongly related to Saturn and Pluto. Grief is something that entered my own life as a small baby when my beloved Poppa died and everyone was so sad. It came again when my older sister left home and there have been numerous griefs for me over the years. I feel that my addiction was also about unresolved grief that was ancestrally carried.

It might sound weird my great great grandfather Thomas Matts Trudgeon often shares his grief over his lost mother with me. I know what I carry collectively I saw my older sister carry this ancestral burden for most of her life as a Sun and Venus sign Capricorn ruled by Saturn placed in the sign of the mother Cancer in her birthchart. I saw her collapse under the repression, it was a subject that came up around the lunch table yesterday when my sister and I were discussing how Jude so often wanted things and was denied them and would get into a rage. I personally think the ‘manic’ diagnosis is a masculine partriachial driven judgement that has strangled so many of us, especially women seeking to come fully alive under the heavy thumb of masculine repression (and I don’t mean here repression by men per se but also my women who are what Jung called ‘animus’ or perfection bound.)

Today I honour all the feelings of my sisters they could not get validated or respected. I cry for what the deep feminine soul in all of us had endured under the old order of conciousness. I feel so sad for my Dad who tried to hard to escape the pain and deprivation of his past but never could and only ended up trapped inside of it and passing on a difficult legacy I am still trying to get out from under. I think of the tale of the Handless Maiden who is promised to the devil by the father who does not know his daughter stands behind the old mill and how much of that my sister’s and I have lived in our own lives. But it seems to me lately that capacity to grieve and then release all of this is what most affects our capacity for resilience or redemption. Right now the earth is crying out for us and we are crying out in our own ways, surely now we can find new ways to react, surely there are new ways we can learn to meet each other across the divides of heroic wounded ego in order to birth a more compassionate, nature and feminine centred world. What do you think are the chances?