Memory and aging

I wonder if as we age memory becomes more prevalent, as if those experiences we underwent encoded in the soul can rise up like vapors at times and make their presence felt. In astrology memory can be related to the Moon and Cancer where the Moon is placed today as it slowly inches towards its monthly opposition with Pluto in Capricorn. As some of you may know Pluto can relate to what is held in the subconscious, maybe even the ancestral subconscious since epigentic research has shown encoded in cells our parents pass on are emotions and neurological events.

I was sitting here a moment ago as soft rain fell and was vividly transported back to one of the bookshops in Cambridge where my ex husband I lived for a time and the site of my second head injury.. It was as if I was there, on wet day like today, I could see the books and the cafe where I was seated I could feel the warmth of it. Possibly these memories become stronger when we are not out there engaged in life. This is how I spend a lot of my time, and have done for many years but I am finding lately the charge of painful things is not as bad, it seemed to reach some kind of crescendo on Saturday following the lunar eclipse and with Mars on top of natal Neptune..

Part of my soul still at times feels like it is still in Cambridge, I had some of the most lovely times of my life living there, working at the Botanic Garden, cycling everywhere, living in a lovely little place with a long narrow garden with a walnut tree at the end where squirrels took the nuts scarpering along the fence then to bury them somewhere in the garden. And the red robin would often come if I was there, as I often was on those long summer afternoons after work. Before all of our stuff arrived from Australia we spent evenings after dinner often cycling together through the cow parsley littered meadows that follow the river Cam to Grantchester. Friday nights we often had a meal at the Rupert Brooke pub, and never failed to smile over the name of a favorite English pudding, Spotted Dick!

This now feels like another phase of my life but I cannot lie, lately I want to go back but then I know part of me is also at home here in Australia, even as I miss the UK and I am aware not to make all of those memories rosy, as there were tough times too.. I do not cry about it as much any more. Life is just life, in fact I was just reading something William Seighart writes about grief in his collection The Poetry Pharmacy that accompanies a poem by Wendy Cope called My Funeral. This poem is written from the perspective of a dead person both observing the proceedings while saying what she would most hope for, that others would not use the opportunity to give a eulogy as an ego trip, that the eulogy be kept succinct and brief. The poem gives a sense of how she was in life, impatient to get on and not a fan of sentiment.. Seighart talks about how in death we can tend to idealize those who have passed on, not seeing them as realistically, and I wonder if we do this with some of our memories too, making of an experience we went through something more or less.

Ideally when these memory vapors arise I would be best to observe and then let them pass on by. The past is the past and it is gone, but still at times its echoes live on, haunting my present.

Thank God for poems anyway, thank God for a place to write even if is really only for myself. Today I relish a clear open present moment of deep quiet as this gentle rain falls, Jasper snoring lightly beside me, I have a free day to enjoy as I wish reading my book, making a nice lunch, choosing not to be pulled in again by all of Scott’s demands while I sit with the anger I feel over landing myself in a situation where someone used me for money.. Regardless of the fact it seems he is genuine, I was reading up about this Pluto transit to his natal Sun Venus Mars conjunction in Libra last night and it spoke of someone using co-ersion and pressure to get their way.. This is what he did, regardless of whether he pays all of this money back he got over a 3 year period. I do not want to gripe about it any more or play the victim card.. facts are facts.. It was a lesson..There is absolutely zip I can do about things gone past so in that situation I just pray today for serenity to accept those things (from the past) I cannot change.