I am noticing that my sense of time is all over the place at the moment.. My ex husband was in touch over Instagram and the grief that began to pour out of me pretty much immediately was so intense. Seeing all of his beautiful photos of flowers and his allotment and of nature scenes with his sweet commentary made me realize again all the things I love and loved about him, but at one time I could only feel the hurt and often that paralyzed me.. I did an entire review then, later in bed, scenes from our meeting and life were pouring over me and I was having seizures of sadness and longing, most especially for the UK and our old life there.. He continues to do a lot of cycling and some of my fondest memories are of us cycling over the meadows to Granchester past the Blue Ball pub on late summer evenings when we first arrived and were living in idyllic Newnham, but the gathering darkness was there too and began to emerge on our first winter spent there in 1999 especially around the anniversary of Dad’s death 14 years earlier. That was my first major breakthrough of grief in therapy after getting sober 6 years before.. it took all of that time for it to thaw but it did not please my husband or his family.
That dream before we left Australia for Cambridge to live in April 199 of cow’s dead bodies littering blood red fields is so powerful to me in its imagery when I consider the blood of those who died in Flander’s fields during WW1 and how Jonathan’s moher sent us some photos before this of meadows strewn with red poppies prior to this and it awoke cell memory, lately at night I could feel the shells and bombardments of blasts falling all around me and most especially this morning as I woke from sleep I felt myself to be almost dissolved in that pain.
I managed to get up and into the bath but was crying again so I got back into bed and slept for another hour when I woke I had that sense of not really knowing where solid land was, how to rise, and I was also trying to breath while feeling like I was drowning in inner phlegm/silt there was then the sense of my bowels needing to evacuate my bowels. I forced myself to get going, as my Higher Power said, “put the radio on, make something to eat and just get moving, dont think about your body being under your control as it is not, you just have to take a step forward and so I have managed to get out of the quagmire again today. It is so obvious to me now that both accidents I had were repeats in some way of those young men nearly being obliterated by war, an earlier therapist even drew this parrallel one day saying my siezures seemed to echoe those of shell shock survivors such as depicted by Australian artist Ben Quilty.
After getting on breakfast I then got a shock when I heard a noise and looked over my shoulder to see the cleaner arrive, he was an hour early and I startled even though i ‘knew’ last night he was due I forgot the sense of time entirely, that today was Thursday, strange times.
I was beating myself up again so much again last night for my part in the breakdown of my marriage, I was avoiding and retreating and making Jonathan’s life so hard, I see that now in the two years prior to him making the decision to leave but as I consider it now it was the collective unconscious calling upon me.. Sadly for so many years since I have still felt too unsafe and I so I have ran, repeating that ancestral pattern about 4 times back and forward.. When it got too much and he left me in about two weeks time 18 years ago (a full astrologial nodal cycle) I went into a breakdown and began to fragment. It was a kind of hell I was living in but it was also a kind of shamanic descent if that makes any sense in what it began to reveal for me in terms of the ancestral and psychic forces around me from that time..
When I had the head smash in June 2005 it was in many ways a lot like the aneurysm my sister Judith suffered at the age of 34 that fragmented my life and my families life and led to the death of my father in 1985. Jonathan’s family had their own fragmentation and he lost his father at a similar age, going overseas like me and even to Greece and struggling on then. When we met he gave me a life raft as I truly was drowning, I see that now. I see more and more lately how porous my ego is and how much I can get inundated with the unconscious of the collective, it really is a case of high level sensitivity and empathy but a need for love and approval also, in many ways led me to self abandon.
On that note I rediscovered and excellent book on this issue of vulnerability to gaslighting today The Gaslight Effect : How To Spot the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life and it explores in depth how some of us can be both overpowered by and put down by those with stronger wills or ego investments.. It makes sense too of how lately I allowed myself to be manipulated for money.. In that book Robin Stern explains how our need for approval and inherent sense of self doubt can back fire and lead us to be both overpowered and undermined.. I noticed some of this happening over my brother and the car a few weeks ago..When people tell me what they think I should think or say or do it has not always been easy to hold onto my own point of view.
Mars in Taurus by transit may be beginning to trigger all of this as is squares my Mars Moon Saturn and square to natal Neptune… and at it opposes that Neptune in Scorpio which makes me so open to the collective feelings and undifferentiated mass of inner combined energies. Often I experience this as contractions and spasms in my body and I have also noticed that a part of me is trying to undermine my own forward progress at times by inner gaslighting, maybe something that got set up in childhood when forces set me at war with my own intuitive self.
Sun transiting the 12th of my chart at the moment in the late degrees of Cancer (and now opposing transiting Pluto in Capricorn at 27 degrees) means all of this ancestral longing and pain is also opening up so how timely was it to buy Susan Cain’s book on the bittersweet nature of our longings and desires and memories that so often we are just told to forget about our put away to favour more sanguine pursuits and hyper rational points of view. No wonder so many artists have to suffer for their art, pushed to the outskirts they have to enter the wildnerness, often through a time of inner breakdown to actually find themselves and to explore the pain or damage of a past that has hidden roots and tendrils or threads extending very far back in family or collective fate.
I was also interested to read this week that Chiron may have to do with fragmenting and the falling away or apart or our old lives to enter a new dimension of consciousness where ego boundaries do dissovle to reavel we are all connected.. We still need a healthy functioning ego though in order to navigate all of this.
I listened to a video on ascension last night that spoke of how we are moving from a 3D to a 5D systems and that our very cells are mutating.. this may make some sense of how I feel in my body at times, while at the same time I sense we are collectively standing on the brink of a time of great crisis on the earth where nature is concerned and most especially our split from nature.
Mars is not the only planet in Taurus at the moment the North Node (point of evolving destiny) and Uranus are also placed here. Taurus as Venus ruled sign related to the earth to in the esoteric system of astrology speaks to our need too for embodiment and to experience a groundedness in and fully established sense of love and self nourishment in our bodie.. We experience this via touch and inter connected being connections with others. We are also connected via the ethereal these in many ways are a polarity.
If at the moment then, I now feel myself very much betwixt and between the worlds maybe it’s no sign of madness as I so often fear but of an ongoing shift, one that began to open up when both Saturn and Pluto faced off in June or July 2001.
Emerging From The Dark Night 