Immersion in the Grand-Cross Interrelatedness

4.11.14


Pretty much every day has brought me a new surprise since April began.

Is this an instance of self-fulfilling prophecy, based on the hype with which we astrologers have saddled the current month? Am I looking to be surprised, or am I just more keenly attuned to noticing the surprises (which, perhaps, are all around me all the time)?

I'm not sure it's important, at this point, to discern whether these coursing astro-energies are indeed as wily and erratic as anticipated… or whether all the commentary and consciousness we've tossed into this pot have helped to co-create this wily-and-erratic experience. In our inconceivably magical universe, is there a need to distinguish? The consciousness is the experience; they feed each other symbiotically.

Perhaps I've been most startled by the (for lack of a better term) spirit communication I experienced last week… the interjection of a disembodied voice-of-wisdom into my mental-space, urgently loving (though didactic), warning me to immediately alter certain behaviors for my safety and protection. You probably won't be shocked to know it wasn't my first trip around this block, for I've encountered various mystical happenings like this one throughout my life (and such happenings have everything to do with why I'm an astrologer writing these words to you now). And I hope I won't shock anybody's sensibilities too much by reporting that this one was qualitatively different because it didn't just come in through the usual crown-chakra sensations (related to one's connection with the spirit realm and universal oneness), but was also felt as a buzz in my sacral-chakra (related to creativity, passion and sexuality). Yes, I got libidinously cruised from the other side, for the first time ever. Uh, let's just leave that right there. (No worries: My therapist continues to reassure me I'm not 'crazy'.)

I suppose I shouldn't have been that startled, as I've sort of been 'calling in' this type of contact. As I mentioned in my last article about the benefic water-element vibes presently accompanying this grand-cross volatility, I recently discussed these alternative modes of knowing ('evocative, imagistic, psychically resonant, yet hard-to-decipher and impossible-to-prove') in my highly Neptunian talk at IAD. I spoke at length about spiritualism, a religious movement based in the belief that the soul continues after the death of the body, and that we the living have the capacity to communicate with the spirits of discarnate humans who have passed, as a means of receiving messages for personal guidance. In preparing, I mused that my presentation was also an invitation for such spirits to show up in the room while I was speaking, both to illustrate my point and maybe fill up some of my allotted speaking-time with otherworldly insights, taking a bit of the pressure off me. Little did I suspect this invitation was open-ended… and would be collected upon well after the audience and I had gone home.

Following my surprise communication, I naturally felt a bit ungrounded. I immediately grabbed for a second helping of dinner, then proceeded to spend the next couple days chowing down on lots of carb-heavy food: pizza, big sandwiches, giant breakfasts, even (strangely for me) Easter candy. Even as I knew my body hungered for a weighting-down and I was merely giving it what it wanted, my brain warned me that this sudden binge would have its obvious consequences. Sure enough, during my morning self-assessments, the digits on the scale went quickly up to an anxiety-provoking number. In full disclosure, I've struggled with food issues, yo-yoing weight and body dysmorphia for years… and though I've spent the last year working hard on my fitness, building muscle and transforming my body, my awareness doesn't always align with physical reality. (For instance, I must remind myself, increasing muscle mass increases the number on the scale.) Though I knew I'd done the right thing by eating a bit more for a few days, I struggled to accept the momentary weight-gain. It kicked me into an unfortunate tailspin, one which anybody who's ever attached their sense of self-worth to fluctuating superficialities would find familiar.

It's a steep sad slope from fluctuating self-worth to actively kicking up dust in one's personal relationships, I'm here to attest, because it wasn't long thereafter that I was brattily acting out in a needy play for affirmation from my partner. But just in case this isn't clear from my previous sentence, I already receive plenty of affirmation from my partner. Our relationship is pretty damn solid, especially as we approach our ten-year anniversary next month. Yet, while I'd never experienced much envy in my life up until Pluto crossed my Descendent in 2012, I now sometimes find myself competitively over-concerned with what he is doing (and feeling bad, in comparison, about myself) in those moments when I'm suffering a dip in self-confidence. We had one of 'those moments' as a direct result of the indulgent eating, which was a direct result of the spirit communication. We emoted; we processed; we got through another uncomfortable checkpoint along the road to further intimacy; we remain committed and in love. And also: What a fucking pain in the ass.

But to come full-circle (instead of leaving this narration to droop into a woeful tale of complaints), that same magical whir which begat the protruding spirit-voice (and then the pizza and then the brattiness) has also saturated my April days with such a strong serendipitous quality, I've almost had to pinch myself at times to make sure I'm not dreaming. I've been flooded with the very sort of 'profound emotional connection' I described in my last piece, seemingly out of the blue. I've observed jarringly precise manifestations of prayer-wishes I'd sent out, awestruck at how they were answered verbatim, to the letter. And I'm about to set out on a great adventure I've been quietly concocting for a couple years now… and which I purposely timed to finally happen now, to harness these powerful winds of discontinuity toward a creative self-reinvention I've been deeply yearning for.

I am literally buzzing, the dynamized spirit-molecules raising my vibration to an exaggerated level of excitation. And also, I'm reminded by both my physical body and my emotions, I remain a dense mundane human. I'm pretty elated overall… and, at moments, panicky and mournful and self-doubting. All of it, all at once. Such is the current state of being.

We are in the culminating waxing phase of this moon cycle, leading up to a total-lunar-eclipse full moon early next Tuesday morning (Apr 15), and the emotional swells continue building until then. Lunar eclipses add a layer of synchronistic magnitude to the larger emotional awarenesses which present themselves at a full moon, as if some 'missing piece' finally reveals that fuller understanding which our minds could've never produced with cerebral analysis alone. The bleeding-together of seemingly conflicting emotions (as I described in my first-person confessions above) may leave us feeling confused or a little schizo, but these disparate emotional threads are actually more interrelated than first glances might expose.

Our lives are not comprised of neatly-cordoned-off cubicles of discrete spheres-of-experience, like peas and mashed potatoes carefully kept from touching each other on some fussy child's dinner plate… though plenty of us try our compartmentalizing best to maintain that illusion. It's the glaring contrasts between our moments of relative ecstasy and agony that help the wiser among us to set our most satisfying priority-list, and make necessary course-corrections to remedy the more agonizing circumstances. We cannot recognize what's working well for us—and what's not—without such contrasts. It's much harder to muster a clear call-to-action when we paint over our entire life-structure in a uniform tone, whether a pleasant-enough pastel or a dull drab grey. Light needs dark to define itself.

Though everything's always interrelated with everything else (if, that is, one healthfully strives for an integrated existence), we now deal with a peculiarly heightened complexity of interrelationship under this cardinal grand-cross. Four planets are at perpendicular angles, squaring and opposing one another… which means that, in each of our birthcharts, four different interrelated zones are being simultaneously hit by this mega-intense burst of astro-pressure. What's going on in one corner of life right now, then, is not tidily distinct from what's going on elsewhere; they directly impact each other. In my own tale, for instance, my immersion in a professional project (i.e., my Neptune-inspired IAD talk) led to an ultra-personal spiritual epiphany, followed by earnest re-engagement with my bodily struggles, stirring up one more round of interpersonal-relationship growth, and capped off with an icing of enthusiastic forward-thinking optimism. In trying to 'make sense' (HA!) of this month's continuing surprises, be very suspicious of any explanation that dodges such an interrelating perspective, in hopes of conveniently leaving out the puzzle-piece hardest to fit into place.

Mere hours before the lunar eclipse, Pluto stations retrograde (on Mon Apr 14), forcing a palpable emphasis onto whatever's the most psychologically 'inconvenient' facet of our current life-overhaul. As a major player in the grand-cross, Pluto drives us to unconsciously re-impose whatever ordering structure we're concurrently trying to revolutionize, terrified as he is to give up his existing power on behalf of unknowns and uncertainties. Pluto represents those urges we may seek to deny, due to the intense and/or complicating effects they might produce if allowed expression—though, by denying them, we only give them more power to operate in the shadows, motivating us to do the very things we'll later feel shame, regret, and/or self-hatred about.

As Pluto stands still and the moon waxes to its eclipsed fullness, we may likely encounter such a reasserted rise of any ingrained complexes which, if given into, would love nothing more than to halt us in our personal revolutions and retributively force us into retreat. To reassert our power over such unconscious Plutonian terrors, they must be confronted head-on, uncomfortably unpacked, and definitively dealt with. Otherwise, those self-denying fears we had hoisted upon us in our earlier days will remain in charge of our destiny, to the detriment of our delight-seeking souls. That knot's got to get untied, or else we stay in bondage.

Now bring on the next surprise.