Some folks’ lives roll easy as a breeze
Drifting through a summer night
Heading for a sunny day
But most folks’ lives, oh they stumble

Lord they fall
Through no fault of their own
Most folks never catch their stars

And here I am, Lord
I’m knocking at your place of business
I know I ain’t got no business here
But you said if I ever got so low
I was busted,
You could be trusted

Some folks’ lives roll easy
Some folks’ lives
Never roll at all
Oh, they just fall
They just fall
Some folks’ lives

(The astrology bits are at the end so that anyone unfamiliar with astro-terms can skip them.)

I am in my current favourite runaway-to place with the 300+ year old copper beech. Unlike some folks, I cannot recall a time when I have decided with a rational steady mind to go on a trip, instead I feel so distressed that I have to go because I cannot stay at home another minute.

I am explaining this to the internet because it helps me if I formulate the inner experience and see it in words. But it is also a life-saver to see the inner experience alive and real in the birth chart – just like having a map when you are lost in unknown territory.

Mercury represents the way we think and the moon represents our feelings. To have them in hard geometrical aspect to each other in the birth chart is different, in a challenging way, than to have them with no aspect to each other at all or in a positive aspect to each other. No one wants what we think to fight against the way we feel – it feels better to have these two, mind and feelings, in harmony. Waking up this morning in my (of the moment) best place to be (‘place’ has always been important to me) I was surprised to feel as unwell as I had felt the previous day at home, especially as the strength of relief when I arrived was so welcome and present. I had gone to sleep in a positive frame of mind, woken a couple of times in the night bewildered, but figured it out and went back to sleep.

In the morning I did the usual ritual of coffee and contemplating the tree and a kind of meditation. The bad feeling persisted. Why was this happening? The worst of the transits had moved on, so I backtracked through time to the beginning of this testing phase in March, saw the energies in the charts – my chart and the transit chart – and saw that the archetype of the ‘wounded healer’ was still strong, that Neptune ‘the dissolver’ was helping me to fall apart and Pluto was still suggesting that the whole world as I know it be upturned and remade.

I wondered about checking myself into some sort of healing centre with comfortable rooms like the one I am in now, but then decided to be the healer instead of the one who carries the wound (as if they can be separated). I believe in the persistent message from A-H that to focus on positive thoughts is essential.

So, having now dragged myself back up to ‘normal’ from ‘breakdown’, here is a word about why it is sometimes hard to turn round quickly from a negative state of being: Pluto moves very slowly, as does Neptune, Uranus and Chiron. They work to offer us what we do not know we need to take us to the place we do not know we want to be. In a chart/life which is challenging, this happens on and off throughout the life.

I know I am in for the long-haul at this time, but I also know that I can touch base with my chart in its current state to see what is going on, and I also know that, although I resist it sometimes, Abraham is a stream of inspirational energy. And we all have our invisible helpers.

My issue is mostly a 4^th house thing – sun, Saturn Neptune by the IC with squares from Mars and Uranus. But also the square between Mercury and the moon. Briefly, when an outer slow-moving planet makes contact (transits) with a natal personal planet, you know about it. So, since March I have been under attack from Neptune, Pluto, Chiron and Saturn – hitting my moon, Mercury, Venus and the IC/MC axis. Also, this is at a time when, by secondary progression a 30 year cycle is ending and beginning.

The Neptune ingredient is always difficult to define because that is its godly function: Saturn defines our boundaries, Neptune dissolves them. I have the two tightly conjunct and sitting on the IC, which is the bottom of the chart: the 4 main angles of the chart are the most powerful – that is, the cross within the wheel. Anything either on that cross at birth or even in the 1^st, 4^th, 7^th and 10^th houses, or hitting these places by transit or progression (in the now) is an energy up for review in the life which will get our attention. For me the astro-question has always been, how do I know what it is like not to have these two opposing energies in constant dialogue with each other? Neptune saying ‘there is no answer as there is no question’, and Saturn saying ‘you must know and do the right thing’.

The above lyrics of Paul Simon came to mind this morning. Link to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbagtXi4HBs&list=RDkbagtXi4HBs