Delicate
And so it all ended with a whimper. An event “so scary that I’m giving classes on it,” said one astrologer with a keen nose for fear-based hype. The heralded Cardinal Grand Cross of 2014 did not bring the fireworks or big bangs predicted by many astrologers who warned clients to lie low, not to make any decisions. There were the usual political smoke and mirrors. The usual human dramas. The ominous rumble of anarchy in the Ukraine. The ghastly spectre of yet another self-serving dictator in Russia standing on the bodies of those he has trampled as Putin struts and pouts. But for most of us mere mortals the astrology has spotlighted the need for some kind of internal shift. Tension, crisis, chaos, pain, is how we humans have evolved over the millennia, and many of us may choose (unconsciously) to “hit rock bottom” in our lives – illness, relationship break-ups, or the euphemistically-named “down-sizing”, all of which is change coming at us from the outside. Change thrust upon us through illness, divorce or retrenchment so often leaves us truly down-sized as we clear our desks and carry out our possessions in a small brown box.
The eclipse season began with a much publicised lunar eclipse on April 15th, and ended when she met by her consort, the Sun with a solar eclipse on April 29th, all celestial markers for new cycles of change in our lives if we are willing to do what it takes and stick with the programme.
We say we want to change. And there are times we truly mean it. We begin new eating regimes, new jobs and new relationships. We find a new hairdresser. We have a make-over.
Change is a word that slips silently through the cracks of our over-committed, overwhelmed lives. We know the world around us is changing in a way that leaves us breathless. The delicate ecology of our Blue Planet is in a process of mass extinction. Forests are felled for the cancerous spread of housing estates, shopping malls, and factories that make more stuff for us to buy and throw away. Bees are dying; coral reefs now pale spectres of their incandescent beauty. Robotics are replacing humans. Without work we cannot feed our families. Yet, like laboratory rats in a frenzy of heated oestrus, we continue to breed more and more children. We want to change; we know our collective survival depends upon it. But we don’t.
For many of us “change” has no more power than a low-wattage light bulb to shine light into the dark corners of our personal lives. Change means to make different, to alter, to modify, to transform. And yet, deeply rooted in the meaning is also a sense of barter – an exchange of energy or substance. Change, like love is also a verb. When we change something in our life, whether it is a habitual pattern of thinking or behaving, a job or a way of relating, we need to let go of something. Even if this means walking away from a relationship that has ignited our Victim, Addict or Rescuer Archetype or literally endangered our health or wellbeing. Change means no more excuses. To change is to choose.
Most of us (unless we live in tribal communities or cower in silent submission in the shadow of repressive political or religious tyranny), choose the cereal we want to eat in the morning, the material we read on the internet, the lovers we invite into our beds. Most of us know, or think we know, that all evolution requires continual change and that life on this earth is a cycle of birthing and growing and dying. And yet when the Angel of Opportunity comes and taps us on the shoulder, we ignore her. We walk on by tenaciously clutching the bony hand of old behaviours and beliefs about the world. Every moment of every day we make choices – mostly driven by ghosts from the past that move silently through the chambers of faded memory. Thought patterns and behaviours with long dark cords that connect them still to the Tribal Mind are woven into synapses. We fret and chafe against the stifling cords that bind us to our pain. We stand, trussed up in our fears, our excuses, our hot-headed reactivity, our slippery avoidance, at the threshold of change which we say we want – but only on our terms at our own pace – and in a way that will not shatter the casing of our lives.
As we cross the threshold into this new astrological Age of Aquarius and terms like “The Law of Attraction” or “The Field” become part of the common lexicon, we know that change can happen in a nanosecond. So our choices mirror our experiences, draw in our lovers, our friends. Our choices bring us those who prick our delicate skins with betrayal, acts of violence, greed or callousness. We can choose to forgive – not condone the behaviour of those who have wounded our hearts with carefully calculated actions that puncture but leave no exit wound.
Our spiritual teachers have been saying over and over again: Every thought creates form. Every choice has a consequence. Every thought, every emotion is an act of creation – there is no such thing as any activity of our mind or heart that is not an act of creation. Our choices are enormously powerful. We can choose to accept things the way they are. We can choose to take action to change those things which can be changed. And we can pray for wisdom to know the one from the other.
Damien Rice. Delicate
