Living Astrologies: An Invitation to be Surprised

I (Nicole) am writing these thoughts in the early hours before sunrise. The stars are softening into the cool grey of early dawn. It’s quiet. I hear a northern flicker to the south. The call of a towhee. A crow and an acorn woodpecker. 

As more participants in the dawn chorus arrive, I sense the oaks and pines in their own kind of stage transition. At night, I feel a close, grandmotherly presence from the trees. In the dark, they seem to form a kind of shelter or embrace as they bend and branch overhead. The textures of shadowed and moonlit leaves give me a sense of being held close to Earth, of being inside of Her beauty, even as Ouranos, the Sky, draws my attention up to marvel at the unspeakable vastness of the heavens. 

But here, standing at the brink of day, I feel these same trees begin to straighten into their daytime stature. Not quite aloof, but distant in comparison. They are standing there, while I am here.

I find myself missing the trees, even though I rationally know that they haven’t gone anywhere. I meet the part of me that grieves the night, how the stars can reveal themselves in the dark and the grand-motherliness I feel from the oaks.

Staying with this grief, I now meet a sense of helplessness in the face of another incoming day. My brief moment of solitude, deep reflection and dreaming with a view of the starry sky — is leaving. And there is not a thing that I can do about it.  

By entering this hidden-in-plain-sight portal of helplessness, I find myself now moving into the day with full feeling. With a deeper sense of felt-connection and aliveness. I am both surprised by my grief for losing the night —  and surprised by this medicine it’s revealed. By paying more careful attention to how I am affected by the rhythms of life around me, I remember how much I love life yet must always be letting it go its own way at the same time. I remember that, despite the brightness and sense of separateness the sun brings, the night — with all its intimacy, deep feeling and mystery — is never really gone. 

The sun is now fully in the sky, moving through the temple we call the 12th house. I find myself facing a jumbled day of various tasks and responsibilities, the impossibilities of parent-work balance — but humbled to and resourced by this dear ground of rhythm, grief and gratitude.

To me, living astrology makes space for this kind of surprise by implicating us in what we are studying.

For example, inside this act of writing an email intended to invoke and inspire a contemplation of what ‘living astrology’ is for you — I myself was surprised by and taken deeper into my own experience. Today’s sunrise helped me encounter the symbolism of the 1st and 12th houses in a new way. I found myself giving permission and admission to the creature in me that cries out for the grandmother oaks, aching and terrified by the possibility of losing their embrace. How many mornings have I moved past this feeling? — And the medicine inside of it?

Determining whether my experience of the trees shifting from grandmotherly to distant is “real” or not, isn’t the point in experiential astrology. We trust ways of seeing that are “subjective” or “surplus” to consensus-based realities. We value the sensuous, the sense-able, the sensual. We’ve discovered, time and again, how it bridges to meaning and symbolic revelation. And so, the question we often ask in our classes with respect to our course material is:

Where is this taking you?  Where does this myth take you in your own memories, emotions, sensations, dreams, current life?  What character or place in the story really speaks to you, at this moment?  

Following our senses and lived experience can lead us to unexpected clearings and a quality of astrological insight that does not take us up and out — but down and into our bodies, and our embeddedness with all life.