The Dead and the True

October 31 marks the mid-point between the Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice in traditional, earth-honoring calendars.  Known as Samhain, it is a major nature-based holiday for honoring our ancestors and inviting the dead to visit and advise us.  As we move deeper into the season of darkness, which begins at the Fall Equinox, Samhain marks the moment when the veils between the living and the dead are at their thinnest.  It is a time to sit quietly and listen carefully to the signs, words and vast experience of the sages that have passed before us, holding the place of the wisdom of death and the contemplation of what has been before the cycle of rebirth and life begin again.  It is important to remember that, as we sit and request respectful counsel of our ancestors, so, too, one day will those who come after us sit and request our presence with them.

Living in western societies, which are governed by a primarily unconscious terror of the natural cycles of life, death and rebirth, it will serve us all well to revive and renew a relationship with a force and power that has always held sway over us and cannot be denied despite our best efforts to compartmentalize it in dark rooms hidden behind facelifts and iPods and our ceaseless pursuits of instant gratifications.

October 2010 New Moon in Libra

What do we mean when we speak of love and justice?

The conjunction of the moon and sun in Libra on October 7, gives us the opportunity to ponder our definitions of relationship and our own, subjective needs and desires and how we engage  with others.

In order to understand the sign of Libra, we must first examine his ruling planet, Venus and how she transmits her energies through this Fall sign of the zodiac.  Venus also rules Taurus, and in this home Venus represents the sexuality and sensuality of the maiden.  It is no accident that, during her time in Taurus, we celebrate the earthy rites of Beltane.  Hers is the new and vital exploration of fecundity and fertility found in the sign of the Bull.  The exploration of beauty, passion and pleasure of coupling and play at the physical level are hers to enjoy.  Through these activities, she develops her physical senses and grounds them into her being.  Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste are taken in in order to draw a boundary around the material being, to find and define its potentials and limitations.  This Venusian early adult, like all late adolescents, can become involved in the expressions of the inferior ego self and fall into the all-too-familiar patterns of jealousy, manipulation and obsession with control over the other.  This is a non-gendered potential that comes with the Taurean terrain of the relationship to possessions, which range from the material (as is traditionally understood) to the psychic/emotional ties that bind the self to other.  To be fully with something or someone is entirely different than “owning” it, and discernment of these two states is the challenge of the young Venus.