Shine and Rest
Hello friends,
I’m still reporting from my own cave so I wanted to share some more thoughts on periods like this: dark, still, mysterious, deep.
One thing I find in astrology is solace; not just solace in my connection to the stars but that my inner experience is often reflected in the current sky.
So if you’re feeling crunchy, unsure or stuck this past week, then perhaps these transits have something to do with it:
Mercury conjoined Pluto: Mercury has recently entered Aquarius but it met the planet of the Underworld on Thursday of last week. Mercury rules our thoughts and communication, while Pluto is like a deep dark cave. It can lead to great transmutation of this darkness but not before descending fully. You may have had to deal with facing harmful thought patterns or had difficult conversations; perhaps something hidden has been revealed.
Saturn conjoined Sun: Any planet that is less than 1º of the Sun is called "in the seat of the king” and is made stronger and more visible. Yesterday Saturn, planet of restriction, was in this position, shining a light on the structure and limitations in our lives. Many have reported this cazimi feels like a wake-up call. The usual liveliness and confidence of the Sun is dampened by Saturn asking for proof and hard work, not without potential anxiety or despair.
I am reminded of passages from one of my favorite contemporary Zen texts, “The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul and the Spiritual Life” by John Tarrant. In one chapter titled “The Second Descent,” he describes the sort of darkness that encroaches on our lives even when we’re doing everything “right”.
I think a big thing for me right now is to give myself permission to struggle or not be at my most effective.
Or, in other words, giving myself permission to see the value of this confinement, this waiting period (though it’s always a process).
When we first encounter a dark period without proportion or appreciation for our cycles, our lives seem solely dark and immovable. But if we dare, “we [can] notice that this second darkness," as in the second after the initial descent that introduced us to our spiritual lives, "is more dynamic and less dense” than our initial plunge. While the first time around we may “wait helplessly—putrefying, it seems, in our coffin,” in the second descent “we know again the sharpness of the inferno—yet this time we are not rudderless”.1 Tarrant points out that we may feel the sorrow of this descent more acutely but we also have movement within it.
By fully sinking into a current darkness, we also make room for the light when it comes back; not clinging to it, but letting it walk through freely, perhaps surprising us.
Want help moving through this darkness? I would happy to be a friend to help you sink deep into where you are, make room, let the light filter in.
My books are currently open:
How Does Your Sun Shine?
For the last few weeks, I have been releasing deep dives on the planets with an emphasis on embodiment and creative ritual. I want people to understand astrology through their experience and inspire creatives to use astrology as a source of embodied inspiration rather than something overly complicated.
You can read my essays on the Sun and Moon by clicking the hyperlinks.
But these essays focus on the purest essence of these planets; what these bodies are like without any other influence.
In practice, however, we don’t experience the Sun on its own but filtered through *our* unique Sun— the sign and house it’s in, fixed star parans, the other planets that aspect it, etc. Feeding your individual Sun, for example, may look different than the classic vision we have of this planet.
The Sun is out core identity— both our ego and the spark of the divine that connects us to Spirit. It is our golden spark, our unique self that deserves to shine. We engage in the Sun when we are praised for our skills or show them off with confidence.
The Sun helps us enter the public sphere and shine. Classically, we see the Sun represented by Kings or those with immense wealth or visibility. But we may shine for just our loved ones! Or through our writing or labor. There are as many ways to be a “genius” as there are people. Because genius isn’t some self-made intellect that only a select few people have; genius originally meant “"guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth”— one’s daimon or guardian spirit, leading you on the path only you can take.
So let’s look at Sylvia Plath’s Sun to understand her shine.
First off, her Sun is in the 10th by whole-sign. The 10th house, representing the highest part of the sky, is the place that tells us of someone’s public role and social recognition. Right off the bat, Sylvia Plath was meant to have her individual genius seen by the public. She first has her poetry published in high school and was successful enough in the public sphere to get a full scholarship to Smith College and then a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge. She was famous within her short life and was given acclaim for her books of poetry as well as her novel, “The Bell Jar”.
But what are her poems famous for? Death, loss, chaos, deep feeling and because we’re talking about the Sun, they usually draw from her own personal experiences. Margaret Hess puts it this way:
“Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.”2
You see Plath has her Sun in Scorpio, the sign of nocturnal Mars. Mars is the god of war and rules contentions, bloodshed, turbulence, and all that arouses our fighting spirit. But as a nocturnal sign, Scorpio is not the foot soldier or the warrior at the front of the line— he’s the sniper lying in wait or the poisoner who’s penetrated you from the inside before you even have a chance to realize.
Valens says those born under Scorpio are “tricky, base, thieves, murderers, traitors, incorrigible, destroyers of property, connivers,” and while we should take these traits with a grain of salt, we certainly see a theme of the more dark, underworld parts of life being highlighting in her work. Scorpio is the shaman, able to transmute shadow into medicine; the detective who looks beneath the surface to the secrets writhing beneath— echoing how Hesse describes Plath’s work above.
It’s also worth noting that her natal Mars, which rules her Sun, is in the 7th house, place of relationships, and not only was she known for marrying another poet, Ted Hughes, their meet-cute is the stuff Mars’s dreams are made of:
One night at a party in Cambridge, February 25, 1956, she met Ted Hughes, and their romance began in a blaze of passion. She wrote, "He kissed me bang smash on the mouth, And when he kissed my neck, I bit him long and hard on the cheek and, when we came out of the room, Blood was running down his face." The handsome gifted pair married four months later, on June 16, 1956.3
But remember Mars does only promise passion; there was quite a measure of betrayal in their relationship and her suspecting him having an affair led her to burning all of his papers; quite the Mars-7th house display.
All of this was, for better or worse, part of her identity: confronting issues of visibility alongside partnership; having public attention on her romantic life, often with a passionate, martial edge.
And for each person, how their Sun shines or their Moon manifests will be completely their own.
I could probably spend a whole session waxing poetic on just one placement; they’re all that rich.
If you want that sort of attention on one part of your chart or simply give voice to your entire chart’s complexity, I can provide you with that magic.
For now, I leave you with a poem of Sylvia’s, which I am finding both illustrative of her Sun and giving balm to the issues I discussed above. May it nourish you:
Fever 103º
(by Sylvia Plath)
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him
Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——
To Paradise.
(source)
Until next week loves,
Chloe
Light Inside the Dark, p. 159
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath
https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Plath,_Sylvia