By Cal Garrison
This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of an Aries Moon. The Sun entered Taurus on April 19, which puts us in the last hours of the “Old Moon.” This means we will be wrapping things up, dealing with elements of endings and completion, until the Moon turns “New” at 10:26 p.m. on April 22.
In all of my readings, for the last couple of weeks, the burning question of the day has revolved around the whole concept of relationships. It seems like all of us are hogtied to strict notions about what it means to love and be loved. We’ve talked about this before, but because this issue appears to be universal, I thought it might be good to use an example from this week’s round of clients to examine it in a little more depth.
With the Covid-19 routine forcing so many of us into solitary confinement with our mates, who knows? What I have to say might turn out to be useful.
This one comes from a session with a woman in her mid-40s who wanted to know if she would ever find true love. She told me that she had been in a number of relationships, but none of them worked out because she had a hard time figuring out how to create intimacy and have enough space to be herself with another person, at the same time. She had also been told by another astrologer that she would never find love, and that it would be best to forget about relationships and focus on her career.
Looking at her charts, her Cancer Moon told me that this gal had spent many lifetimes being in what I call “traditional relationships.” This means that she had graduated, with honors, from the business of being married, having kids, being a parent, having a family, and remaining tied to another human being until the end of her days. As the hallmark of the past, the Moon in Cancer indicated that her spirit had gotten as much as it could out of that particular aspect of human experience.
This condition is hard for the average person to wrap their mind around. Why? Because we are conditioned to believe that our main purpose for living revolves around mating and breeding. Those activities are part of the human experience, but they do not define, nor do they justify it. Still, this gal had Libra Rising, which gave me pause to look around and see why, if all of the above held true, the penultimate relationship sign would be sitting on her point of purpose.
In a nutshell, she had basically OD’d on relationships in previous lives, but, with the Libra ascendant, there appeared to be a few loose ends in that department, i.e., things that needed to get straightened out in this life. When Libra is rising it means that the individual has come back to learn how to create conscious and equal relationships with others. Conscious and equal means that what we want for whoever we’re with, is whatever they want for themselves. For this construct to work, the dynamic has to go both ways.
This sounds easy enough but what we tend to overlook is that it is bound to include things that may not be to our liking; as in: if your partner needs to be with someone else for a period of time, you have to find a way to make room for that. Or if you need to split for India to sit at the feet of the Master and not be around for five years, your partner has to figure out how to be OK with that.
We tend to think of Libra Rising as all sweetness and light, but it is a tough road. No one finds their way on this path until time and experience teach them what it’s all about. At 45, this gal is just scratching the surface. To help her understand how to go deeper, I had to explain to her that love is not what we think it is — and it definitely has little to do with the happy couple under the arbor of lily-of-the-valley that is perched on top of the wedding cake. Everyone’s experience of love is unique to them and their circumstances. How we get to it is colored by what we thought we had to do to get love from our parents.
As far as that goes – oy vey! I don’t care who I am talking with, pretty much everyone had to tie themselves up in knots to get love from their parents. And it’s what we learn from that, that we carry out into the world as adults and use to get love from whoever shows up to stand in for them. In this particular case, the woman in question grew up with a controlling mother who was domineering, and a father who went to work and came home to be nagged by his wife. Her parents are still together. But her father, as she put it, “has been totally destroyed by her mother.” Were it not for the fact that he has had a mistress for 25 years he would be dead by now. All of this showed up in her charts: between a Pluto-Moon square, and a complex series of squares that included one between Saturn and Lilith, it was obvious that Mom was the Dragon Lady, and Dad had a girlfriend.
So what this woman learned about how to get love got twisted up in issues that entrained her to co-depend with Mom no matter what (Pluto square Moon, Moon square Arachne, Moon opposite Toro, Moon square Vesta) and fostered huge needs to rescue her father, (Siva square Saturn) keep his secret, (Saturn square Lilith/Pluto) and protect him from being destroyed (ditto). If what I said earlier holds true, was this gal well-equipped to approach her primary relationships with men from a balanced place? She was born and bred to believe that love equals enabling. The atmosphere in the home was saturated with themes of infidelity, and because she was required her to sell off her individuality to win approval from a tyrannical mother, her love life was sprinkled with an inability to find intimacy and independence in the same bed. With this much dirty laundry stuffed in her hope chest of romantic expectations, her relationships yielded nothing but disappointment.
And yet, here she was, at 45, stuck on the fairy tale, asking me if she would ever find true love. This question comes up again and again. The stories are all different, but the question is the same. And what it comes down to is, even though we are led to believe that true love grows on trees, the truth is, all of us have to plow through the wreckage of our primary issues before we can climb high enough to access it. Whether we are successful when it comes to that is never a sure thing. The woman in question was at a point where she had a good chance of getting it right; her progressions indicated that her current affair just might work out. But these things are never guaranteed because everything hinges on our ability to reckon with our “stuff.”
If the question is always the same, so is the answer. No matter who we are, or how the story goes, whether we find true love or not hinges entirely upon the extent to which we are able to reckon with the truth about ourselves. Let me leave you with that, wish you the ability to come to terms with your primary issues in a way that allows you to establish a balanced relationship with your life, and invite you to take what you can from this week’s ‘scopes.
