Column, Mother's celestial inspirations

Love is not what we think

By Cal Garrison a.k.a Mother of the Skye

This week’s horoscopes are coming out under the waning light of a Virgo Moon. We are coming up on the annual festival of love and hearts, Valentine’s Day. With that in mind it must be time to talk about what we do in the name of love. This week’s intro gives me a golden opportunity to look at all of that from a realistic perspective – because love is not what we think it is – and if the coming week is clouded by the illusion that it’s all about boxes of candy and playing spin the bottle with our dream date, I am here with a story that will show you that when it comes to love, our lessons inevitably take us much deeper than that.

I get a lot of letters from people who ask me to take a quick peek at their charts and tell them what’s going on. Since my schedule is already full of appointments that take precedence over anything I can do for people on a spur of the moment basis, most of the time, I respond to these queries by saying that I am not an astrological vending machine and that their issues cannot be covered with a passing glance and a word or two. There are times, however, when the feeling in the message is poignant enough to make me wish that I could offer them a morsel of insight – and at those times I say – “OK, let me see if I can make time to look at this, and get back to you.”

In a recent email, a man wrote to me and told me that he had given everything he had to a woman who wound up exploiting both his affection and his generosity. At the end of the day the woman destroyed him. He confessed that he never needed or wanted anything but “to make this work,” and went on to say that now, he is at a giant crossroads, totally devastated and lost.

My heart went out to him, so I did up his charts and wrote back to tell him what I saw. Here is a synopsis of that email. This is a lengthy intro. If you’re not in the mood, feel free to skip on ahead to your weekly predictions. If you’re up for hearing a little bit about love, and what it does to the human soul, here goes:

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You have high ideals when it comes to love. You believe in it. This has its good points and its bad points. Love is an area where humans process a great deal of pain. Sometimes it’s wiser to be realistic about it, instead of romanticizing it.

You believe in the traditional standards. You have a tried and true attitude. This becomes problematic in situations that don’t fit the norm. It devastates you when things don’t go the way they are supposed to go, or the way you expect them to. This situation that you are in is unusual – the odds were/are stacked against you. The sense of disillusionment is huge.

You have already lived the lifetime where home and family were the centerpiece of your experience. You have basically graduated from that level of experience and need to realize that this lifetime is teaching you about other things. It’s not about being happily married with a home and family this time. Those things are not necessarily always part of the deal here, even though the commonly held belief in this culture is that all of us were born to cuddle up with another human being and stay with them forever.

In your case, your purpose for living revolves around needing to find your spiritual purpose, and to direct your heart toward discovering the meaning of life. At the highest level of expression you are a sorcerer. In a more mundane expression you would be someone who understood the power of life and death and who had mastery over those forces. In real time, this energy would make you really good with numbers, money, investments, and the management of other people’s resources. Scorpio rising usually bestows an intense vibration to the life circumstances, as in, hard lessons. This may have something to do with the fact that you had a lot of power in a previous life. That power was earthly, and I suspect you abused it. The hard lessons in this life are to compensate for abuses of power in the previous time.

You have huge abandonment issues. Who abandoned you? This aspect makes it so the fear of abandonment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The woman who left you in the lurch by going her own way, despite everything you did to make her stay, is an example of what happens when we draw to us that which we fear the most. You broadcast the fear of abandonment and, boom, this causes the other person to leave. When love is true, there is no need to go through hell and high water to keep your lover around. It might help you to look at what happened between your parents; did they abandon each other? If so did you think it was your fault? Did either one of them abandon you? If so, what impact did that have on you? You’d do well to look at this because your current situation has abandonment and third-party interference themes written all over it. The woman in question has essentially abandoned you. At the same time, you are abandoning your partner. (This man happens to be in the midst of a divorce). These themes, and the extent to which they are manifesting in your life right now will require you to look at the early life story in depth.

You are currently at the effect of transits that translate as: intense endings that wipe you out in a very impersonal way. People leave or end things out of a need for independence. Obsessive compulsive attempts to control others end in disaster. To experience extreme emotional conflict and a sense of powerlessness in connection with an ending. To have others engineer an ending. To have a really hard time letting go and to hang on to the source of the emotional pain like a pit bull, instead of being able to release it and let it go. To be caught up in the cross-fire of other people and their issues and to be completely wiped out by this.

Rose-colored glasses lead to disillusionment and intense grief and sadness in a love affair. Deceit leads to the same thing. Being deceived in a matter of love breaks your heart. Look at what you didn’t see coming. Look at what you chose to ignore.

You are getting nailed to the cross by the devastating impact of an ending.

Looking at what got you into trouble: you become too codependent in your relationships. You think love equals help; it does not.

You try too hard to please the other person. Your life starts to depend on needing to please them no matter what. All of who you are gets sacrificed to this and you wind up losing yourself in the relationship, one way or another. You would do well to observe this tendency and to free yourself from it. Love has nothing to do with pleasing.

Help equals codependence. It does others no good for you to go out of your way helping them to the point where you wind up trapped in a state of sick codependence. This implies that you do not feel worthy of their love and you end up paying for it by giving everything you’ve got to someone who has no idea what love is. Look to see what you have done to make this woman love you. Be honest about it. Deep down, why weren’t you enough? Why couldn’t she just love you for who you are? It looks to me like you hooked up with an emotional grifter who used you.

When it comes to the woman who took you for a ride, she is a very charming young woman who has no idea who she is. She has spent many past lives as an extension of someone else in a relationship. She is here in this life now to find herself and to stand on her own two feet for the first time. She allowed you to become codependent with her, because that’s all she knows how to do. If she used you, she didn’t know any better.

She may be charming on the surface but she is a piece of work. I suspect that you and she have been involved in previous lifetimes. You found each other again, not to stay together but to correct the mistakes that were made the last time around.

If she threw it all away, be grateful for it. The connection is over– if she tries to come back, be careful. Maybe let this cover it for now. What also needs to be addressed is the age difference. Not to be harsh, but you are 23 years her senior.  At 33 she is still a work in progress, who has to find her own way. Let her go. What can you take from the relationship? What did it teach you about love?

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It took about two days for this man to get back to me. When he did, he told me the following, which I will share with you so that you can see the connection between his feedback and what showed up in his chart:

After a difficult marriage his parents divorced before he turned 7. He stayed with his dad. His mother moved far away. His father remarried a wonderful woman who died when he was 10. From the age of 10 on there was no supervision. He got cared for by housekeepers. At 14 his dad married a difficult woman.

His email went on to say many things that confirmed so much of what appeared in his chart: relative to his abandonment issues with his mother, and to the void that all of that left in his heart that has made finding love more important to him than anything else.

Is it any wonder that he feels lost and devastated? When it comes to love, on the flip side of the hearts and flowers, the other end of the stick is always intense and painful.

What we expect when we give our hearts away often turns out to be anything but sweetness and light. Everybody’s karma is different in this regard.

Our hearts get broken more than once before we die. If we’re lucky, each break teaches us, and takes us deeper into the place where we finally learn that love is everywhere, in everything, and that, in fact, we are made of it. Once we figure that out, we never have to go looking for it, outside of ourselves, again.

Let me leave you with that, wish you a happy Valentine’s Day, and invite you to take what you can from this week’s ‘scopes.

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