The dreams of my father - Pluto-Moon

If I had chosen a birthday for my son I would have chosen early January 2008 which had a much easier, more harmonious chart than the one he was born with on the 30th of December 2007.

But the one thing I know now from motherhood and pregnancy is that our thoughts of what we wish for our children are not as important as the wishes of the children themselves.

When I was pregnant my husband and I had done a lot of planning and saving in preparation for our transition into parenthood and the resulting drop in income and increase in underslept stressed-out craziness. We had been feeling pretty on track about things and wanted to spend the last month of my pregnancy being as relaxed as possible, just taking it easy and enjoying the last days of being a family of two.

Instead when last December rolled around all hell broke loose. My husband found out he was a victim of (essentially a form of fraud) that nonetheless jeopardised his credit rating and livelihood and decimated both his morale and his savings. The ultimate sword hanging over his head was the possibility that he would not be able to get a re-mortage and lose his house and considering that this house represented what he had spent years of his life saving and working towards, the prospect of that loss was painful for him.

And even though both of us tried to focus on what was the most important - we had each other and we would have a baby and we would always have somewhere to live - the effects of stress were undeniable and the free-floating anxiety and anger and pain reached out to touch my son as well and coloured the world into which he was born.

My family has a legacy of loss. So many of us have fought for our lives and run and hidden. My hope was to protect my child for this, but he is the one who gets to choose, not I. And he chose to be firmly connected to that inheritance.

My son was born with a fourth house Moon in Libra as the apex of a tight t-square with Pluto and Mars. Natally he is plugged in to a collective drive for survival and the fear/memory of the world as an unsafe and threatening place. Furthermore, his Moon conjuncts my Mars and his father's Pluto so in our interaction the natal T-square is being constantly activated.

My son was born into a world that was falling apart. Shortly after I had him, I also had a substantial haemorrhage so within 15 minutes we were snapped from a lovely Libran thing into a more existential state of hospitals and ambulances and then after a lingering anxiety about renewed bleeding and long-term weakness while my body recovered. Furthermore, within a week of his birth we had two deaths in the family. It was a strange, intense time, when our nerves were strethed as thin as the boundaries between worlds and in the dark hours of the night love and sadness and bitter rage vied for attention.

The world into which my son was born welcomed him and loved him, but it reinforced his perceptions that it was fundamentally unsafe. And he reacted with all the terror, wrath and despair his lungs and tiny flailing fists could muster. There was no language. He couldn't tell us what he was terrified of and we couldn't reassure him. If his need wasn't recognised or met instantly it was like it was never going to be met. And if his need wasn't met within a particular window of time then he'd have a complete fit of frustration which would need to be calmed before anything else could be resolved.

We spent a lot of time holding him, and rocking, and soothing and pacing up and down while he bent his back like a bow and screamed in our arms rigid-bodied and scarlet-faced. He was so peaceful in sleep and generally inconsolable when awake. I remember feeling pushed to the end of my tether and then pushed again - to breaking point and then past it as I struggled to please him and to contain the waves of frustration and tiredness and anger that surged in me like the sea.

Growing and experience have mellowed him. At some point what we offered became enough, and having remembered that his needs were met yesterday, and the day before , and the day before that he has become more patient, more able to wait. But memory and cognition are a double-edged sword and now he has taken to waking at least once per night screaming with fear or some terrible dream.

Each night is a separate world, a dark sea we navigate by stars and instinct alone. Each night is an undoing, replete with the phantoms and monsters of our past. The lost dreams of my father and the ongoing legacy of war and death and loss. I don't know what my son sees which terrifies him, only that his dream journeys lead him to places of which he is terrified. His racing heart tells me that, and the nature of his cries.

I am his mother, and I have a Scorpio Moon. I know the shadow and the dark. So each night when he cries I reach out for him and he snuggles in my arms and I hold him. He presses his cheek against my skin, sobs his ragged breath into my neck. And I kiss his hair and stroke his face and hum solaces and lullabies.

I tell him: I am here. I am always here. I have walked the shadow-places. And I love you. And I will protect you. And I am not leaving, and I am not afraid.

He may not know all my words yet, but he knows the beating of my heart and he knows the flavour of my thoughts, just as I remember knowing my father's (who had a Scorpio Moon conjunct mine).

In those nights, he is often there with us, my father. Neptune is part of the legacy. I have it in the fourth. My father was a Pisces rising with a Sun-Neptune opposition. He was a singer and musician who died when I was a child. However, the veils between worlds are thin. Love is what connects us still. And sadness. And music.

My whole life since he died I have heard music in my mind so vividly I spent years making a mistake of thinking that someone had the radio playing.

In the dark as I hold my son, I also am held. I feel his presence. I hear his voice and the song he sings.

Your Bruised Heart, Courtesy Of Pluto In Capricorn

So. It's been a while. Astrology Blogging with children is even harder than blogging while heavily pregnant and fully employed, who knew?
Anyway.

So, Pluto has entered the Earth Sign of Capricorn and all the (Jupiterian) over-extended and happy-go-lucky irresponsible investing and lending of the Pluto in Sagittarius era has given way to more sombre outlooks. The credit has crunched and the real estate prices have fallen and people are talking about the economy with frowny faces.

Fiscally, things are tight and grim. (This is the first December in my memory that I have seen so many sales and so many slashed prices before Christmas).

Emotionally, it hasn't been a barrel of laughs either. Personally speaking this is
an intensely challenging time (and if you feel the same, which I know many people do, then I feel for you; Hang in there). Essentially, it feels like the entire Universe has turned into Boot Camp and pleading with it to be merciful simply ends with it sneering in your face before kicking you in the stomach, while it calls you a sissy and says nasty things about your mother.

I think in the current climate all you can do to get through is just grit your teeth, stiffen your upper lip and apply yourself. This is the time when all of us, are being challenged on a global and personal level to work hard and eliminate the unnecessary from our lives. Although you can, if you choose, sit there and feel sorry for yourself this is unlikely to advance your situation because Capricorn (being an Earth sign) wants things to be manifested, created in the real world. Instead of debating Why Me and Why Is Everything So Unfair it is probably more productive in the long run to take responsibility for past mistakes and future possibilities and work to change this.

Pluto in Capricorn feels to me like a personal trainer. One that knocks on your door at the bleeding crack of dawn and just stands there and the longer you ignore it the more precarious your position becomes. On the other hand if you accept its offer it may make you cry and curse (and keep crying and cursing for a long while) but you'll have fantastic abs at the end of it.

Pluto in Capricorn is similar to The Devil and The Tower cards in the Tarot. It's about Truth and it's about Change, and although it's about as welcome and cuddly as taxes it's unstoppable. Often it is both hard and painful because it reminds us that no one is safe as all that we have built and achieved gets hauled out to be tested for strength and weakness and validity.

Schocking things happen. Painful truths come out, although how painful they are is in correlation to how much work on them you've done before. If the thing is sound, it holds. (Sometimes things turn out all right. The Ark floated, the razed cities were rebuilt, people survived and other people realised that facing down the tough things only made their marriages stronger).

I have a personal take on this since the last three generations of my family have spent significant portions of their lifetime being prosecuted and running. I was born with these memories - hard-wired into the collective drive for survival. We hid. We ran. We hung in there -sometimes for years- we fought sometimes, we defended what we could and ran with what we could carry and we started over.

In this a Pluto transit is an incredibly creative force, a bit like riding a wave. You can't control the wave, and you can't oppose it, but you can use it. Each difficult time you face is like your soul shouting at you Who Am I? and you decide what kind of person you want to be, what you want your actions to say about you.

You have skills and resiliences and kindnesses you may not even know you have. Pluto will show you that. It may push hard and relentlessly but when the dust settles you usually feel it was of benefit.

So by all means, be wary. But don't be frightened because breakdown and breakthrough go hand in hand and panic doesn't serve anyone in a crisis.

x

Die Another Day- The Transits of Pluto

It's the calm in between storms in my houshold. My husband and I are in between major Pluto transits to our charts (the last lot were some 5 years ago) and the new set of aspects to our Cardinal Signs (opposition to my Cancer Sun, squares to my Libra Mars, mutual Libra Pluto and his Aries Moon Chiron and Mars) have a few years before they start pumelling.

On the other hand as Jupiter and Pluto conjunct each other and the galactic center in Sagittarius, gearing up to transit into Capricorn everyone seems to be feeling it and for me this comes across as Pluto Amplified.

(And speaking from a long experience of Pluto transits, the fact that it's officially no longer a planet has not affected its ability to sucker punch me one bit).

And as a taster of all this Pluto-ey goodness, (and no doubt a preview of coming attractions to the natal chart) Pluto and Jupiter are starting to make a loose out-of-sign square to the Libra Sun of mine and my husband's composite chart.

In the composite Sun is conjunct Pluto anyway (with the IC sandwiched in between)
and from the start, the relationship had a feeling of union through a shared experience of hardship and oppression ie. "this world has teeth and little mercy for you and me, so watch my back while I watch yours and we'll take the bastard on together."

There is no negotiating with any of our planets but this is especially true of the three collective planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). The forces they are symbols of are bigger than any single life, and the please and cries of the individual are as the beatings of a moth's wings in a hurricane.

Like the Tower card in the Tarot, Pluto is not interested in plea-bargaining. It cannot be swayed, or deterred, or locked out. Only accepted and rolled with, or fought tooth and nail against until it burns your house down.

Similarly, Plutonic experiences have little to do with justice. Earthquakes strike the innocent and wicked alike, and when burning ash is gearing up to fall onto your head, one of the least constructive things to do is ask "Why me?" (with or without the fist-shaking). Instead, I generally find it more productive to buckle down and get on with the business of breathing and surviving whatever is happening stage by stage.

And the transit to the composite has indeed coincided with irreversible changes to the relationship. December has been the month of Waiting For The Baby's Birth and Trying To Wrap Our Heads Around The Enormity Of Change That Will Mean, as well as the month of Fighting Shocking Assaults From Unseen Ennemies and Facing Up To The Threats To Our Home.

The stresses have been sudden and enormous, the Plutonic kinds of pressures that strip you down to your naked shivering core and challenge you to face up to what's truly real and fundamental to you. Pluto's transits are NEVER comfortable, but they can certainly be very exciting and if you play your cards right you are likely to emerge from its trials by fire singing "Je ne regrette rien".

And they're not all bad. December 2007 was the most challenging month so far for the relationship (previous record-holder, September 2006 when my mother in law died suddenly) but it's also been the most intimate. There are special kinds of bonds forged in the war against the world when your partner is the only one you can rely on and you realise how deeply (Pluto) love and trust go. When you finding yourselves turning to one another in your hour of need and see that both of you completely meant the whole "for richer, for poorer etc." thing.

Transits of Pluto last for years and they can be exhausting. They can also be intensely rewarding if you roll with them right. Pluto is an invitation to travel to the underground of the Self (or the relationship, or the family, or the collective), a primal force, a dare to see what you're made of and ultimately an invitation to truth.

Whereas the transits of Neptune mistify and cloud, transits of Pluto leave you in doubt about what's real and true what with the truth & reality constantly punching you in the eye.

The feeling of a Pluto transit ridden right is the euphoria of a hard test passed. The feeling of it ridden wrong is "Owwwwwwwwwwww, bloody hell this hurts". Either way though the long slow transits of this celestial body mean that frequent opportunities for re-testing present itself for better or for worse. And once you know they are inescapable it makes it so much easier to save your strength and face up to its invitations to dance or fight.