Questioning the Heavens

(Summer Reading)

How do we become who we are?  How do we emerge from the nexus of childhood?  Why and how did we choose that tribe? That particular moment of birth? Providence or accident?  DNA or the Moira of our ‘allotment’?  Luck or Karma? Random or synchronistic?  These are watery, Cancer questions, and Astrologically, we are awash in Cancer energies, making moms, family, tribal connections, country, ancestors, and emotions of utmost interest.

Rilke wrote, “Never believe fate’s more than the consideration of childhood.”  Since Rilke was a poet of profound heart and thought, I agree.  But what composes the matrix of childhood?  Like Yoga, Astrology, myth, and psychology multiple layers, seen and unseen, are tangled together in that ‘fate.’  One does not argue about the layers, only their substance, their consciousness, and perhaps, their timing.

If we think mythologically, as in Greek, members in a family come together from a litany of tragic connections.  The hope in each incarnation is that ancient wounds of slaughtering and being slaughtered tale opportunity to heal, and that old curses be laid to rest, ‘paid in full.’  Myths may be florid and over the top, but looking at their archetypal patterns we still act out similar energetic tragedies, much of it remaining unconscious, which is why it remains powerful.  Is this allotment, or our choice?

Perhaps archetypal patterns within the family help create blood and bone, the DNA, of biological heredity.  The conversations, the silences, the habits and wounds, the  dis-connect, as well as the love enmesh the closed family circle.  These are the amniotic fluids of Moira.  If we are born with innate predispositions, and if we are choosing to work through particular myths, then it may be true, as many believe, the soul chooses to take on a lifetime, the parents, and the cellular DNA. The work then is to become conscious of childhood unconsciousness, to wake up to our soul’s choices, to move from old systems and patterns to become a poet of life.

After asking such questions, I no longer despair in not knowing.  It is the questions that lead me on.  When standing under a starry night and contemplating the heavens, I hope only to reflect some minute particle of that sublime intelligence. Despite many desires to understand, I’m grateful for the mystery, and thank God there is always magic of the unknown.

(My indebtedness to the writing of Liz Greene in The Astrology of Fate.)