The Inscrutable Sky

All astrologers would appear to agree - the conjunction of Neptune and Saturn means something, though exactly what is in dispute. Perhaps it means clarity, breaking free from illusion. Perhaps it means war, or maybe peace. Perhaps it's rebuilding from the ashes or finally learning a lesson once and for all. Only time can tell. 

All I know is at that moment, I was standing in the hallway, lost in the diffuse sunlight from of glass-block window at the edge of my vision, and felt a shift out there, somewhere. Beyond. 

Celestial Clockwork (or): Waiting Around for Grace, cont'd

Well, (she said, to the empty air) you can't have thought I'd forgotten, for the heart is persistent, down to its last agonized beat.

I don't know if this will make any sense. Maybe it will only make sense to the ones who need it.

I wrote the linked post quoted above back in September 2021, after a particularly haunting sort of day, the kind where absence feels as solid as presence should be, and loneliness is so sharp you can almost trace the outline of what is missing from your life. 

The title was from a song that was stuck in my head at the time, called Waiting Around for Grace, about which I'd privately mused that "Grace", aside from a desired state of being, might as well have been a dear friend you'd once arranged to meet at a certain time and place, who never arrives because she'd died long ago. (A feeling not unfamiliar to me - my best friend has been gone 20 years now.)

It was a significant day, spiritually at least, and aside from the post named above, I had continued to write and ponder on it for a long time. I'd always expected to finish this related piece called "Celestial Clockwork" when I figured out what it all meant, but 4 years later, I don't suppose I am any closer to knowing, so I guess I'm just going to post it today. 

This is what I wrote, back in 2021: 

Celestial Clockwork

 The restlessness started in mid-afternoon. It wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, but unfamiliar. Like craving food while having no appetite. 

The sense of needing something gnawed at me, though what it could be was not clear. I ran through all the possibilities in my head, all the things a person might conceivably need, but nothing came up a match. 

I went outside to where my husband sat under a tree, partly to consult him, but mostly because I couldn't stay still. "I need something, but don't know what, " I said. "Do you ever feel that way?" He looked up into the branches, thinking for a moment. 

"No, never."

Trying another tactic, I asked "well, what do you need, then?"

"Chinese food." he said.

Okay, we could do that, at least. Get the keys and go. You know how it is with these things. When you don't know what you're looking for, you might find it anywhere.

...

The restaurant seems out of place in the market plaza; the curling manes of the stone lions not in keeping with the stark façade. Like a few things I've come upon in my travels, these lions do not want to be photographed. It's simply not possible to get them both in the frame. I gave up trying long ago. What's the use of having the yin without the yang?

Inside is a darkened maze of wooden booths and bamboo screens. It's very quiet. The servers dart about soundlessly. In the center of the maze, the buffet tables are steaming. There is something slightly surreal in this, I think, the bright shimmer in the dim room. Visible heat. Strange how a sense of unreality can creep into most mundane of scenes. The transmutation of the unseen into the seen.

My husband has positioned himself at the end of one of the tables, and while I know he's just waiting for the General Tso's chicken, there's something about the sight that puts me in the mind of a chess piece awaiting the next move. In turn I position myself near the cauldrons of soup, another chess piece, if a less imposing one. In the stillness, I can feel a clock ticking both inside and outside. Above me, I notice, the ceiling is painted like the evening sky. 

Outside the restaurant it is silent. Amid the oblique geometry of the forecourt, the breeze moves in angular bursts. Pigeon feathers hover and swirl before drifting away. It's still summer, and hot, but the air has a trace of melancholy, the end of the season in a tourist town. We take our food and head home, and somehow things seem different, even though it's not clear what has changed. There is a vague sense of a far-off glimmer. Perhaps some unseen satellite ascending.

....

I don't know from astrology; I only know I like charts and glyphs. It's a comfort to me, mapping the arcane. Planets transit the houses, the moon changes its phase, a stranger on the street turns to catch your eye. Who can say what it means? I just like to think about it. 

Anyway, it helps with the restlessness, which has begun to metamorphize into an uncomfortable prickling, the feel of a cheap wool sweater on a hot day. The clock is ticking, I can feel it now that it has come into my awareness, though it must have always been there. What it is counting down to is a mystery. Perhaps some enigmatic matter of fate, which I can sense now like magnetic north or the pull of the ocean across the plain. 

This might be an unlikely claim from someone like me, but sometimes there is no point in asking why. Every so often, things just are, and you won't get anywhere pretending otherwise. I meditate for an hour, surfing relentless waves of inner itch, but all that happens is wanting to shed my body like a dry lizard skin. So, lacking any other solution, I mentally track the planets through their whorl of nebulous destiny. I don't believe for one moment that, say, Venus transiting the 7th house has an actual, physical pull on anything, but I know - the way one knows these things - that recurring patterns in the chaos are a signal. Cosmic tarot. Symbol plus placement plus synchronicity. 

It's Saturday, the 11th of September 2021, and aside from the internal ticking of the clock, there is no sound but the echo of blowing leaves.

At home, I skim the edges of the yard, looking for a place to land. It's easier to think outdoors, and there is much to ponder. The ticking of that clock, for one thing. Why do I suddenly feel as if I'm one of those number slide puzzles with the tiles slightly out of order? That I need to figure out what to shift before the clock winds down? It must have been just after 6:30 when I settled down in an out of the way corner behind the house. No one would be likely to find me there. My restless heart ached for peace, among other things. It seemed I was supposed to do something, and there is nothing worse for an aching heart than to feel there is some unknown move you should make to resolve the pain. 

I sat there in the dusty heat and tried to clear my mind. Somewhere up above I was dimly aware of planetary gears. I was conceived in September and born in June; there has always been something autumnal inside me, a wistfulness, an animal-like alertness to incipient change. I felt it keenly at the moment the clock went silent. A dust devil rose from the ground like a phantasm, present only briefly but portentous all the same. Somehow, I knew - at that moment, like a weight falling - that the first part of my life and its purpose were over. Whatever signal I had been sending like a determined firefly had gone out into the aether, and now there was nothing to do but to wait for a signal in return before moving forward to the next.

....

And that (having never become clear on her purpose) was all she wrote. 

Not that there was no more to the story, you understand - there was so much more to the story, so many layers, and loops, and walking one careful foot in front of the other down what seemed like a fateful and fated road that somehow instead came to a dead end. 

Yet, the feeling remains. The sense of absent presence, a third energy, a golden thread, an intangible field on which unseen action is meant to play out. My life has changed completely - sometimes serendipitously, sometimes forcibly pummeled into a new shape - from the way it was in 2021. But where this journey goes or why, I have even less of a clue now than I did then. 

As for Grace, I'm no longer waiting for her arrival. I accept that she isn't coming after all. Even the Chinese restaurant with the curly-maned lions is long gone, and the Texas hill country is far in the distance. I had a heart attack last year, and now my agonized old heart beats more erratically than ever.

Even so - for the moment, though - it still persists. 

The picture at the top of this post was taken as a somewhat mocking nod to that very same linked piece, outside a florist in Detroit one night in the autumn of 2023. Perhaps you can tell by my pained smile, that - despite the signage - grace was not exactly forthcoming for me at that time. 

The Opposite of Presence

It's late mid-winter in northwest Ohio, and the wind is achingly cold. The fields are empty even though they are not empty. The silence is a deafening roar. 

Muddy sun sets in grey sky. Cell towers blink on the horizon. At dusk, the belt of Venus appears in the east, but close, so close that it feels that the edge of the earth is near.

The pain in my bones signals my own existence. 

I step into the field to pose for a picture, but already I am disappearing from the landscape. It doesn't know me and won't miss me. My greatest value now is in being gone.

Inside, invisible to see, I recall that it was only a year ago that I watched the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter from the end of my street. Every night the planets drew closer and closer. It seemed to mean something then, it must have meant something; even if I can't remember the way it felt now. I watched and waited and was happy then, until the planets moved apart, the way they always do.

Crescent Moon in the Window, Crescent Moon in the Sky

Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong). 

On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.

Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie. 

One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere. 

Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.

My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."

Pluto, 29° 59'

It's the time of endings, and even the birds are restless. Footprints in the snow, walking away. I see (to my surprise, though it really shouldn't be) that I wrote this exactly 2 years ago, and this nearly 3 years ago, and wouldn't you know it's all to do again, because submission to Fate is a constant process, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you are so very tired now.

Dog Star

Walking widdershins through the side yard to the back, drought-colored grass burning under my feet. The grass is scattered with leaves the same color. Everything has turned brittle in the heat. 

I pass my husband who is sorting through boxes on the porch. We say nothing, but I can feel his preoccupied silence. I wonder if he notices my receding figure as I walk away. In my mind's eye we are like planets, moving through conjunctions, oppositions, trines.

On the other side of the fence, even as I stop to consider it, the woman who lives next door is dying. I push back against this stark knowledge and find myself remembering the lighted doorbell of her house, how it always flickered faintly, like a pulse. 

The dry grass stabs at me, rustles in the dusty breeze. 

I think, to live is to pass from one space to another. I think, I would make an inventory of my pockets, if I had any. 

Far away in the blue distance, Sirius stirs and yawns, awaiting its heliacal rise. 

Image source: Canis Major