Rot and Roll: Transiting Pluto Opposing My Natal Sun, 2018-19

It's just another sign of the times, so to speak, that I was so consumed by my corporate job that I thought transiting Pluto had finished opposing my natal Sun for the third and final time last month.

I was so wrong it wasn't funny.

Nope, I am in for two more back-and-forths with Pluto this fall, and as someone with Pluto Rising, you can bet that I'm taking it personally.

My whole sense of "I am"-ness, aka the Sun in astrology, has been annihilated this past year. I keep thinking of that line from William Butler Yeats's masterful poem "The Second Coming" (from which I quoted in my last astrology post from 2016, before my two-plus years of radio silence): "The center cannot hold."

It's not just the obvious challenges of Pluto -- the power-tripping, the greed, the sense of being held down by The Man or Big Brother, the attraction-repulsion to just about everything vaguely interesting, the humorless intensity that makes Having Fun into as much of a challenge as scaling Mt. Everest.

This transit of Pluto has given me 8 cavities in the past year (Capricorn rules the teeth) that I have to get filled next week and will set me back thousands of dollars (even though I was able to get it financed). 8 cavities. How can this be my mouth?! I have about half that number of fillings acquired within my near half century in this incarnation. Can we say the rot has literally set in? Yes, let's.

What else? Well, though my job involves writing, it is about as far from my identity (the Sun) as a writer as I could get, and I find that it has hindered my ability to write For Real. The good stuff, the real stuff, which for me means fiction, poetry, and astrologizing. What I have been writing and so-called proofreading for the past year and a half may be helping some people, but it sure ain't beautiful, and it often feels like a dubious travesty that exists only to make boo coo Delores for the genius who saw a particular market open up (thanks to Resident Trump) and rushed to fill it.

It occurred to me tonight that it is not a coincidence that the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993 fell within a degree of opposing my Sun, so that Pluto has been going back and forth over that point for the past year or so. 1993 was such a crisis-filled year for me that I suppose that I am lucky to have survived it. But in a strange, subtle way, I didn't.

That was the year I derailed myself from my trajectory -- MFA degree, English and/or creative writing professor, making good on my Golden Girl promise as an official adult.

I jumped because the alternative was to remain in Boston, where burglars broke into my nice little studio apartment in the Back Bay and stole my jewelry and my stash, a splinter infected my heel, and my middle-aged, married, lush of a writing professor (who at that time was also the head of the MFA program and editor in chief of a prominent literary magazine) hit on me 25 years before the #metoo movement.

And where did I land? In the heroin-chic grunge scene of Seattle to collide with fellow Pluto Rising Kurt Cobain? Nope, I landed in the house of my suburban childhood, just outside the only city that could just go by "the city" and you would know which one I was referring to, back to my screwed-up parents who showed not a drop of sympathy for what I had been through. I was also seeing a shrink who was so harmful I complained about him to the National Association of Shrinks, which of course didn't take me seriously. Hardly the best milieu in which to lick my wounds, so after some gratuitous verbal abuse from my father, who didn't like the look on my face one fine November day, I mainly stayed with my best (and only) friend, a much older man whom I'd met at a writing program two years earlier and had turned me on to astrology. He lived in a rundown hovel in the East Village when Alphabet City was still somewhat dangerous, and I got into shrooms and rediscovered my passion for drawing, which helped give me something resembling perspective and hope instead of giving up when both MFA programs I'd applied to rejected me the following spring, and I did not mail a piece of shit to my undergrad writing prof who'd refused to write me a new set of recommendations on the grounds that I had lost whatever was "goodhearted and true" about my prior work.

And speaking of work that year...I didn't, unless you count the handful of astrology charts I did that year for the first of my clients, mostly women from the baby boom generation who were irked yet intrigued that a so-called slacker like me, about half their age, could be so insightful. Would you count that as work? No, I probably wouldn't either -- not anymore, at least. That alone shows me how far I've fallen.

Clearly, Pluto has been stirring up all this long-time-ago shit, of my first year out of college, the year I veered away from literary academia, the year I first became aware that I was in something called Generation X (up till then, I thought only baby boomers had a generation) yet set apart from it (Uranus-Neptune transit opposing my Sun). A quarter of a century later, determined to be autonomous and not depend on anyone ever again, to live in the city, my city, on my terms, I have made a chilling discovery:

I still have not found any measure of peace or true self-acceptance. I try to count my blessings every day, because I know how much emptier and more awful life would be without a home, love (even if it is fraught), my cats, and my few real friends. Yet at the heart of everything is my stomach-sinking feeling that I am making a living, but not truly living.

If life is suffering, I must find something in this life that is worth suffering for.

Do you hear me, Pluto? If you can't throw me a bone, send me a sign to help me find my way back to the self who still had hope (and an hourglass figure to boot).

Moving House: Progressed Moon Conjunct Midheaven

Today my progressed Moon is officially conjunct my Midheaven at 24'48" Gemini. The last time this happened was in the late spring of 1986, when I was in high school and couldn't really do much with this most public, career-oriented, sitting-on-top-of-the-roller-coaster aspect except ace some Regents exams, write a lot of angsty poetry, and act in a community play. But oh, was I ambitious...not in the "normal" sense of the word in my high school, i.e., being Ms. Extracurricular or pulling down straight A's, but in the sense of longing to make my mark in the world of the arts. I dreamed of living in a Soho loft and writing and drawing my aching heart out. Of course I dreamed of finding soul mate, too -- but even at that tender age, I wanted validation, and the freedom that comes with that validation, more.

And now, like that Carly Simon song from the mid-1980s, it's "coming around again" and I still haven't made my mark. It's more like a faint scribbling in the sand that could easily be washed away by the incoming tide. None of my publications in various genres have enabled me to quit copyediting and proofreading other authors' books for a barely eked-out living. I couldn't even make the Labor Day deadline for the children's chapter book that I am both writing and illustrating. It's progressing (if you'll pardon my pun) fairly well, mind you -- but it's nowhere close to being finished.

While my progressed Moon was in my 9th house, I had many adventures, inner and outer travel, ups and downs, moved twice (i.e., two times too many for a Cancer Sun), and garnered enough material in general to fill a Proustian-length body of work. I even found my soul mate, or should I say, he re-found me, and because of him, my world expanded to include two adolescent girls and a gray tabby cat who is petite and contains multitudes. Now, with my progressed Moon entering my 10th house, I feel in a mad rush to finish sowing in order that I may reap. (On that note, I do not feel it is a coincidence that the Harvest Moon is coming up on the 19th, and falls pretty much on my Asc./Desc. axis.) Yet I also realize that I am at the very beginning of an important progression that will last for nearly three years.

I have known for at least half of my life that I have not chosen an easy path. The paradox is that I have been given much without "earning" it -- or if I did, it was in a previous incarnation. But I am very much aware that with this privilege comes an even greater responsibility. I have a whole slew of "first world" worries that sometimes fill me with shame whenever I am objective enough to have some perspective. I am far from starving and for now, at least, have a place to call home in one of our planet's epicenters of culture and cool. And I really have no excuse not to make it -- despite some aspects that I would not wish on my worst enemy, my 2nd-house Jupiter trines my MC.

Yes, far from starving, indeed -- but still very, very hungry.

The night before last, something occurred that perfectly symbolizes my progressed Moon changing houses in late Gemini. It was the first night I'd slept in my own bed in over a week; in fact, I'd slept in four different beds due to travel. I woke up sometime in the wee hours, needing to pee, and though my eyes were wide open, I had no idea where I was. I might have still been dreaming, for I could see unfamiliar furniture and got the distinct feeling that I was in a strange house. I pulled on a shirt because I was not not certain where the bathroom was and equally unsure whom I was going to run into en route, in the almost otherworldly darkness. About halfway there, I finally realized that I was home.

Gemini at the Midheaven Musings

Traditionally, this means I should have two careers. Ideally it would be three, but at the moment I'm earning more money as a writer as I am as an astrologer, which is terrifying to contemplate. Still, it makes me feel good to know that I have my eggs distributed, albeit unevenly, in more than one basket. Especially during Great Depression II, it's a strength to be flexible in this way.

Plutonians, however, are not noted for flexibility, and my own Pluto exactly squares my Gemini Midheaven from the Ascendant. I have indeed clashed with authority figures on more than a few occasions, and yes, like nearly everything, it started in the home. If I ever become an authority figure, I sure hope not to run into power struggles with myself. It's actually something to which I've given much thought, just like the mock interviews I used to conduct with myself, even though I am still only a legend in my own mind. Perhaps this "training" I've put myself through means I am conscious enough not to become a power-abusing tyrant if I manage to get the kind of break that really matters in the real world.

Now I have to get back to the job at which I'm almost earning a living, even though I'd much rather be writing.