Crazy Wisdom

I will start with a warning that I’m using a lot of astro-talk in this blog. That in itself is curious because I haven’t been seriously following the planets for quite a while.  I used to be pretty good at it. Then a gradual loss of interest came with years of numbing routine and my window on both the world and sky dimmed with accumulated haze.

We see a lot of the Rez,beautiful even through a dirty windshield.

The week started off OK, despite being cold and windy in the morning, and then went south. Even Microsoft Word is misbehaving and so is this computer. At Walmart, there were no jeans my size, and  the pair I have is wearing out. It was the third store I’d tried in two days, lite on cash; I’ve avoided a regular department store, which we don’t have in Taos anyway. The message from all four directions is, “don’t try to move in any direction or acquire anything just stay put.” Although we rented out the Rez  house and now have a bit more income, we are still walking backward, just slower. I feel the presence of Saturn breathing down my neck, I have lessons on endurance and frugality to learn and there will be no leniency. Family members needing a boost to get back on track, and minor repairs that the rented house has needed for a long time, took another bite out of the proceeds. An invisible vexation buzzes like a hungry mosquito, just out of swatting range, waiting to suck our blood.

Saturn that grim taskmaster of the zodiac just won’t be satisfied and to my surprise, has a trickster side. Just when we have pruned our excesses and balanced income and outgo, a new hole in our cash bucket appears.

Meanwhile the weather is being erratic, although so far we haven’t had the wind and hail that eastern New Mexico experienced over the past few days, nevertheless it’s possibly a sign not to expect normal right now. It’s dawning on me that I’m supposed to be still, wait for further instructions, and quit flopping around like a stranded fish trying to jump back into the old stream. Maybe it isn’t flowing in the direction I’m supposed to be going.

I’ve been immensely sad for no identifiable reason and life seems like a handful of jewels slipping through my uncoordinated fingers while nostalgia gives me an emotionally laden tour of lost times both good and bad. My birthday is coming up and that might account for some of this mawkishness. 

Astrologically, the sun is passing through my solar 12^th house, home of the hidden and blocked aspects of life and a threshold between the manifest and unmanifest worlds. This regularly occurs in that month preceding one’s Birthday. Since I was born with the Sun, Mercury, Moon and Jupiter all in my natal 12^th house, I live there much of the time anyhow. 

This guy came in and made himself at home.
I'm afraid he's homeless and plans to stay.

Now and then, I binge on awful possibilities, perhaps a Cancer Moon rising trait, but then I get it out of my system and life goes on. PQ sometimes takes my mood swings too much to heart and I’m sure it doesn’t look good from the sidelines but I’ve learned that I get some of my best insights while trudging through deep psychic sludge. While life is flowing, I tend dance along the surface.

Once in a while I have a genuine aha moment, yet when reading old journal entries, I see the same insight discovered and rediscovered. It’s disheartening to find that I’ve been chasing my tail for so long. However, while meditating on this 12^th house thing a few days ago something entirely fresh came in.  The 12^th house is about unconscious and unfulfilled possibilities and their repression in the outer world. A person with heavy 12^th house energy may carry the denied and unrecognized possibilities both good and bad of an entire family and culture. This in turn brings recollection of something I read years ago about the Old Hebrew prophets and how the very circumstances of their lives and deaths embodied the prophesy they came to deliver. The Lakota Heyoka or Contrary medicine men had a similar role, as does the Crazy Wisdom personified by some Tibetan Buddhist monks.

From Wikipedia:

  In Lakota mythology, Heyókȟa is also a spirit of thunder and lightning. He is said to use the wind as sticks to beat the drum of thunder. His emotions are portrayed opposite the norm; he laughs when he is sad and cries when he is happy, cold makes him sweat and heat makes him shiver. In art, he is depicted as having two horns, which marks him as a hunting spirit.

    When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm... you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping... as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.

    —Black Elk

And, what does the Heyoka hunt? Perhaps, it’s the chance to down those demons who program us humans to scurry about like confused ants.  We 12^th house people notoriously have one foot in each of two worlds. It’s as I imagine being half-born would be. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never learned which reality to acknowledge.  I was waiting at the gate, ready to enter and the gate only opened halfway.  It’s beginning to awaken that my troubles dealing with the material world are the result of confusion about which side of the gate, I should take for real. Of course, they both are as real as we live them.  

Something different is about to happen. I can feel it coming, it isn’t in my thought repertoire, not even in my repertoire of dreads, and that’s a good thing.