Tag: Jupiter

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Astrology Charleston, West Virginia Writings

Jupiter is Idealism

Big Stuff is one of the Giants I wrote about in an earlier post. But he looks pretty Jupiterian to me, so I will place him here.

When you are a child you desire to be awesome- to have exceptional abilities that make you shine to those around you. Growing up is about realizing that no one wants to watch you shine. It’s annoying. What people want is for you to add value to their lives. What society wants is for you to add value to society.

Enter Jupiter. In traditional astrology, he is the bringer of wisdom, luck & riches. In modern astrology, he is frequently associated with weight gain, overspending & all forms of excess.

If I had to sum up Jupiter in one word, I would call him Idealism. He is the first planet who causes us to look beyond our personal goals to see how we can benefit the world around us. And as we become *for others* others become for us. They now have a motivation to help us. Society now has a motivation to reward us. People can open doors for us which we could never have opened for ourselves. This is luck. People invest in us and introduce us to new ideas & ways of seeing things. And so our world begins to expand.

But will our waistline expand as well? Possibly yes, but not because Jupiter is a pleasure seeking lush. In my opinion, every planet is a correcting force to the planet preceeding it. The Sun is hot and the Moon cools it. The moon is mushy but mercury is crisp. Mercury is too mental so Venus opens the heart. Venus is weak so Mars is strong-willed. Mars is shielded and independent, focusing on enemies and threats. So Jupiter opens up, to see the good in the world and also the good that COULD be in the world. You will never hear Jupiter say that humans suck. He fucking LOVES humanity.

But this new openness and love for the world naturally leads to a softening of personal boundaries and willpower. Jupiter will eat more, drink more and buy more just because he is more in touch with the goodness around him and lacks the will to resist. His personal bank account is not the most important thing to Jupiter anyway. He is externally focused. Just as the moon focuses on children and Venus focuses on her boyfriend, Jupiter focuses on society, seeing it through a doting golden glaze. He is the true believer in humanity’s potential and this excites him more than personal glory or owning buns of steel. His mind and emotions are mixed up and swirled with the world around him. If this goes too far of course, his generous optimistic spirit can be his undoing, which is why he is followed by the correcting force of hard & crusty Saturn.

And I believe Jupiter’s altruism is responsible for the high spirits he is known for. Our personal cares often dissolve when we develop an outer focus and fall in love with something beyond our self. Jupiter is about falling in love with our human tribe or even humanity. The world becomes brighter, more interesting, filled with meaning and purpose. Suddenly we matter because there are always things we can do to benefit and romance our new love interest. This does not necessarily mean we will be volunteer at a soup kitchen however. Depending on the sign and placement of Jupiter, this altruism can take many forms. Maybe we are Batman and do the dark works no one else has the stomach for. Maybe we are a clown working at a gas station, bringing a laugh to all the customers. We could be a writer, a hater, a bragger or a dancer. It isn’t the actions themselves which are Jupiterian but the motivation behind them. Jupiter’s motivation is to give to humanity. Idealism.

My Jupiter is in Aries for example, so at times when I am overtaken by altruism I become more fiery & belligerent than my normal personality. Almost as though our idealistic self is a genie kept in a bottle, a separate spirit who can possess us and provoke us into action our regular self would not take. My idealistic self tries to place myself in the line of fire in the hopes of taking a few bullets for humanity. Perhaps since I am cowardly by nature, being brave seems like the most idealistic thing I can do. I can only be brave though when this spirit overtakes me. A spirit of gratitude and awe for everyone and everything that has gone before. We all have this spirit and you can see its presence marbled throughout history when over and over again people devote and sometimes sacrifice themselves to transform the world for the better. It’s beautiful.

And in you this spirit, this altruism, may take any form. You may become maternal and start baking everyone muffins. Maybe you give hand jobs while expecting nothing in return. Lock yourself in your tool shed until you invent a better pencil. Or perhaps just lie on your sofa and dream new dreams that will one day come true for all of us.


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Astrology Charleston, West Virginia Writings

Projection

Although you probably hear the word “projection” being thrown around a lot, if you are like me (or at least the person I was until yesterday) you might not have a clear idea of how psychological projection works.

I vaguely saw projecting as the act of imagining others to have qualities they don’t actually possess. But what I’ve realized is that projecting is more about actively trying to dissociate from a specific part of yourself, which you then try to see in others. But seeing this quality in others is more of a side effect. The heart of projection is trying to detach from a part of yourself.

Another aspect of projection is that you don’t realize you are doing it. And while it is easy to imagine other people doing things unawares, it can come as a shock to realize you have been doing this yourself.

Yesterday, I experienced this shock when I became aware of a projection I have been carrying on throughout my life. I realized I have always tried to divorce myself from being in any way intellectual, educated, or sophisticated. Instead, I would project these traits onto others and feel in awe of their cosmopolitan qualities, despite the fact that they would frequently be people less “cultured” than myself.

This may seem like a strange aspect of oneself to project, since many people view sophistication as a desirable quality. Astrologically, though, it makes sense. There are a few factors in a person’s chart that determine which parts of themselves they desire to offload onto others. For example, the qualities of any planet opposite to Venus at the time of birth, will tend to get projected. I was born with Venus opposite Jupiter, who rules higher education, philosophy, wealth,  and the high brow parts of a culture in general. Therefore, I would want to see scholarly, urbane qualities in others, but never in myself.

I grew up wealthy and as a child my identity was the smart, intellectual one, which never made me feel especially cute. Perhaps this is why I dreamed of being an uneducated hayseed from the country.  When I first read Rousseau, his glamorization of the Noble Savage went straight to my heart. I wanted so badly to be that natural, lovable person, uncorrupted by human culture. And it seemed to me that poor people were somehow closer to Rousseau’s ideal.

Eventually I began trying (subconsciously) to associate myself with everything the opposite of the wealthy world I knew.  My favorite wine had to be Boone’s Farm, Strawberry-Kiwi. I tried to read harlequin novels and listen to cheesiest forms of country music. I attempted to become a secretary, a stripper, a worker at KFC. Some of which are noble jobs, but to the culture I came from, they were shocking and inappropriate choices. Especially secretary.

It was probably this same projection which caused me to move to West Virginia. I remember as a child how Kentucky (where I lived) was generally ranked second to last in everything. This made me proud. But West Virginia was always dead last in education, wealth, etc, which made me jealous. Being in last place made West Virginia pure. Beautiful.

And the more I convinced myself that I was, in fact, a rube, the more I would take pleasure in being wowed by the wealth and sophistication of those around me. If someone spoke a few words of another language, attended an art gallery, or took a plane ride to another country, I would be floored with admiration. Impressed. Delightfully intimidated. Feelings that gave me an almost sexual thrill. It made me feel warm and rosy to be a nothing, looking up in astonishment at someone else. Again, this was happening subconsciously, at the reptile level.

Over time, the projections grew more extreme. At first, it took a person’s trip to Africa to impress me. Eventually, their trip to the Olive Garden would do the trick. There was a point when I came close to being institutionalized for  mental retardation, while just a few years earlier I had been getting scholarships to Ivy League schools. So why did I feel such a desperate need to separate myself from the gloss of education and wealth? What was I trying to gain?

I don’t know. Maybe I felt more feminine and lovable as a simpleton. Maybe I felt restricted by my identity as a smart person. One drawback to being tagged intelligent is that you can only keep that label by expressing ideas that other people find intelligent. While for me, the ideas closest to my heart usually fall into realms which society finds fruit loopy, or sometimes just too far our and individualistic to be considered at all.

Maybe I felt confined by growing up wealthy. When your dinner chairs are valuable antiques, you can’t paint purple polka dots on them when the mood strikes. No one glues dinosaur figurines to a brand new Mercedes. It always seemed as though “the poor” had more options for how to express themselves. Of course, now I see things differently. Whimsical life choices are far more appealing when money is all around. When you are really poor, you don’t want to glue dinosaurs to your car.

Or it could be that we project aspects of ourselves as a response to external pressure. Another person convinces us to leave parts of ourselves behind so he can feed off them. After all, my obsession with being lowly made me eager to give away anything of value that I did possess, and to treat those around me like nobles. Maybe there were people encouraging me.

Causes aside, it is easy to see the damage this sort of projection can cause. Of course, people can project their “negative” qualities as well. If, for example, someone has a testy planet like Mars or Pluto opposite Venus, they will tend to see anger, hatred, and manipulation in those around them. Nonetheless, these projections are still damaging to the one doing them, because we can’t project our aggression onto someone else without giving them our power and agency as well.

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So, that is all I have to say. My hope is that by sharing my longstanding pattern of projection with the wide and faceless world, it will be harder for me to keep doing it! 🙂

 

 

 

Categories
Astrology Charleston, West Virginia Writings

Corn Bread Days

Sitting on my lucky corn colored stool.

I have been hounding James for a while to let us move to the woods of Maine & live off the land, certain the only way I could find happiness would be to live a simple life as a lumberjack.  And just like an answered prayer, it has turned quite cold and we have no heat in our house, giving me the chance to live out as least parts of my fantasy. The worst part of being cold, I think, is how your wrists freeze up, making it hard to do things with your hands like type or play guitar. The best part is that you never forget to cook. Instead, I hover around the warm stove all day, cooking up anything that can be made out of corn, beans, eggs, butter, sugar, and dandelions. Which is quite a lot, actually.

As you may know already, I am quite obsessed with corn- more as a spiritual entity than a food source- and I have a corn colored stool which I can place next to the oven, giving me a warm(er) spot to write or sing while corn sandies are baking or dandelion tea is brewing. So all in all, the cold life is not a bad one.

Sometimes I think about the relative virtues of poverty vs wealth. Do you? I mean, on the surface, it is obviously much better to be rich and perhaps that is all there is to it, but at the same time there are many valuable things which only poverty can create. I wonder how many of the negative feelings we have about poverty are based in reality, and how many are due to our collective imaginations absorbing the dreams and life goals given us by Hollywood.

Poverty can give you focus, humility, ingenuity, appreciation, and perhaps above all, the need to fall back on your own inner resources. How many rich people remove their own teeth with a pair of pliers? Additionally, since no one will respect you when you are poor, poverty forces you to mine you self-esteem from within. There are lots of movements now to eliminate poverty from our society which always seem to start off with the assumption that the poor are worse off than the rich. That is an assumption I do not share. From an astrological perspective, the rich can be said to be learning the lessons of Jupiter- ease, growth, expansion, generosity- while the poor are learning the lessons of Saturn- endurance, patience, faith and how to thrive within restriction.  Sometimes when the rich want to help the poor, I wonder if they are merely projecting their own sense of emptiness onto someone else, in order to feel better about their lives.

I don’t think the poor should be pitied or helped- they should be admired and learned from. Most of all, we should stop making people feel bad or ashamed for living on a limited material budget, and stop treating it as a problem to be solved.

My change of heart about poverty came when I realized one day that life is really what you give to it, not what you get out of it. Because we all come here from a spiritual dimension, I believe, where we are kings. We do not need to be kings in this world, but what we do need is the opportunity to make something of ourselves. Poor people have the same opportunities to contribute to life as the rich ones. They are not less blessed, just financially thinner.

In some ways, poor people can contribute more easily, I think, because they have less to lose. They have no pride, no dignity that they must cling to, and therefore they can develop true integrity more easily. In a moment of time when everyone is clamoring to be respected by society, I think we have also forgotten how easily external respect can rot a person’s character. It isn’t respect that we should be seeking- much less demanding- instead we should be turning ourselves into someone that WE can respect, by aligning ourselves with our own guiding stars. Because we are only in this world for a short time. When we leave, we leave behind the approval or disapproval of the crowds. But whatever gold we have managed to weave into our souls will travel forward with us.

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And now my fingers are too cold to keep writing.  So let me summarize by saying, Poor people, you are awesome, always hold your head high. Your true treasure is stored in a vault in the sky.

 

I have to include this clip because it contains the song “Beer for my Horses” by Toby Keith, one of maybe 3 songs in the world that I like. What a man Toby Keith is, or at least pretends to be in this song. 🙂