Sep

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Filed Under Illuminated Lunations, Pisces

I’ve often felt astrologically cheated out of that zany and enlightened experience known as Pisces. I’ve thought how fun it would be to draw people into my comet’s trail as I light tripped through the stratosphere. As it is, Pisces holds only a small footnote in my Fifth House, staking a far larger claim in my Sixth, also home to a Mars-Pluto opposition (currently being squared by Pluto). Yes, as the textbooks say I ‘must have creativity and imagination in your work situations’ because I climb the walls without that. And I’ve lived the whole unhealthy work environment causes illness thing. Yet, when I try to use the sign on the Sixth House cusp as a life management strategy going with the flow and having plenty of time to space out, that good intention is overtaken by M-P who more insistently requires energetic and physical output than Pisces requires napping and movie-watching. Consequently in the past I’ve pulled on my Pisces like you would a medical prescription – to counteract burnout and stress. Then I bemoan my fatigue and illness. Dana Gerhardt says of the Sixth House, In the 6th we notice life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We can drown in our failure. Or we can do something about it. We can change our approach, acquire new techniques. We can either suffer or grow. It is a learning curve. As a kid, I never learned how to manage stress; my family was far better at the chaos and checking out part and as a result of that – and maybe a past life spent tending emergencies, it’s been my cosmic inheritance to learn self-care. Well, as with anything Sixth House, Pisces is a life skill I need to practice, to acquire and eventually master to thrive.

Having Pisces on this particular house of self-improvement has kept me in the position of humble apprentice while half-expecting the other shoe to drop (Mars-Pluto), but I’ve also learned to appreciate the subtle simplicity of Pisces and how easy it is to mess it up. The need for relaxation, escape, time spent human be-ing, not human doing is necessary for us to be whole, healthy people. Simple enough, but how utterly confused we are about just be-ing and accepting our selves. We confuse be-ing with passivity, acceptance with condoning bad behavior, especially in the West. No wonder the USA has the highest rate of mental illness in the world. This isn’t just another unrelated statistic. Each of us have paid the blood price for not honoring Pisces, for not enough time spent in retreat, relaxation, contemplation and, here’s the important one - in absolute and unconditional self-acceptance. We work to be perfect. We work and work. We self-improve to the point of turning into robots. We feel like failures. And we think our problems are separate from the rest of our life. The symptoms? Emotional disorders, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse etc. I can identity the price because I’ve had to put myself back together like humpty-dumpty, too.

The Fishes ways aren’t easy to wrap one’s head around. Into the area of life Pisces falls, we may struggle with one big paradox, a seemingly irreconcilable conundrum that ties us in knots until we learn. What are we meant to learn? We are usually faced with a choice, although at first appears with the cryptic message ‘There’s No Way Out Of This One, Buddy’. Funny thing is, the choice in the matter rests in our own ability to slightly alter our solid perceptions. Will we choose binge eating or periodic escapes to belly dancing class where our belly-body is honored? Artistic irreverence or maniacal egocentrism? Will we drink spirituality or buy spirits at the liquor store? Will we choose sleep or fall asleep at the wheel from exhaustion? Creative imagination or madness? Illness or the opportunity to heal? Victimization or the ownership of your life? Take your pick. You could say where you find Pisces in your chart is where you’ve discovered your own private Idaho, perplexing and maddeningly confounding and…resolvable. As with any double-bodied sign (Gemini-Sagittarius-Pisces), you will probably need to reconcile one or the other thinking – at least at first.

You’re living in your own Private Idaho
Living in your own Private Idaho
Underground like a wild potato.
Don’t go on the patio.
Beware of the pool,
blue bottomless pool.
It leads you straight
right through the gate
that opens on the pool. – B52’s Private Idaho

Last weekend I made a trip to Ohio, the place of my birth for my cousin’s wedding. Johnny Cash played on high rotation quite a bit while I was there and randomly, while troving for ancient treasures in my grandmother’s basement, I discovered a biography about him. Johnny was a Pisces. As I looked at pictures of his life I realized he walked the line of addiction and creativity and still lived a long, full life. Some members of my family hasn’t fared so well; alcoholism is the bottomless pool in my gene pool so I have always had very strong viewpoints about drug abuse, having claimed lives of people I love and never got to love and fracturing others. Because of who I am and where I live now, and the spiritual folk I know, I don’t see this side of Pisces any longer though still keep one eye open for different kinds of Fish hooks. I live in Fairfax, CA, which I’m certain is a Pisces town (two incorporation dates conflict – between Aries & Pisces) and is a community of artists, light-seekers and crystal squeezers which one native told me hasn’t changed since the Sixties. I love it here. However, being a Sun-Saturn person I still approach certain Pisces aspects with wary caution: one wide-eye fixated in fascination on the characters who live here, another eye on the lookout for those who have lost all touch with the really essential laws of reality, like gravity. Yet even I recognize those laws of reality are exactly the same laws we need to give up to experience the full range of Pisces blessings.

Case in point I have a few friends who astral travel, who regularly commune with Ultimate Consciousness in ways I’ve never really understood how to do. This is the case for my friend, Emma. Emma has a few Twelfth House planets including the South Node so I wasn’t surprised when one day she relayed a story about ecstatic experience involving trance, dance and slipping between the veils of the world. I had already imagined this type of experience came easy to her (whereas I noted grudgingly, for me it does not) and told her so. Yet in comparing our experiences with the Twelfth House (Pisces) we both found common ground. We had individually reached the last exit of a self-directed life in our own way and discovered a greater power there. She had an ecstatic experience of asking for guidance; and me, with no less than Pluto in my natal Twelfth House, I walked into the great dark Pacific one night with the intention of never coming back.

I don’t think I was re-born in the Christian sense, but maybe I was. It still remains mysterious as to what actually happened for me in those baptismal waters of the great Pacific. I do know that when I walked back to shore, I returned with the certain consciousness of a Creator and that my life mattered. My mind knows I accepted a higher power – but what does that mean? To this day I can only say nothing in my life really changed except my thinking about it. As different as our experiences were that led to this same point, we both broke that invisible cycle of impossibility and futility by surrendering to and acknowledging a greater power. We both reached a spiritual impasse, a crisis, and it all turned around in a millisecond.

There’s still a lot I don’t yet understand about Pisces. I don’t know if this is something you can actually will to happen, or you have to be broken down, as Emma and I were. I do know that once I stopped believing what was in front of my eyes, ie what reality was telling me was possible, everything changed. The small ‘I’ broke and Consciousness flooded in, I changed. Returning from my water-fire baptism, I approached my life from the perspective that I was not alone. I began to pray. I affirmed. I visualized my way out of darkness. The more I put my faith in the Universe, the more I align my will with Divine Will, the more I pull on intuition and use co-creativity as my birthright, no Fish trap holds no water. This continues to be true. I am capable of holding ambiguity and hardship, pain and pleasure, sickness and health, without having it tear me apart.

Pisces waters have pulled me under, held me firmly in the undertow, basically by believing what my mind tells me to believe. Experience has taught me there’s only one way out and it doesn’t necessarily involve God-contact, if you don’t want to call it that. What It is is a direct experience with a larger Consciousness. When you’re all tied up in Pisces ropes it is pretty unbelievable that with a Houdini’s sleight of hand Consciousness can untie what you’ve been struggling with for years in a heartbeat. BUT IT CAN. Yet beyond the secret of not believing what’s in front of your eyes and putting a greater power in faith, I still have no idea how Pisces works it’s magical ways. But I’m also pretty sure I’m not supposed to know.

This remains a little disconcerting to the part of me that believes it’s all about the work and effort. My Mars still has the work ethic of a migrant field worker in the final days of harvest season. Part of this is cultural, part personal. But with Pisces along for the ride, a thimble’s worth of consciousness effort is far mightier than the alternative which kind of makes me a true Californian. I’ve also learned to appreciate the flexibility inherent in my best-laid plans, even the spiritually visualized ones that I think are in line with Divinity. Because, as my current Saturn in Twelfth House transit is informing me, if you really believe your life and your consciousness and your accomplishments are separate from everything and everyone else, you’ve really been duped. Pisces will smile as the best laid plans fall by the wayside forcing you to wait for something better. Pisces will also help you imagine the fruits of accomplishment into existence and then buy you a ringside seat to watch as they dissolve into an inglorious puddle of water. This is not so great if you were doing whatever you were doing for reasons other than (fame, money, glory, accomplishment, habit) following the dictates of Spirit. Pisces teaches me and my Mars that my life is my own and not my own. This teaching is a great preventative against suffering, too, because when you really get that you’re in this together and then the Creator moves you off the map for a time it’s a lot easier to let go and let God. To relax and laugh at the zaniness of it all.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Pisces Full Moon, Your Own Private Idaho or Mystical Experience”

jotracey on September 3rd, 2009 8:49 pm

Great post Jessica. I have asc, sun, moon & merc in pisces & often struggle with the very piscean-ness of pisces, try & get control through the virgo opposite…or sometimes the shadow side of excesses & escape, but in truth, I love it. This full Moon is a spotlight granting clarity & a gorgeously lit path to what I like to call beyondness.
Jessica on September 4th, 2009 8:58 am

Thanks for writing, Jo. I thought of your ‘getting in touch with beyond-ness’ comment last night as I drifted to sleep under the moonlight and *almost* felt it… I do imagine how wonderful it must be to dip in to that starry liquid ocean on a daily basis.

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