Follow theYellow Brick Road
Well here we are.
It's been a while, and a lot has changed. Its difficult to say just what has changed, but its beginning to become more apparent. Slowly.
Tomorrow, I begin a pilgrimage to the Holly Land where we will be participating in a ritual. I’ll be returning to the state that I left in a hurry to escape the grips of my ex, during a hurricane and during the pandemic. It feels like it will be very healing, grounding. I will be calling my spirit back. The girl I left. But first, I’ll be baby sitting Zeus. That’s right. King of Mount Olympus, only in this life he is a miniature pincher that has recently undergone surgery. I will be caring for him.
I never really expected this to be my gig; dogsitting. Not even cat-sitting. I never expected to be a sitter of any kind. I can definitely see how its something I was raised to do. We had an ungodly amount of feral cats when I was a kid. Growing up on nine acres in the woods of South Georgia, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. If anything, they kept the rodent population to a non-existent level. We also had several dogs, first Duke, then Buddy, both strays that just wandered on to our property. Of course they stayed because we fed them. Then we got Jake and Jenny and they had puppies: chocolate, black, and golden in color.
I remember one day I found a litter of kittens outside. It was raining and I was home alone. I must have heard them meowing or something which led me to go looking. When I finally got a visual, they were covered in fly eggs. I don’t know how long they’d been there but the panic in my heart still gets me to this day. I ran inside and called my mom asking how to help them. I began combing them with a lice comb, but it was no use. I felt helpless and completely defeated. My heart has yet to recover from that awful sight.
Thats one failure of many success stories, though. I’m fortunate to have a mother that is so capable when it comes to caregiving, she could rehabilitate any animal that came our way. Its pretty remarkable actually, this was before you could just use a search engine to find answers. Her intuition played a big part in it, but also the fact that she knew the right people to call when she came across a wild animal in need. We rehabilitated baby deer and turkeys, an opossum, a horse, a dove, some quail, its like Snow White but not as naive. Snow White in Maiden form. She can speak the language of animals and I feel blessed to have had that passed on to me.
Back to Zeus, not the dog but the god. On my pilgrimage, out in the Heavens, Jupiter will be conjoining Chiron, the wounded healer. Venus will be co-present, in her detriment (in the sign of Aries). It hadn’t occurred to me how much this represents my mother until just now writing about how amazing she is. My mom was born to a couple of 16 year olds that had gone on three outings before getting married. After about a year and a half, she contracted tuberculosis. There’s no official story on how, but the one I’ve been told is that she got it from raw cow’s milk. While being treated in the hospital for this condition, she was put in the children’s ward and contracted Polio airborne. Before she ever turned two, my mom had already had some of the worst health conditions that humans could contract at the time.
This plays a big part in my mother’s faith in God. She was taken care of by nuns and priests while her young parents worked day jobs. Some of her earliest memories are in a hospital. The people that had time for her were devout Christians that wanted to serve those that needed them most: sick children. Those people were real Christians, but the problem that I have is my mother was programmed into a life of sacrifice. She is nice to a fault. From my perspective, she cares for people that don’t deserve it, sometimes myself included in that. Its frustrating to see someone feel so unworthy that they expend all of their energy on other people (and animals but the animals are more worthy). The feeling of being indebted to God brings on a sense of judgement. “If you do not act with virtue then you are no child of mine”. It leads to feeling alienated. With God, she has a sense of belonging. It helps her to make sense of all the tragedies that have happened to her. What if, though, this perception is what brings more tragedies on?
Living with my grandparents and mom for the past two years has taken away something in my spirit. A desire to go and be free. Being here has made me want to find virtue and be noble even at the expense of my own thirty year old impulses. To an extent that is a good thing for me, I’ve done fewer regrettable things than I might have otherwise. But there is a part of me that just wants to be young and delusional even if its of no benefit to anyone else. I want to feel joy. Here’s hoping that the ritual I’ll be attending can alleviate some of this sense of responsibility. Life is a game we play that I wish not to take so seriously.
My mother is the wounded-healer for me forever and always. The conjunction with Venus brings in her beauty and the expansion of Jupiter says to me that I will be spreading this woman’s resilience in this life. This triple conjunction happens on my Part of Fortune and that is a very significant point in my chart. It signifies the place of prosperity and success. It is co-present with my Sun and natal Mercury. This will be a transformation in my 11th house of organizations, hopes, wishes, and dreams.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
