So I mentioned in the last post some of the transits that are now occurring for me: particularly most of the planets in Aquarius entering my 12th house, Neptune exactly on my ascendant, and Mercury retrograde squaring my natal Mercury retrograde/Uranus in Scorpio.

I have many things to say and I can’t say them, so I’m trying to be rational. I’m absorbing what I see and hear, but I’m not finding an appropriate, professional way to express it, so I’m not going to. I always assume that if I’m feeling this, there’s someone else in the world feeling this, and maybe this will help, even if this just means not feeling alone.

The 12th House

The 12th house is the house of undoing, the house where the roosters come home to roost in the evening, the place were we hide from ourselves and attempt to hide from the world. It’s the place where there’s no reason, and thus, also the place where the veil between the worlds is thin. This is the dreamworld, the psychic realm, the places we don’t go during business hours, but the places we end up and run from when we’re alone. It can be the things we fear, but it’s not the primal fear (that’s the Moon). It’s the things we don’t want to admit to ourselves, the things that shackle us until we confront them. The shadow, the excuses, the undoing.

Those with planets in the 12th house may not be as they appear, or may think they appear differently than they actually do. This depends on the planet, but whatever planet is in the 12th house, the rest of the world can sense before you can. It’s difficult to get a really good understanding of how that energy works for you and what it’s doing. It could feel as if it has a mind of its own. For example, having Mercury in the 12th house could feel like you’re always saying the wrong thing, but in reality, you’re saying the right thing, just not the thing others want to hear, but they recognize your ability to hone in on the heart of the matter. Or, you may feel that in order to protect your thoughts, you must be evasive and vague, or try to appear as someone you’re not, or always keep your mouth shut. But people still know what you’re thinking.

You may also not hear things the way others do — you will perceive the lie underneath the words, even if no one else does, even if everyone insists that you deny what you perceive. You may have grown up being taught to mistrust your very strong intuition, even punished or ostracized for it, because you made others feel vulnerable without ever intending to do so. When a planet is suppressed in the 12th house, it goes into the shadows and does it’s work there, and if it’s Mercury, perhaps the individual further leans on their psychic or intuitive ability to protect themselves from others, or escapes into elaborate worlds of fandom or intellectual pursuits, or decides to pretend to be a super intellectual who is smarter than everyone else around them as a way to shield themselves. Or, perhaps they succumb to this unchanneled anxiety and develop OCD (real OCD, not omg-I-need-my-towels-to-match-I’m-so-OCD-lol), reflecting the 6th house, and creating rituals in attempt to give their minds rest.

Whew.

So, when planets transit the 12th house, they wake up this hidden place, and when those planets make strong aspects to natal planets, they can create a sense of vulnerability or of ensnarement pertaining to the natal planet.

The Soul of the Sea

I was sent this song by a reader and now it’s My Song:

This is very much a Neptune on the Ascendant song. This transit actually feels fine to me until there’s another transit that reminds that I’m losing my ability to stay grounded and please other adults my adultness, and then a bunch of planets start moving into my 12th house and then I’m sitting in my apartment in a snow storm ambivalent about it ending, longing for and fearing for the future, feeling amazing and inadequate, and wondering what the fuck I should actually be doing with my time, energy, and abilities, and if it’s actually okay to just…be. To just relax. To just attempt to enjoy life but to also enjoy life being myself.

This year has been very hard. We’ve been working from home for 11 months, and I’ve been pretty much solitary for about ten of them, and while there’s much to rue and lament, there is much to be grateful for. I mean, there are a lot of things to be grateful for if you just cover your eyes and cover your eyes and sit and be. Don’t think about what other people are doing, or what you think you should be doing in comparison to what they’re doing. My life has become so simple in ways I would long for, and now I have it, and now I must allow myself to embrace it and enjoy it.

Have you floated on the water and all you could hear was the water and see the sky, and the world melted away, and it was just you and the water cradling and rocking you? And even though you know that there is a world on the shore or at the edge of the pool that needs you, that you also need, there is respite in just being the only person on Earth with the water and the sky and the sun and the breeze?

That’s part of the feeling.

The other feeling is that suddenly, no one can see me for who I think I am, whom I’m trying to tell people I am, but the words I rely on just don’t come. There’s images and feelings, but no words (Mercury retrograde square Mercury retrograde).

12th house: What if I’m wrong?

I don’t like to be wrong. No one likes to be wrong (most of the time), but I will inevitably be wrong about something sometime, many times, many things. I usually don’t care much if it’s minor, because the only power a mistake has is the power you give it and power you give others to hold it over you, but I’m not different from most people in that I don’t want to be wrong about major, fundamental things, like who I am, and if I’m going in the right direction in life.

But I don’t have an answer. I have a lot of questions, a lot of hazy images.

Dreams

Even the answers I’m getting are fuzzy. My dreams are telling me some things. Recently, I dreamed that I was helping someone clean his house. In the dream, he was away and I just decided because I was there, it would be a nice thing to do to tidy up for him. The house didn’t appear to be too bad, and I was able to get in, so why not be nice? The living room and the dining room were okay. They didn’t take much straightening up, so I focused on the kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t too bad either, but there was a little clutter by the kitchen sink, some papers and some tupperware and such. When I turned over a piece of Tupperware, there was this huge armored beetle like nothing I had ever seen before. It was bronze with two parts, a head and thorax that were round and covered with a thick shell. I know that because I freak out and threw the tupperware at the bug, but it just bounced off. The bug didn’t run away: it scuttled toward me. I backed away. I even tried to stomp on it. It felt like I stomped on a rock.

And then more came out from everywhere. I thought they were coming for me, and I’m not entire sure whether or not they weren’t, but it turns out that many of them were actually marching to the front door. Someone came over, a middle aged woman I didn’t know. She asked me what was going on. I told her that I didn’t know, that I just started cleaning and all these bugs came out, and there they were, going out the front door. She asked me if I woke them up? I asked her why they were there in the first place and what the fuck were they?

And yet, as they marched out the door and into the world, I saw that in the living room, there was a recessed floor level window that went across most of the wall that had ceramic statues of saints in it, like the kind you would see in a Catholic Church. I then realized it wasn’t just a window, but an elaborate gas fireplace design and the statues were sitting on top of the part where the gas and flame comes out. I thought it would look very pretty to have the fireplace operational and clean instead of all these dusty church statues cluttering up the place.

I went over to them. I was surprised that the bugs weren’t interested, so I started moving the statues, thinking that I just knew that, unlike waking up the army of superbugs that were apparently infesting his house, he would want these statues gone and the fireplace working. So I starting moving them, and then I woke up.

I still couldn’t tell you how I got into this man’s house, especially because I didn’t talk to him in the dream. I’m pretty sure I’ve had a dream in the recent past with this person in it, at least one, but haven’t ever talked to them, but there I was, in their house, moving things around, unveiling the unseen, and they weren’t there.

Did I have a dream in which I was poking around someone else’s 12th house?

My tarot readings have been turning up the 6th of Cups very often, regardless of the deck. I’ve read lots of meanings for this card, but nothing definitive. Nostalgia? The past? Karma? Happiness? I don’t understand how this card relates to the rosey past, other than it gives the appearance of innocence and pure and simple love, which I suppose belongs to children, belongs to the people we were in the past.

But I think it also belongs to Aries Moons, you know?

Retreat

I have big plans but no energy. I sleep and it’s glorious, I lay around and read and it’s so nice. The world is quiet, just me and my music, until someone from work texts me on a weekend to ask me a question that can definitely wait.

So I make them wait. It’s not an emergency or even something that falls within my purview.

Some people have to be trained to respect boundaries, or else I’ll have to release the armored beetles, I guess.

I am a person with a soul, too, and the workweek comes too fast, and so does the anxiety of having to talk to people and be the grown up I’ve become, pretending I’m not being a contrarian pain in the ass.

But it gives me a headache to think about myself in old ways. I’m not an atheist because non-theist pagans don’t have a seat at that table. I’m not rational, or a materialist. And the world doesn’t see me that way. It sees an Aquarian-type weirdo, and that’s what I am. I’m really weird. Always have been. Not as weird as some, and probably not weird in a destructive way, but if I’m to learn anything from this transit, it’s that it’s fabulous that I’m eccentric and don’t fit in, and that like many things Aquarius, there’s actually a lot more of us than we would think, and I’m not alone.

The world is full of fabulous weirdos.

The snow just keeps falling. I’m not sure why February even exists. It’s my 12th-house month, and the storm means not going to the store to get the Valentine’s Day candy half off, but there’s something to be said about having no where to go otherwise, and when I find my car this week and take my life in my hands trying to get to the office, I’ll know there’s a life where I’m an attorney, a number, a citizen, a drop in the bucket, but not for another day.