Imbolc

Very pleased today that the recent cold weather has abated enough to do our Imbolc ritual in relative comfort! We've been doing this long enough now so that it no longer feels contrived and we have a genuine gladness for it.

     

We fill the bowl with things that represent all the things we want to grow in the coming season: seeds of root crops and salads, onions and fruits such as peppers, herbs, culinary and medicinal, beans and flowers and leafy greens;  The  peas represent gratitude for last year's harvest ~ there's also a pencil for writing and drawing and a sample of the lip balm I made with beeswax and honey. There is a heart shaped beach pebble for Steve and Me and a little gold heart I made  for all our loved ones,  and our internet friends ~ that's you!

A good blowy walk up Sancreed Beacon first, then quietly, past flocks of fieldfares down to the Holy Well.

Beautifully adorned for the celebration of new energies.

Down the seven steps into the womblike dripping darkness to light a candle and float

our thanks and dreams and blessings on the sacred waters..

Imbolc blessings to us all

Neptune's Home! (a dry land tale of the deep)

"Neptune moves into Pisces later today.." I said.
"Oh?, and what's that good for?" He asked..

" That's a bit of a mystery," I replied, "but do you

remember the story of Little Red Riding Hood?  That has lots of Neptune elements to it - compassion,
disguise,deception and escape for a start.:

 ~  Kind, sweet young female, with a glamorous red cloak

goes to take some tempting goodies to her elderly

grandmother who is sick in bed.

 As she goes through the dark forest, she is spotted by the

hungry wolf who wants to eat her all up! For this he needs

some privacy however, so he suggests that she pick her

grandmother some of the beautiful flowers that grow along the

path.  She's a suggestible soul and is soon completely

absorbed  in her task.                                             

    Meanwhile, the wolf has scurried off to Grandma's cottage

and entering under false pretences he soon gobbles up Grandma

and then disguised in her bed clothes, lies in wait for  Red 

Riding Hood.    She's suspicious, but deceived long enough to be

consumed as well.

  Of course there's a hero (it is a Neptune story after all) and along comes the brave hunter, just in time to kill the wolf and allow the still kicking girls to escape.   And not a dolphin in sight! ~

Neptune's at home in Pisces and this is his first visit here since 1847 - 1861. We don't know what to expect really, but there will most likely be an emphasis on the mutual qualities and rulerships of Neptune and Pisces : Inspiration and music, Glamour,delusion,illusion, meditation,deception, compassion, psychic experience,poetry,drugs, hallucinations, dreams, healing, addiction, spirituality and the spiritual nature of religion (as opposed to morality and the church - that's Jupiter and Sagittarius), sacrifice, the dissolving of ego, ritual and magic,film and photography,oil and gas and of course, the deep oceans. Dissolving boundaries of all kinds, Neptune forgives and forgets and if death is part of that process, so be it, dissolve, move on...always move on..
    This time, our oceans as well as our collective unconscious are rather full of things we'd rather forget as well as things we want to extract aren't they?
 Last time Neptune was here many uniting movements came into being. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels,Spiritualism, the new Empiricism of Darwin, throwing the established Christian Church into turmoil, The PreRaphaelite Brotherhood and the dawning of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was the period when people liked to 'take the waters' and hydrotherapy became popular and it was this era that finally led to the  American Civil War.
 Neptune in Pisces born children from this time included Bram Stoker, Annie Besant,  Tiffany, Gaugin, Waterhouse, de Maupassant and RL Stevenson. Gaudi, Van Gogh, George Eastman, Oscar Wilde and Paul Ehrlich, father of chemotherapy.  Sigmund Freud, Rider Haggard and George Bernard Shaw; Conrad, Elgar and AE Waite (originator of the Rider Waite tarot deck).Puccini, Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame; AE Housman, Seurat and Kaiser Wilhelm; Albeniz,, JM Barrie and Max Planck (originator of Quantum Theory). Chekhov, Mahler and Robert Baden Powell to name but a few.  Who will the new generation of Pisces Neptune children be? What will they be good for?

   Image from 'Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories' by VariousAuthors 1927 [Project Gutenberg]

Happy New Year!

Wishing you all the very best for 2012 ~ Morvah xxx

Blessings to the Gardener

                                 Blessings to the gardener                                     

Who turns his back to the rain,

Who bends his  knee to soil and stone,

Whose quiet hands,

Cracked and black with juices

The robin loves.

Whose master is daylight,

Whom the moon allows,

Who searches the skies,

 Whose hunger tells the time.

Whose blade is sharp

Who knows a spell

For every blight and blow,

Whose work folk attribute to God,

Who turns the loam to flowers..

 Morvah ~ Christmas 2011

Maths and other things

 I'm often surprised by today's children who, upon being asked what they enjoy at school, frequently reply 'Maths'.  I suspect this has much to do with technology and enlightened teaching methods sadly unavailable in my youth.   My Father worked with numbers for most of his life and rather misguidedly had ambitions for me to do  the same. He was flogging a dead horse.  With his Mercury conjuct Neptune in Leo trine his Mars in Aries, maths was instinctual to him and he could add columns of figures in his head with the facility of an idiot savant.  Not so his Saturn return eldest child! Whereas we had so much in common, he and I, my Mercury in Pisces ~ renowned for its stupidity, was poor Dad's Waterloo!   His terrible fixity of purpose, compounded by a square of Saturn in Scorpio to Mercury, drove him to demand that my primary school should set me maths homework every night, which he would supervise. My desperate attempts to please would dissolve into Pisces tears at his impatience and my inept fumblings at comprehension would drive him to despair! Then we would both lose our fiery tempers and all was lost . I hated maths with a passion after this and escaped it whenever possible. I always enjoyed geometry however and my long-suffering teachers were often bewildered by this anomaly in an otherwise hopeless case.   Of course the truth of it was that Dad didn't know geometry and I liked drawing. Geometry offered  useful drawing techniques, it was beautiful in a way that mathematics could have been without the emotional trauma.  Years passed, my maths never improved much but strangely blossomed when I took up astrology around my Saturn return. My Saturn -  only ten degrees away from my Father's - is trine  the guilty Mercury in Pisces so I suddenly found myself working out proportional logarithms to calculate lunar progressions and converting obscure daylight saving systems to sidereal time, both without benefit of a calculator. Dad would have been so pleased had he known, but of course you don't mention astrology in a Catholic household do you?  How's your mathematical ability? What's the astrology?
      Here are a few Mercury in Pisces things and some other things from the last week.

                                

  Research has shown that in speaking about their work, mathematicians use the words 'elegance', 'truth',and 'beauty' more than everyone else combined.

  Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe, there's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines......

                                Buckminster Fuller

' THE MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIENCE IS THE MYSTERIOUS.. IT IS THE SOURCE OF TRUE ART AND SCIENCE'

                           Albert Einstein    

 


           ' When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it to be wrong.'

                       Buckminster Fuller

      


  'I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus.  I saw exactly how it happened...but it was after dinner and I let it go,'

  Winston Churchill  (My Early Life, 1930)                                                              

   'Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be forever explaining things to them.'

             Antoine de St Exupery

                            

Apology

Sorry if people have been checking here for new posts and found me missing again ~ The articles are here waiting to post but blogger is refusing my photos at the moment! As soon as I find a solution I'll be back! Lots of love to all of you ~ M x
  Experimenting with firefox but alas still no photos!

Waiting for Venus

                                                                                                                                             
  After many days of gloom, the Sabbath sun shone fair across the land so that it was decided that the gardeners should spend the late afternoon at Sancreed Beacon in the hope of seeing the conjunction of Venus and Mercury in the western sky. The dusk was clear as the Moon rose over the bay, the only sound that of rooks,rising and circling their roost beside the church far below. We  climbed to the summit for the best view but a very chilly easterly made it too uncomfortable to stay long and we soon scuttled back down out of the wind.  The sky slowly turned golden in the west, while behind us,the bay shimmered in pink and blue stillness. Jupiter rose below the moon, huge and sparkling but still no Venus...

 

The Sun had set and we should have been able to see her but the twilight was just too bright. By now the temperature had dropped and we were freezing.  Reluctantly we decided to make our way home as by the time Venus was visible, Mercury would be long gone.  There aren't many days left to see this rare event -on November 10 - 11th, Venus, Mercury and Antares will be closest together, about 30 minutes after sunset . If you have a clear western horizon, look out for them - this won't be visible again in any of our lifetimes.  Regretfully but glad to get in the warm car we trundled home through the now dark country lanes.

               By the time we arrived home Venus was twinkling  beautifully - we could see her through the kitchen window ! The UK weather forecast isn't too good, but if you get a chance - pop out for a look at the heavens - we have the Taurus Full Moon on Thursday evening, Jupiter will be close behind her. Mars is visible now in the Eastern sky towards morning and the winter constellations are breathtakingly beautiful!