Gazing in the Mirror

January 31 - Returns

If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant,
or weak, return to yourself, to who
you are, here and now and when you get
there, you will discover yourself, like
a lotus flower in full bloom, even in
a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.
~ Masaru Emoto,
The Secret Life of Water

The renewing of the mind is a scientific
act. As the conscious thought pours truth
into the subjective channels of creative
energy, the body is automatically renewed;
this is mental healing.
~ Ernest Holmes

Returns were on my mind the day I first wrote this essay. I never thought in such terms until a friend of mine mentioned her Saturn return a year or two ago. I wish I had followed up then and learned more about that because mine seems to have begun in 2012 – and in hindsight, I can see those effects (these are 28-30 yr cycles). My Saturn is in Scorpio and in the Sixth House. Scorpio wants to "feel deeply and intimately" on every level – spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. Saturn returned to Scorpio in October 2012 and remained there until 2014 (the year I wrote this essay). Then it will return again in June 2015 through September 2015. Oh wow !!  That was the month and year my mother died.  It was my second Saturn return and is a cycle of achievement and maturity. These phases challenge us to face reality and thereby open us up to increased wisdom and the freedom that comes with living in truth.  That certainly happened to me as I had to perform the duty of executor when my dad died 4 months after my mom.

Saturn is in my Sixth House – which rules taking care of business on an everyday level. This includes my job, paying bills and keeping the house clean. It also includes maintaining my body with medical checkups and a daily regimen of nutrition and exercise. It can rule the way I offer service to others. Basically what happens with a Saturn return is a form of pruning or slimming down in the area of life affected by Saturn. We are getting rid of things in our lives that are not working for us in the real world and focusing on improving and strengthening the things that do serve a useful purpose. This had been happening for me most especially in the context of my spiritual and online social networking communities, then it happened to me as I was called upon to care for the family I was born into. In maturing, I realized that I could pass the blame for onto anyone else. My response to the focus and the energy must be from the perspective of my own experience. This period in any life, while temporary, is a time for learning about personal limits as well as inner strengths.  And did I ever !!

Cycles manage to be both familiar yet puzzling at the same time. A "return" is the completion of a cycle and the beginning of a "new" cycle. The Mayan calendar had a "return" in 2012 of a 5,000+ year cycle. My Saturn return began during one of those Mayan long count cycle's end and the new cycle's beginning. I am here on this planet at this time and I will admit that it has been personally an intense time to be living through this convergence of these important cycles – both planetary and personal. Jose Arguelles studied Mayan calendrics and came to believe that modern humanity is out of harmony with natural time and believed that humans needed to follow a nature-based Lunar calendar to shift back into alignment with the living biosphere of our planet.

Today is the day my mother was born.  I lost her in September 2015.  The year I first wrote this was 2014 and I was turning 60 (so I will be 66 this coming May). Yet another "return" had arrived for me in 2014.  This date was then the Chinese Lunar New Year and it was the "return" of the Year of the Wood Horse, which happens to be my birth Chinese Zodiac sign. I find that I cannot disown what is mine. There is always another return or a reckoning and sometimes fortunately a reconciliation or resolution. In nature there seem to be lots of returns. Cycles are a kind of return that is familiar to all us: night and day, the tides, the seasons, etc. These cycles include the larger ebb and flow of the full moon and new moon transitions. That year it was also the second New Moon in the month of January and therefore referred to as a Black Moon. There is the common literary structure of a cycle or return – the hero or heroine sets out from a place, has experiences that result in some kind of transformation and returns to the place where it all began as a different person. The Wizard of Oz is a familiar example.

How do we explain the regularity of cyclical returns ? There does seem to be a human need to consider more deeply the appearance of information of personal relevance. Humans throughout the ages have been inspired by the cycles of nature which are tied to the cycles of the Sun and Moon. Those are the cycles which we are all the most familiar with and feel the effects of at a physical, mental and emotional level. These natural cycles reoccur at regular intervals. Cycles help us to learn that changes and endings are necessary for growth and for creating a better future. We arrive in the world by departing from wherever we originated and what we call death may only be a return to that same place. We seem to have deep longings to return to whatever we consider "home" when we have been elsewhere. We may think of returning to a heavenly home when the time of leaving approaches.

Metaphysically cycles consist of the periodic repetition of matter molded into form and the dissolving of forms. Form has a purpose in being. The process of manifestation moves forward changes that evolve Life. At some point in planetary history some active intelligence was developed within Earthly form (ie human beings). Personally I believe that the most recent cyclical Mayan energies were meant to move our species more fully an expression based on Love. It is my hope that eventually a morphic resonance, an energy of activation, will move humanity into our next best, yet-to-be expressions.  We aren't there yet.

~ perspective

I honor the cyclical returns in
my own life.
It is as though we move through
an entire cycle of incarnation and
then pass through someplace that
takes us back to the next cycle.
I understand the expression of
my "higher self" as that fundamental
conception by Spirit that I am as
individualized Self, ever manifesting
through time and space, renewed and
returning.
I see it as a natural law of conservation
that energetic forms demand eternal
recurrence.
Forms in time are finite but Time Itself
is infinite in its reach and there seems
to be an eternal play of repetition existing.

#achievement #cycles #death #freedom #maturity #resonance #mother #reality #strength #truth