I want to write about the Capricorn lunar eclipse, but I kind of don’t even know what to say about it. My life’s been blown open. So apologies if the following doesn’t make any linear sense, I’m kind of picking everything up in bits and pieces as I go along.
Since the Uranus retrograde and this whole business about going back to school suddenly becoming a looming possibility, all of a sudden I feel like everything has changed. Yesterday I spoke to this incredibly nice lady in the psychology department of Hunter College, who helped me figure out exactly what non-matric courses I’d need and explained how I can still register for the fall semester. It seems like a much more graspable possibility now. And I think I want to do it.
Oh God.
Reading about the eclipse today, the words “security,” “authority,” “boundaries,” “needs,” and such were thrown around a lot. I think what was jarring about this is the fact that I don’t think I actually have any of those things under control. The eclipse only highlighted this realization since it fell in my natal 2nd/8th-House axis (Cancer and Capricorn, respectively). Sounds comfortable and intuitive? It’s really not, actually.
The 2nd House has traditionally been understood as The Things You Own and Money, while the 8th House is traditionally referred to as Sex, Death and Other Peoples’ Money- definitions which are extremely vague until you actually get a job or lose your virginity. Lately, though, I’ve come to understand it in a slightly different way, with another layer on top. I’ve been calling it the axis of, in purely physical terms, What You Can Control versus What You Cannot Control. Think about it: in the 2nd House, you exert a considerable amount of agency in physically manifesting what makes you feel most secure. You can arrange your Le Creuset pots in size order and only use them to make certain foods. You can open as many bank accounts as you want. You can sleep with your head where your feet should be. In the 8th House, however, your terms become somewhat irrelevant, because external forces that no one can truly control come into play, which understandably make a lot of people very uncomfortable. People die suddenly, and no one knows where they “go.” You come to realize that other peoples’ money has a much higher bearing on your own livelihood than may be immediately apparent, and that as zen as you want to believe you are, money really does drive people apart if you can’t even the score. Sex pulls you into a vacuum of intimacy where you look like An Asshole if you try to treat someone else’s body like your Le Creuset pots. This can also apply in terms of another common association of the 2nd House, self-worth: in the 2nd House, you can feel like a worthwhile human being who deserves to be alive. In the 8th House, your self-worth is totally irrelevant, because there are bigger, heavier, darker forces at work than whether or not you feel bloated.
It’s weird, because in a way, certain elements of Cancer/Capricorn have always eluded me, but at the same time I can see so clearly how they play out in my life. The 2nd and 8th Houses are almost the perfect place for these two signs to be, because for me, having suffered from eating disorders for years, my body (Cancer) has been the ultimate symbol of What You Can Control in all my self-destructive attempts to fundamentally change it. Although I’m coming to a place of acceptance as far as my body goes, and finally beginning to view my curves as an asset and not a burden, I’m also realizing that being secure in one’s own skin still does not necessarily mean being secure in the 8th House (in my case, Capricorn) world of What You Cannot Control. I certainly believe in free will, but I’m still hard-pressed to determine whether understanding/acceptance of forces we can’t control, like sex and death, makes them more or less scary, and whether the unknown will ever stop carrying a menacing sense of threat.
It may sound like a weird segue, but I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks already and I realized that none of my thoughts and preoccupations are ever random, that they all trace back to the same root eventually. Two weeks ago I watched David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which I hadn’t seen when it first came out in 2006 and knew nothing about, and it scared me so badly that I had to sleep with the light on, when I finally stopped crying and had watched like three hours of The Muppet Show to cleanse my brain-palate. Seriously, this movie scared me the way Poltergeist scares little kids. It’s difficult to describe what the movie is about, since it doesn’t really have a clear-cut story or even clear-cut characters. But I think the simplest way to try is that through a series of extremely frightening and disjointed events, a woman comes to realize that she may actually have an entirely different identity than the one she imagined she was living. And the scary part is that for most of the film, she’s living out these different situations but even towards the end, she never comes entirely closer to figuring out who and where she really is. It’s like she’s having a really bad dream, but every time she opens her eyes, she’s still dreaming, and she’s still confused.
I realized that I frequently have dreams with that pattern, where I keep “waking up” and “waking up” and “waking up,” and that I’ve sometimes just stopped and kind of puzzled over how very weird it is to be aware of your sentience and your identity, and how easily one could just not exist. Never had it occurred to me, though, at least not before watching Inland Empire, just how irrelevant identity could actually be in a 2nd/8th House kind of way similar to the one I described above. One’s sentience obviously has meaning, but identity and the details of self-worth are really so arbitrary and subjective. You acquire certain vital 2nd House qualities from your environment, those which are not necessarily innate. But in a larger 8th House context, all those identity markers could just fall away. One could very easily enter an alien and dangerous situation and just become a different person.
And this has become one of my fears. In less than two months, I could be in school again, which would not only be a huge shift in both my daily life and my long-term goals, but I would also have to move apartments to cut costs, and I’d be around an entirely different and unfamiliar group of people, and maybe I would get over my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and lose some weight and maybe my weird anxious skin eruptions that I’ve been having since I’ve lived in this place would stop. In short, I could wake up one morning and have an entirely, frighteningly different life. And in that case, it would be so easy to just change.
Wow, that was significantly heavier than I intended. Sorry, everybody. *awkward silence*
In any event, I’m sure it doesn’t have to be nearly as heavy as I’m making it out to be. I am going to request my transcript and get the ball rolling on this non-matric situation. And then Thursday I am going out of town on another shoot, which will hopefully stop me from thinking too hard about this kind of thing because I will be working. Although being on shoots in small towns and having to check all your identity markers at the door is always a very strange opportunity to just change.
I know this eclipse was supposed to be pretty intense, but does anyone else feel particularly shot full of holes, or is it just me?
