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Newsletter: Libra - Sept / Oct 2008

Welcome to The Alchemical Journey Libra Newsletter. I have opted for a different format for these newsletters, which I hope will meet with your approval. I have decided to personalise them much more and to share my own experiences and personal reflections. Hope you enjoy!

1. Reflections on the Turning Year
2. Working with the Libra Cycle
3. My Story
4. What the Alchemical Journey is All About
5. Alchemical Journey Taster Evening in Glastonbury: Weds 1st Oct

Reflections on the Turning of the Year

“Turn, Turn, Turn.  To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.”  These words, immortalised in the 1965 hit by The Byrds, have always inspired me.  As an astrologer and lover of nature, I find it much easier to think of time as a turning wheel, rather than as a linear commodity forever pressurising us to ‘do’ something.  The sun, moon and planets won’t be rushed.  They each have their own rhythms and cycles, just as the seasons do, and as they turn and transform their masks of expression, so do we turn and transform ours. Whenever I get held fast for too long in the dominant cultural paradigm of linear thinking, I find myself under pressure.  Time becomes something finite, a commodity that can be bought and sold.  Connecting to nature gets me back to seeing my life as a cycle, and I relax again. This is the inspiration behind The Alchemical Journey, the initiatory 12-month adventure around the astrological wheel which I facilitate each year.  It's a process that honours that transformational process in our own journeys, as mirrored in the sun’s passage through the zodiac. Through engaging with the myths and rich symbolic associations of that journey, I believe we can come to see the correlations with our own lives.

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Working with the Libra Cycle

Right now, along with this year’s Alchemical Journey participants, I’m donning a Libran mask, as the Sun passes through that sign, and engaging with the rich symbolism of this sign.  The alchemy of Libra is to do with partnership and union, the wedding of opposites.  Libra marks the onset of Autumn, the leaves turning golden, and seducing us with their fragile beauty, as they begin to fall from their branches.  I find myself attempting to capture that moment of transformation through poetry, music and movement, and reflecting on the paradox of beauty and the longing it instils in me.  As the scales tip gradually toward shorter days and longer nights, I want to reflect, to weigh my life in the balance and, as best I can, embrace another’s viewpoint.  Libra reminds me of the need to consider perspectives other than my own, suspend judgment and hold out an olive branch for peace. It reminds me of the agreements I have with the significant others in my life and confronts me with the question of whether I am honouring those agreements authentically. The Libra phase of the year can act like a moment of pause and reflection, where we can step back from the drama and have a look at what is really going on in our relationships.

During the Libran weekend just gone, we explored the art of balance through a simple piece of astrological theatre. Embodying a pair of scales, balancing apparently conflicting concerns in each pan, we each, in turn, attempted to walk along a straight line heel-to-toe and maintain our balance, while members of our group each took a particular role in trying to persuade the balancer to swing one way or the other. It was very revealing to see just how difficult it was to maintain that poise with all the distractions coming in on either side. Yet, it also served as a valuable reflection on just what an important practice it is to walk that middle line, in the midst of so many emotional demands and challenges.

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My Story

I first discovered astrology in 1990, through a stranger I met on a beach in Southern Spain, someone I seemed to recognise though I’d never met him before.  He wasn’t an astrologer, yet he immediately identified my sun sign.  It stirred something deep in my soul and led to an evening of indescribable epiphany under a bright, full-moon-lit sky.  As I gazed up in wonder, I understood something in the core of my being – that all things are connected and that earth and sky dance together as one.  A deep and ancient wound suddenly cried out for healing and I was overcome with joy.  The experience turned my whole world upside down, destiny had knocked at my door, and magic was happening all around me.  I couldn’t ignore it.  Within two years, I had abandoned my fledgling career as a trainee chartered surveyor and had become a professional astrologer.

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What The Alchemical Journey is All About

Rather than simply making predictions for people or analysing their character, my real passion as an astrologer is to empower people to reconnect to their innate intuitive ability.  Above all else, I see astrology as a way of enriching the imagination and liberating creativity, helping people make intuitive associations between things that we, as a society, have forgotten are connected.  I see the imaginative engagement with astrological symbolism as being about healing and re-connection, it’s about weaving things back together that we have forgotten are connected.  That’s the real alchemy, I believe, for as we do this, we become stronger, more coherent, able to make clearer choices in our lives, predict patterns and become ever more agile in our ability to respond to life’s challenges.  We can shake ourselves loose of the materialist illusion and begin to perceive the invisible web that links everything together and which is ever being woven.   

I often think of the ever turning astrological wheel as a wheel of memory.  Indeed, this idea was fundamental to the Greek oral storytelling tradition and was woven into the design of their theatres.  Astrology has the potential to reconnect us to a memory of who really we are.  It can provide us with an appropriate cue as to the timing of things. It shows us when we the time is right for us to act more effectively. It also reminds us of the relationship between that which is constant and that which is constantly turning. So I employ guided imagery, symbol divination, music, storytelling, theatre, and walking in sacred landscapes, as ways of sensing that invisible web of connectedness and opening up people’s hearts to the magic within. That’s what The Alchemical Journey is all about.  The 2009-10 programme is running from Glastonbury and I’ll be joined by renowned landscape geomancer Dr. Anthony Thorley, who will be leading ritual journeys in the Glastonbury landscape zodiac. 

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Alchemical Journey Taster Evening in Glastonbury: Weds 1st Oct

If you can, please come along to a taster evening at Glastonbury Assembly Rooms on Weds 1st Oct at 7pm. This is one of a series of presentations being offered by the Glastonbury Positive Living Group. See: http://shiny-happy-people.co.uk/

 

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