the perfect blue house

There was a period of time after college when I walked through my neighborhood in St. Paul searching for a perfect blue colored house. I was trying out a fantasy that I would feel something full and exhilarating that I absolutely needed to feel healthy - something like the sound of a dozen brass horns playing in unison. I was also putting off dealing with realities like finding a job and paying rent by dreaming about finding a paint color for a house I had no means of purchasing for a family I hadn't even begun to establish. Perhaps the perfect blue flame of a warm functioning furnace would have been more effectual, or buying a pint of blue at the hardware or art stores down the street and painting a piece of furniture, but that probably wouldn't have seemed grand enough.

Later, though, I had an unusual dream that featured a brilliant blue color. I shared my dream with a psychiatrist, who wondered what it meant but didn't offer an interpretation. It was one of those flying dreams that ended with a blue kite, which I had been during part of the dream, angling above a long, high slightly rusted chainlink fence - the kinds you see around schoolyards - and then it did a kind of maneuver where it made a tight pivot and snapped into place along an invisible horizontal line and the blue color became electrified with silver energy and I felt exhilarated. It sounds a lot like the little mechanism that turns ignites the gas burner when the temperature gets too cold, but about twenty years later I come across Isabel Hickey's symbolic description of Aquarius - the clear, blue electric air of winter - and now I think I understand something about the dream and the feeling associated with that color, regardless of its source - I analyzed every symbol in my diary/journal and it all made sense. And given the chilliness of midwinter, I would have to say the appropriateness of finding warmth in the deep blue of an Aquarian intellect is even more suspect. I've steered myself toward more calming colors now.

There are a lot of things I've accumulated to wonder about in my adult life (and from before), and when an answer comes twenty years later, it is, like the electrified blue kite, also a little exhilarating. I think that getting these kinds of answers just normal everyday functioning for some, or perhaps 'they' don't keep thinking about these things the way I do. It's getting easier for me in that regard, and I like the idea that some day in the not too distant future, I'll make peace with this side of myself, or understand it better - that part that isn't clued in like the rest. It would be nice if I knew the answers to 'life's persistent questions' and could use that knowledge instantly in conversations and other interactions, but maybe that's a need I'll learn to let go of - or make more practical - like the need for a perfect shade of blue, which I found and used to paint my bathroom.

I'm gradually scraping that blue paint off the walls and replacing it with a lilac shade. I was nervous and forgot to sand the original coat, so a fingernail peels it off, and lilac is a color that I've read is calming for high-strung Virgo Moons, which is what I am. Might as well try it out, as an experiment, I reason convincingly - see if has the right effect on me. In any case, I'll get a nice looking bathroom, and it will have been me that made it look the way it does. With the experience I get learning how to do it in a relaxed, gradual manner, it will be easier to do other things even more creatively in the future - now that's the proper use of Aquarian energy!

Given that my first house Venus and Mars conjunction in Aquarius aspects my South Node rather than my North Node (a quintile, continuing on to a biquintile to Uranus-Pluto in the eighth), I think its useful, for now at least, to suspect that searching for fourth house comforts of the North Node in chilly intellectual pursuits of Aquarius is going to be about as fulfilling as substituting backlit pictures of food dishes for the actual thing. Although, to stretch this metaphor as far as I can, perhaps the conversation that goes on around the meal and during the preparation will be the real sustenance while the food is a really nice accent. This I base on the fact that the North Node is in conversational Gemini.

The lone quintile to my North Node is Chiron, and that is positioned in Pisces, second house. If Chiron represents the wound of separation we carry through life, and which we become more conscious of as we develop the potential and possibility for understanding and healing, then maybe searching for that object - a perfect, deep blue colored home, was a way of coping with the pain of separation I felt as I tried to maintain a space separate from my family, who, despite their good intentions, offered little in the way of guidance or support but quite a bit of anxiety-ridden pressure to do something along the traditional lines of pleasing others so as to get by in life.

Perhaps I was trying to understand why I hid my fear of 'normal' jobs and interactions with others. Had I not earned my achievements and received the academic accolades that I had always frustratingly striven for? Yes, though every once in a while I glimpsed a maddening difference between certain other peoples' interactions with ideas and the people who talked and wrote about them, and my own straight down the pike, hard-headed, and equally maddening way of hammering out of assignments and studies with no gentle reason or method for doing so. I admired these others but I didn't know how to access their 'feel' for things.

I think I can find places in my natal chart where these stories from my life and the image of myself they portray originate. There is the tenth house Sagittarian South Node always seeking another (important) adventure to be off on; its ruler, the fifth house Jupiter with its inconjunct to a Neptune MC that has often blinded me to an honest assessment of my actual skill level and my standing among others, which I need even more dearly. Its T-square to Chiron on one side of the chart and Uranus and Pluto on the other, pushes me intensely to get at this problem, but doesn't endear me to others - or sometimes myself. Vesta in sixth house Cancer has certainly added an emotional challenge to jobs, that I've not until recently been able to be firm but gentle about. (It's also made food service feel like an always available option.). Maybe even my latest find - asteroid Lilith in Cancer opposite my natal Sun has something to do with the extreme resistance to fitting into a traditional mode, even while I try anxiously to serve.

I need a purpose for this recitation. I imagine it's an exercise routine for my Aquarian Mars - trotting around the chart, finding explanations for things, honing one's understanding, while I expand and deepen descriptions of other peoples' charts at the same time. I know that showing it off is an easy outlet for me and yet uncomfortable and a little dangerous (that T-square again, perhaps) - I don't hear myself too clearly when the words are too loud and anxious. They feel dishonest in my body, and that actually causes a lot of discomfort, and I worry incessantly about that as a good, brooding Scorpio energy often must. But honest expression feels very different - a release - and simple, very simple; no need for embellishment or compulsive repaving. Which goes against my training - what do I do with all that time and energy that I'm using to belabor or refine a point I can't get quite right? That's all okay, but enough navel peering. I fear the tread of little feet walking out of the classroom.

I still find myself trying to get that big, full feeling from objects, like perfect blue houses. These days its flowers and gardens, the perfect arrangement of things on shelves, the purest collection of items, containing only what I want and need to create that sublime, big, full feeling. I've had this compulsion to winnow, though it isn't without practicality, ever since I moved into a dorm and subsequently had to move every few years, while managing all those other things that go on in one's life. I guess if I look at it from a different perspective, as something that is part of routine or a coping skill that I employ regularly, but know that I'm not doing it to find the source of life energy I mistakenly thought it contained, then it becomes an artistic process or an organization skill.

I've recently taken photos of several objects that I've had for a long time (and had been using regularly) and then I discarded the items - an expensive skillet cooking pan that I bought from the clinic I had been going to around the time I was hospitalized (I burned it and dropped it a few times, but it always managed to scrub up nice and function well enough), the flint ware sauce pan I inherited ten years ago from my grandmother when she passed on at the age of 92, the Health Valley rubber jar opening pad that finally wore out after twenty years - that one came with the sample box I ordered from the company the year I was part of the German House crew at Macalester College.

I also discarded a spatula I believe I borrowed from them or bought from a yard sale around that time. In that case, I might have been premature - the ergonomic 'eco-friendly' variety I bought from BB&B to 'upgrade' it appears to have melted along the business edge. I guess I admit to hoping to hang on to old friends and happier times with these items, and I'm not saying that kind of thing isn't worth respect. With Chiron and Saturn in the second, I don't take lightly the consequences of purchasing something unnecessarily or unwisely - or parting with objects that truly have value for me, personally, even if others might impatiently roll their eyes or grit their teeth. Writing about them and photographing them are the ways to honor them in parting, and it seems to be doing the trick for me, increasingly with more kindness towards the emotional side and more gentle determination on the 'moving ahead' side. Taking the objects apart and recycling them is also a patient exercise that honors the values I'm trying to cultivate in my life, by choice. Death - a part of the natural cycle of life. Honoring and moving on both important - necessary! And no big, full feeling needed to move on - just whatever is there.