The Shape of Each Soul
THE AQUARIUS FULL MOON
Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 11:57 am PDT
The Moon and Sun in Opposition at 21 degrees Aquarius/Leo
When I was a kid, I was drawn to the unusual. At the ice cream store, given a choice between chocolate, vanilla, or something altogether new and different, I almost always opted for the weirdest, most off-beat flavor. Even though every single time, I had to endure some amount of ribbing from my sister who would invariably sneer, over her standard scoop of chocolate chip, at my pink bubblegum or strawberry cheesecake. I also preferred nature hikes in the woods over trips to amusement parks; and one Christmas I asked Santa for a rock tumbler and science kit, something that — given it was the 1960s and I was a girl — was quirky, at least for my rather conservative northern Virginia neighborhood. But probably one of the best weirdo things about me was the fact that I played the inexcusably geeky violin.
I was forever doing the "wrong" thing, but not in a deliberate, attention-getting kind of way. I was different without even thinking about it, without any effort at all, just naturally, inconveniently oddball. Of course this often led to my feeling like an outcast, the kook who doesn't blend in. But in all honesty, for the most part, I didn't really want to fit in, to do what everyone else was doing. I was compulsively drawn to try other things, take other approaches, to answer my weirdo's call. But in pursuit of this strange brand of happiness, I often inadvertently, and quite innocently, rubbed people the wrong way.
I was born with the iconoclastic sign of Aquarius on the Midheaven, which is the "public sector" — that piece of horoscope pie that represents the role we are meant to play in the world, our public face, our life purpose. To have Aquarius here, in the number 10 house, is to be compelled to reject a life that follows easy, conventional lines, and to push against the status quo in some way. But being different can be a lonely experience, even for cool, intellectually-detached, mad scientist Aquarius.
As soon as I left childhood behind and entered the hostile world of junior high school, the pressure to conform, fit in, be hip — to adopt, wholesale, that entire cool package: the right clothes, lingo, musical tastes, lipstick color, was ratcheted up to a painfully intolerable pitch. For the first time in my life the threat of rejection and loneliness won out over such "childish" needs as expressing myself, and I began to hide my unusual tastes and uncool interests. Down it went, all of it, pushed below the surface and buried painfully deep: the pink bubblegum ice cream, the green glitter nail polish, the fascinating UFO stories, the ambitious desire to master Mendelssohn's Violin concerto. It was then I quit playing the violin, even though I had real talent and promise, and joined the chorus, literally and figuratively.
And so, all of my delicious weirdness went underground, that is until I hit 40 and these disowned and ignored aspects of self — "my unlived life" — quite unexpectedly rose up out of the depths and would not let me be. It was then, that I started to resurrect many of my old interests from childhood, one of which was astrology. And it was through my study of astrology that I learned that all these quirky interests and tastes of mine, were just my own, very natural way of expressing that free-spirited, Aquarian 10th house.
Tonight's Full Moon will fall in dare-to-be-different Aquarius, and the Aquarian emphasis on following your own true path, however different that may be, is an important message for all of us right now. Every one of us has Aquarius encamped somewhere in our charts, where our inner hippie resides. (Here's a photo of mine.) This is the place in our charts where the light of our soul wants so very much to shine in all its beautiful unique zaniness. Tonight's Full Moon offers up a mirror that reflects our funkier, wilder side right back at us, the side that has been waiting so very long and patiently to hear a good UFO story and have a scoop of pink bubblegum ice cream.
I'd like to close with a passage that I've shared before here, so very Aquarian it bears repeating. Excerpted from an essay, "The Sin of the Unlived Life," by the late John O'Donohue, the passage is from his lovely book Anam Cara (Gaelic for "soul friend"):
The shape of each soul is different. There is a secret destiny for each person. When you endeavor to repeat what others have done or force yourself into a preset mold, you betray your individuality. We need to return to the solitude within, to find again the dream that lies at the hearth of the soul. We need to feel the dream with the wonder of a child approaching a threshold of discovery. When we rediscover our childlike nature, we enter into a world of gentle possibility. Consequently, we will find ourselves more frequently at that place, that place of ease, delight, and celebration. The false burdens fall away. We come into rhythm with ourselves. Our clay shape gradually learns to walk beautifully on this magnificent earth.
— John O'Donohue
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The photo of the adorable girl eating ice cream is from this blog article: School Kids Tricked Into Eating Healthy
The photo of my inner hippie is from Hippie Mobiles: A Collection of Psychedelic Buses
© 2012 Elaine Kalantarian, all rights reserved