Love and Pain

The Super Conjunction is about to be broadsided by the Goddess of Love and her consort.
As July opens, Venus will square the conjunction from Taurus to Aquarius. On the 6th, Mars will do the same, and on the 10th Jupiter and Neptune reach exactitude again. This puts our focus on relationships; with all the heat (Mars), attraction (Venus), pain (Chiron) and dreams of escape (Neptune) that relationships entail.

It was the Summer Solstice transits that paved the way for all this. Venus and Mars were together in the sky – in Taurus, no less – while the New Moon and Vesta were opposite Pluto: a situation loaded with the charge of sexual taboo. Now Venus and Mars are, one after another, going to pay a call on the triumvirate of grandiosity, illusions and wounds.

As a cautionary tale, this pattern expressed itself in the bizarre Lost-Weekend+ of Governor Mark Sanford. Here’s a guy whose utterly human drives burst out from behind his twee Southern-family-man exterior, making mincemeat out of the tightly wound persona that packaged him. Poor fellow. He heard that siren call and instead of stuffing his ears with wax, as Ulysses did, he jumped right in. He chose the Neptune option.

There’s going to be a tremendous energetic tension over the next couple of weeks between the personal and the transpersonal. The former will be represented by Venus and Mars, the duo of giving-to and taking-from others; the latter by those mysterious cravings symbolized by the Aquarius cluster. If we want to avoid pulling a Sanford, we might give a thought to what the highest way of playing out these transits might be.

How to honor our sensate selves in healthy, conscious ways; at the same time that we surrender to the unconscious drives that are guiding us to deep healing? How might we acknowledge both urges without giving up the manageability of our lives?

The best approach is to already know where we’re wounded (Chiron). The tragedy of these GOP sex scandals seems to be that these men have not confronted their hurt and need; instead they seem to have closeted them. This gives the deep psyche no alternative but to do something rash, such as compelling us to Argentina to play hooky and risk all for nookie. This syndrome is an expression of shadow Venus, Mars, Pluto, Vesta and the Moon (see my article in DayKeeper Journal) which clashed in the sky under which Sanford flew the coop.

The lesson behind all the Super Conjunction’s various expressions this year, behind all of the clashing juxtapositions of the known and unknown parts of ourselves, behind all the confusions and embarrassments that our human conflicts engender, is that of our shared condition. The dramas that will occur in July and ongoing, in bedrooms and boardrooms all over the world, are there to teach us about humanness (Aquarius). There is a universality to every human foible. Anticipating this will allow us to soften and deepen while we negotiate the sweet chaos of intimacy.

It takes humility (Neptune) to admit that we don’t always know what to do with our desires (Mars & Venus); and humility is exactly what we’re supposed to be learning. If we go into these next few weeks open-heartedly, our relationships will show us how to absorb, with grace and self-forgiveness, the overriding teaching of 2009: that we are all wounded (Chiron), we are all growing (Jupiter), and we are all children of the Universe (Neptune).