1605, 14APR2013
Sun: 25'Aries Moon 17'Gemini
April is the cruelest month, they say, and I know it. The Sun has entered Aries, bringing with it the hard-charging energies of the Ram and the gods of war (collectively called "Mars,") and in synchronicity the Northern Hemisphere's pursuit of new life and reproduction takes over in full force and flower, with all the beauty and mercy of a diamond.
Nothing is born, without something dying to make way for it.
And so your animals fight one another (and sometimes kill) for a mate: reproduction is heavy on the subconscious mind with the gentler, more nurturing energy of Taurus (Venus) on approach. Blood is shed, the winds grow more fierce with rain and storm; even plants will fight amongst themselves as new seedlings and shoots fight to crowd one another out of the best growing spaces.
And those stragglers, those last hangers-on that shouldn't have made it through the winter, but somehow did, die now.
For me, the beauty of the flowers - roses particularly - remind me of my grandmother Carol. She died on April 16th - which, that year, was Tax Day due to Easter Sunday having fallen on the usual tax deadline of April 15th. It was not long after recovering from the initial shock of losing the woman who had raised me for as long as I can remember as her own daughter that I noticed: she had brought some tiny bit of humor, albeit inadvertently, to her passing. Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes, after all.
My grandmother was a woman who had her great strengths, and her great weaknesses. She was born a Cancer on July 4th, with Mars transiting the sign as well: she loved her family dearly and kept a beautiful, comfortable home for her children, her granddaughter and her furbabies, but she also had the deep manipulative streak that Mars-in-Cancer is known for. Fair enough to mention it, as years later I can now look back without too much pain and see that that flaw was an integral part of her personality, tied in with her love for us all and inseparable from it.
And as I think about her, I understand now that she was the one who first began to teach me about magick. Even before my mother, whose communication with me was rather strictly controlled by my father, told me the stories of Dame Hulda and the Archangels and Saynday as bedtime stories, I was learning the very basics of magick at her knee.
She didn't know it then, of course. And I certainly didn't. She wasn't much for intuition: I asked her once if we were Native American, which was scoffed aside instantly: it was later that I learned from my grandfather (her husband) that that might very well be true. But I also remember going to elementary school and being questioned by other kids about what religion I was, what church I went to, and bringing that question home. So my grandmother brought me to the local Episcopal church - as it happened, she even knew the pastor and the deacon from the family's days in New York - and I became an acolyte shortly thereafter.
I carried the candles, and on occasion the cross, down the main aisle to open and close the rituals. I stood behind the pastor at the podium as he gave the sermons, held the heavy leather Gospel book open to the right page so that he could read it when the Word was given in the middle of the congregational seating area, and assisted at the altar during the ceremony. I began to learn, although it was not phrased in the terms of magick, about the transubstantiation that serious Christians believe happens at Communion.
And I also began to notice that my grandmother did not often pray to Jesus, but to the saints, and that at different times the collection of medallions on her necklace changed. St. Christopher was always there, the patron of travelers: she loved to travel, and when I got older I learned about a hilarious (though not appropriate for children) episode that happened when she went to London's Piccadilly Park as a younger woman. I forget who the patron saint of the falsely accused is, but she wore his medal as well for the rest of her life after an incident that almost cost my family their custody of me. And, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was to Saint Jude - the patron of hopeless causes - that she turned for healing and solace as her cancer waned, and then returned with a vengeance to eventually end her life.
She taught me, in that way, of prayer and faith, and never let go of it. She taught me about love, and about control and manipulation as well (not-love), and the very beginnings of magick, and so much more that I cannot put into words. She taught me courage, too: she tried everything she could think of to fight, endured both the chemo and the radiation and experimental treatments as well, but she never let me see the pain. Trained as a registered nurse, she was always seeing to the pain of others, but never allowed those she was taking care of to see her own: true to Cancer, true to herself, all the way to the end.
And towards the end, when it was clear nothing was working to stop the spread of her breast cancer, it had gone to her brain... The pain must have been immense, and the frustration no less so, as it was not affecting her mental faculties but her ability to express her thoughts. But she never lost hope, and she never lost faith, even when the dog she had raised from a puppy turned on her and attacked, even though the healing magick she asked of her saints did not come through. And she never, ever, ever let go of her love for me.
I am no longer in California and am thus unable to make the trip to her grave in El Toro anymore, but I think of her often, and each April I remember her in a different way. As mother to my father and my uncle; as a woman who divorced her husband bitterly, but loved him enough that she wore the wedding ring he gave her to the end of her days with the medals of the saints and never once considered marrying another man; as both my mother and my grandmother. Each year the grief comes anew, not entirely buried, as I consider that she was in her early fifties. She had years yet, but for the cancer that cut her down too soon.
Now, perhaps, I can begin to remember her also as a woman of great willpower and courage, whose tenacity enabled her to hold on in the face of the betrayal by her own body and the intensely painful treatments necessary to try to drive it back, and to try to run (and later own) an antiques store to support her medical bills even after the failure of her limousine business in New York. I can remember my own mother, a trained witch, telling me once that she would not have wanted to engage in a magickal war with my grandmother, because Carol, though not trained, was such a dominant and forceful Will in her own realm. To be quite blunt about it, she usually got her way, one way or another (though I do not ever recall her using "feminine wiles" to do it.)
I know now that my grandmother taught me more than she realized, and with the 12th anniversary (one Jupiter cycle) of her passing just two days away, it is appropriate to recognize especially the lessons of courage and love in this, the cruelest month of the year. It is equally appropriate to take those lessons and apply them inside, where they can begin to make the changes in me and in the world that I see are necessary.
Rest in peace, Carol Marsha Rosen. I love you.
Sun: 25'Aries Moon 17'Gemini
April is the cruelest month, they say, and I know it. The Sun has entered Aries, bringing with it the hard-charging energies of the Ram and the gods of war (collectively called "Mars,") and in synchronicity the Northern Hemisphere's pursuit of new life and reproduction takes over in full force and flower, with all the beauty and mercy of a diamond.
Nothing is born, without something dying to make way for it.
And so your animals fight one another (and sometimes kill) for a mate: reproduction is heavy on the subconscious mind with the gentler, more nurturing energy of Taurus (Venus) on approach. Blood is shed, the winds grow more fierce with rain and storm; even plants will fight amongst themselves as new seedlings and shoots fight to crowd one another out of the best growing spaces.
And those stragglers, those last hangers-on that shouldn't have made it through the winter, but somehow did, die now.
For me, the beauty of the flowers - roses particularly - remind me of my grandmother Carol. She died on April 16th - which, that year, was Tax Day due to Easter Sunday having fallen on the usual tax deadline of April 15th. It was not long after recovering from the initial shock of losing the woman who had raised me for as long as I can remember as her own daughter that I noticed: she had brought some tiny bit of humor, albeit inadvertently, to her passing. Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes, after all.
My grandmother was a woman who had her great strengths, and her great weaknesses. She was born a Cancer on July 4th, with Mars transiting the sign as well: she loved her family dearly and kept a beautiful, comfortable home for her children, her granddaughter and her furbabies, but she also had the deep manipulative streak that Mars-in-Cancer is known for. Fair enough to mention it, as years later I can now look back without too much pain and see that that flaw was an integral part of her personality, tied in with her love for us all and inseparable from it.
And as I think about her, I understand now that she was the one who first began to teach me about magick. Even before my mother, whose communication with me was rather strictly controlled by my father, told me the stories of Dame Hulda and the Archangels and Saynday as bedtime stories, I was learning the very basics of magick at her knee.
She didn't know it then, of course. And I certainly didn't. She wasn't much for intuition: I asked her once if we were Native American, which was scoffed aside instantly: it was later that I learned from my grandfather (her husband) that that might very well be true. But I also remember going to elementary school and being questioned by other kids about what religion I was, what church I went to, and bringing that question home. So my grandmother brought me to the local Episcopal church - as it happened, she even knew the pastor and the deacon from the family's days in New York - and I became an acolyte shortly thereafter.
I carried the candles, and on occasion the cross, down the main aisle to open and close the rituals. I stood behind the pastor at the podium as he gave the sermons, held the heavy leather Gospel book open to the right page so that he could read it when the Word was given in the middle of the congregational seating area, and assisted at the altar during the ceremony. I began to learn, although it was not phrased in the terms of magick, about the transubstantiation that serious Christians believe happens at Communion.
And I also began to notice that my grandmother did not often pray to Jesus, but to the saints, and that at different times the collection of medallions on her necklace changed. St. Christopher was always there, the patron of travelers: she loved to travel, and when I got older I learned about a hilarious (though not appropriate for children) episode that happened when she went to London's Piccadilly Park as a younger woman. I forget who the patron saint of the falsely accused is, but she wore his medal as well for the rest of her life after an incident that almost cost my family their custody of me. And, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was to Saint Jude - the patron of hopeless causes - that she turned for healing and solace as her cancer waned, and then returned with a vengeance to eventually end her life.
She taught me, in that way, of prayer and faith, and never let go of it. She taught me about love, and about control and manipulation as well (not-love), and the very beginnings of magick, and so much more that I cannot put into words. She taught me courage, too: she tried everything she could think of to fight, endured both the chemo and the radiation and experimental treatments as well, but she never let me see the pain. Trained as a registered nurse, she was always seeing to the pain of others, but never allowed those she was taking care of to see her own: true to Cancer, true to herself, all the way to the end.
And towards the end, when it was clear nothing was working to stop the spread of her breast cancer, it had gone to her brain... The pain must have been immense, and the frustration no less so, as it was not affecting her mental faculties but her ability to express her thoughts. But she never lost hope, and she never lost faith, even when the dog she had raised from a puppy turned on her and attacked, even though the healing magick she asked of her saints did not come through. And she never, ever, ever let go of her love for me.
I am no longer in California and am thus unable to make the trip to her grave in El Toro anymore, but I think of her often, and each April I remember her in a different way. As mother to my father and my uncle; as a woman who divorced her husband bitterly, but loved him enough that she wore the wedding ring he gave her to the end of her days with the medals of the saints and never once considered marrying another man; as both my mother and my grandmother. Each year the grief comes anew, not entirely buried, as I consider that she was in her early fifties. She had years yet, but for the cancer that cut her down too soon.
Now, perhaps, I can begin to remember her also as a woman of great willpower and courage, whose tenacity enabled her to hold on in the face of the betrayal by her own body and the intensely painful treatments necessary to try to drive it back, and to try to run (and later own) an antiques store to support her medical bills even after the failure of her limousine business in New York. I can remember my own mother, a trained witch, telling me once that she would not have wanted to engage in a magickal war with my grandmother, because Carol, though not trained, was such a dominant and forceful Will in her own realm. To be quite blunt about it, she usually got her way, one way or another (though I do not ever recall her using "feminine wiles" to do it.)
I know now that my grandmother taught me more than she realized, and with the 12th anniversary (one Jupiter cycle) of her passing just two days away, it is appropriate to recognize especially the lessons of courage and love in this, the cruelest month of the year. It is equally appropriate to take those lessons and apply them inside, where they can begin to make the changes in me and in the world that I see are necessary.
Rest in peace, Carol Marsha Rosen. I love you.
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