Today, on my walk, finally, BALANCE!

December 17, 2025

See Yesterday’s post.

Not sure why I’m still absorbed in my own personal mutating dark/light interiority; maybe it’s just because we are in the holy season when the dark, four days from now, on December 21, reaches its maximum at 10:03 AM EST and begins to wane.

Here’s a chart that that almost gets it right. (Sun should be at 0°00 Capricorn, not at 29°59 Sagittarius). In any case, it shows the extraordinary energy configuration operating during this time, with especially the fiery upthrust of Sagittarius at odds with the watery confusion of Pisces.

Also interesting: the Ascendant, at 0°06 Aquarius, with Pluto very closely conjunct at 2°25: each of us a singular individual, learning how to cooperate.

But the big one, the set of squares between late Sagittarius Venus and Sun (along with Mars just over the edge in early Capricorn), both of which square the every-36-year conjunction between Saturn and Neptune in late Pisces, ongoing for quite a while now, and on its way to the big one, Saturn/Neptune conjunct at 0° Aries: major extraordinary brand new beginning for humanity. The last time these two were conjunct at the degree that signifies the very beginning of the zodiac was in 593 BC! So this coming February 20, 2026, when they will finally move into exact conjunction at 0° Aries (after flirting with it several times in 2025), and and not back up into Pisces is definitive. From then on, all systems go.

And of course, this ongoing Saturn/Neptune phenomenon, this difficult Piscean union between structure and mystery, between walls and infinity, between holding on desperately and letting go utterly has captured my attention this year, with at least six posts on that subject. Here’s a quote from one of them:

“Saturn, however, will turn to go direct on November 28 and Neptune on December 10th. So things should ease up a bit after that.  Even so,  for months now, it’s as if the entire human race has stopped all forward movement in order to return to the twilight zone where we must re-member all that we would prefer to forget, in order to heal ourselves of  individual and collective PTSD which drags us down into the muck and holds us there, too often without our even realizing it.”

So yeah, deep dark, and I DO realize it.

What’s interesting to me now, is that today, on my walk, unlike yesterday, the interior of my psyche did not switch back and forth; I was neither grinch or angel; instead, my interior felt dynamically balanced, the two, dark and light occupying their own spaces while allowing each other room to breathe. Grinch Saturn was not forbidding Neptune; nor was angelic Neptune dissipating Saturn. The yin yang symbol feels particularly appropriate here.

 

THE GRINCH AND THE ANGEL: within myself

December 16, 2025

As we approach the longest dark of the year, the holy day called Winter Solstice, I cannot help but notice, each morning during my four-mile walk with puppy Scampi, that underneath the intense frequencies of this holiday season, with people I come across tending towards either joy (of being enveloped in the love of family, friends, no matter how near or far) or depression (from feeling unusually isolated, lonely, in comparison to others), I notice my own switching back and forth, between again, two opposites states.

But for me, these felt opposites lie at a subliminal level below conscious experience.

It’s as if there is a prevailing mood that drifts up from below, and infects my thinking process in one way or another. This mood is either dark, or it is light. The first immerses all my conscious thoughts (what I have to do today, what lies unfinished from yesterday) in usually, given my fiery nature, frustration or fury. The second immerses all my conscious thoughts in a spacious presence that easily and generously includes them all.

Yesterday, I was the grinch.

Today I felt like an angel.

What do “they” call this? Bi-polar disorder? But the highs for me, the lights, are not manic. In fact, anyone who is with me wouldn’t know which mood I was in, dark or light. My conscious thoughts and behavior are identical, either way.

Does this mean I’m masked?

I remember back in my 20s, being utterly obsessed with the phenomenon of masks. It began with my dreams, and spread into daily life. How everyone, everyone was wearing a mask! No one, no one was being real! How everyone was merely playing out a pre-set role, rather than expressing themselves authentically!

It was awful. I hated it.

Actually, I was talking about myself. This was the bare beginning of my glimpsing into the conditioning we females absorbed, growing up in ’50s America.

Now I can look back and see myself back then, as one of the proto-feminists: I kept all these feelings to myself, because no one would understand what I was talking about. Until that day when Nancy, one of my friends, sat with me at my kitchen table, and we both removed our masks! Thus began, I imagine at kitchen tables all over this land, the intense “feminist” conversations that ended up changing the world — and not necessarily for the better!

Long story, of course, all stories are, if you allow them to flow both backwards and forwards. Who knows when something — some quality, some decision, some action, actually begins? What’s the back story to that, whatever that is, because, as Wittgenstein said (and I paraphrase), “It’s hard to start at the beginning, and not go further back.”

So, what’s the beginning of this seemingly daily fluctuation between dark and light within myself that is occurring at precisely the lead up to the longest dark, shortest light of the year?

Who knows? All I can do is observe, hopefully in a detached manner, these seemingly inexorable complexities within my own being.