22 Sep Love is Harmony, Even in Discord ~ Libra Season – September 22nd-October 22nd, 2021

The season of Libra has arrived, heralding the beginning of autumn in the Northern hemisphere when the Sun begins to fall. As the day yields to the night, the year grows old. The abundance of the harvest foreshadows the Sun’s death. 

Libra represents the threshold to the underworld. 

The traditional sign of Libra is symbolized by the scales of justice. The equinox that begins the autumn season is an image of these scales in perfect balance. But when the darkness overtakes the light, the Sun falls into the underworld.

Weighing of the Heart

The threshold to the underworld is where you prepare for the journey into darkness. It is always recommended that you travel as lightly as possible. 

The Libran scales are a symbol of the equinox, the perfect balance of day and night. But their deeper mythic value evokes a famous scene from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead where it is said that immediately after death, all souls have their hearts weighed upon the scales: balanced against the lightness of a feather. 

The judgement of the scales were swift and final. Those with hearts as light as a feather were invited into eternity. And those with heavy hearts were torn to shreds by the hounds of hell.

This myth makes its severe point very clear. There is no excuse for dying with a heavy heart. A light heart is offered eternal life because it is a heart that has remained open to love.

Love is the underlying rhythm of creation and a light heart is its instrument. Throughout life, your heart beats faithfully to the rhythm of love from which it was born. And to betray that love casts your soul into hell. 

But what is love? 

Love is not always an easy path to follow. The world mocks love with many cheap substitutes: lust, obsession or toxic codependency. Love is murkily communicated by society through legal contracts or in ambiguous phrases like: “love is love.” 

Worst of all, love is often treated as a blissful narcotic, a high inhaled from a chemical attraction that can be chased farther than any opium dragons. But love is none of these things.

Love is the wisdom of your heart’s true devotion to life. Love is a path of bliss and pain; sacrifice and struggle. It is salvation, but never a narcotic. It hurts to love, which is why we so often fail one another.

Love is always true and truth often hurts in a world that insists on lies. In the ancient Egyptian sense, when your heart is light as a feather, your life is led by truth. And when your heart is heavy, you are living a lie.

“Love is harmony, even in discord,” as Master Khan so beautifully said in the epic 1970’s show, Kung Fu.

This means that love is there for all that is broken. This was the message of Christ. And this is the enduring message from the divine that will never change, no matter what Zodiacal Age you may be living in. 

When the Sun enters Libra, you are asked to return to your lightness of heart. This is not a dissociative state, or an escape from discomfort. Nor is it pretense or fantasy. Love is always true, never trivial.

Lightness of heart comes from the strength to find harmony, even in discord.

That means seeing all the vivid colors of the dystopian nightmare that we are living through and choosing to love anyway. Love is there for all that is broken. 

In the spiritual war that the world is entrenched in, the heart of Libra reaches across the dividing lines and makes a connection with the other. Libra remembers the divinity in those who are on the right or left, vaxxed or unvaxxed. And with mutual respect for humanity restored, the tyrants who seek to divide and conquer are destroyed.  

At the threshold of the underworld, the wisdom of the Sun in Libra encourages you to dissolve the weight of selfishness on your heart, using grace, wit, and beauty to uplift your spirits and bring harmony even in discord.

As a reminder of what selfishness truly is, I offer a lightning bolt of truth from the Libran extraordinaire, Oscar Wilde:

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.

Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.”

Demanding that someone live as you do, think as you do, and choose as you do is the epitome of selfishness. What’s worse is that your sovereignty ceases to exist when you empower yourself by trampling on another.

Love doesn’t ask for conformity or perfect agreement on everything. Even the greatest marriage of true minds contains conflict. Love recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing and responds by creating harmony, even in discord.

Cooperation and mutual reciprocity is the truth of nature. Whereas, total conformity of any kind is unnatural and impossible. As Monsanto has so grossly demonstrated, monoculture is deadly. And as the medical industry is demonstrating now, the final solution is never a solution. True life is infinite variety. 

Harmony is not the act of mashing two things together so they become the same. It is the art of bringing disparate forms, ideas, and tones together, letting them all vibrate together while remaining individual and particular. The high note and the low note are not lost, but are unified by love.

You may not like your neighbors or your ideological enemies. But if your ideas have any love in them, then there is a way to create harmony even in discord and allow others to follow their own conscience even if it diverges from yours.

Expecting everyone to mirror your opinions and language is selfish. Expecting everyone to mirror the government’s opinions and language is totalitarianism. 

Better to learn the wisdom of Libra and accept, acquiesce and enjoy the variety of thought present in humanity, whether it mirrors your path in life or not. 

True Manners are True Love

Beauty is a form of genius–is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation…It has its divine right of sovereignty.

As one of Venus’ signs of rulership, Libra is devoted to beauty and love through the creation of mutually beneficial relationships. Wherever there is discord and opposition, a search for unity and harmony begins. Thus, it is in Libra where manners and diplomacy become an art. 

In Libra, the Sun’s light begins to yield to the nocturnal mysteries. In exactly the same way, the light of self is invited to yield to another. The Sun in Libra is an ember that burns for others: finding it light within everyone’s eyes and bowing gracefully to that reflection. 

Thus, the foundation of true manners is the acknowledgment of divinity in every person you meet. This is the meaning of the sanskrit, namaste. True manners come from the principle of love in creation. And to show respect, even for your enemies, invites reciprocity, harmony and rapport. And anything less breeds an intolerable heaviness of heart.

In times of great strife, it is helpful to remember that lightness of heart is not just a silly mood that arises during fun times. It is a matter of life and death at the final threshold: the choice between your soul’s eternity or its extinguishment. 

But as the ancient Egyptians believed, all you have to do is choose love which is truth which is freedom.

The Blood of a Poet ~ Oscar Wilde

 There is no one whose heart exemplifies the true wisdom of Libra, the divine lightness of love, better than Oscar Wilde. As a writer, he spoke nothing but the truth, which is why his words remain as relevant to and observant in the technocratic world of 2021 as they were to in the Victorian-era. He knew people and people haven’t changed.

Oscar Wilde first rose to fame as an award winning scholar with an encyclopedic memory. But it was wit and humor that became his offering of lightness to balance the heaviness of Victorian life. As he said:

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

There are many parallels between Oscar Wilde’s world of Victorian England and 21st Century America. In 2021, it is easy to laugh at how repressed the Victorians were about sex. And we often imagine ourselves superior to those primitive minds.

Death and Dying  Passing Away…

The repression that plagues this age is far worse than that of the Victorians. The 21st century technocratic culture is hyper-sexed but super repressed about death. See no death. Hear no death. Hide from death. 

The reality of death torments the modern psyche, so conditioned by science and hubris that life’s eventual end has become unreasonably and hysterically unbearable. 

God is dead. But no… please, not me!

Dogmatic materialism has created such a toxic relationship between eros and thanatos that insanity has become commonplace. The climate of fear we are enduring now is the toxic dust that arises from a long decay of spirit and soul.

The Victorians hid their ankles. Meanwhile, we sanitize and hide death, cover the smell in rubbing alcohol, mask its sunken face with makeup and now desperately smother ourselves for fear of it.

The pandemic revealed how thin the line of sanity was for most people when the visage of death began to invade every corner of their mind. The only cure for this insanity is to return to the rhythm of love, remember your soul’s eternity and laugh.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

Oscar Wilde lived through the Industrial Revolution. And like the Globalist Tyranny of today, those in power waved the flag of progress and plagued the earth with a barrage of dehumanizing acts. Just as now, the seismic shifts occurring in the nexus of global power created a vast tangle of social inequities, class issues, and wars. 

Oscar Wilde’s wit was sharpened on these swords of progress, which is why he remains quite provocative for modern readers since the commodified culture of decadence that he knew in Victorian England has only increased and become more extreme. 

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

As an Irishman, Oscar Wilde was the descendent of conquered people who had been tortured, dehumanized and abused for centuries by the British. 

And as a bisexual, some of his natural desires made him a criminal. In 1895, he was imprisoned for indecency: a two-year sentence of hard labor that led to his early death. There is no doubt that Wilde suffered many things and had many good reasons to live with a heavy heart and a serious attitude.

And yet, as a consummate Libra, he chose to lighten up life with beauty and laughter, all born from his intellectual courage and honesty. His observations of human nature remain totally on pointe, proving that the motivations of modern people haven’t changed since the 19th century, despite all the technocratic arrogance about progress.

“Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.” 

In the Victorian era, Wilde was imprisoned for being a “homosexual”. But it was actually to silence his powerful voice from influencing the public to dissent against authority. 

Today, he would be allowed to be a homosexual. But he would still be silenced. Nothing has changed about the relationship between truth and power.

Lockdown is a Prison-term

In prison, Oscar Wilde became very weak and depressed. At first he was denied the right to write anything. But his gentle demeanor and ability to connect with the prison guards eventually earned him the right to compose letters. (harmony in discord)

In the letters he wrote from prison, Wilde was not in a humorous mood. But his voice embodied a calm eloquence, transforming the pain of his captivity into a lucid form of beauty. He wrote: 

“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.”

Upon his release, Wilde was bankrupt and ill. After moving to Paris, he became swallowed up in alcohol and morphine. 

His last publications described the cruelties of prison, inspiring social outrage and sweeping reforms. By the end of his life, his friends described him as saying:

“I have lived. I drank the sweet, I drank the bitter, and I found the bitterness in the sweet and the sweetness in the bitterness.”

He died at only forty-six, but left a tremendous legacy that uplifts the heaviness of life through humor and beauty. It is certain that upon death, his heart was as light as a feather.

So this Libra season, at the threshold to the underworld, take some time to honor the life of Oscar Wilde and remember not to take life too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. And not living at all out of fear of death is even more absurd.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world.”

In every age, there is fearful extremism and grotesque abuses of power. Nothing has changed about the world. But you can do more than exist and endure. Your heart wants you to truly live by loving deeply, laughing at death, and making peace with sorrow and its beauty. 

Forecast for Libra Season

The beginning of Libra season this year will be influenced by Venus’ transit through Scorpio, where the goddess descends into the uncomfortable truths hiding inside your heart. The seeds of deeper intimacy are being planted, but they will only grow for those willing to share the truth of who they are and how they really feel. You will find conversations becoming much more interesting, inviting you to get to know others so much better. But this demands courage and discernment, for as Oscar Wilde reminds us:  

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

The high ideals and good manners of Libra will be challenged by some of the raw facts of human nature. Venus in Scorpio is a tormentor for those who believe the path of true love will be easy. 

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

September 26th – Mercury Retrograde in Libra 

The necessity of good humor increases on September 26th when Mercury turns retrograde in Libra, ensuring that all social pretension, the veneer of diplomacy and the feigned compassion for others will blow up in your face. 

This will be a personal and collective challenge that reveals some excruciating truths about how much hatred has been disguised as compassion in the world. 

The divide between what you say and what you actually do is painful to acknowledge. It taps into a deep wound, a core of shame and delusion. If you take yourself too seriously, the mood may become very dark. 

The truth is never simple and is often awkward, but it will be the only way to navigate through this tangled web of Mercurial tricks. Tell the truth and you’ll rise like a phoenix. 

Lie for yourself or others and you’ll fall.

October 6th – New Moon in Libra and Pluto Direct

The New Moon in Libra is conjunct to Mars, demanding that you take a stand for truth and justice. In the air sign of Libra, the pen is mightier than the sword. Thoughts are things. And any conflict that tests your conscience will give you the power to not only think for yourself, but also act against any authority that undermines the wisdom of your heart. 

On the same day, Pluto stations direct after being retrograde since April. This represents a powerful point on your journey of transformation: a butterfly emerges and flies free, leaving behind the matrix of darkness and confinement.

October 7th – Venus in Sagittarius 

On October 7th, Venus will leave Scorpio for the spirited realm of Sagittarius. The bright optimism of a spiritual quest will light up the sky, calling your heart to expand its capacity to love. There’s always the danger of of over-estimating your charm when Venus is in Sagittarius. You may find yourself overwhelming someone with your fire. But overall, the adventurous spirit will resurrect your more innocent and romantic nature. 

October 9th- Sun Conjunct Mercury Rx

While in retrograde, Mercury enters the heart of the Sun. This is known as the inferior conjunction or the Cazimi, representing a purification of mind that invites clarity of thought. The muddled swirl of subconscious chatter settles and your will can become one with the will of the divine.  

October 10th- Saturn Direct

Saturn has been retrograde in Aquarius since May. And this station direct brings you back into finer form. Something you’ve been uncertain and irresolute about since the spring now comes into full focus. The mudslide you’ve been stumbling through becomes solid ground. Resolution returns, making you unstoppable so long as you remain committed to your path. Saturn reminds you that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And with Saturn moving direct, you know where you’re heading with utter certainty. 

October 17th – Jupiter stations direct in Aquarius trine the Sun and Mars in Libra

Jupiter went retrograde in June, leaving the nourishing waters of Pisces and returning to the wilderness of Aquarius to complete its unfinished business. It has been a dry walk through the desert with Jupiter so distant and removed. But today, in harmonious trine to the Sun and Mars in Libra, Jupiter’s station direct will brings a wave of happiness and courage that will strengthen your spirits. You know where you’re going and you now envision the best possible outcome. With the Moon still waxing, almost any action you begin now will find success and lead you to prosper.

Saturn has carved your path. But Jupiter will summon the blessings you need to thrive. Your prayers for courage and anything else you need to support your material and spiritual growth will be answered.

October 18th- Mercury stations direct opposed Chiron

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.”

Following Jupiter’s station direct, Mercury also returns to direct motion, signaling that your path is clear and the obstacles before you are no match for your spirits. Mercury’s retrograde in Libra has purified your social conscience and given you a deeper relationship to your story. Opposed to Chiron in Aries, Mercury in Libra will aggravate a wounded place in your psyche where you’ve been dragged down by some false, shallow or degrading notion of yourself.

But you will now be empowered to show up for your life fully, to share your story which is the only possession you truly own. The truth of who you are and what you’ve experienced is your greatest source of wealth. And it is the only wealth that will remain yours when you cross the threshold and leave this life behind. 

October 20th- Full Moon in Aries

“Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.” 

At the Full Moon in Aries, the Sun remains closely conjoined to Mars. The opposition between the Sun/Mars in Libra and the Moon in Aries will present a great conflict between the raw power of your self-interest and the great necessity of your social conscience. The polarization of thought and feeling will become extreme, tempting you into a glaring act of hypocrisy. 

The inner turmoil is real. But in terms of you against the world, this Full Moon will light you on fire! The Moon in Aries is refreshingly honest and the Sun and Mars in Libra are ready for an epic debate that you will win.

“High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

The deeper wisdom of this Libra season reveals itself at the Full Moon in Aries, illuminating how isolating and dull selfishness really is.  Conformity and uniformity is the enemy of life. Your friends, lovers and neighbors are not there to mirror your opinions and feed your narcissism. The people in your life, both friends and enemies, are there to cultivate your taste for infinite variety as a delightful thing.

True love and beauty can only be realized through connection and compassion. Thus, the path to internal harmony is not one of aestheticism, but of finding equilibrium between body and soul; self and other. 

This Libra season, set the intention to find internal harmony. It is in this way that your heart will become light as a feather.

October 22nd – The Sun enters Scorpio

The season of the Sun’s death begins in Scorpio, its light slipping into the dark tunnels of the underworld. Fully prepared and lightened by love, you fearlessly follow and enter the void as a free spirit.

Much love,

Rachel