Pluto in Aquarius is a brand new transit for us all. We’re just getting to know it, like a new friend. Can you make it nice and light like that?
I went for a walk the other day with a new friend by the water and in the wind. Pluto is your friend. Pluto is your new friend. And I can see and hear you laughing at this ridiculous thought about Herr Pluto.
Pluto SUCKS!, we cry in unison. We know Pluto all too well. Pluto comes to die. Pluto comes to kill. We lose under Pluto transits. We lose and we find.
If you’ve been alive long enough, you’ve suffered the slings and arrows of many, many hard transits. And yet… Pluto changes signs and changes houses and we have… untested battles, new landscapes, brave new worlds, ch-ch-changes. Every transit a wishing well.
And I’m talking to you from a new vantage point. After three years of a psychoanalysis, I’m more healed than I was. More cured. And yes more healed means more consciousness which means more mourning, more desire for reparation, more regret. But I’m all here. Or, more here than I used to be.
The Sixth House is the House of MORE HERE and this word: Housekeeping.
This is the housekeeping transit. The little things find their places and spaces. Dishes. Bills. Babies. Babies? Listen, it’s a long transit. Who knows what Pluto has in store. Service, too, is another big 6th house keyword but that’s not what’s on my mind this morning. Instead, I’m thinking about mopping. How I bought a mop last month. Thinking about how I’ve finally learned to clean the house (maybe). How I may or may not be inhabiting my body yet (also 6th House) but I seem to be learning to inhabit this house. Maybe. I’m keeping it all tentative for now. It’ll settle. With the 6th House, there’s always another window to wash, but it’s not perfection we’re after. It’s peace.
The 6th House is the morning. The 6th house is the coffee. The 6th House is waking up and going for a walk. The 6th House is the body. The 6th House is you, returning to yourself and finding peace there – within – that you’ve never known, harmony in the work and the woods. Is this a feeling? How does it feel? Solid. Settled. Clean.
Wendell Berry wrote, “I come into the peace of wild things.” The 6th House is the domestic. And yet… the 6th House is the house of practical magic, the altar, the wand, the familiar. Suddenly I want to cook. I never cook. I hate cooking. Planets move around the wheel of our lives and things change.
What affect is Pluto in Aquarius having on you and in what House?
What do you notice?
Of course I’ll have more to say as I move through losing Sue Ellen to ALS and losing Sue Ellen to madness and making of it what I will, as writers do. I remember after my mother died, I listened to her office voice mail over and over and over. We had no cell phones then, only memories. I’ve begun having flashbacks here and there, not just of Sue Ellen, but childhood memories, unrelated to her, when she was just a distant cousin who lived in this exciting place called New York City, on the Upper West Side.
I’m waiting for you now, Sue Ellen. Waiting for what messages you have to share. And I think of how the time will come when I’m not here either, writing to you. It’s funny. Elon Musk has outer space ambitions and dreams but where you are? There is no spaceship as of yet. Being a medium is the best we’ve got. What is Pluto through the 6th House if not the medium? Pluto rules death.
My analyst misunderstood me the other day. I was talking about how she told me she wanted to die. The illness was stealing her away. And I was talking about what it was like to sit with her IN it and he misunderstood me. He thought I was saying it was hard to do. But the opposite is true. And I told him as much. I said NO. I was born to do this work. I’ve been doing it my entire life. I sit with the dead and the dying and I sit and I contain it. And I remembered the time I sat with a dying lady in a hospital, she’d been in that coma I forget how long, and my job was just to sit with her and someone said to me: I don’t know how you do that. There are all kinds of things I can’t do, but that I can do.
Think of Pluto as a weathervane. Where is the wind blowing today? “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?”
Anyway, to be continued. Pluto awaits…
xo
