HD Transits 20 – 26 September 2023

What It Feels Like to Be Alive

If you don’t feel like engaging with the world a whole lot this week, trust yourself. All the outer planets are retrograde. They are cultural influencers, so the world is getting a moment to take a good hard look at itself. And a bit closer to home – by which I mean you – there is also a moment happening.

And it goes like this.

Mars shifts into the Gate of Gentle Penetration (57) this week. If you’re a Human Design fan, you probably know that sitting in the complementary gate of Shock (51) is Chiron. Complementary gates work together to bring two apparently opposing forces into partnership.

The Gate of Shock shakes us awake to our own instincts for aliveness in the Gate of Gentle Penetration. We are a part of something, we can talk to trees and dance with the wind. We do have powers of conscious awareness that leave AI and bio-hacking in the dust.

Our human heritage began on the great plains , deep forests, vast oceans and starlit nights. We hold the memories of those experiences in our DNA. They are part of our humanity.

Chiron reveals our blind spots – perspectives we’ve missed, wounds we have learnt to ignore, pockets of neglect we have become accustomed to. Gate 51, which most know as shock but is also called The Arousing, and Taking Action, is the energy of spring. It is when the sap, dormant during winter, begins to rise. The early storms bring lightning and thunder to wake up the uninitiated.

Chiron in Gate 51 draws our attention to the life forming under our feet. We’ve been looking at pavements and failed to notice the weeds in the cracks. We’ve been watching for signs and missed the art of it all.

Mars in the Gate of Gentle Penetration embeds us in place and relationship. It gives us the courage for things to be what they are, not what our fearful imaginings would prefer them to be. It allows us to enter gently into life, and allow ourselves to be changed by the experience. We allow life to shape us, and we find our place within a greater reality.

Chiron and Mars represent a wound to the masculine principle. But more than that, they combine to show us where we have neglected our capacity for courage, and the ways in which we have lost our ability to take action based on what we know to be true. In the past. Not now.

Why Everyone Needs A Basket

Jupiter is in the Gate of the Receptive (2) until 12 October. While Mars would perhaps like to think of himself as the lone hero solely responsible for creating his own glory, Jupiter has another story to tell. Of days spent doing everyday things, of help offered and accepted, of meals prepared and shared.

To quote Ursula LeGuin, from her wonderful essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,

We’ve heard all about the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. Before – once you think about it, surely long before – the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool – for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to bring them home in – we made the tool that brings the energy home – the carrier bag, the container.

Jupiter in the Gate of the Receptive speaks to the container, the carrier bag, and how we need to stop whacking at everything, and make space for, collect, store and share, the things that feed us.

Letting Go Of Who You Were

On 21 September, the Earth moves into the Gate of Innocence. (25), making a channel with Chiron in the Gate of Shock (The Arousing – 51). This channel forms a connection between the old world and the new, reframed through our sense of individuality and identity.

If nothing else, 2027 is about this – how we think about who we are.

We are a collection of the things we believe give us value in the eyes of others – the things we deserve to receive, the things we choose to contribute.

Mars is making a channel with dwarf planet Sedna, which is in Gate 20 until 2033.

Sedna is our need to cut loose from our traditional roles, to drop deeper into the places that have frozen over within us. She recognises us as a natural inhabitant of our own place.  Where we can make our own decisions, trusting in what feels right for us. The beauty of Gate 20 – Presence – is its capacity for witnessing. It has the patience and wisdom to be present to what exists in place.

Mars feeds its instinctive, felt sense of aliveness, and its courage to partner with reality, into Sedna’s need for true sacred presence and purpose. The Earth, in Gate 25, which is innocence, has a desire to remember what it felt like before all the killing began, when life was more about the container and less about the spear.

These planets – Mars, Sedna, Chiron and the Earth – they are all playing in the circuitry that calls us to find our unique way to be ourselves.

Reclaiming The Art of Partnering

Mercury spends most of this week in Gate 64, Venus in Gate 4. Both of these gates are in channels that sit between the Head and Ajna Centre – channels that turn inspiration into thinking. But it’s not Mercury and Venus that are the attraction here, they are just signposts to the main event.

Every 200 years, two minor planets called Orcus and Nessus face off. This time around they started out in 2016, and they’ll move on in 2026. They’re coming up to one of 17 exact oppositions later, on 21 October. But this week, with Mercury and Venus turning up, they are very active.

I’ve written a lot about Orcus (in 64.4 this week) in these posts, and how he is bringing down new soul missions. He does this by keeping us trapped until we have developed the maturity to handle what comes next.

Nessus (in 63.6 this week) is complex and extreme, and generally not a nice fellow. He doesn’t know how to spell the word CONSENT, and feels entitled to cross the personal boundaries of others – psychic, energetic and physical. You can see from the timing of his opposition with Orcus, starting in 2016, that it matches almost exactly the rise of the #METOO movement. And right on time, we get the Russell Brand story bringing up the whole issue of consent again.

It goes much deeper than this though – into the realm of extraction as a way of living. When greed, hidden abuses and forcible ‘taking’ is the norm, and considered a valuable individual trait, we lose our capacity for partnering. We believe we must force things rather than be available to them. We fall into the habit of trying to overpower rather than be vulnerable and open.

Joining Orcus in Gate 64 is Ceto, the daughter of Gaia, usually depicted as a sea monster – representing the large and scary things we find in the deep. Ceto detects huge social blind-spots, unconscious reality tectonics.

This week’s transits might elicit deep and dark fears, but they are not true fear. We have become conditioned to believe we should be alert to things that don’t threaten us, and in the process have lost both our sense of aliveness and our capacity to partner with all that is. Alone and without a way to experience ourselves in place, we had only fear to keep us company.

Rooting these false fears from your body takes time, energy, care, love.

Venus – planet of partnering – is in the Gate of the Young Fool this week (4) – a call to play, to experiment, to find our way back to the innocence and aliveness that is our true reality.