HD Transits 23 August 2023

Our Evolution is our Story

We came to the end of our physical evolution about 50,000 years ago. Since then we have relied on culture to continue our evolution. Culture is built from story. Layers and layers of story. Our evolution, and our survival, rests firmly upon the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

And right now, in this moment, we have the chance to regain the truth of who we are by telling a different story.

The Story of Life and Killing Death

It matters what fundamental story we build our stories upon. Is it a killing story? Or a life story? Is it – to quote Ursula Le Guin – a linear progressive killing arrow mode of time, who’s hero is the Techno-Heroic? Or – to quote Donna Haraway – is it the practice of living and dying well together in the thick and uncertain present?

Death is natural. Killing is not.

The opening few moments of the Barbie movie are a take on Stanley Kubriks’ 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the original movie we meet the killer monkeys, using a bone to bludgeon their enemies to death. The bone spirals upward and becomes a spaceship.

We have been sold a fundamental story of the base nature of humanity when the opposite is true. In 1996 a 3 year old boy fell into a gorilla enclosure at a Chicago zoo. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy says the only people unsurprised by the gentle rescue were primatologists, who know the killer ape stories are far from reality. But, Le Guin explains, these killing stories are useful to some. They work to uphold the linear theory of evolution – the arc of time from killer monkey to savage and sinful human to heavenly soul. They keep us afraid of each other, and of the future.

Think about the word revolution. It means to revolve around a central point. In Human Design, the Gate of Revolution (49) is about restoring harmony by bringing our daily activities back into alignment with source. We are in the midst of a revolution, and its a very personal one, full of the stories of your life, of what’s important to you, and how you go about your day. What are you revolving around, and how do you maintain harmony with that source?

We are not at war

Another hero of mine – Arundhati Roy – says this. We can walk through this present dragging our dead, our prejudices and hatred, dead ideas, dead rivers and smoky skies. Or we can walk lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

In Arundhati Roy’s fighting we are not at war. We are not killer monkeys. Nor do we fight in the way the Techno-Hero would have us believe is not only necessary but inevitable. Instead we put down our baggage and come together to create something beautiful, nourishing, sustaining. In some ways, I think, this requires more courage.

In the Australian version of the television show Alone, the original contestants included two Indigenous men. You would expect, as I did, that they would have been able to make themselves more at home in the wild landscape than the white people did. But no. They left early, because it was so unnatural for them to be away from the people they love. This is another story fundamental that comes from the hero narrative. We are not meant to be alone. All heroes have unacknowledged support, just ask Medea and Penelope.

I’m blessed to have been born and to live on country that has been under the custodianship of the oldest continuous human culture on the planet. Their pan-governance was sustainable and harmonious, bringing together around 500 tribal language groups through complex laws of kinship over 60,000 years or more. There are models for peace, place, community that we can draw on if we look for them.

Donna Haraway talks about staying with the trouble, being fully present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful pasts and apocalyptic futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meaning.

And trouble is necessary. Drew Gilpin describes how necessary it is for minorities to develop blindness to the inequities and constraints put on them. I would add – the cruelties, the de-humanising. To see is to be, and cause, trouble.

And that, right there, is our current challenge. We are headed for trouble, it is necessary, we must stay with it. It is our creative chalice.

A time to gather our soul

This week we are weaving our fragmented souls back together. If we remain in pieces, all our efforts will be in gathering the lost parts of ourselves back, and that will distract us from what we need to do next.

This is the time for soul recovery. The process of recovering the lost soul aspects requires that we detach from the old stories. Back in the day, gatherers provided more food than hunters. Ursula Le Guin suggests we stop all trying to be hunters and spend some time relearning our gathering skills.

Gathering is weaving. We weave the basket to hold what we gather. We gather with others. We wander and weave through the landscape, discovering what we want to gather. We gather together, and share what we have gathered.

We can’t escape, we can create life

Mercury is in the Gate of Oppression (47), and will be in that channel (64-47) until 9 September, and again – after it goes direct – from 22 to 30 September. This is a channel of finding how our thinking has kept us exhausted, confined and unable to move on. Instead of trying to get ‘out there’ we can safely focus on the gentle life and growth ‘in here’. We need to reacquaint ourselves with the life that exists beyond the killing. The place where death is as necessary as life, where life ends and begin.

On 27 August, the Earth will meet Saturn in Gate 55.4, the Sun will be in 59.4.

Gate 55 is called Abundance. These names are just labels, but the gates themselves are processes. The process of the Gate of Abundance is the capacity we have to move beyond our fears, and to use the abundance of the moment. Everything has led you here. Don’t worry about things not being perfect, about what happened in the past or what the future may bring. Right here you are blessed with clarity and the capacity to act on it. How we tell the story of this place and time is everything right now.

At a time of profound and confusing transformation my then-partner would ask me to look around and say if I was okay – right now in this moment, are you safe?
Yes? Good, let’s have some fun with this moment. What shall we make of it?

We can discard the old hero story, and embrace instead the softer gentler story that requires inner courage. To face our fears and recognise them as the last remaining fragments of someone we no longer have to be. To tell a story that walks us beyond that fear. To put down our baggage and come together to create something beautiful, nourishing, sustaining.

The Gate of Abundance (55) contains the instructions for how we can nurture the conditions that reproduce and sustain good fortune. In each moment, the conditions are ripe for you to share yourself, despite your imperfections, despite your fears. Even if only with yourself (and we all have to start there). Your dark secret places shelter the future, it’s young plans and new maps of a brighter tomorrow.

We are not saving ourselves from dying. We are learning how to live again.

(We are learning not to kill ourselves, and to allow the dark places that seem like death to inform our future.)

The Sun will spend most of this week in the Gate of Dispersing (59). There’s a few hours, on 23 – 24 August, when Mars is in Gate 6 and the Moon makes a channel with Jupiter in the Channel of Direction. Venus is in Gate 7 – the Army. Medusa brings the whole lot to the Throat via the Gate of Progress (35).

Let’s start with Venus. The Army (Gate 7) is not about war, but about marching to our own drum. Your find your greatest strength in the flow of your whole self. You shouldn’t cut yourself off from any part of you, any desire, any need. Trying to avoid integrating these parts of you leads to a rabble, but sometimes going there, feeling the feels of it, can seem like a threat. Anchor yourself in the moment, take a breath and let this bit of yourself be part of your now. Whatever happens next, you are more than you were a few moments ago.

Mars in the Gate of Conflict (6) brings the courage to bring back into the fold of your psyche any parts of yourself that have been judged as wrong. This is not about fighting what’s wrong, but opening to the truth of who you are.

Joining Mars is the Sun and Transpluto in the Gate of Dispersing (59). Bradford Hatcher calls this gate Scattering – a degree of change that leaves us unrecognisable, even to ourselves, as if we are a single flower become a thousands seeds, and those seeds scattering and spreading without limits. Old stories and patterns seem illusory and nonsensical. We are dispersed – liberated as old forms release energy into new purpose. opening us to the cosmos and it’s flow.

Medusa’s story (remember she is in Gate 35 in a channel with Neptune) always makes me laugh. Perseus chopped off her head, but she was still so powerful they had to carry her head around in a bag. If the bag slipped open and someone caught a glimpse of her, that person turned to stone. Who’s the hero in this story? Why it’s Perseus! Despite him being doomed to carry around Medusa’s powerful head, clutched tight in a bag lest it escape!

My take on Medusa is this – you are now too powerful to stay dead, to stay within the confines of the old version of the hero’s story. You are the hero, and it’s time for you to own the blessing of your power and find where it will take you. But slowly, weaving it into your daily life.

Jupiter is sitting on the Magnetic Monopole, in Gate 2 (The Receptive). This is a planet that loves a good story, and right now, he is giving us the faith and optimism to recode our life purpose and direction.

On 26 August, the Nodes move – the North Node to the Gate of Increase (42) and the South Node to the Gate of Continuity (32). Working closely with dwarf planet Eris, we are cleaning out the dark corners of the web, bringing awareness to what some like to describe as hell but is really our own power. Eris brings the gift of working collectively for the greater good. She makes chaos less chaotic, and more creative. She calls the hero narrative out into view, reveals it’s hidden decision-making and failure to acknowledge what supports it.

Eris knows who the real trouble-makers are. And she is ready to blow the whistle on them. Calling out the real trouble does not make you a trouble-maker!

My favourite take on Gate 42 comes from Hilary Barrett – Increase simply flows, without limit; there is no need for restrictive frameworks to contain it but only for tools to work with it. There are aspects of your psyche that long to be in that flow of life with you. They have done their bit to keep you safe by hiding away, but you are safe enough now for them to come back to life.

Making a channel with the South Node (in 32.6) is Alcmeme, the mother of the quintessential hero – Hercules (which is in Gate 42 with the North Node just by the way!). Alcmeme is described as the tallest most beautiful woman with wisdom unsurpassed. Hercules himself is named for Hera (the original feminine hero archetype, before there were even heroes).

These two nodal positions are so very powerful, because they teach us the processes of working with change, bending it every so slightly each day towards beauty, love, justice, compassion. The teach us what can be transformed, and what you can safely ignore because it’s not yours to do.

You might want to be elsewhere, but you have everything you need to create your best future. We are working with making things real, with releasing ourselves from the deadly fantasies that have entrapped and exhausted us. And that means we chop wood, carry water, and have the courage to tell stories of life.