Living with the South Node in Scorpio

astrology

Oct 11

"Did you know," my husband said, "you never talk about your childhood? I know almost nothing about it."

Until that moment, I had no idea I'd drawn a line across my biography. There were the before times: my childhood and early adulthood in New England. And then there was the life and identity I made for myself when I moved west in my mid-20s.

I have the south node in Scorpio and the house of the ancestors. The past is a garbage fire I would prefer to leave behind me.

Like so many people before me--including one of my ancestors who died looking for gold mines in California in the 1850s--I took the 3,000 mile journey west as an opportunity to reinvent myself. Far from home and family and friends, it was easy to question my assumptions about myself. I was free to experiment. There was no one there to comment about a sudden change in fashion or lifestyle. When something didn't fit, I left it behind without friction or embarrassment.

I am now in my late-30s, and I have transformed from the fundamentalist stay-at-home wife I was raised to be to a professional astrologer who is expecting a baby with a Buddhist. I am walking proof that people are capable of making immense changes. It is why I love astrological tools like progressions that slowly, gently nudge us through the process of transformation as we mature.

At the same time, there is a part of me (represented by a heavy representation of fixed energy in my natal chart) that is uncomfortable with change. When I first started moving away from the life path that had been laid out for me, I met psychologists who treated me as if I had been raised by wolves. I might learn to talk like a civilized person, they said, but I would never lose the habit of howling at the moon. Their words stuck with me because they spoke to a deep fear of the unchanging core of my being.

What if all this change is really superficial? What if, deep down, I’m never really different at all?

I wanted so badly to become a phoenix, burned to ash behind each transformation. I left scorched earth behind me to make sure I kept moving forward. Rising from the ashes again and again, I combed through the wreckage to make sure there was no trace of the person I had been.

I burned through my 30s, despairing of ever being satisfied with myself, certain that I would never find enough of a foundation to create anything of substance. I longed to follow the advice of Gustave Flaubert: "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." But the change did not stop. Despite my best efforts to become the final version of myself, I was trapped, rolling through life on a Catherine wheel, shooting off sparks and leaving wildfires behind me.

Recently that I've started to wonder if my attempts at self-immolation are doomed to never be as successful as I hoped. I am pregnant. Facing the prospect of becoming a mother, I am watching myself go back in time, my logical brain sneering at the idea there might be anything worth going back for. Fortunately, my logical brain is not in charge. As I walked through the blighted landscape of my history, I discovered that my attempts to incinerate the past had been so thorough, the fire had burned hot and deep enough to turn the ash to diamonds.

Last night, I ate a Macintosh apple. Before last night, the last time I’d eaten a Macintosh apple years ago, and I was disappointed. The apples grown in Washington are not the same as fruit from trees that have weathered New England cold, and the apple failed to give me the sense memory I craved from my childhood. Apparently, I am forgetting the taste of winter. Last night, as I bit into the apple, memories of apple picking and farm stands came rushing back as saliva flooded my mouth.

As I ate, I told my husband stories about my mother, how she bought sour granny smith apples winter, spring, and summer. We ate them hidden away in pies or cold out of the fridge, cut neatly with an apple slicer to make them easier to swallow. But in the fall, we filled baskets with Macintosh apples, sweet beauties we picked ourselves at a local farm. Autumn apples were as sacred as maple candy. They were always eaten out of hand barely warmed by autumn sunshine.

Fruit was like that. Except for sour apples, it never came from the store. We always picked our fruit ourselves, most often eaten off the plant. Except for strawberries that were squirreled away in the freezer for winter cereal. The habit of burning is a legacy I come by honestly. That which is kept is sour. Sweetness is ripe for eating now.

It may seem that I am on my way to backsliding. I have been told a million times that people come back to church when they have children because they want their kids to have the experiences they had. But the diamonds I have found in Bible stories are never taught in Sunday school. No one seems to remember the prodigal son returned home because he knew he would be treated well.

I can eat a million apples without being tempted to fall back to where I came from. Nothing has changed. The Catherine wheel spins on.

I burn. I roll. Always forward. Memories and retrogrades are only optical illusions.