pluto

There is no flower bush worth a grudge. Still, away for a week, I could easily call up the memory of my anger. As I pulled up to our house, war bubbled beneath the still, brackish surface of me--all tears and green muck. I was away from my husband for a week, not because of the flowers, but just because.

I am easily stirred up, prone to hurt, but I let it go today. It was easier than I thought it would be. I crawl on nature like a lifeboat. Cling to it. Attach myself to things dead by the next season even as I practice non-attachment to people. Nature reminds me of impermanence, and because of it, I attach and mourn and attach again. All the nature I coax into wilderness reminds me of somewhere else. And that is what I feel like--Of Somewhere Else. A wildling, or a wild thing, or prey of wild things. Something with w-ings.

I trust language as far as I can throw it. I hurl it across the table, and it lands where it is supposed to. No one wants anything to do with that kind of communication. And I don't understand how something loving in my head comes out as venom. Unintentional and naive as I am. Clearly, I am not Earth People. I mean your people no harm. I am of somewhere else, like I said.

I was away for a week visiting my mother and stepfather. My sister was there too. I felt otherworldly, at the same time, in my tribe. While I was there, I saw the psychic that my mother and my grandmother consulted. She is 93 and told me that the spirits think I should eat before I drive home, and that a small nasal polyp that has plagued me on and off for the last decade or so was caused by a practitioner of voodoo who visited my home. She cast the polyp just to annoy me. It is representative of all the little things that annoy me. All the little curses cast by this person. And apparently, she just likes to annoy me. I thought it was because I did cocaine in the nineties, so that seemed like a positive part of the reading. She told me to take a pine oil bath and light some brown candles. That should take care of it, she said.


When I went to buy some brown candles, an astrologer at the shop told me I am pure Plutonian. I am attracting otherworldly people and readings right now, and so he drafted my astrological chart. I sat comfortably next to a turkey feather and a statue of Kali. The astrologer looked to be about thirty, but told me he is almost fifty. He sketched out all my troublesome aspects. "Your Pluto is personalized," he said. "Mine is too. I understand how hard it is for you, but you will look as young as me when you are almost fifty."


He went on, staring deeply into my eyes. "It is difficult for you. This life, this place, the relationships. For this lifetime, you chose a path of accelerated spiritual growth. It is so accelerated; in fact, it is almost all pain, struggle, drama, and anger. Your Mars and your Aries make love and fight and make love again. You will have many rebirths, many different phases of your life with different people and places."


That is true," I tell him.


"With your Venus where it is, you are fun in bed," he winks. "But it is a struggle for you to have any emotional connection in sex. Everything is a struggle. Embrace that, and  you will be content. You should be proud of all the growth you have accomplished with all that Pluto energy. You will never quite fit in, except with your husband. Cling to that connection, don't let it sour. And that you don't fit in is okay, if you are okay with it. It is allowing that abusive voice to have power that will hurt you. You are prone to self-hatred. Remember that the voices of self-hatred will never tell you the truth."


"But those voices always know so much about me."


"They are lies. A Plutonian's journey is a cyclical journey to the underworld and back again. The dark and the light. Don't believe the self-hatred part. That was not put there by Pluto, that was put there in your childhood and it is a lie. Find a career where you embrace the dark. I think it is something with healing. You would be a gifted healer."

"Like write about grief and anger and resentment and drunkness and lose friends because of it, but keep writing?"

"Exactly. That is the perfect way to use your Plutonian nature. It is for the greater good that you embrace your darkness."

"I don't seem to have a choice."


"I must tell you this about embracing the darkness and losing friends and being who you are with your Mars and your Aries fucking all the time."


"Yes."


"No one can hurt you unless you give them permission."

I laugh. That quote is written on a small piece of paper in my wallet. I show it to him. Someone gave it to me at a meeting, I tell him. My friend gave it to me totally at random while someone else was speaking, and then he left the room.


"Nothing is at random."


Hmmmm.


"The interesting thing about Capricorn Plutonians is that they are born old souls, they work hard. They grow up too fast, but as they age, their burdens lessen. You get more childlike, more light, less burdened. It will get easier. That is what I can promise."


I burned the brown candles tonight with Frankincense while scalding myself in the pine oil bath. It felt satisfying to know that, astrologically, I am not supposed to feel at ease around earth people. It felt good to hear that I am someone who connects people even when I feel disconnected. That perhaps there is a reason that I start out from a place of love and somehow it all goes to shit and that is how it is for Plutonian people like me. Like the Plutonian tribe has the large medallion of a foot in the mouth. I meditate in the heat, sweating and breathing the deep musk of the herbs and smells of purgation and ritual. I remember the sweat lodges of Tucson and the vision quests I have been on. It smells pungent and earthy and sacred, and nothing like healing. I am okay not being healed. I refuse to become a seeker of cures.


+++


Sources.
by Adrienne Rich



II.


I refuse to become a seeker for cures. 
Everything that has ever 
helped me has come through what already 
lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong 
across my heart. 
This is from where 
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength, 
even when it turns on me 
like a violent master.