The Aries Point

Clouds in My Coffee

If you are from my generation, you will recognize clouds in my coffee as a line from "You're So Vain", a song by Carly Simon. There is book out now about three of the biggest women songwriters of my time, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King. I find it suprising how these women's songs were so achingly familiar to me, how much their lyrics were in my head and how much these songs had shaped me. What was suprising to me was that their lives were like so far from perfect.

Joni was born with the name of Roberta Joan to a mother who was quite strong. She had so many fears that her career would be taken away from her, she'd been lucky to have been able to meet people who helped her out along the way. I guess I thought everyone just saw talent and fell all over themselves to sign her on, but that is not what happened. In fact it was Joni's first husband Chuck who saw to it that her songs were published by her own publishing company at a very young age. It was David Crosby who insisted that Joni has creative control of her recordings. Only by luck do we have this fantastic body of work by this great artist.

Carly Simon was a girl who had suffered so deeply in love affairs and yet she still kept on trying to love and trying her best. Carly was a rich kid, but she was turned loose with a small amount of money and forced to get a job in New York. Her successes sometimes happened with years in between of no hit recordings suprisingly enough. I guess I thought that she'd had a perfect life.

Carole King I know almost nothing about I'm sorry to say, to me the emotional pull comes from Carly and Joni.

For in losing they also won, they moved on to new loves and were loyal to their friends. They lost people that they loved and went on to love again. I didn't know how difficult things had been for these women that I used to wish I was like. I wanted to be them. The men in their life of these women that you think of as so very strong were so important, and yet it seems that often they were left to fend for themselves. Maybe that is how gifts are, fleeting, a light in the night that disappears with the sun, so delicate that it is quickly eroded by time.

Medicine

I've often been puzzled by my doctor's inability to prescribe pain medications. It seems that people abuse these medications and so we can't have them if we need them. This seems sad to me. On the other hand, I've become very anxious about my health wondering if I will get any worse. It is quite funny to me that my doctor will give me all sorts of powerful anti-anxiety medications that have all sorts of reactions. I have been addicted to one, Zyprexa, because my doctor gave me free samples and no prescription. I did not know I had one of the most addictive drugs that there is, I only knew that it relieved my symptoms of anxiety though it did make me hungry. One day after taking 3 of the free bottles I ran out of these capsules. I did not think it a big deal. Soon, my hands started shaking and I couldn't stop it. My head was spinning with all sorts of wild thoughts and my stomach was churning with nausea. Somehow I knew what I needed was my medicine.

I called my doctor of course but I was told that I could not have an appointment for 2 and a half weeks. I told her about my symptoms and that I believed that I needed this medicine and she told me that the doctor had other patients besides me. She became very cross with me. I started to cry. My husband also told me that if the doctor gave me this medicine without a prescription then all of my symptoms must be hormones or pms or some other female hystera. He told me that the doctor would not give me something so dangerous without a warning. But he did. When faced with everyone's disbelief, I just started repeating myself over and over again. I looked up the drug on the internet but no one would look at the articles, telling me that you "can read anything on the internet". Soon however, as I spent time walking back and forth so much that I got terrible shin splints in my legs and I kept crying and throwing up so much that even my husband began to think I might truly be ill.

Finally, in desperation, my husband and I waited outside the clinic for my doctor to come to work. We were going to grab him before he entered the clinic and explain to him I needed this medicine or something to help with withdrawal if I couldn't have it. It was unreasonable to expect me to wait for an appointment for a couple of weeks when I was in such a state. The doctor was very nice and understanding and I was so glad that finally someone seemed to feel I wasn't crazy or lying. He validated that what was happening to me was what did happen to people after they took this drug for this amount of time. At last! I was so glad that my terrible experience was going to be over. When we went inside, the lady who makes appointments had such a fit I was very embarrassed! If I could I would've left right then I was so mortified. "She can't do that." she kept saying. She was so angry that I had met the doctor outside and she gave me such horrible looks. The doctor had to calm her, she was yelling that his whole schedule was ruined! I hated to ruin anyone's schedule with my health problems!

What was funny about that was, unknown to me, my period of withdrawal was just about over. When I got a prescription for Zyprexa it no longer worked for me at all, it just makes me tremendously sleepy. Zyprexa is a drug that changes an entire area of the brain, they often give it to anorectics because a weight gain of 10 pounds or more is common. I read in Andrew Solomon's book how he tried unsuccessfully for years to stop taking Zyprexa and takes it even now today. He wanted to stop because he would suddenly become so hungry that he fled his apartment in the middle of the night to get more food. The area of the brain that this drug works on happens to be next door to the hunger mechanism of our brains. It made him carry all this extra weight and he didn't want to be fat, but the withdrawal symptoms were so terrible that he always started taking it again!

I don't blame my doctor, my husband loves free samples and is like a kid in a candy store sometimes asking the doctor constantly for them. He likes free! When this new drug Zyprexa came out the doctor had a lot of free samples and perhaps he didn't know very much about the drug himself. It was funny that he would not give me pain meds because they are so addictive and then he gave me Zyprexa!

My step daughter uses a great deal of sarcasm. She said that it is okay if they mess you up, as long as you don't enjoy it.

I think that if someone had believed me and I had gotten a prescription that Zyprexa would have kept on working. Somehow going through withdrawal made Zyprexa a drug that will never work for me. This is sad as my symptoms of anxiety have gotten so much worse and there is this medicine that will help that I cannot take! I find it a hard cross to bear that people do not believe me. I do believe in strange things like reincarnation and astrology and karma and people mark me off as a flake. I quite like to think that we will live again, what a horrible world it would be if this was the one chance we got! So many people who are forced by circumstances to only suffer and die, all those who die young, and all those people who've lived horrible lives and we are supposed to think they may go to heaven and then they may not but anyway one life is your one chance? I hardly think a loving God would do that. My version of reality might be different from most peoples, but that doesn't make it wrong. (I do keep a great deal of what I think to myself these days) My family came from little towns in Alabama, where poverty was so bad that my father often only had wild berries he had gathered for himself to eat. (His father spent every dime the family had on whiskey) My mother became very ill during the Great Depression and doctors were only seeing the wealthy and so she almost died! My father was brutally raped by another man when he was very young, and he felt as though the whole world hated him and wanted him to die. No one was taking care of my parents and they hardly knew how to take care of children when I and my brother came along. We grew wild, we hit the front door early in the morning and didn't return until nightfall. We played in the woods from dawn until dusk and spent as little time in our own home as possible. If there is one thing I know it is how to endure, I can take a great deal of pain and a great deal of people being mean to me. In fact, all that is just normal. Still I wonder why the world has to be this way for me, now I am an adult and I pay my doctor bills and I have health insurance and I am still no better off than before. When pain does get bad I use medications to sleep through those bad days, I really like Nyquil cold and flu medicine!

The point I am trying to make is that it is a good idea to educate yourself about the medicine you take. We can no longer depend on our doctors. I once read "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can" about a woman who was told by her doctor to throw her pills in the toilet! She was going through withdrawal but had no idea that was what it was! She, like me, understood that the medicine she was taking had caused it, but she foolishly did what the doctor told her to do. We should understand withdrawal and the body's need for a drug that your body had grown accustomed to. Later she was told that if she had taken just one pill, it would have helped her awful symptoms a whole lot. She suffered needlessly, and she suffered even though she had wealth and a college education and paid a great deal of money for a doctor. She was addicted to Valium. Nowadays you cannot get valium except from a psychiatrist. When a new drug is introduced, sometimes it is a while before doctors know everything about it. I don't understand how this happens, I only know that it happened to me.

I went to the doctor and asked for something for pain just last week, and he told me that these drugs were much too addictive for him to prescribe for me! Is that funny or what??!!!!!!

Uranus

Uranus is the planet of the unexpected. Uranus points to where we rebel. Uranus, quirkily enough, also rules insanity. (When badly aspected) I understood Uranus with 2 keywords, purpose and genius.
Whatever talents you may have are ruled by Uranus, and I call that important. Sometimes we are so used to being ourselves we don't understand that we have a gift at all. A genius doesn't know they are a genius until they finally come to understand that other people can't do the stuff they can, or they are taking much longer to get to the same conclusion. Sometimes, you just don't know. Everyone is a genius at something, and sometimes it isn't so easy to figure out what that something is. Stephen King started writing and no one was jumping up & down and calling him a genius, we had to find him through a circuitous route and now we recognize him. Maybe you are a great organizer or a great mother or a talented conversationalist or someone who makes other people feel good about themselves. You have a purpose and you have a talent. For most of us, this is the same thing.
For me I have to reach for it and work for it. For some of us it doesn't come easily. Once upon a time I thought that if you had a talent you just did something without having to work at it. I was wrong.
I have to write to reach my writing talent. I have to stop mid-work and sometimes mid-sentence and think hard about what it is I'm reaching for. In my tweens and teens I wrote millions of poems for myself. I would write something and then later try to figure out what it meant. It is just that way for me. Understanding comes after I've written something out of the blue that doesn't make sense and then I make it make sense. I wonder sometimes if anyone else does this, or if I'm as rare as a ghost orchid after they've built the malls and gas stations. People go through miles of dangerous mucky swamp to see this rare flower bloom. They say it glows. To me writing is like that, you've tried and tried and at the end you have something rare and of value only because it is beautiful. It's not supposed to glow but it does. It is worth more than the sweat and tears you've shed to get there. To me, the goal is to know.
Some people may have the goal in life to be noticed. Some may want to be important. Some may want to spend idle hours at some seashore working on the perfect tan. Some may want to be well thought of by others, my hubby wants this. I want to know things. There is nothing I want to gain from knowing, I just want to know. I want to know secret things, I want to know every thought someone thinks and exactly what they think about all the time! I've always felt the stain of being different, freakish, outside the norm. I think that is why I have something to contribute as a writer, because I've dug deep for secrets. I dug with some vague hope that I could reinvent myself to be like everyone else. I would learn to talk as everyone did, and do the things that everyone else did and in so doing fool everyone into thinking I was part of the group and not an outcast. I could make myself normal.
It didn't work but on the way I've realized I am not so different. Where I am different is the huge amount of thinking and studying I've done of people. Things happened to me to make me different that were beyond my control and now it's done. I'm me. This is what I focused on. This is my Uranus. My Uranus is this private study of people and the many meanings of words. If you use a word differently it suprises you and throws you off track. It is how poems work. Books work in much the same way, you want to know what will happen as the words disappear and you allow yourself to forget the fiction, the cleverness of the writer, the sleight of hand of the magician, and let yourself forget that it is not real. They call this suspension of reality. Still I think fiction is more real than reality, I'm adding here as a sidenote. Fiction writers often have very good memories and huge chunks of novels are literal truth. The people just have different names. I've come to learn this as I've studied writers along with what they wrote. The very best writers can make you forget you are reading at all, with simple words. They say, cut the adverbs on all the writing sites. They mean for you to achieve this leaness of prose, to imitate what successful writers do. I maintain that these writers probably just wrote first and asked questions later. Stephen King has said he didn't articulate how he wrote for years. Still I am told that writing is something that you can learn how to do, but I cannot fathom anyone taking that much time at writing unless they loved it. It's impossible. Writing requires so much, Mr. King says it is like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub.
How do you express your talent? The answer is supposed to be the Sign your Uranus is in. Mine happens to be in Leo. Leo happens to be very important in a chart, Leo is ruled by the Sun and the Sun represents us. Leo is where the vitality of the Sun is. Leo is our inner child, here is where we play. My talent is in fun and there it has always remained. I know it is different for other people but somehow I can't grasp this fact. If I am not having fun then work is like a trip to the dentist. Ask any of my former employers. If I am at all sick or even slightly unwell I find it tremendously difficult to work. Even the mildest of marital spats has left me unable to write at all, which makes me highly agreeable to my husband. When I am happy I will graciously work until I drop, I'm sort of unreliable though. I find that I must be optomistic or I shall soon die. I must always think the future contains great & wonderful things. If I become bitter at life I will be as difficult to be with as a person who has just quit smoking & craves a cigarette. I must think in a certain way. My chart is mostly fire, and fire represents inspiration. Leo is the sign of show business and is dramatic and so is my writing. This, I believe is my talent and my purpose.
Uranus rules the unexpected, and I'm told that I obtain luck through change. When Uranus is powerful you can expect the unexpected. Because Uranus is in my 9th house of long distance travel I am lucky in faraway places and foreign lands. Everyone has luck, all of us would like a clue as to where to find ours.

Lilith

They say before Eve that Adam had a wife named Lilith. I guess that wasn't in the King James version of the Bible I grew up reading. There is a connection to the Moon in astrology, and no less that 3 Liliths. One is called the Black Moon, and one is a point in space exactly opposite your Moon on your chartweel and there is an asteroid named Lilith. She is the feminine energy and is often characterized as evil or jealous and the woman scorned. In the world us females may feel weak, but in astrology and in the cosmic world feminine is equal to masculine and in fact just as powerful. I grew up in a household in which females had little power and I was taught this was the way things were meant to be by my mother. Once when I was 18 she told me a great big secret, men have a powerful sex drive that they cannot control and makes it almost impossible for them to think clearly. What a lesson! Women, she said, were the people in the world who had sense.

While my mom was teaching me the superiority of men she was believing privately in the superiority of women!

Lilith's meaning may not at all be clear yet, astrologers are discovering her just as they discovered Chiron in the seventies.

For me with Lilith in the 3rd house of communication and daily activities I read that I have a messy house! I do indeed but is that the meaning of Lilith? Is she nothing more than bad luck?

Lilith does seem to show us one of our weak spots, my hubby has Lilith in the 7th house. He seems to have gone through life arguing and fighting constantly with the women he is involved with. The 7th is about our romantic partners and I am perplexed by this man who seems to think women cause all the problems in the world. Lilith is the woman who doesn't do what he wants her to do and yet at the same time he will have no other kind of woman than an independent and strong-willed woman. (His Venus is in Aries) I guess I was born for the purpose of teaching my hubby about women, because his ideas have changed radically over the years. I no longer think much about his education, I've drawn lines in the sand and he knows not to cross them with me. There is only so much you can do I've learned. I know things. I can tell you what I know, but your experiences have made a deeper lesson than any words can teach. For instance, fear is something you might read about constantly in books and see in movies, but you don't know fear until you're running through the woods away from a hatchet murderer. Your cells remember. What my hubby remembers is that women have hurt him and that I cannot change.

The 3rd house is the house of communication, it's opposite is the 9th house of higher education and publishing. Gemini is the natural ruler of the 3rd, Sagittarius rules the 9th. I believe Lilith to be a lot like Pluto. It is a point of strength and a point of weakness.

Lilith is where I am strong, and that is in communication. I can make complicated things clear and make simple things complicated, it must be a sort of talent but it's one that people don't seem to want to hear. Rather it seems people want to hear what they expect to hear-no wonder that people get bored! Maybe that is why people get drunk at parties, they can say the unexpected and blame it on the Tequila or the Jack Daniels!

I realize that there are more people than in my little corner of the world and hopefully things are different elsewhere, farmers do seems to talk of nothing but the weather!

Lilith is the wild feminine principal, she will protect her children with her life and not think twice about it. She is dark and capable of vengefullness and sarcasm and make someone's life miserable if she chooses but she is not evil. She is us, everyone of us.

10 Things I Hate About You

!) You lie sometimes and don't even know it. A person should at least reach consciousness.

2) You may push me around and feel better for an hour or so but superiority has nothing to do with power - you just are or you aren't.

3) When you say you love me, don't make me slap you.

4) Everytime I bring home a dog I get a lecture about the cost of dog food and then you end up loving the dog so much I have to steal said dog away from you.

5) It's this way in this situation when you are in it, another way when you are not. This is not logical!

6) There are other things to eat besides french fries.

7) You talk to the television. The people on T.V. cannot hear you.

8) You never believe me unless it is what you, also, believe

9)You tell me to save money when you never do so yourself.

10) I can't owe you money if I am married to you.

Hubby does not read blogs, in fact, he doesn't do computers at all but will watch you across the room and feign disinterest as soon as asked about this.

How To Write?

Wanna be writers are always asking published authors how they write, when they write, how many pages a day, and on and on and on. It seems we are seeking some secret formula, some kind of path to follow. Listening, I see there is no way to do it and that's that. I am still mightily interested in how someone does it, such a marvelous thing to do and how do they make it real what is mostly fiction?

If anything Stephen King seems to be somewhat down to earth at times and at others someone kinda wonderstruck himself. He has said many strange things, or what I would call strange. He has said that in writing something he makes it impossible to really happen, he has said that he has this freakish thing in him. Well I guess if you suddenly find yourself in possession of 3 million dollars in 3 years, you might be a little disconcerted. If I can put in my own 2 cents I would say it is precisely that he writes for himself that is the reason for his success. Can I do it? No, I'm saying that is what he did, that he had this mindset, this shy and reserved personality, and he found he could write and he did it and nevermind what anyone thinks. Horror was dead when he arrived but it is as old as time and campfires. Anyone, approaching from a new direction, can make new what was old in writing I believe. Wasn't the horror in Carrie really that fact that people are so awful to a few in school? Who hasn't known such people during their own school years?

It's interesting to note that there seems to be more writers writing in the morning than there are night owls. There are writers who have written entire books and never mailed them out, now that is interesting. There are writers who are combining genres and I think what comes of that is bound to be interesting. It is amusing how many books have been written on yellow legal pads (got to try that). It is amusing how older writers cling to their old typewriters. It is amusing how many How To Write books are written by those never published, and it is interesting how many writers go for a walk when they need an idea. Writing is a creative endeavor, and you don't need a high I.Q. to do it. Paper and pen and you're in business. I love that. Anyone, anytime, can try to do it. Here it is the 4th of July, and what can be more democratic than that?