I had a grand vision for an expanded vegetable garden this year. The dirt had other ideas.
It was difficult to plant the seedlings we had grown and even the pumpkin seeds seemed resistant to the hard dirt. A peony bush that has bloomed without fail the past 25 years failed to do so this year. There is a lot of dirt but not many flourishing plants.
Which is when I stumbled across something apparently the ancient Babylonians knew all along: Gemini is associated with bricks. It’s quite a paradox—airy Gemini associated with the most earthbound material. Gemini gets caught up in ideas and grand visions and can forget to focus on the practical.
The garden was trying to tell me something about sensation before I had the words for it. Jung says we “need a function of consciousness that registers reality as real: this he called the sensation function, which delivers to us the sensation that something is” (John Beebe, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type. Everything else rides on sensation: thinking then defines what it is, feeling tells us its value, and intuition its possibilities.
There is a brick wall on the Sun tarot card. I had never really focused on that detail before as it’s much easier for the eye to be drawn to the exuberant child on the horse with the dramatic banner, sunflowers, and sun in the background. The latter part of Gemini (the third decan) is ruled by the Sun and therefore correlates with the Sun card. This is fitting, as those are the final days leading up to the Summer Solstice.
It’s the brick wall, however, that holds everything together. It provides a container for the sunflowers and keeps the horse from running wild.
Rather than focusing on the withered failures, I’ve found myself noticing what actually showed up. The other peony that bloomed. The petunias hanging in there quietly. And in the backyard, a new bird feeder with a solar camera that sends me videos throughout the day—269 visits from Baltimore Orioles in the past week alone, and one visit from a baby Northern Cardinal. The sensation function doesn’t always deliver the harvest you planned. Sometimes it delivers the one that was possible.
What are you building this season?
What vision needs to meet actual dirt before it becomes real?
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June 25: Living Seasonally With Astrology seminar in Chicago |
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Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
