While playing pickleball early this morning I got distracted looking up at airplanes as they would disappear completely into the clouds shortly after takeoff.
For some reason I found it intriguing that I could clearly hear the loud planes but not see a trace of them.
This brought to mind our recent Full Moon in the Saturnian earth sign of Capricorn.
The image of Capricorn is the sea goat.
The mountain goat part ascends the rocks, which correlates well with the Capricornian style of working hard and setting goals.
Yet as the goat climbs upward, its fish tail pulls downward towards the watery depths of its opposite sign of Cancer.
The book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane (yes, I am going to enthuse about his books yet again) is perfect Capricorn reading. It was nice to revel in earth during this time of so much fire and air.
The underland contains lakes that have no watercourse running into or out from them.
Lakes disappear and then reappear in a completely different place.
Best of all, rock is tidal and reacts to the moon just like the ocean does!
Of course, they are tiny compared to marine tides. The tidal range of the sea can be up to sixteen metres; the tidal range of limestone up to two centimetres. Nevertheless, here the underworld surges and relaxes beneath your feet without you feeling it (Macfarlane, p. 185).
I love his phrase “deep time.” Our society is hyper-focused on moving upward and avoids depth. But to descend into deep time is the true ascent.
“Deep time is the chronology of the underland” and “is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.”
And: “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert” (Macfarlane, p. 15).
This also makes me think of my favorite James Hillman book, The Soul’s Code, and its focus on the Platonic myth of “growing down.”
Using the image of an upside down tree, at birth our roots are still in the sky, and then we gradually descend:
“Just as the oak’s destiny is contained in the acorn, so our destiny is contained in our soul. Hillman gives us the lesson that true growth involves growing down into the invisible world rather than growing up into the physical world” (Writing Towards Wholeness, Susan Tiberghien).
Deep time, and growing down instead of growing up, are essential for soul-making and connecting with others:
For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us (Macfarlane, p. 15).
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