posted June 22, 2005 02:15 PM            

Ooooh, I like this line from the chapter: "Something in you must abandon inhibition and self-consciousness, and learn to roar." I'd like to hear what a Taurean roar sounds like! Does Mr. T have a creative passion? What are his plans for after the service, or will he be a lifer?

From Steven Forrest's "The Book of Pluto":

quote:

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PLUTO IN THE FIFTH HOUSE
THE FIFTH HOUSE ARENA: Creativity; Self-Expression; Renewal through Joy
THE FIFTH HOUSE PITS: Dissipation... or "Uptightness."

IN THE TRADITION...
...the fifth house is often named "The House of Children" and taken literally and narrowly as astrology's way of referring to kids. That notion is not so much wrong as it is limited. Certainly people with the fifth house strong in their charts commonly find themselves much involved with children. Maybe they have kids of their own. Maybe they're grammar school teachers or toy designers or social workers helping children who've been abused or abandoned. But fifth house emphasis also appears commonly in the charts of people involved with creative work — musicians, actors, painters. Or very active, engaged hobbyists. Or simply in the charts of people whom we might view as particularly colorful or entertaining.
The common denominator is not children in the outward, concrete sense. It is the "inner child” — that playful, expressive, self-indulgent, often self-centered part of every human being regardless of his or her age. Something inside us all is noisy, innocent, and hungry for attention. It wants to have a peak experience and to have it immediately. And if we try to ignore it too utterly, we grow either dispiritingly flat or dangerously explosive.
Traditionally, the fifth house has a cautionary side as well. It's recognized as a House of Debauchery. The human need to have pleasure and emotional release is like a mighty river that can overflood its banks, leading to obsession and addiction. The old astrologers recognized the pattern: people with powerful fifth house emphasis in their charts were over represented among the compulsive gamblers, the drunkards and the gluttons. Needless to say, the wilder aspects of human sexual expression were evident here too.
So, we all need to have some fun...but what's so much fun about Pluto? Let's unravel it...

YOUR HIGH DESTINY
What makes humans different from the rest of the animals? Not a heck of a lot. Fundamentalists like to put "Man" in another category entirely, but increasingly we see both science and ecoconscious popular culture moving towards a realization that the gulf between ourselves and the rest of life isn't as wide as our ancestors imagined. We used to say, "Humans use tools" — but more and more we are recognizing tool use among other creatures. And language: but chimps are learning sign language at an alarming rate, and anyone with a cat or dog can tell you they've got large and expressive vocabularies. What about a shared culture transmitted down the generations? Check out the tribal "songs" of the whale cultures. A cynic might play a trump card: we humans are unique in that we are the only species that has ever threatened to wipe out life entirely. Compelling — but wrong again. About a billion years ago, green plants began pumping huge volumes of a grossly toxic chemical into earth's atmosphere, destroying almost all existing life on the planet. The "chemical" was oxygen.
Are humans truly distinct in any way at all? Maybe not, but if I had to defend our uniqueness in a debate, I'd forget all the old claims and rest my argument on art. We are creative creatures. And even those of us who are not actively creative still respond to art ...and make "creative" choices regarding what color shirt to wear, what sofa to buy, which automobile most pleases our eye.
Art, as I am using the term here, is very broad. Essentially, it is any attempt to represent experience, and through that representation, to interpret it. Thus, a woman telling a joke at a party is in the same boat with Georgia O'Keefe: she's expressing herself creatively.
Virtually everyone enjoys art in some form. Ninety-two percent of us spend a lot of our lives in front of the television, for example. Most of us listen to music or go to the movies sometimes. And the enjoyment itself renews us. Some art is legitimately there simply to make us laugh — and wouldn't life be hard without any laughter? Even "silly” art serves a serious purpose. And of course there is "serious” art — films and novels, for example, that deal with complex, emotionally volatile topics. Could we be fully human without them? Without the artists who represent these aspects of life to us, we would all be terribly alone — as alone as the mourning dove staring blankly at the body of her mate.
With Pluto in the fifth house, your high destiny involves developing your capacity for dramatization, representation, and self-expression. It is "creative" in the broadest sense.....but I want to emphasize that creativity isn't always "artistic” in the narrow, obvious way. It boils down to a vigorous, striking exhibition of some inner state or heart-held value. Your high destiny entails channeling ego-energy colorfully and unselfconsciously in a way that encourages others to forget themselves momentarily and lose themselves in an identification with you. One way or another, it puts you on center stage.
And what is your message? We cannot know precisely because above all it is highly individual — that's really the point with creative self-expression. But we do know that the message is Plutonian: your destiny lies in symbolizing the dark for us, and ideally, representing for us a path through the dark.

YOUR DISTORTING WOUND
Grandpa is dying of cancer. He's emaciated. Chemotherapy has stripped him of all his hair. He's pale as blotchy snow. Little Billy is brought to the hospital to say good-bye to his dying grandfather. It's a very dramatic moment for the child. Everyone is gentle with Billy, and in a few minutes he's allowed to leave the room. A few days later, grandpa exits the flesh.
A month later, there happens to be a family get-together. Life is back to normal and the adults are in the living room talking, drinking, and laughing.
In walks Billy. He's got a stocking pulled over his head, reproducing his grandfather's pale, hairless visage. He's applied powder and lurid rouge to his face. His cheeks are sucked in.
Zombie-like, he walks into the living room and speaks his grandfather's name.
And you can imagine the reviews his performance receives.
Billy is following the deepest impulse of his fifth house Pluto: the impulse to represent the dark. But people have mixed feelings about that kind of performance. In this case, Billy in his innocence hit everyone a little too hard and a little too unexpectedly. Mom rushes him out of the living room, leaving his relatives shocked and stunned.….until nervous giggles release the tension.
This story is dramatic; yours may not be so extreme. But in your youth you had a fascination with what the world would call the “morbid" or the ”macabre" — in fact it was simply a fascination with those aspects of life which make us all uncomfortable or embarrassed. You were very likely punished for it either directly, or through the withholding of love or approval. You were told to keep a lid on it. And that hurt you. It hurt your inner child — specifically it hurt your childlike spontaneity, your guileless urge to share yourself. And less directly that repression impacted your innocent, wanton desire for fun.

YOUR NAVIGATIONAL ERROR
.….can take a lot of different forms, depending in part upon the nature of the rest of your birth chart. But they break down into two clear categories. The first is an inappropriate expression of the human drive for creative pleasure. The second is an unnatural suppression of that drive.
In the first category we recognize forms of "fun" that prove destructive either to yourself or to other people. In all the examples that follow, we observe one common denominator: the unconscious urge to represent, in one's own bodily life, the dark. Down that road we may see a person who consistently gets herself or himself involved in hurtful, unseemly, or empty sexual affairs. We may see the addict or the drunk. We may observe a person who is morbidly obese. Or one in constant, self-created financial dilemmas. The point is that all these behaviors become part of the individual's public "act;" unwittingly, he or she is symbolizing the darker, more taboo aspects of life for the community: the natural human hunger for pleasure run amuck. Such a person may feel out of control and ashamed by these circumstances, or may take an arrogant "in your face" attitude. Either way, we notice the same critical features marking the behavior as unconscious. The pleasure-seeking behavior doesn't work very well: such a person is not actually having much fun. There is an apparent drive, owned or unowned, to make the dysfunction visible to the community. And the individual may inevitably be cited as "a bad example” by others.
All this is the shadow expression of the high destiny, which would turn the Plutonian juice into art in some form, to be shared with the community in a vastly more healing — and more pleasurable — way.
The second Plutonian fifth house navigational error lies in an unnatural suppression or "demonizing" of the same creative, pleasure-seeking drives. There is a wildness in all pleasurable activity, a shadow dimension in everything that fills us with fire and life. A person might become so inordinately and unnecessarily frightened of that loss of self-control, that he or she withers into a judgmental wet blanket. Then, quite unconsciously, there arises a simultaneous compulsion to limit the pleasure and self-expression in the lives of everyone else. He or she delights in the words, "Thou Shalt Not," and applies them liberally and equally to self and others.
And in the cellar, down in the ashes, behind both that repressive behavior and the wild, injurious behavior we explored earlier, is a sad child who heard the word "No" too many times.

THE HEALING METHOD
Many years ago I attended a concert given by the virtuoso jazz guitarist, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. I had good seats and my eyes were bugging out. I play some guitar myself and while my skills are not within a hundred light-years of McLaughlin's, I knew enough to know that I was in the presence of extraordinary talent. One image remains impressed on my memory: His face contorted in extreme concentration, McLaughlin dazzled me with the fastest guitar lick I'd ever heard. Then his face relaxed; he looked heavenward with an expression of transcendent bliss — and played the same lick twice as fast.
Creativity has an ecstatic component. While one must certainly make substantial effort to master the techniques, tools, and crafts connected with one's chosen form, there is a place where magic enters the equations. John McLaughlin demonstrated it in his concert that night. The skater who transcends herself and delivers a sublime performance does it too. Or the actor who utterly loses himself and becomes the role he's playing.
Your Healing Method lies in tapping into your latent capacity for that kind of Dionysian creative ecstasy. Maybe you join a drumming circle and find yourself in communion with your pagan ancestors, lost in rhythm-trance. Or maybe you quietly take up watercolors and stay up until four in the morning painting a flower arrangement. The shape of the creativity doesn't matter. What matters is that you lose yourself in it, surrender to it, go willingly and intentionally toward that edge beyond which lies madness.
Something in you must abandon inhibition and self-consciousness, and learn to roar.

THE ENERGIZING VISION
In the old Welsh culture there was a proverb: "Three equals: a poet, a harper, and a king." This seems to me a splendid attitude, and one that is also sound psychologically. Human culture needs inspired leadership — "kings" — but just as fundamentally we need our ”poets" and our “harpers:" our artists. They uplift us and inspire us. They comfort us in our pain and grief, and sometimes they temper our laughter with wisdom.
You are a Plutonian bard; your message may not always be easy for us to hear, but we need to hear it anyway. So convey it to us skillfully and gracefully, with beauty, craft, and patience. And if lightness and laughter enter the message, there's much good to be said about that too. Your art need not be "heavy" all the time; many times we hear the truth more clearly from a comedian than from a minister.

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Looking forward to your feedback!

posted June 23, 2005 02:19 PM            

Nope..Mr. T will not be a lifer. His time is up on June 12, 2006 (he will begin his leave of the Army May 1, 2006 and we get married on June 2nd).

He is extremely creative, he loves to write, play games, cook, draw..and he is excellent with children. He can, at times though, be self-indulgent. He said in his past he was quite hedonistic (combine self-indulgent Taurus with Pluto in the 5th and I think there is a very strong case of over doing things).

He does roar and he knows his voice. He can get very angry, but I have not seen that extreme side to him. Since he discovered Eastern philosophy, he has been able to manage his temper / feelings. For me, it was / is meditation on the more Amerian Indian level.

He can also get very fixated on something, collecting in an obsessive manner (which he readily admits and inherited from his collector father and grandfather) My attention span is too short to collect things for too long. He can also play computer games or xbox for 10 hours if he chooses too. LOL...

When he gets out of the Army he will either go to Iraq for a year for a security position (that will enable him to earn a huge chunk of change tax free) and then he'll take that money and open up Working Dog kennels (He trains dogs for law enforcement and is in the K9 unit). If he doesn't go to Iraq, or even when he gets back, he is still thinking of joining a police dept out here to finish out his retirement and also have a steady income while working in the kennels.

I'll help him with the dogs, but I am not a trainer (my background is more vet med from working for years in ER vet hospitals - so we'd made a good team).

He is very creative...yep..LOL..

posted June 23, 2005 03:32 PM              

quote:

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Grandpa is dying of cancer. He's emaciated. Chemotherapy has stripped him of all his hair. He's pale as blotchy snow.

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I nearly cried at that..

quote:

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Then, quite unconsciously, there arises a simultaneous compulsion to limit the pleasure and self-expression in the lives of everyone else. He or she delights in the words, "Thou Shalt Not," and applies them liberally and equally to self and others.
And in the cellar, down in the ashes, behind both that repressive behavior and the wild, injurious behavior we explored earlier, is a sad child who heard the word "No" too many times.

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Wow that's very true as well..except NO I wouldn't "limit" anything in someone else's life. It only applies to me..but I know I'm too cautious, I guess and repressive in that way and I also know that I could easily switch to the other extreme and be too out there and controversial - but that extreme scares me..Pluto's on my SN..Venus is on NN and they're opposed..I always get the feeling I should move towards Venus, away from Pluto..like that's best for me so I think I keep my plutonian "crap" lol hidden.

quote:

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Or maybe you quietly take up watercolors and stay up until four in the morning painting a flower arrangement. The shape of the creativity doesn't matter. What matters is that you lose yourself in it, surrender to it, go willingly and intentionally toward that edge beyond which lies madness.

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And that gave me chills up my spine. I'd absolutely love that..getting lost in some art form. I've always liked drama and drawing/painting ..I'd really like singing if I had a better voice lol that's too bad. But art is deffinetly a big thing to me and it does help "heal".

I've actually had a very Plutonian theme in my life..where I've had to start from scratch a few times over..and lost a few of the ppl closest to me. I read somewhere, I think it was a singleton Pluto article that Pluto rules regenaration..and the life of "plutonian ppl" always changes dramatically. Which is true for me because my life really feels like it was cut in two very different parts..it's so strange.. it feels like two different life times..

Anyways nough ranting for today.. thanks again