Showing ANGER is an act of vulnerability.
Emotionally intense people are used to feeling embarrassed of what they feel (love, lust, hatred, desire, sadness, pain), how they feel (“you’re too sensitive!”) but anger is… something else entirely. It’s a total reveal even though the person you are angry at may not feel the same. They just feel assaulted and perhaps rightly so.
I wanted to write about Mercury trine Uranus (exact today): the brainstorm, the bright idea. And I wanted to write about Venus entering Libra this week, from hygiene–o-rama to the perfect hostess–
But most of all, I am obsessed with MARS conjunct my Mercury today and applying to my natal Mars. In Cancer. And how when I express my anger, I feel shame. Justified or not, that it is wrong. I’ve exposed my fear, my cruelty, my weakness, the ugly truth, that there is much to be healed. My father’s temper. Lack of control. Loss. How is it that we cannot keep it all curled up in a little anger puff, diffuse it instead of detonate. If only.
I wrote to a friend, telling her some of this, and she told me this, “Don’t be hard on yourself. Just ask God for guidance. And let go.”
Ah the letting go. That’s the hard part.
What are you sorting through?
Love, MP
14 thoughts on “Rockets Red Glare And The Mars Return”
When I read this, I thought…’emotionally intense’ people are just normal. As humans we ARE emotionally intense but find a myriad ways to hide this from ourselves and others. It’s really sad how much we do this…try to flatline ourselves. Perhaps it should read ’emotionally honest’ people instead.
Aliza, hate to hijack your post but turns out that has been with me a lot lately, and powerfully, learning how to allow for gestation where it involves one’s creativity/work. We sometimes get in such a hungry hurry that we dismiss the “simple” application of maybe just one single brick, because we can forget how those bricks can pile up and “all of a sudden” become a house.
I have allowed myself to approach in those small steps, to settle for a well-executed nibble in lieu of an incomplete gulp. It has in a sense been a meditation these past few months, when I find myself in a hurry to get to the end. To be done.
it took some time before I realized the work was the beneficiary of slowing down and setting “small” simple tasks for myself. It takes longer, but the work is better. More polished.
In other words, if I can’t complete the paragraph today – and I’d like to – I will make a point of at least arriving at the lead sentence.
Sometimes the vision of the whole is so overwhelming we can get paralyzed by the scope and seeming enormity of it. And we stop. A brick at a time.
Hexagram 62 comes to mind. Success in small, even minute, measures.
It has taken me years and years to realize the power and necessity of the gestative period, and to trust.
Hijack away. Thank you. Much food for thought here.
You just inspired me to buy two I Ching books!
I still have a hard time with anger, when and how and whether to voice it. But a lot of the deep-down rage has been tempered – channeled, perhaps – toward a kind of mostly-conscious release, which can feel healthy and right sometimes, but now and then I realize it’s just as much apathy, simply not giving a damn anymore and just distancing myself, which seems, in honesty, to be the larger weather trend. Removal of self. Likely a work in progress til The End.
Hmm. Well, transiting Mars is trining my natal Mars. What am I sorting through?
I’m sorting through a screenplay scene in which a woman in her mid-60’s is telling the story of how she met her (late) husband one bittercold pre-dawn in Elko, Nevada, 25 years previously, when she had slipped on ice after getting off “work” in a brothel and knocked herself unconscious, to be found by her late husband when he happened to see her while pushing his grocery cart full of cans and bottles up the street.
She is telling this story to her late husband’s son, who met his father for the first time only a couple days previous to this meeting with the widow.
And so, pondering your question, given my awareness of how my work is some sort of unconscious “sorting through,” I wonder.
But not too much because I find that knowing too much of how work connects to real life can easily ruin the storytelling.
At any rate, this is the scene I happened to decide to work on today; I might just as easily have picked another.
Though this may seem an entirely non-sequitur answer to your question, I suspect you’ll feel that it does connect. And now I am curiouser.
Thank you, Bob. Always happy to see you
Not sure yet how it connects, but feels fine to me. And reminds me of an abandoned play of mine — that remains unedited in a folder on my desk. Your comment most of all is encouraging me to slow down with my art. I’m always in a hurry. But a hurry which leads to stopping. How to slow down and work slowly and not stop. Mars keeps going.
Lately I find myself trying to breathe deeply but gently into my resistance and hold on to the flow. In that way I allow the energy to move and I don’t get stuck between polarizing forces.
My mars is at 1 degree Leo 11th/12th house and usually I barely notice it. Its hard when I want to be angry because I don’t always know how to express it other than through physical exercise. Currently I lack motivation to maintain much of anything for a long period of time and since most of my drives seem to be linked to others I get more discouraged when I find myself alone in my endeavors. I’ve always been very independent until the past few months where I feel myself actually needing to utilize partnered energy and it isn’t easy to find/maintain it.
To be truest to my needs, my mars is looking for something worth doing and someone worth partnering with. So far nothing’s really sticking and I’m not sure why.
Parenting brings out the anger in me sometimes. Especially at bedtime. I try to sort it out. I try to figure out what it is triggering in me. I wonder if it has to do with my progressed mars on my sons natal mars, which both happen to be forming a conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn right now……
Mars Pluto… not an easy energy
yes. Lots of karmic clean up I suspect. Hopefully we will both come through this stronger and not do any irreparable damage. it manifests itself in some interesting ways. My son is too young to be aware of it but I think I can learn from it in spectacular ways…..Now if I can just keep my patience….
In learning about Buddhism – that is the thing that spurs me on — trying to obtain awareness of that slim space where a choice can be made — to act on or to just observe the anger and let it pass. It is a goal – distant – but a goal.
And then sometimes it happens so fast