Why I Love Astrology…
I’m laying on my couch tonight, looking up at the ceiling fan. It’s finally cool in the house. My wife is asleep, my daughter is asleep, the dogs are asleep. I feel such tremendous gratitude for the beauty I’m surrounded by, and I’m even more grateful that I don’t know who to name or thank…that gratitude isn’t, doesn’t, discriminate.
Then in my mind’s eye I see the vision of a memory. I’m transported into my apartment living room in 2003. I’m standing on the balcony with three other friends. We’re all smoking in silence and looking up into the night sky, which is exploding into the most dazzling images and colors that I’ve ever seen. My thoughts are not my own because they are moving through the world around me now…just as strong and clear and soft as water. My mind is no longer my own. I am no longer my own. “My God,” I say. And it’s the first time I’ve ever meant it. It’s my first substantial psychedelic experience…and just as my mind is being broken and placed onto the seat of my heart, a song is elevating in the background…it’s a song called “Heaven” by the band the Fire Theft. After uttering the words “My God,” the lyrics to this song are the first words I have ever heard in this state of consciousness…in fact in some childlike way it feels like they are the first words I’ve ever truly heard in my life. And they just “happened” to be there with me at that moment. When the song is done I become conscious of the fact that there are plentiful and indifferent tears running down my face…
It’s funny…that a person can be silently exuding gratitude for their life, just reflecting on it by themselves, like a quiet fountain in a nighttime garden, and that something autonomous living inside that person can simply recall or invoke a particular memory in response…and so vividly…as if to say, “it began here, do you remember…” or “what you’re feeling now is similar to what you were feeling then…” or even, “these moments were looking at each other across time.”
So being the astrologer that I am, I decide to read the lead singer’s bio and listen to that particular song again because I haven’t listened to it for years. I decide to do this very basic research in response to the memory because I know now like I knew that first night that my mind is not my own…my thoughts are not my own…and the heavens are always waiting just outside the door. I know that “my” gratitude isn’t my own, and I know that “my” memories are not my own, and I know, like the song says, “that it’s the simple things that are so hard to grasp.”
So as I’m listening to the song again and reliving that beautiful memory, perhaps one of the most significant events that would lead to exactly where I am now, doing and being exactly the person I am, filled with the gratitude that I feel, I read the first line of the lead singer’s bio: Jeremy Enigk, born July 16th….
We just happen to share the same birthday…which just happens to be this Saturday.
Thank you…says the astrologer to the heavens…and I can almost hear the heavens respond, “happy birthday astrologer.”
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