“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” PSH

I’m still reeling from the news. I never met him, I don’t even remember any one performance that particularity changed my life. But Philip Seymour Hoffman was always there, in the background, foreground, some way or another of many of the great movies of my lifetime. He was like a wise and troubled big brother, a messed up mentor. He displayed the possibility of what art can become if we let ourselves rise up within the discipline of our choice. His vulnerability, willingness to be human and his ability to be in service of the story made him so endearing, captivating and trustworthy. Every time I watched him I believed him fully. I may not remember any one moment specifically; when I think of him or see his image flashing across the screen in recent days I feel connected to him, because he let me be. He let us all be, perhaps at his own detriment. We will never know nor is it ultimately important to know why he chose to leave. He was a mascot for the imperfect, complex, tormented, wild, irreverent, tender and complicated. His work wove itself into the fabric of our lives so un-self consciously, so effortlessly and so seamlessly because it was never about him-the man or the celebrity, it was about the work.

I do not believe we have to live in a state of perpetual torture to be great artists. Life experience helps for sure but the thing about addiction is that it stems from a greater threat than suffering; it comes from a desire to kill the suffering self. Addiction is about seeking a way out of feeling. Being human is no small task. We so desperately want to feel good and we so vehemently oppose the very thing that will transform our pain and suffering; sitting with it. We will do many things in order to prevent the pain from crashing in. So much of the pain, of our disease is rooted in the mind. Puppies turn into menacing monsters, best friends into worst enemies and life into tragedy when the mind has its way with us. Our wounds are our greatest gifts and our most dangerous curse depending on how adept we are at handle the atomic material of our lives. Sometimes the weight is just too much to bear, alone without a god in sight.

There is a lot to say about the astrology on the day he was found, and of the very little we know of his chart (we have no birth time). He transitioned a day and a half after Venus stationed direct a mere degree from Pluto while Jupiter was in Opposition to both. I wrote this for the astrology, “Any combination of Jupiter and Pluto is vortex-ish in nature. Pluto represents the underworld and Jupiter expands what it connects to while wanting a lot of everything. With Venus so close to Pluto, stationing direct during the opposition to Jupiter one has to wonder (as if watching a horror movie) if she’ll get tricked by the evil monster-man and sucked into a black-hole of death. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for ambivalence when Pluto and Jupiter are in the room. That’s quite possibly the precise place where we lose consciousness.” We lose consciousness when we forget who we are, what our responsibility to others is, denying our importance and forgetting that whatever we are going through that this too shall pass. We cannot afford to be asleep for long, if at all.

The other piece of the astrology that’s important to note is this week’s Mercury station retrograde at an almost conjunction with Neptune in Pisces. If there is a planet in a sign that can both inspire the visions of our greatest artists meanwhile eroding the very ground we stand on leaving one feeling lost at sea; adrift in a world of phantoms, failures, losses, grief and sorrow it’s this one. I don’t want to understate the creative possibilities that this combination contains. However we cannot divorce the creative experience from the lived one. To bring something in to creation is to birth something into being. Anyone who has given birth will tell you that the former self is left in ruins on the floor. We are never the same, but hopefully we eventually emerge as another version of ourselves; one a little truer, sharper and more alive. Great talent demands a sturdy container.

Retrogrades are about HEALING the patterns that keep us in our suffering and we are in a season of back to back to back retrogrades (from Venus to Mercury to Mars spanning the first five months of 2014). We just finished Venus’s retrograde and we are now moving into Mercury’s retrograde on Thursday, February 6th-28th (and then on March 1st Mars will station retrograde). Mercury retrogrades reveal the stories we tend to put on repeat so that we can stay in the grove of safe sorrow, victimization and wallowing in woe is me. Sometimes the pain is too much to bear, it just is. Sometimes the pain is too much to bear and we have no choice but to lean into our structures, or fall into despair. Mercury’s upcoming Squares to Saturn are pointing to this. If we want to stand the test of time we must have routines that prop us up and sort us out. We all suffer, we all lose, we all fret and fight and struggle and hurt. There are many of us that live a great deal with this; depending on complex intersecting oppressions we may live in and through. Yet we all have to make it through this life one way or another. We don’t all have access to the same choices. We don’t all have the gift of perspective. We don’t all have access to the same options. None of this is simple terrain to wander through. Projections are the trickiest, slipperiest, funkiest foes we have.

My prayer is that with this Mercury retrograde we all have the wherewithal to know when we are making up stories and collecting evidence to prove our theory right. My hope is that we all take pause and say something along the lines of, “I am making up a story about______ right now and I have no idea if it’s true.” My dream is that we are able to do this in the moment and forego any unnecessary pain, sorrow and grief.

As an aside and a reminder these days when Mercury stations retrograde (or direct for that matter) seem to be the times when the most snafu’s happen. I have lost countless emails (please call or text me if you haven’t heard from me) and spent the majority of the past two days on the phone with tech support. Back up your files, double check times, locations, dates and emails. I think the slippery nature of Neptune is making this one magnificent system failure of a start. Be patient and kind (I’m talking to myself here-the young man at GoDaddy this morning surely received neither from me) and willing to go with the wishy-washy, loopy flow of the next few weeks. I think it will firm up a little when Mercury moves back in Aquarius (February 13th) and Squares Saturn (February 19th) but I’ve been wrong before. Ha!

Blessings, Peace and Love to you and yours, Chani

*Edited by Laurence Joseph Jones