What Constitutes A Homeland?
In traditional western astrology, the 4th house is the house of "home" as well as the mother or the father depending on what source you're using. There's something very specific about that grouping. After all, don't we often call where we were born and raised a "motherland" or a "fatherland"?
But I don't need to tell you that sometimes home is not the land of your mother nor father. Sometimes it's very far away from where you were born.
There was a fire in my homeland today. I don't live there yet. It's an area a little over 15 miles away from my current apartment. Apollo has an incredibly strong presence in one of its preserves, full of groves and active murders of crows. Whenever I gift the trees on the street some water, they thank me with the most adorable startles of surprise. And everyone who lives there often goes out of their way to be nice to me, which they don't do with most who come by temporarily—some of them think I'm already a neighbor.
I know I carry myself as if I belong there because I do.
It's fortunate I did not visit today even though I'd considered it because my friend, who also worships Apollo, wanted to go another day. We are planning a really exciting series of spiritual events for our local transgender population and so far everything is aligning as it should. To check some details, we unearthed his tarot deck from his car.
He pulled, he pulled, he pulled. Good, good, oh great! That's what we wanted for this effort, so affirming!
But then my phone started going off with notifications about fires. My heart dropped as I saw the one that started in my homeland. Then my friend drew his deck's version of The Tower.
~*~
Our local fire department contained the fire within an hour and a half, after it "posed an immediate threat to life" and surrounding structures by burning through two acres in a highly populated area. Back there, everything is okay.
I don't know if our country will be, though.
Looking down at my friend's card, our shared god borrowed my voice in a way that my friend could very clearly see, "That wasn't you." Out of my mouth poured a harrowing prediction—in less than a year's time, there will be an attack from overseas. This would at least partially divert the federal government's attention. Our highly militarized city will mobilize. It will change drastically forever.
Driving on my way home, a slowdown on the way to the freeway enhanced the already ripe potential for trance (not that my claircognizant ability ever fully closes). I can't remember why my mind idly wandered to my place of origin, New Jersey. But the first thing I saw was it being absorbed into New York.
Recognizing the meaning, I pulled outward as if viewing a map. California adopted Arizona. Texas and Florida marked the ends of a new territory that stretched between them (that's going to be a pain in the ass, I opined). I "looked" at Michigan, thinking of Grace. Although newly acquainted with Canada, it seemed to take on both Ohio and Indiana.
I drove by an omen, a road sign that said "SEPARATED..." I would later check the astrology transit chart and find that the ascendant of the moment was applying to Mars, the planet of difference, divorce, secession.
~*~
Don't believe this if you don't want to. Admittedly, I want my state to secede from the current federal government given the disasters the latter has inflicted on thousands its meant to serve in only the first few days of its administration. However, I do not long for such a shattering, as if the aftermath of a fist to a mirror.
It is true, however, that practicing astrologers much more experienced than I have pointed out that the revolutionary and shocking planet Uranus was in Gemini during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. He is ingressing into the sign in the beginning of July of this year.
The first time I ever read occultist William Butler Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" over 10 years ago as a college undergrad, it seemed to contain a feeling I thought I would understand someday. I fear that that time has come.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
