Understanding your relationships

I love a new discovery, and last weekend I found Richard Idemon's Through the Looking Glass about the astrology of relationships. It came back into print, and thank god, because it is so good. I'm partial to astrologers who simplify astrology, because you can get really granular and into certain points and asteroids and spend many hours of most days feeling like you're wandering around holding a protractor and a compass, measuring angles of things, or you can zoom out, because the broad strokes and the major aspects to the major planets are going to carry the day (in my opinion). Idemon has a method of examining charts and counting planets to emphasize how heavy your chart is by types of planets (cardinal, fixed, mutable, fire, air, earth, water, personal, relational, and universal) and it's simple enough that most of what you're doing is counting. Like, if you can count, and if you can read a chart enough to know which glyph means which planet, you can more or less understand his work.

One point that he makes that I love a lot is that people who lack a certain type of function tend to delegate it to other people, and relationships are a great way to do that. Let's say you don't have planets in water, or you have one. Or you don't have any mutable planets in your chart. It's actually pretty impossible to have the full diversity of the zodiac in your chart, just based on how the solar system is set up, so you're going to have to import *something.* The problem is, if you appoint someone the resident feeler (the person in your life with the planets in water signs if you don't have any) or the resident jack-of-all-trades (the person with the mutable energy), then you are going to feel they meet a need and they will become indispensable to you, which can be dangerous if that person happens to be an asshole or if you're the type of person to wander into something codependent.

The "personal" signs are the first four of the zodiac, so Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer. People with a lot of planets in the personal signs have a tendency to process what's going on in the world through the lens of what it means for them, whether it's their immediate world or in a global sense. Conversely, people with planets in the last four of the zodiac (Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces) are more prone to be IMpersonal, and you can't particularly get them to zoom in to what a development means for them, because they're focused on the bigger picture and society as a whole. (And the other 4 are the relationship signs, so need to chat 1:1 with someone to figure out what things mean for them).

I have zero energy in personal signs, except an asteroid or two and a north node. So guess who my treasured friends are, and who I like to date? People with a bunch of energy in the signs where I have nothing. Problem is, they're always taking things personally that are not meant personally, so I've spent half my life wondering what the deal is with these people who are so mortally emotionally wounded by perceived sleights, and now it all makes sense. Meanwhile, I'm wandering around spouting big picture ideas and zooming out all the time, and I manage to offend people with planets in personal signs a lot (that's the understatement of the year, by the way). My immediate family also has barely any energy in personal signs: my dad has 2 and my mom has 1....and that is IT. (And wouldn't you know it, the close friends of my immediate family mostly have summer birthdays, so the lower half of the zodiac got imported in various ways, since it is sorely lacking.) Both my parents also come from families in which there were people with planets in the lower half of the zodiac. They then had two children who are both super Aquarian and with barely any planets in relational signs, even (I have 2 and my sister has 1), and I think they were confused as to why neither of us displayed personal passions in the way other kids did (like our closest friend family was a baseball family, and we were a *shrug* family). There was no one to take things personally, so we all had to go find other places and people where things were more personal.

To give you an example of what it's like to have primarily universal energy, I spent four hours at work yesterday doing a self-directed training that everyone who has done it agrees sucks, and I had about a week to do it all, so I knocked it all out in basically one sitting after figuring out how to optimize passing the quizzes at the end. My brain hurt and I was mentally exhausted at the end of it, but I did it, justifying my actions by reminding myself that I was meeting a goal and clearing the way to be productive in other areas, and then I went on to do several other unpleasant tasks that also needed to get done. Someone called me to ask how long the training took, and I told him I did all of it, and he was incredulous. I refrained from telling him that I'm both stupid and insane to have done it the way I did it, but I felt good about the fact that it was done and I am now prepared for even more unpleasant trainings I've been assigned to.

I spent part of my life in a strange wind tunnel in which most of the people in my life (on the daily) were Aquarian. Everyone's birthday was in a two-week span. I was also married to a person who was born 4 days before me, and I've discussed that elsewhere. I felt like I was stagnating, and when you have a repeat of your own energy again and again, you can get stuck in a lack of novelty or diversity. There was some comfort in all of that sameness, but I would never go back to it, because I felt very stuck in my established patterns. Then I met a Gemini who I found fascinating, and life became exciting again.

The lessons here? You can't have energy that you don't have natally, but you can import it from others. Just beware appointing someone the person who zooms in, or the person who zooms out, or the diplomat who relates to others on your behalf. Or if you do this, understand the function they are serving for you, and don't chalk it up to inexplicable magic. It's all just energy.

... yeah that's a universal energy thing to say, isn't it?