Aries 17°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree: click here)

 

Excerpty Excerption

 Any acting teacher worth her salt will tell you that to recreate life on stage, in film, or any medium, the actor must have an objective firmly in mind; and then take action after action, physical, verbal or what have you, to realize that goal. Now, this key nugget of thespian wisdom rings so true because it is taken and deconstructed from life, all the world being a stage and we would-be players, even in the most modern vernacular sense of that word. We had a client who had difficulty approaching life thus objectively. Rather he viewed himself through the lens of what he thought, and often feared, others perceived about him. And so he got lost in playing others’ agendas and objectives, mainly, in order to be liked. He had also lost touch with his initial what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up intentions, even allowing himself to be led into relationships based on the importance of how said bonds looked on the outside, to those around him, rather than being driven by his intrinsic loving and lusting desires. Now, to varying degrees, many of us suffer from a similar separation from self, which, like in this case, threatens to weaken the foundation of our very being. But we can ill afford to let this happen, even in the smallest of ways. The 1st Cosmic Energy has nothing to do with how we are like others, and it couldn’t give an owl’s hoot about being liked, that favorite little birdie of Athena being an avatar of her wisdom. The myths of both Mars and Athena entail their continually going against the grain, the former personifying outright conflict, the latter more subtle controversy, while neither dynamic is something we can always shy away from. These archetypes embody the universal knowledge that life is, in so many ways, a matter of contest from which is wrought the spears we must all, at any point, take up.

            Circling back to the purely physical aspect of this 1st energy, we find that if one is engaged, body and soul, in their life’s objectives, taking action after action to achieve them, that life itself becomes practically enough of a work-out precluding the need to allocate set hours of gym time—provided, of course, ones main objectives aren’t of a strictly athletic nature or require the physical fitness as that of a cosmonaut. In a nod to the first astrological house’s association with early childhood, a time when play and exercise were one and the same, this premier cosmic force reignites the notion and the practice of expending this renewable energy, bodily, while in the process of playing the game of life as you divine it. For more of us than one might imagine this (life) is the only exercise required. You’ve heard the old saying, “the more you do, the more you can do,” but we find this only holds true if you are your objectives, the Aries motto “I am” elliptically waiting for you to fill in the blank. And like the knight who knows he can only do his small part, nonetheless keeping the larger goal of fighting the proverbial good fight in mind, it is only in galloping toward our goals, once achieved setting new ones, or even never quite fully realizing them, that we come to embrace the verb of living: the means not the end. This is the source of our greatest confidence, which cannot help but translate physically.

 

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