What’s with all the Christmas stuff? It is a bit synchronic though as I work on our show for Joe’s Pub on the Summer Solstice, the day the Holly King takes over from the Oak King and pagans do burn mistletoe, at least the pagans in the Celtic tradition. So fine I will deal with this Holly and Mistletoe Reawaken Old Memories Of Christmas symbol for 4° Gemini. We are dealing with ancestral images which, even those dating to pre-Christian, Druidic roots, and such things are ruled by the sign of Cancer and the fourth astrological house in a twelve-fold sequence. Dane Rudhyar says today is about a “return to the source”, and Cancer, as the cardinal water sign, is expressed by a fountain or spring. I am doing my own returning, in the next couple of days, to Cape Cod where I can’t wait to get sand in really uncomfortable places. I have always needed to live near an ocean and have been very fortunate that I have for most of my life. I was speaking with a client recently about recapturing the spirt of ones salad days. The misteltoe and holly in the image are sacred and ancestral, and I think they ask us to examine what those elements are inside of us. How do we get back to our own source of being. It certainly isn’t through nostalgia but something deeper and more primal a connection. These are themes in the show we’re currently writing for sure. In this fish bowl world in which we live, where everybody is watching everybody posture and post visual and textual snippets of their life on social media, directing it to appear a way, trying to manipulate others’ perspective of them, it only makes me crave a simpler, more anonymous time when, if you had to reach me, you had to catch me at home on the phone, now quaintly referred to as “the land line.”

Of course I am saying this in a post that will appear on social media. And I wish more people liked the Facebook page for the Cosmic Blague but I really shouldn’t care. The whole purpose of this endeavor is to return to, first, the source of these daily Sabian symbols but also to whatever wellspring of stories these symbols might trigger. Whether writing or performing or producing or what have you there is that soul-crushing risk that there won’t be an audience. But it can’t stop one from soldiering on if you have some calling to express yourself. I do think our popular culture has torqued the balance to the extreme; such that the same handful of celebrites get all the attention; the sad fact is that this trend is mirrored even in what are meant to be non-commercial forms of art and entertainment; it can all seem like a popularity contest; and if you’re not designed to be so over-the-top needful of attention or worship—as many popular artists and personalities are, even in what’s left of our (or any) subculture, you won’t get it. The same downtown performer who bemoans the loss of a true avant-garde artistic community is the same one who goes on tirades that they don’t get enough press, awards, or attention from the media or gentry at large. You can’t have it both ways. I have always thought that such self-professed “down and out” people who protest too much about the evils of celebrity or wealth would be the first to jump at the opportunity to have them, and they would be just as bad as any kardashian [sic.]—I am of the mind that the lower-case “word” kardashian should be introduced into the English language, meaning: an entitled, vapid greedy, venal no-talent who seeks fame for fame’s sake and is devoid of any spirituality, compassion or sense of proportion; it could also work as an adjective given its -ian suffix.

So perhaps we don’t know what it means exactly to return to a source or our own individual source but I think we know what it isn’t, and what elements of our own personal or collective life represent being as far from a sense of honest purity and spiritual power as can be. So maybe we start there and just keep backing off these things in our own life. For some it could be as simple as cancelling cable, or only using social media for professional or philanthropic purposes, or turning off any means by which we can become polluted or manipulated by such powers seeking to create a certain want in us that manifests in our buying products or into political or religious or other kinds of ideology. We can’t totally isolate that’s not good. But we can stay away from people who play the game of making others feel less than or are constantly and desperately trying to represent their lives to us as somehow better than our own. I think another aspect of returning to the source is finding your true tribe which for me means developing relationships with other nerds who are on a path toward increased self-awareness and expression in manners that lift up others not put them down for ones own self-aggrandizement. And if that means a lot of solo time en route to better communion, well, that’s what books, beach blankets and hammocks are for.

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