And now A Retired Sea Captain Watches Ships Entering And Leaving The Harbor providing us the energetic “capacity to gain an objective and calm understanding of human in experiences in which one was once deeply involved” at Libra 17°, ruled by Leo in a twelve-fold zodiacal sequence.

The shift from the previous image to this one is a certain mastery over emotions. We have weathered storms and rebuilt our landings and now we see ships sailing in and out. This is how we must view external experience, as well as our own thoughts and associative feelings: objectively; they come in and they go out, and we can simply observe them. There is a distance here, which the fixed-sign energy of Leo provides, and certain authority, which is always endemic to that sign. The captain, being old, symbolizes the sagacity that is tantamount to knowing calm. It is over calm seas (of our own inner life) which our ships sail in. Those who get what (they think) they want when in a period of tumult in their life usually fail to appreciate these boons or ultimately suffer the loss of them. We cannot remain in the storm, nor even in the recovery, we must perch ourselves on solid land with a full view of what is occuring. Oftentimes I see people who, recovering from a life of addiction, say, remaining too much in the experience of recovery so that it becomes the new addiction. We must remove ourselves, even, from that mode and become our own authority and beacons of inner strength and, in short, get over ourselves and the troubles. Too often we want to live in the troubles of our past feeling that so long as we keep talking about them we won’t fall back into the whirlpool. But it’s not enough to talk—we must own the authority of our having been at sea and the perspective it’s provided us, now, not to direct the current action but to observe the present conditions of our past actions. The retired captain was probably instrumental in systemizing the current activities now playing out before him in said harbor.

Wisdom and serenity are the outcroppings of inner conflict and personal struggle. It is our responsibility to see ourselves as having achieved the right to embody them, not just for ourselves, but for others. That captain is indeed a beacon. He’s been there and done it. He has sailed his ships through both troubled and smooth waters—the polarities of his consciousness—and he’s been battered by gales, risking mutiny by his ego-nature. Others are now following the courses he likely laid out. How can we see this as metaphor for the patterns and occurances in our own lives. Can we retire our egos and let them just observe? Or are we still acting out or in constant need of others to fuel our own recovery, either of which is worse than the other. After all, this contemplation that we achieve isn’t passive, in might be preparation for future voyages into more dangerously uncharted seas. Stella often reminds us of the anonymous adage, attributed to the Buddha, that: Pain is inevitable, but Suffering is a choice. It is my observance that even those who have made it through the troubled waters of their own emotion troubles still prefer to remain a wreck in their recovery, voicing these same troubles of the past, ad infinitum, without ever finding the silent calm that should be the natural next step. In this way, the simply relive their tribulations, continually casting others in the existing roles that make up the cast of their crisis living. It’s that type of typecasting that we must eschew at all cost.

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