The Great Escape
Chapter 114
The Great Escape
On the Shape of Your Mind &
the Freedom You Possess
The story for the Taurus new moon time:
May 19 - June 2, 2023
Like the hand of God reaching for Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, freedom is reaching for you just as you are reaching for it.
☆
I want to tell you a story. I want it to be pretty. I want it to be good. But instead, it comes out like this:
☆
The little boxes made of ticky tacky were never just on the hillside, lining the streets of suburban America. First and foremost, they were inside. In the minds of the American people.
Our internal boxes inspire our external ones. Our external experience inspires our internal box building. But ultimately (psychological extremes aside), no one can make you build a box that you don’t want to build.
You are the master builder of your mind. And desire is your building block.
We build things consciously and subconsciously. We have desires we know and ones that lay hidden from view.
The construction of a mind is a deeply personal endeavor, and gaining mastery over this process is perhaps our most vital work.
For freedom is seeking you just as you are seeking it.
If you can find each other, you will find peace. You will build peace. You will help bring peace to all the world.
☆
This is what I think when I close my eyes:
we’re all running around like chickens with heads cut
off.
The words from my favorite poem fill my mind as the smoke rises from the fire and burns my eyes. I carefully dab the tears beneath my lashes as people kneel around the flame, roasting marshmallows and strawberries on long metal sticks.
I’m surrounded by strangers who all know each other, and I am - as I’ve often felt - on the outside, looking in. Was I trained to see the world this way?
As an ethnographer.
As a meditator.
Full of space.
Or was my mind always this shape? I think…perhaps it was.
I have always been an observer. Noticing the boxes all around me. Debating them with my parents as a fiery youth. Writing about them in stories on three-hole-punched paper and then, in Microsoft DOS. Perhaps this is why I was drawn to anthropology and meditation in the first place. Because they touched a part of me that was already formed or already taking shape.
The part that is full of space. The part that is free. The part that has never sat long within any box before drawing down the hatch and climbing the ladder or - as is often my woe - screaming and punching my way through the walls.
The walls are not just my own. They are not just yours. They belong to all of us.
Eventually, I kneel down beside the fire too. I eat a roasted strawberry, and I squeeze a gooey marshmallow between two graham crackers. It softens the oh-so-American rectangles of Hershey’s chocolate, and it is delicious.
It melts in my mouth as I listen to the conversations unfolding all around me. As I listen, one thing becomes clear: all of these people know each other because they belong to the same church.
I see their mutual belonging like a series of bridges between the boxes of their individual minds. Like through these bridges, they have built one big box in which they can all live happily together.
But I have built no such bridge. I don’t even have a box from which to construct a bridge. I am simply sitting in the grass, facing the walls of their collective box and wondering if there is an opening between these places.
I personally have no interest in stepping inside their box, and perhaps they have no interest in stepping outside of it. In which case, c’est la vie. We’ll go our separate ways. But it’s always seemed to me that much of society is like this: an open field full of boxes - hard walls through which there is no ready passage - and I am outside wandering, joyfully embracing my fellow wanderers - the plants, the animals, and the people who, like me, were born without a box or fought their way to freedom.
Your walls are not just your own. They are not just your group’s. They belong to all of us.
True freedom is wall-less, I think, while embracing the paradox: Everyone should be free to build the walls they want to build, and true freedom is wall-less.
Are we all just grieving the loss of each other?
I miss you. Behind your walls.
If desire is my building block, I want to be free. I want you to be free. I want a world of more open space and fewer boxes. I want to feel all the room in the world to roam before encountering a rigid wall.
I dance around it. I stick to the grass.
Still, I empathize with the desire to build a box, to stay inside a box, to forge a collective box of mutual belonging. Life looks nice there. Sometimes, it looks better there - full of instantly recognizable friends. Out in the field, nothing is so simple. Everything’s unknown.
I say goodbye to the group and walk to my car. The sky is still bright with sun when I spot the full moon rising above the trees. It’s huge and golden, perched atop green needles and leaves.
It rises higher as I drive north and the sun sets.
By the time I pull into my drive, Venus is shining brightly overhead, and Mars - to her left - is emitting a faint, reddish glow.
The stars in the sky, in all their distinct glory, form a blanket of light. If only we don’t pollute our freedom to see it.
☆
On May 19, 2023, at 11:53 A.M. EST, the sun and moon are aligning at the same point in the sky. The point of 28°35’ Taurus. Here, a bridge is formed between the sun and moon, a reaching of hands across a field, but no box is in sight. The natural world, without the projections of the human mind, is only ever free.
How free? I wonder. Completely free? Or held, still, inside a larger box? All the world - a matryoshka doll of boxes.
Here - your mind.
Held inside your body.
Held inside a code of DNA and all the evolved fibers of your being.
Held inside this moment.
Held inside the history of the entire world.
Held inside…something more. I think.
I think, sometimes, I see it. Through holes in the walls of boxes, I peer onto the surface of something larger than myself, my body, this code, this moment, this history.
It’s gleaming.
☆
My nine-year-old niece calls me from the car and tells me she watched Jaws.
It’s horror! She explains. Her older brother hums the theme song in the background.
Two days later, I read a message I wrote in February. Back then, I closed my eyes and felt forward in time, to this moment now, to the date: May 17, 2023. When I did, I heard the music for Jaws. I wrote: it’s “like something is trying to shake the sphere /enter the sphere of light…or simply, you fear that it is.”
The sphere of light? I see it now: the gleaming interior surface of some big box. Holding us all.
But what can enter? If this is the outermost layer? Perhaps that’s what’s knocking now: the knowledge that it’s not. That beyond the outermost regions of what your mind can perceive, there is even more.
☆
I struggle to write this chapter. Or really, it comes out easily. Stream of consciousness, one word after the next, but I know it’s different than usual. I fear what you will think. I hear a message: Shhhh, don’t think too much about the words. Just read them.
As though reading them will unlock something, open a gate, punch a hole in a wall.
Still, I feel the fear like a bubbling at my solar plexus. It attempts to obstruct my breath and force me into shallow waters, but I don’t let it. I breathe past the block. I let the air fill my body belly deep.
I wonder what more there is to say and reach for a deck of cards resting on the table in front of me.
I shuffle the cards, and as they slip between my hands, I think about this Taurus new moon, this period in time from May 19th to June 2nd.
It’s planting a seed, I see, for what’s to come on Halloween.
Three cards escape my hands and land - two on the couch, one on my knee.
I turn them over and see:
The Golden Body - gleaming from the inside out, the outside in.
The Tree of Life - reminding me of the final image in the animation at the top of this chapter.
And…The Golden Gate.
When I created that card, I named it after The Golden Gate of the Ecliptic. The Golden Gate is a stretch of sky framed by two star clusters. It has been observed for thousands of years, and in the western astrological system, it lies between zero and nine degrees Gemini. Only upon shuffling the deck and receiving this card did I realize that this is where the sun is crossing during this Taurus new moon time.
From May 21 - May 31, the sun is crossing The Golden Gate.
This happens every year at this same time, but this year, the sun’s transit through the gate is uniquely framed by the new and full moon, and it’s happening alongside the rare conjunction of Jupiter and the north node of the moon (aka the destiny point).
The gate, like the hatch in the animation, helps free you from the walls of your mind. It fuels an internal, personal expansion that ultimately leads to an external expansion.
Sometimes, when the walls come crashing down, the world feels terrifying. Like the Jaws soundtrack is playing, and out here, in the wide open space, anything could get you.
Your mind clings for safety.
Your arms reach for security.
You might start rushing around doing whatever you can to rebuild those walls and feel safe again.
But what if, instead, you breathed.
Breathe past the fear.
Breathe into the unknown spaces all around you.
Perhaps you take your body outside and quite literally relax into the grass. Notice the flowers blooming. Can you trust the gleaming box in which you’re held? Can you trust in the mysterious possible something that lies beyond it? Can you focus on that rather than the many smaller boxes that seem to be piling up all around you, threatening to run you over?
Breathe.
Look outside.
Isn’t it beautiful?
Can you trust in the creation of beautiful things?
For beautiful things are happening all over the world, again and again and again.
☆
Jupiter hasn’t conjuncted the destiny point since June 21, 2016. On that day, I met my husband.
A few days earlier, I had wished to meet my partner.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but as you likely already know, I don’t really believe in those.
The truth is that all of the most wonderful things in my life - my husband, my cat, my home (just to scratch the surface) - have appeared in an unexpected rush of magic - as if out of nowhere, as if materializing through a swirl of synchronicity - and it was this very fact that I was thinking about last year as the sun crossed The Golden Gate and I drew myself this reminder:
What will happen now? As Jupiter conjuncts the destiny point and the sun crosses The Golden Gate? This particular concurrence (especially with Jupiter and the destiny point in Taurus) hasn’t happened in God knows how long. Hundreds of years? Thousands? This is rare!
Bringing forth a period of verdant constancy.
The new moon is conjunct the asteroid Thalia, and the sun will be perfectly conjunct Thalia on May 30th just before Jupiter perfectly conjuncts the destiny point on June 1st.
Thalia was named after the Ancient Greek muse of comedy, and her name literally means “to flourish, to be verdant,” but in the context of her story, the word flourishing speaks to her ability to inspire the creation of things that last. Whatever happens during this period helps ESTABLISH A NEW ORDER IN YOUR MIND. A lasting order that helps shape the world around you and allow for a tremendous expansion of opportunity and luck.
Stay open to what this means for you. Opportunity and luck may not appear as you expect them to. All things might start appearing in a magical unexpected swirl, or perhaps, for you, it will all seem very different.
True freedom is wall-less. Here, in the green grass, your body becomes like the tree of life itself, full of golden stars and capable of producing everything you need simply by being a part of everything that is.
☆
I wish for constancy. For the light to stop flashing and stay on. For my wings to stop closing and stay spread.
True freedom is wall-less.
What does this mean?
We get to find out.
We get to find out.
☆
To be continued…
Long Story Short:
This period of time - from May 19th to June 2nd - marks the sun’s transit through The Golden Gate of the Ecliptic. This is happening during a rare astronomical conjunction between Jupiter and the destiny point in Taurus. While this is technically a Taurus new moon, it is happening at the cusp of Gemini, during the start of Gemini Season, and your experience during this time is likely to be highly internal - related to your thoughts and words - but specifically, this is a breaking down of preconceived notions and rigid beliefs. It’s the creation of MORE SPACE to allow the creation of something lasting. What’s created now is not just mental. The mental forms the material. These are connected, and I realize now how perfect it is that during a new moon gathering I attended last night, this song was played. All things materializing through a swirl of synchronicity. Even this chapter - numbered 114 - is being published as this new moon falls where asteroid #114 was when I was born. How much of the world around you is coming together beautifully? Trust in the creation of beautiful things and let them form. Over the next two weeks, stay open to the unexpected, and just let them form. Let them form.
The Tip Jar
The Magic Guide is a calling I answer every time I sit to write. Every month, I spend 50+ hours creating it, and I couldn’t do it without you. If you’re enjoying The Magic Guide, please help contribute to its continued creation. Thank you.
