Constancy is a Beating Heart
Chapter 115
CONSTANCY IS A
BEATING HEART
The story for the Sagittarius full moon time:
June 3 - June 17, 2023
It was a Thursday when just outside my garden gate, I spotted an A.
It was drawn plainly in the mulch by a pair of carefully placed sticks. I hopped the stone wall to get a closer look, and as I stood over the A, I observed how it was formed—by one stick shaped like a y and another like a scraggly, diagonal I.
Was it placed carefully? Or was it simply a consequence of wind and chipmunks at play? Either way, I saw an A. I delighted in its presence. I leaned over it to take a picture, and when I did, I saw my shadow on the earth.
The A was perfectly positioned atop my shadow’s heart, resembling some witchy version of Hester Prynne, but I was no adulteress. This much I knew. So, what did it mean? Because, I decided, it must mean something.
I placed my question in the sky and trusted that in time, an answer would reveal itself.
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“A” Marks the Spot
Twenty-four hours later, I woke from a nap. I woke with words streaming through my mind, repeating the same sentence again and again until my mind was awake enough to process it:
She drove through the stone pillars framing the gate.
The words immediately reminded me of The Golden Gate, that special stretch of sky that’s framed on either side—by stars, not stones—and I looked at a map of the sky. I saw how the sun was passing through the gate at that very moment and how, in just a few days, it would complete its transit through the gate and past the pillar of stars marking its eastern edge.
The pillar is capped by the brightest star in the constellation Taurus—the star Aldebaran. Its red light radiates from the eye of the bull in the sky.
A bull?! A bull. Like the letter A, which evolved from an ancient symbol representing, of all things, an ox.
Over thousands of years, the symbol for ox, which was first shaped like the head of a bull, evolved into the A we know today.
The A I saw on the other side of my garden gate. An A for ox? An A for Aldebaran?
Aldebaran, I read, is one of four stars that used to be considered royal. These royal stars—one in each quadrant of the sky surrounding the earth—were viewed as guardians, protecting the planet at four entry points.
In addition to Aldebaran, the royal stars are Regulus, Fomalhaut, and Antares. Of the four, Antares sits directly opposite Aldebaran on the other side of the earth. Together, they are the fifteenth and fourteenth brightest stars in the sky—just two red giants* shining their red light from the eye of the bull and…the heart of the scorpion.
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Antares is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpio. For at least three thousand years, it has been seen as the scorpion’s heart, and on June 3, 2023, as the sun aligns with Aldebaran on one side of the earth, the moon will be reflecting its light on the opposite side, right by the star Antares.
It’s as though two red As are reaching for each other across the sky, and while western Astrology will tell you that this full moon is in the sign of Sagittarius, the literal, physical moon is aligned with the heart of the scorpion, and it was here, in the constellation Scorpio, where the sun appeared to be traveling when I was born.
The A was perfectly positioned atop my shadow’s heart —the heart of a Scorpio.
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A Scorpion Heart
A scorpion’s heart is different than yours and mine.
Both are pulsing with electricity, pumping blood, and moving oxygen and nutrients throughout the body.
But while the human circulatory system is closed, keeping blood inside the walls of vessels, the scorpion’s heart is open, pumping blood through a wall-less system.
The scorpion’s blood flows freely, mixing with other bodily fluids and forming an alchemized mixture known as hemolymph.
As I type that, my mind flashes forward to Saturday, to when I was on the highway, driving east towards a series of buildings reaching higher and higher towards the sky.
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I could feel the pull of New York City miles before I saw its skyline.
Yes, I could see it too—in the growing buildings, the decreasing space between cars, the green exit signs hanging overhead—but mostly, I could feel it.
The encroaching matter.
The pulsing of all those human hearts.
So many now—changing lanes, passing quickly, honking horns.
A sense of urgency fills the air. It flows through my car’s filtration system and is pulled deep into my lungs. Oxygen-rich blood moves to my left atrium, and I feel my heart quicken. I struggle to breathe—as though I am inhaling all the desire and need pumping not just through me, not just through my husband, not just through the handful of cars we passed 100 miles earlier, but now, through the tens, the hundreds. Each connected to the densely permeated pulsing of millions of lives that together beat as one through a system that despite its concrete walls cannot successfully separate one life from the next.
THE SCORPIONS.
The book title jumps through the glass door protecting the wooden shelves in the hotel room. I slowly open the door and pick up the book—one of three that just happens to be before me now.
On the title page, I run my finger over the image of a Vedic astrology chart, but this is not an astrology book. This is a work of fiction.
It’s Monday now. Forty-eight hours have passed since I was driving towards the city. Since then, I drove north and east and west, over the river and through the mountains, which despite their lush green foliage still feel connected to the vortex of pulsing hearts 133 miles away.
One heart, I think, of this wall-less system.
One heart.
And it’s through this heart—I believe, I think, I know—that we experience the deepest depths of human compassion and empathy.
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The Heart of the World
The truth is (I think) that we are always connected to this heart. Moving through an area of densely packed human emotion can intensify the experience of the collective heart, but the heart is always there. Information is always flowing through it, and the question becomes: how easily do we let it flow?
For most of us, it’s easy enough to imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes. We can play the whole scenario in our mind and think about how it would feel to experience their lives ourselves. But when we do this, we aren’t actually connecting with the heart of the world. We are, instead, still trapped in the bounds our minds even as we try to escape it.
Thankfully, the mind often lays paths to the heart, and imagination can carry us outside ourselves if we let it. All of this is to say that I’m not here to pooh-pooh on empathetic thoughts. Fostering empathetic thinking is an incredibly valuable skill, but also, it is different than empathetic feeling.
Empathetic feeling is born from the experience of One Heart. It’s born from the flow of information moving through the collective body of being like blood through a wall-less system, beating and pulsing and mixing with every other substance it encounters.
And ultimately, to experience the depths of human empathy and the beauty of our collective being, you must leave the experience of your mind and sink into the metaphorical (and often, literal) beating of the muscle in your chest.
When you do, you might be surprised to learn that your heart leads you to different places than your mind.
Your mind is mostly a highly curated, illusory version of reality that tricks you into thinking that the world you see with your eyes is the world as it is. That’s not really a problem. Your mind is doing what it was built to do—help you survive. But because it’s so focused on accomplishing this task, it edits out anything that hasn’t proven useful to your survival to date (or anything that you’ve been taught isn’t helpful to your survival).
As a result, when you think your way to empathy, you’re limited by the amount of information that your mind can consciously process, and you tend to come up against all sorts of ideological stories about right and wrong. But if instead you feel your way through a situation—by listening to your physical sensations, your emotions, and also the random “thoughts” that move through but are often discarded as waste—you can open the door to a lot of information that your mind is wired to edit from view.
As you start processing this new information, you might first encounter more illusions—like shadows dancing on the walls of your mind—but over time, if you pay attention, you can learn to spot these and differentiate between the mind-stuff and the heart-stuff. As you do, you sink deeper and deeper into the heart of the world, and it is here, where you’ll start to experience genuine empathy—not through the imaginings of the mind but through the collective body of beating hearts that together form one heart.
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Just like we have walls in our minds, we also have walls in our hearts.
Structures built to try to control the flow of information through our bodies, like vessels directing blood in a closed system.
When I started feeling all the suffering and intensity of New York City, I quite consciously built a wall around myself. I didn’t want to let those feelings in. I wasn’t interested in any of that. And sometimes, that’s what we need, but other times, we are ready to drop all the armor and FEEL.
During this full moon time, we are invited to break down the walls of our individual hearts to more thoroughly experience the power of One Heart.
How much of your heart is living in the shadows? Hidden behind structures you didn’t even know were there?
What would you feel if you simply…let it all in?
Maybe you’d feel…everything.
Maybe you’d realize that you are strong enough to be a vessel for…everything.
Maybe you’d learn that in feeling everything, there is a constancy that arises from the alchemized mixture of emotion and experience. That life is not just a series of differentiated experiences of fear and pain and joy and pleasure, but it’s also…something else.
Something full.
Something built in the breast of your being that’s capable of staying with you through everything.
A foundational beating.
A pulsing of merriment and good will.
A constant state of openness that allows you to carry the weight of the scorpion, even when you know that eventually, it’s going to sting.
This is not about simply accepting your life and being content. This is…something else. This is…the truth of our collective heart.
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This full moon period—from June 3 to 17—connects back to the new moon time from November 23 to December 6.
That new moon led to the December 7th full moon, which was, in many ways, an inversion of this moon now. Back then: the moon was near Aldebaran, and the sun was near Antares.
To better understand all that you’re processing now, look back at that period in time: November 23 to December 22. I recommend checking your calendar, your camera roll, your journal, your social media feed (if you have such a thing)—basically anything that captures what you were encountering and experiencing at the end of 2022. As you reflect, you’ll likely see all sorts of magical connections between then and now that you otherwise would have missed because our memory? It’s also a highly curated construction of our mind.
This full moon falls at 13°18’ Sagittarius at 11:41 PM EST on June 3, and on the 3rd, the rare Jupiter/destiny point conjunction discussed in the last chapter is still in effect. In many ways, the “energy” of this moon really started on June 1 as Jupiter perfectly conjuncted the destiny point and the sun perfectly conjuncted Aldebaran. I don’t know about you, but I felt exhausted and a bit head-spinny that day. Also, if you’ve been following along with The Golden Broom, I feel strongly that its “results” will continue to play out through this full moon period.
I think…big things are in store. A big heart opening. A lesson in how to forgive, forget, and keep going as our hearts open wider to the full breadth of human experience, and in so doing, the walls of our minds crumble more and more.
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It’s June.
Outside my garden gate, the wind blows.
The robins hunt for grubs to bring back to their nest, and the vine of the poisonberry reaches through a large green bush.
It grows yellow beneath the poisonberry’s purple blooms, and in the mulch, the scraggly diagonal I of the A is nowhere to be found.
And all that remains is a single, solid y.
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To be continued…
Long Story Short:
This full moon time takes us through June 17th. Whatever you’re feeling now is part of a massive heart opening, calling all of us to expand towards each other, to open ourselves not just to our personal feelings but to the feelings of the entire world. By world, I don’t just mean other people. I mean…the world. All of it. This June, you are invited to connect with the Heart of the World, to let its secrets reveal themselves to you, to let its alchemized mixture of feeling take root inside your being as a foundational knowing of…well, I’ll let you fill in that blank. Reflection dates and all that good stuff are in the story above, but in short: this is about your heart. Breathe into it. Listen to it. Relax, rest, be, act. Do whatever you’re called to do—not directed by your mind but prodded by that beating thing inside your chest. Godspeed.
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.
*Antares is technically a supergiant.
