... is totally new to me. I have no idea whether I'm up for the task of forming coherent thoughts out loud on a public web page. We shall see. After much tinkering and somewhat of an intense learning process (scripts are not my thing), the blogs are up now. I originally created one for a friend and in the process was smitten with the templates that could be applied so I put Movable Type on my site just for fun. Never intended to actually blog; it seems terribly public to this hermit, an invitation for rejection of one's thoughts, grammar (which years of blabbing lazily in email has killed!), content, and just flat-out who one is. It feels like a cross between spilling my guts to an invisible friend and writing an essay that might not get an A+. With the fear around it, it becomes an invitation to growth, an exercise in self-expression (not to mention honing the incredibly rusty writing skills). So I'll give it a shot.

I've finally begun to understand why I have been at such a loss for words the past few years. Delusional, abstract, White Rabbit Neptune has been touching natal Mercury in my chart, affecting my intepretations of reality, my filters, and my communication. With Mercury under the watery influence of Neptune, linear thinking goes out the window and seaming together a meaningful sentence -- or rather, a sentence which properly conveys the intended meaning -- is a thing of the past. It's something like being in a fun house, with all the magic mirrors to hide which image is real and which is a reflection. Very easy to become completely tangled up in what I'm attempting to think or say. Or write.

Ironically at the same time I am going through a Venus-Pluto conjunction and one of the impacts of this is a death and rebirth of my values and beliefs. That piece in itself has been worth the Venus-Pluto ride; there's nothing quite like the thrill of throwing everything out the window and studying the pieces as they drift and flutter in the wind. Cliché, but the Phoenix comes to mind because it's firey and beautiful, and something both Plutonian and Venusian. The mythic beauty of the process is most evident in hindsight, although I'm sure that I'm nowhere near finished enough to even call it hindsight. My beliefs seem to be an ever-evolving thing under this conjunction, and I like it that way. Perhaps it's Neptune who makes an otherwise terribly uncomfortable few years of shedding and birthing feel like magic since he's part of the show right now, casting his spell over the process. The irony of being under these two transits at the same time is that I have no words with which to describe the experience. The Ah ha! moments when Spirit strikes and I discover a new (to me) truth are stuck in a place where I can't explain to anyone what happened or why. And I seem to have absolutely no ability right now to piece everything together into a "world view." If someone were to walk up and ask me "What do you believe?" I would be caught floundering, not for lack of belief or knowledge of my heart and soul, but for lack of any way to explain it. It would take three weeks of solid conversation, during which I would completely exhaust the both of us with my attempts to convey where I think I am. And the next day it would change. So, that's my experience of Venus-Pluto. Well, one facet of it. There is much more, but the telling will have to wait for another day.