ISON…once more

Melanie Reinhart’s Comet ISON blog from last week generated a record response: 198 “likes” and 91 “shares” on TMA’s Facebook page.

Please do read her beautiful analysis if you missed it last week.

It’s not just astrologers who have been fascinated. Astronomers have been watching ISON since its discovery in September 2012 and “knew they had a special opportunity to watch a pristine comet come in from the very edge of the solar system and make its first (and apparently only) swing around the sun.“ (1)

Referring to ISON’s unusual trajectory since its discovery, and especially its startling appearance close to the Sun (i.e., perihelion) on November 28, Karl Battams of CIOC (NASA Comet Observing Campaign) wrote: “We’ve had a crazy year, an even crazier past few months, and a truly insane couple of days. But everything we get out of this will make it more than worth it, and for me it’s just a privilege to have played a part in this unprecedented and extraordinary event.” (2)

(Here’s an awesome video of ISON’s perihelion. Remember, aside from its current trivialized usage, the word “awesome” is connected to a capacity to feel awe. “Genuine awe is when something is beyond our capacity to rationalize it; it is incredible and we only experience it at the level of our soul.”) (3)

And here is Melanie’s graphic from last week for November 28.

As Melanie noted, the mystic Rudolf Steiner wrote provocatively about comets. One of his ideas is that comets all have a specific purpose and arrive in our solar system at the cosmically ordained time. (4) Many are millions of years old; they travel into the inner solar system from the Oort cloud, or, as recently discovered, from the asteroid belt. (5)

Steiner sometimes referred to comets as connected to the astral body, i.e., a subtle realm connected in many energy systems to the emotional body.

This view of comets coming into our solar system and collecting astral/emotional debris has long appealed to me. (With natal Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in water signs, I seem to cling to emotional debris.)

In the spirit of recording immediate impressions of such a magnificent and mysterious celestial omen, I have a few personal stories.

On November 25, I caught a glimpse of someone with whom I have a rich (and incomplete) emotional history, someone that I hadn’t spoken to (or even seen) in several years. I asked for a meeting, which was a surprise; he said I was very brave (I was). The conversation played out over the evening and was so, so helpful — soothing, forgiving, honest. I left feeling so refreshed, as if a stubborn scar had been truly, surprisingly, magically transformed.

On Thanksgiving Day, I had dinner with a few family members, with whom there had also been awkwardness and unspoken regret and recrimination strongly in the air in the past years. We spent three days together and it was also an amazingly comfortable and easeful time. At first, I was thinking rather ordinarily that time really does heal wounds, and I did notice planetary symbolism that spoke to the happiness and graciousness we all felt. (6)

But then I remembered the comet! And had a whole new view of how this happened — the collecting of emotional residue and clearing the energy felt absolutely true. I also believe in the possibility that our simple actions and experiences can be magnified and offered for the good of the whole. Hail ISON!

I spoke with my sister Kate, an astrologer in New York (I’m in Oregon). She had a similar experience on Thanksgiving Day. She spent part of the day with long known friends, connections that had also previously been colored by the hint of remorse that also disappeared; the emotional air was cleared and fresh and new for them as well.  (See Footnote for another astrological detail.) (7)

As Melanie Reinhart wrote last week: “If we can allow our imaginations to sense and feel the meaning of the images suggested here, we participate in a deeply personal way with these energies. ‘Our’ meaning is unique to ‘our’ journey, and we do not need to impress it on anyone else, as it is not ‘the ultimate truth.’ The experience of meaning is sufficient unto itself.”

We’d love to hear your ISON stories.

Footnotes:

(1) NBC News

(2) ISON Campaign

(3) The Path of Awe

(4) “Slightly later, on 18 April 1910, Steiner discussed these points again, more briefly and from a slightly different angle: ‘Just as the movements of the planets circling the sun correspond to the regular events in the evolution of humanity, so the appearance of a comet corresponds to an influence that runs counter to the regular events. Rosicrucian research has demonstrated that every comet exerts a particular influence on human evolution.’”
RS Archive

(5) From an article dated August 2, 2013: “PARIS: Astronomers on Friday said a vast cemetery of comets lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, some revived by a nudge from the Sun after millions of years of dormancy, a finding that would overturn conventional thinking about these wanderers of the Solar System.
‘We found a graveyard of comets,’ said Ignacio Ferrín of the University of Anitoquia in Medellin, Colombia. ‘Imagine all these asteroids going around the Sun for aeons, with no hint of activity. We have found that some of these are not dead rocks after all, but are dormant comets that may yet come back to life if the energy that they receive from the Sun increases by a few percent.’ ”
Science Tech Daily

(6) As for the day itself, you may remember that Jupiter in Cancer, dispositor of the Sun in Sagittarius was opposite Venus in Capricorn that day (of ISON’s perihelion).

As for the personal charts: I have late Scorpio ascending; the visiting son has early Scorpio ascending. His progressed Ascendant has come to the degree of my natal Ascendant. His progressed MC degree has also come to my natal MC degree. His father (my former husband) has Taurus Ascending natally; progressed Venus has come to 6° Virgo, my natal and our son’s progressed MC. (Progressions move slowly and, when precise, have a significant impact.)

(7) Interestingly, in this case, her friend’s progressed Venus has also arrived at her natal Ascendant degree — a story, as in my case, of progressed planets in one chart coming to a natal angle in the other’s chart.