Take Thyself For a Light
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died.
I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness, to send up the first signal – a white fan streaked with pink and violet, even green. An old man, he lay down between two sala trees, and he might have said anything, knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward, it thickens and settles over the fields. Around him, the villagers gathered and stretched forward to listen. Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached, in the blue air, I am touched everywhere by its ocean of yellow waves. No doubt he thought of everything that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire –clearly I’m not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value. Slowly, beneath the branches, he raised his head. He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
~ Mary Oliver
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
‘You owe me.’
Look what happens
With a love like that,
It lights up the whole sky.
~ Hafiz
Poems of love and light abound, but these two strike me as beautiful illustrations of the Leo archetype, ruled by the Sun, the Light that makes all Life possible in its great generosity. As Mary Oliver say, when we allow that light in energetically, we feel ourselves infused with “something of inexplicable value.” We ourselves become a Light. Being the next of the Fixed signs after Taurus, Leo is concerned with that which is of value. But being a Fire sign, the value is felt more in what shines through one’s personhood, ultimately through the heart, rather than in the accoutrements of one’s life.
And as the Sun is to life on earth, so too is the Heart to we humans, both physically and emotionally, the beating heart of course being what keeps us physically alive, as well as the symbolic center of Love. As the Sun nourishes the leaves, whose chlorophyll absorbs its life-giving light, so the heart sends life-giving chi nourishment through the blood – this an energy healer recently advised me of, as I have had some heart-related symptoms in the wake of Long Covid, which I’ve experienced this year.
The healer had already given me a very effective protocol of supplements and teas to address the prominent symptoms of exhaustion, brain fog, and headaches, but some heart symptoms were persisting. Checking me out with her energy medicine techniques, she determined after quite some time that I didn’t need to change anything outward that I was doing, but simply engage with the unusual practice (we agreed) of circulating light through my blood. As soon as I tried it, I felt a calming, like something falling into place, a state of ease. She advised that I let the light radiate into the networks of my body, which is exactly what the Leo archetype does, radiate its light, into its networks!
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The Heart as Master Connector
As always with the Sun sign archetypes, I’ve been struck by several synchronicities during this time of the Sun’s journey through Leo (where it will be until Aug. 22). One is that, before my heart issues became apparent, I had been called to pull down a book that’s been on my shelf for 10 years, inherited from my ex-husband, who passed away that many years ago. The book is The Secret Teachings of Plants, by Stephen Buhner, a respected plant medicine researcher and author of numerous impactful books, who died just last year. After I started perusing the chapters, I was stunned to discover that the whole book was in fact about the heart. This while I was preparing my class on Leo. Indeed the subtitle, which I had not initially noted, is The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. (Can’t make this stuff up, as they say.) Being endowed with a poetic spirit, Buhner sprinkles the book generously with quotes from Kabir, James Hillman, Henry David Thoreau, Goethe, and Luther Burbank, tying together the physical and the spiritual all in the name of the powerful and truly magnificent heart, pointing to its capacity to hook us directly into the communications of the natural world, particularly plants, but rocks and other life forms as well. In a powerful passage he relates his first deep contact with wild nature after high school, 12,000 feet up in the mountains. He writes: …slowly, my heart began beating with the rhythms of the glade, my tiny life held in the embrace of its older and more powerful waves. And those waves were a language, carrying within them a meaning far older than words, telling me of being wanted, a part of something that would always be. Murmuring that in this place was my place, in this heart my heart. But deeper still, under all of that, there was a substance, some soul food that I needed to become human, that came to me now. I breathed it in with every breath, took it in with every heartbeat. A food as important to my spirit as my mother’s milk had been to my body. And something in me opened up, some tiny doorway within me, and through it flowed this substance. From me, too, it flowed, and the glad took it in and rejoiced. And in that moment, I bonded with the world… |
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Buhner was influenced by author Joseph Chilton Pearce’s pioneering discovery that the heart functions as a powerful ‘brain’ in the human body, with the two operating together as a “heart-mind matrix.” (Calling to mind the potent Sufi teaching, Take a hammer to your head, and pound it into your heart.) Pearce writes in The Biology of Transcendence, “In an efficient biological unfolding, the intelligence of our heart and the intellect in our head should function as an interdependent dynamic, each influencing and giving rise to the other. The breakdown or impairment of this reciprocal action is brought about by its cultural counterfeits of myth and religion. This, in turn, brings about both our fundamental split of self and our self-wrought woes—providing an explanation for why it is that we build bombs with one hand even as we gesture toward peace and love with the other.”Potent words in this time of the blockbuster Oppenheimer film, and relevant, with Oppenheimer having quoted Vedic scripture from the Bhagavad Gita when announcing the first nuclear bomb test. “When a thousand suns explode in the sky, I shall come as death,” the scripture prophesized. (I know, a bit heavy for a blog about joyful and playful Leo! But it’s all connected…Technically, though, the ‘war and peace’ archetypal axis is that of Aries and Libra.)
Buhner describes in his books how the ‘heart-based cognition’ of indigenous peoples the world over, and throughout history, is what enables them to listen to and understand directly from plants themselves what their medicinal uses are. He also writes in detail about the hugely powerful electromagnetic fields of the heart, which extend in 3D around the body in a torus, a semi-spherical fractal that flows continually through space.
“Measured with magnetic field meters, the electromagnetic field that the heart produces is some five thousand times more powerful than that created by the brain. While strongest at the body’s surface, it extends out further than human measuring devices can detect.” The shape of the waves the heart produces, like radio waves, depends on the information they receive.
Buhner invites us to focus outside ourselves and attend to the energetic encounters we can feel with persons, plants, and rocks, stating that when we do so, we feel a range of emotional impressions based on those organisms’ electromagnetic fields, and how these alter our own fields. He writes: This is, in fact, the source of the deep feelings that come from our immersion in wild landscapes…And these externally generated feelings are an important and essential source of emotions for all human beings, for we emerged not only from our mothers’ wombs, but also from the wildness of the world. We developed nestled not only in our mothers’ electromagnetic fields, but also within the larger electromagnetic field of the Earth. A man after my own heart!
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Of Kings and Queens
Leo the lion, being linked with the highest qualities of Light and Love, is thereby associated as well with king- and queenliness, the likes of which include Zeus, the lion Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and King Arthur. In ancient times, the Egyptian Queen of Sheba is described as being the daughter of the Sun, her lineage emanating from the Ethiopian “King of kings,” Jah—Jah being the god of the Rastafarians, found in Ethiopia and Jamaica.
Here I am moved to invoke the late and great (in my book), as well as great suffering, singer/songwriter Sinead O’Connor. When I was developing my class on Leo last month, I typed the above information about Jah in my class notes, and while doing so, Sinead’s devotional song 33 came to mind, as in it she sings praises to Jah. At that time she had not yet left this world.
While we’re on music, with the Leo theme I can’t not invoke the young singer holding the Lion’s share of social media acclaim at the moment, Taylor Swift, whose world-wide Eras tour I finally took full cognizance of after a friend mentioned his friend’s college-bound teenagers had recently seen one such marathon concert (where they contracted Covid, alas!).
I don’t put much attention on mainstream culture (my daughter used to charge that I lived under a rock, but I’d say rather under a magnolia flower, or the rings of Jupiter!), so I had to do some brushing up on the current phenomenon she’s become. When I did, I thought, what must her chart be like? I bet she’s got some Leo, for the performer in her. Turns out she majored in Leo in prior lives (and/or early childhood) with her Moon’s South Node (where she is ‘coming from,’ and has lots of prowess and comfort), in Leo. The ruler of that S. Node is her Sun in the 1st House, in fiery Sagittarius. The ruler of her 5th house of Leo creativity is Mars in Scorpio, also in her 1st House, on her Ascendant. The girl’s got Fire. Hence the sparkly knee-high ‘boots’ and glittering body suits, and her facility with claiming such a powerful world-wide presence.
Some folks have to really work (or do drugs and alcohol!), to strut their Leo stuff, to put out their creative gifts with a confidence and excitement that radiates, but not Ms. Swift. Interestingly, her strong Leo signature is supported by a load of Virgo personal planets, which describe why she’s got such a ‘’good girl” persona, whose only foible seems to be her troubles in love. I guess she’s good at shining her love to the crowd, but not so much with the “one,” at least not in a way that is satisfactorily reciprocal, which Leo very much needs, and then some! With a North Node in Aquarius, this could be a good thing for her, to share the Love with ‘the many’, however. Ultimately, she will be learning this lifetime that it’s not all about her (a Leo error in self-perception.) Regardless, she remains a current cultural marvel of the Leo variety!
But lest we think that Leo energy is all light and love, like all signs, Leo has its off-centered manifestations, for which it is well-known, such as hogging the limelight, and various manifestations of self-centeredness and grandiosity, which make them not care about “the little guys”, other than as members of the necessary Audience. We have a certain ex-President who, while being a Gemini Sun sign, has Leo rising, with both Mars (taking action) and Pluto (Mars on scary steroids) in Leo in his first house of Here I Am energy. Might this type of person perhaps invest in a gold toilet for themselves, Pluto being about purging and eliminating what is unwanted? At least he can be useful in understand the manifestion of Leo that is NOT advisable.
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Light in August
Coming back to earth for a moment, and before I turn to the current astrology (replete with Leo emphasis), I want to share a quote about the unique quality of soft, diffused Light that hits the northern hemisphere at this time of year, which I myself first noticed decades ago when living on 40 acres of land in the remote reaches of western Sonoma County. Walking the other day, sensing this unique vibration of light arising again, the words “Light in August” came to me, from the title of a book by William Faulkner. I may or may not have read that particular book of his in high school (I do recall his famous long sentences, which put mine to shame!), but the title I have long loved. In it, he writes:
. . . in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambency, a soft, luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .[it invokes] a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.
Indeed, I do find a magical quality about August’s unique slant of light.
Astrology of Now
According to writer/philosopher/poet John O’Donohue, in his book Beauty, The Insivisible Embrace, the flowering of individuality is at the heart of all beauty, which is what the Leo archetype is all about. And where individuality flowers, he says, beauty comes forth. “Individuality is the primal masterpiece of the primal artist.” The astrology of now is about this very flowering, inviting us to find enthusiasm for ourselves, our passions, our creative impulses and offerings, and of course, to shower our love and enthusiasm on the world around us. For Leo does need an audience (even if it’s in cyberspace—which marks the strangeness of this Aquarian time we’re living into).
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Speaking of beauty, this Wednesday’s New Moon (2:30am PDT) at 23° Leo includes a conjunction to beauty-full Venus also in Leo, now travelling retrograde during it’s ‘descent’ journey into the Underworld. As mentioned in my last blog, this Rx period (until Sept. 3) marks a time to review our Venus-ruled values, as well as our stories and personal ‘myths’ about how relationship goes, or doesn’t go! It’s a great time to take quiet time to reflect on what your prominent values are at this point in your life, and consider whether you are living into these to the extent you would like.
Perhaps you are still holding to some outdated values, which need a bit of a redirect. Likewise with the notions we have about who we are in relationship, and how others treat us (or we them), or how things turn out in the end. It’s not always easy to take a cold hard look at this stuff, but now is a very good time for it, before Venus reemerges as the morning star on Sept. 3.
Those of you with planets in Leo, or in other Fixed signs that could be squaring or opposing the Venus Rx or New Moon, will experience a greater impact beaming from the current Leo dance. However, all of us could be seeing Venus in Leo accentuating our impulse for style, beauty, and flare. Leo is very much concerned with creativity (including children, the creative fruits of humans in love!), as the light of the Sun is what fuels creation. Likewise, passion, and celebration (another Leo phenomenon) fuel creative endeavors. So relationally, whether that be with other humans, or with the natural world (our ‘other Mother’ as Buhner points out), we will be wanting to bring these themes into our lives in some way.
Adding to this New Moon signature is a tight square from change-it-up Uranus in Taurus, so be prepared for the unexpected, if such a thing were possible. Or, don’t be surprised if you’re surprised! Astrology won’t tell us whether the upsets could be good or bad, but with Uranus, it’s all in the name of liberation, helping us to detach from where we’re stuck, glued to old patterns. So even if there’s a shock of sorts, consider it like an electrical shock – a wake-up call to be more careful, to consider the powers of our words and expressions, and to consider new myths and values by which to proceed. Mars and Mercury now in Virgo are trining that Uranus, so we might experience the Uranian charge in our work communications or daily life actions. There may be an insistent streak of insight from Uranus that asks to be in some way grounded into our hearts and minds.
Throughout any excitement that may arise, I wish you glimpses of August’s special strain of light in these next weeks, and as well, that you be touched by the creativity and beauty of the precious Life around us in the waning weeks of Summer.
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Further Meanderings
Stephen Harold Buhner: https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/about
Joseph Chilton Pearce: https://josephchiltonpearce.org/biography
Why Oppenheimer Quoted the Bhagavad Gita – Sadhguru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eusYd8NOOkQ
Sinead O’Connor song 33 (London sessions version), from the album Theology, published 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GpVKNlw8Q0
John O’Donohue: Beauty, The Invisible Embrace: https://calendly.com/insightastrology/virgo-archetype-learning-group-clone
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All photos copyright Diana Badger 2023