Blogging is a dangerous business. You never know when some injudicious slip of the keyboard, a post, a paragraph or perhaps even a phrase that seems a good idea to you might rub raw the sensitivities or hurt the heart of another. And then what can be said? This is my attempt to say it.

I am a public person; I can see it in my natal chart. The infamous Gemini Midheaven Mars can be an annoying loudmouth who spills secrets to the world in exchange for some sense of hope for profit or recognition. The Midheaven represents the part of the blueprint where we are required to give back to society. Get a job, offer a service, have a career, whatever it is, the Midheaven, its aspects, rulerships and inhabitants very accurately describes what we do for our living.

Mars in Gemini is right at home on the internet. I can blog my brains out, spill my wormy can all over the place, tell it like it’s just a story for the entertainment of the masses. And it is a story. Just a story. But whose story is it? Who owns the story of my life? Discriminating between what’s mine and what rightfully belongs to another is the most difficult task I have ever set my heart to.

It’s my job–my responsibility to society, strange as that may seem–to babble whatever trivialities and observations might occur to me. That’s what Gemini is about, babbling trivialities, following curiosity’s fickle nose through the random dandelion fields of life’s interactions. There’s more to the story than that, of course, but you can see it’s a tricky sort of career path I’m on.

I am as careful as I can be with this configuration; with Saturn opposing Mars on the Nadir, I’m more and more responsible over time about what I say, how I say it and who I say it about. However, a Mars-Saturn opposition like this can be described as the classic irresistible force meets immovable object, and sometimes Mars escapes Saturn’s iron grip and babbles outside the bounds of what’s normally allowed.

All this is to express my deepest regrets to any and all parties who have felt hurt or offended by my periodic indiscreet peepings in this space. I do my best to walk the line of integrity, but I am wired for maximum difficulty in that challenge.

You see, my Mars is semisquare my twelfth house Pluto, which trumps any argument. So I must (as in, have no choice but to for the sake of my own survival) cut myself slack for the fact that I am sometimes compelled, willy-nilly, by forces undeniable yet utterly outside my own ken, to speak without real awareness of the consequences of such speach.

While I hate to, I must do as I would counsel another to do in my place, which is, come to accept and expect that despite my best efforts, there will be times (which will decrease in frequency as balance is found, yet still regrettably inevitable) when I’ll mess up.

This will not look pretty or feel good to others. It’s the way I’m wired. It sucks to be me sometimes, ya know?

I have hurt many in my life, including but definitely not limited to my offspring. I know full well that I have, but it was never intentional. I am at a loss as to how to cover the cost of such broachings of trust. Oh the pain, melodrama queen moans, poor me to have to be this ugly out of control self, acting on impulse even when I don’t understand why.

I have left so many behind me, just blundered away from them, not even realizing I was leaving until I turned and they were not there, specks in the distance. I thought they had abandoned me. But it was I who moved, blown by winds of chance or lost in the steps of my own wild dance.

It’s been difficult for me to look clearly at past choices, too busy alternating between protestations of innocence and abject apology to see what was really happening. From my current perspective, I see that I made many indefensible decisions. Yet, in the context of a whole life, and according to the route mapped out in my personal pathway to something I can only call salvation, everything I have done has been unavoidable.

I grieve the ones left behind, and I invite them to come to my couch and catch up, but I can’t undo what’s done or unsay what’s said.

Oh, moans broken heart, where is forgiveness found? And how might redemption start? Hearts, when broken young, harden crooked, and all our hearts break young in this crazy age of machines and devils from hell. How may I be responsible for the broken hearts of my children when I parented in a broken state? Who do I blame? My parents? Broken. Their parents? Even worse. The farther back you go, the more pain piles up. Oh Lord, whoever that is, save me from my history.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive the ones who have trespassed against us. When I do forgive (and I have, over and over), I find that I have hurt them too. My ex hurt me, that’s been my story for years. He was abusive. He called me cruel names and treated me as if I really was the worthless, ugly old boot he liked to call me. This is true. My family breathed a collective sigh of relief when I left him.

Yet I hurt him, too. I hurt him desperately, nearly fatally, I didn’t care. My heart was hard for him. He had softened, opened, cried, begged me to try, to give our marriage another chance. And I pretended to but my mind had been made up and it did not change. Everything that followed was the consequence of my choice to close my heart and mind to the possibility of staying in the marriage. I had the vision of a life free of him, free of the ways he revealed my self-hate to me, and I couldn’t stay. I was compelled to escape. But what was I escaping? I had no idea.

Could he have changed, had I stayed? Would we have survived? Did I squander the opportunity to keep my family whole? Was I capable of doing anything differently than I did? I have believed that I was not. But I did make choices, and I have never accepted responsibility for those choices. And now, I don’t know how to.

I feel sorrow about that. Sorrow, as in, I’m sorry; but I can’t truthfully claim to wish I had chosen differently. I’m sorry that I can’t, but I’m on the path I was meant to be on, that’s plain.

I believe in something like (but not quite) God, you see. I believe in a force that flows through me and compels me to choose in the direction of ever-expanding, ever-evolving life. This force is vast, and it does not take the preferences of the children into account. As long as they survive, they have the potential to thrive, and that’s what this force intends.

We all get what we need in this life. It may not be what we want, and it may hurt like hell, but as we grow older we find good use for the gifts that we were forced by our personal privations to accept.

Here’s some truth. I feel great sorrow and regret for what I’ve done, and at the same time, I am fully aware that it could not have been another way or it would have been. There is no such thing as what did not happen. It can’t meaningfully be pointed at as what should have been; the options have closed. Once choice is made, reality crystallizes. Only futures can be chosen. The past can never be unchosen. That means, we must learn to live with the consequences of past choices.

In the interest of enabling better futures for myself and everything that radiates out from me, that is touched by me and for which I am responsible, I now increase my intention and commitment to speak and acting with integrity. That’s the best I can do, and I am for this moment content to do it.

Back to the concept of redemption. Living with consequences needn’t mean love can never be born in a relationship once trust has been breached. Love is never too late, nor can it be too little or too much. Love simply is, a feeling, a state of being.

I live there. Love is what I am. It’s what you are, too. I see that, I know it. I honour you there. All of you. I’m sorry. And thank you. Thank you all. To my ex, my family, my friends old and new, all who have touched me in so many different places, my heartfelt thanks, and my deepest apologies.

I grieve. I do not grovel. I hope it is enough.

If you want to see larger versions of the photos, click on them. That will take you to my flickr page. Most of them have captions there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 2:01 am and is filed under about me, truth and strangeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.