There's a sad sort of ticking from the clock in the hall
And the bells from the steeple, too
And up from the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say, "Cuckoo"
"Cuckoo!"
"Cuckoo!"
"Cuckoo!"
"Cuckoo!"
Regretfully they tell us
-- but firmly they compel us
-- to say goodbye... to... you!
Everyone get the reference? That's from the Sound of Music, of course. The very first film I ever saw on the big screen - back when English-language films were still kind of a special occurrence in Cyprus - even though Cypriots have always liked their movies.
My Sagittarian, film-buff mother was the one who took me to see it. She insisted. It was of grave importance to be exposed to cinema at an early age. Indeed, to all the arts - some lesser or greater in the grand scheme of things.
Just as she was adamant that I be taken to the circus whenever a company was in town (even though she - and swiftly, I, too,) found such shows deathly dull.
But entertainment wasn't the point. What mattered was cultivating an appreciation for spectacle, self-expression and the celebration of creative freedom.
Such pursuits- and of course, travelling - were always a huge deal for my Archer mama.
And she it was again, who handed me T. S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland", when I was about 13 or 14, saying she thought it would be good for me to read. And so it was, even though, having read it at that age, I had no real clue as to what it was actually about.
Nonetheless, I was sufficiently captivated by the strange collage of imagery, arcane symbolism and modernist erudition to write a graduate paper on "The Wasteland", many years later.
Come to think of it, it was probably the best paper I wrote during those particular studies, and one made possible by my built-in love for the poem, even before studying it. All because of my mother's recommendation.
Meanwhile, two years after I wrote that essay, I went on to study directing at film school, which finally allowed me to create and express myself in the context of a professional vocation. So you might say my mother set into motion an artistic reverberation that will probably continue till I die.
Which is odd, you see, because I have the Moon in sombre, responsible, ambitious, worldly Capricorn.
Herein lies the beauty of any natal blueprint. We are to expect paradox, contradiction, opposition, metaphor, foreshadowing, enigma... yet all the different elements of a birth chart can still be synthesised into an elegant, multi-layered whole.
(Well, with a bit of self-knowledge and effort, that is.)
My mother definitely is the Moon in Capricorn for me. She has always modelled prudent, strategic behaviour - vital, given the weight of the family responsibilities she has carried from her first Saturn Return till the present. We are a large family in which she is the eldest and - according to the Armenian/Mediterranean order of things - therefore consigned to attend to everyone else's needs. This despite her own desire for freedom and all-consuming hunger to see the world.
Yet for all the admirable Capricornian caution, hard work and prudentia, her instincts have always been to ride off towards the horizon, unshackled and free. Because of course, she is also that fiery Neptune in Sagittarius in my natal Fourth*.
I've only just realised this because lately I've had a huge spike in my (ever-free-floating) guilt at my current lack of familial - or even worldly - responsibility. Yet while prepping a client's chart for a reading, I stumbled across a keynote for Neptune in the Fourth house which spoke of an inherent compulsion 'to escape'.
And beyond the minor eureka of: "No wonder I always want to forgo being tied down to anyone or anything", there was the far more major illumination of: "My mother's harboured that desire, albeit in its repressed form, since I was born".
Now let me be clear. My mother is a very responsible human being. She really IS the Cappie Moon. And her British boarding school years have certainly inclined her to be pragmatic and practical about most things.
But what it has cost her to manage a variety of familial burdens has been mine to witness first-hand. And thus, from time to time, the sheer panic that one day my own freedom might be curtailed due to social and familial expectation, is absolutely overwhelming.
At such moments, I catch myself thinking: could I live with the guilt of running away and shirking every responsibility in the book? On the other hand: could I live with the suffocating frustration of being 'dutiful'?
This sort of introspection inevitably leads down the familiar spiral of guilt and fear. But I know enough about my own psychological development now (not to mention, my own astrological transits and progressions) to realise there are other factors at play in the collective which are ramping up my unease.
Not to mention, there are other signatures in my chart - Saturn trine Sun, Virgo ascendant, Mars and Mercury in the Sixth - that actually incline me toward taking charge in areas of service and duty.
Nonetheless, I do wonder, if the day should come that I am asked to put my own needs aside to serve the wider family, whether I will successfully subjugate my own desires per the Capricorn Moon, or gallop towards the sunset, shaking off social moraes and expectations as I go, accepting the responsibility of being true to myself and free.
Sagittarius Neptune in the Fourth would certainly know the answer to that...
* Classical astrology would have given that Neptune to my father (who, interestingly enough, is a Capricorn Sun with a whole lot of fire). But modern astrology is less willing to assign a fixed parental gender to the Fourth and Tenth Houses, and that's the approach I take.
The image above was taken from this site.
