It's
downhill all the way to the ocean, so
of course the river always wants to flow.
The river's been here longer,
It's older and stronger and knows where to go.
~
David Wilcox, "Slipping Through My Fist"
Ever hopeful for increased prosperity
and other cosmic bonbons, I decided to perform the Venus
Santeria ritual that Dana wrote about at MoonCircles.
It sounded so simple - a piece of bread, a smallish candle,
a nickel, a body of running water - but it took me the better
part of an afternoon to collect the right size candle, the
right shape roll. Finally, I had everything I needed to perform
the ritual on the day after the New Moon – on Friday, which
is Venus' day.
So just before lunchtime I wrote
out my wish list, prepared my little roll, and lit the candle.
As it burned down, I followed the ritual’s instructions to
pursue pleasant Venusian pastimes. I had my favorite food
for lunch, and then I replaced my decaying guitar strings,
which seemed appropriately Venusy. Within a couple of hours
the candle burned itself out, and I was ready to - well, roll,
so to speak. The question was, where to release my Venusian
offering into the wild? I had been thinking of taking it over
to Coronado and tossing it into the ocean, but then I reread
Dana's article and realized salt water was out of the question.
Then my husband remembered a
spot down in the valley where we might be able to get close
enough to the bank of the San Diego River to surrender my
cosmic muffin therein. We parked in a nearby lot, trundled
down the street a piece, and found a likely - if rocky - spot.
We picked our way cautiously a few feet down, where I perched
on a rock and hurled the bun. At first, I was dismayed;
the roll fell just at the edge of a kind of breakwater thing
and just sat there for a minute. And then I noticed that the
wind was blowing the water toward the breakwater, and despaired
of my little offering to Venus getting very far at all.
Then, an intervention: a
group of four ducks descended on the roll, pushed it into
the river, and began eating it. "That's... good, right?" I
asked my husband. "I mean, nature participating in the ritual,
and all." "Well, think of it this way," he pointed out. "That
roll is going to get a lot further down the river in the stomach
of that duck than it would have on its own."
I am weirdly (among my astrologer
friends, anyway) skeptical about magic, which is perhaps
why my forays into ritual so often go comically awry. And
yet, they have occasionally yielded intriguing results, too.
Many years ago, not long before I met my spouse, I performed
a New Moon ritual that included writing a list of the qualities
I desired in a mate and leaving it under a burning candle.
A couple of years later as I was packing up to move to San
Diego and get married, I ran across the long-forgotten list.
It read like a resume of my husband-to-be.
Likewise, since performing the
Santeria ritual a couple of weeks ago, it seems that I’m
getting pretty much whatever I ask for – which, believe
me when I tell you, is not a normal state of affairs. On the
penultimate day of last month, for instance, I made a silent
request to Venus to send me one more client before the next
month was through; at 11:00 p.m. the next evening, I received
a Pay Pal payment. That night, we went to a concert featuring
one of my favorite singer-songwriters. I was really eager
to hear him perform a particular song that I adore, a relatively
obscure number, and on a whim, I silently sent the wish along.
Within ten minutes, he performed the tune. And yesterday I
placed a "wish" for three new clients this week.
The third payment arrived this afternoon!
I don’t know. Maybe it’s all
a series of coincidences. But at this Full Moon in Scorpio,
the sign of magical, unseen forces and the power of universal
support, I find myself dazzled by such a generous display
of cosmic goodwill. It’s illuminating to contemplate that
among the Gods of mythology, Pluto/Hades – ruler of Scorpio
– was known as "The Rich One." In astrology, Scorpio,
Pluto, and the 8th house have come to symbolize
the world’s riches – "other people’s money," inheritance
and loans, mysterious windfalls. It makes sense to consider
that what we put forward from Venus and the second house
must eventually find a response from Pluto and the eighth
house.
And yet, it’s very hard for
some of us to rely upon Scorpio’s cosmic trust fund, the enormous
stockpile of goods, services, and enlightenment that sits
waiting for us to draw checks against it. I grew up among
farmers who worked extraordinarily hard for every dollar,
and I definitely absorbed the ethos that hard work alone,
not magic, would summon financial security (although none
of the hard-working families around us seemed especially prosperous).
So I’ve always worked hard and
asked for little. And I think I’m beginning to understand
that while preparation is key to receiving the world’s bounty
– and hard work is part of that preparation – so is the ability
to articulate what you want, and the willingness to claim
it. It’s important to use all your gifts to create a life
that is a sincere offering to the gods, but prosperity is
a dance you must do with the unseen forces of the collective.
You can’t achieve prosperity in a vacuum, not unless you own
a mint. Prosperity is not a closed system; the money
you hope to attract has to come from other people. And the
minute you demonstrate a willingness to accept help from the
collective, the oppressive weight of trying to earn a living
is immediately cut in half. There’s no shame in letting others
carry you part of the way along your journey.
So it’s important to prepare
the Cosmic Bun of Goodwill and Intention, to do the work of
finding the stream, and to drive down to the water to send
it on its way. But once you’ve done your part, maybe it’s
perfectly all right to let your offering be carried along
downstream in the wind, or stuck to the bottom of a boat,
or even in the belly of a duck - propelled by collective
forces that can carry your wishes far beyond the limited reach
of your own, small imagination.
