After what happened last week, reading this helps me understand.
From http://www.bigskyastrology.com/mars-conjunct-pluto-sometimes-youre-the-bug/
MARS CONJUNCT PLUTO: SOMETIMES YOU’RE THE BUG
Posted November 14th, 2014
One morning last week, just as the transiting Mar/Pluto conjunction in Capricorn was rising, I was falling. I had just set down the cat’s food dish, and when I stood up, a violent spasm in my lower back sent me crumpled to the hard, tile kitchen floor. As I lay there writhing in agony, the cats ambled over to investigate. Spike apparently decided that if I was screaming, I was still alive; so he calmly started eating his breakfast a few inches from my ear, in a show of Mars/Pluto ruthlessness and Capricornian pragmatism.
As Mark Knopfler once wrote, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” When Mars and Pluto come together, anything soft and slow is going to get squished against hard, fast-moving reality. Much of what happens during this roughly one week transit seems sudden, like a slap across the face; but the underlying cause has been building for a while. I’d known for days that I needed to do some yoga to stretch things out and relieve the building tension in my back. Driven by deadlines and obligations, I’d ignored the warning signs and let circumstances twist me into a pretzel. The next thing I knew, I was crawling to the sofa to wait, powerless, for the next spasm.
Transits involving Pluto always reflect our part in a larger, collective struggle with power and control. Struggling for control creates fear and tension that collect deep below the surface until something—say, Mars—sets off volcanic emotions that melt them into hard, unyielding glass.
Even the transits of fast-moving planets like Mars can express themselves potently. When Mars and Pluto, two hard-edged characters, come together in any kind of aspect, little bugs like you and me need to look both ways before we fly across the road. We rarely see the windshield coming until we’re already on the floor.
The solution is to be a smarter bug. Fly higher; the hard, fearful places are down low, and that’s where the danger is. Don’t let yourself get sucked into petty disputes. Fly faster, in the direction of your own choosing. Recognize when you are powerless, and retreat to fly another day.
Transiting Mars/Pluto aspects: conjunction (Nov. 10, 2014), sextile (Jan. 30, 2015), square (March 11, 2015), trine (April 21, 2015), opposition (July 15, 2015). These are the dates the aspects are exact; the influence of them is usually felt about one week before and after the exact aspect.
[from Faelind – Conjunctions are the strongest influences, usually beneficial, but depends on one’s chart. Sextiles are harmonious or favorable, but require effort. Squares are challenging and stressful but, like obstacles overcome, can build character. Trines are most harmonious and require no effort on your part to bring ease. Oppositions are most unharmonious and bring strain and separation.]
On Monday, November 10th beginning mid-morning and lasting until early evening, I had such a horrible pain in my right side I thought about driving myself to the hospital. I didn’t feel it was a heart attack (as if I would know-LOL), but the pain was excruciating. I could not understand it. I was afraid. Afraid of being ill, afraid of dying with so much left to do, afraid because I did not understand what was going on. (Methinks this may have been what AH PUCH the God of Fear, the card I drew from the God deck during class on November 9th may have been all about.)
I didn’t drive myself to the hospital, but continued working, and stayed afraid all day. When my SO got home from work, I told him about my pain and asked him did I look all right? He responded, “Do I need to take you to the hospital?” and then told me I better not be dying, he wasn’t having none of that – we laughed…
I usually called my Dad on Monday’s because I am so busy on the weekends. I didn’t call him that night.
Tuesday evening, my brother, Dean returns from an out-of-town trip and is called by my step-sister who tells him that Dad is doing really bad and she is scared. My step-sister, (who seems mentally challenged) has been staying with my Dad to help him as he had gotten weaker and weaker and more winded just walking from room to room. The hospice people saw my father each day, but were not there in the evenings. Dean tells her to call the hospice nurse and he meets him there.
He learns from the hospice nurse that my Dad’s right lung has stopped working and is either filled with fluid or the lining has filled with fluid and has collapsed the lung. My dad never complained of the pain but the nurse tells my brother that my dad is in a lot of pain. The nurse gives my dad a breathing treatment and morphine to calm him down so he can breathe a little easier and to help with the pain. My Dad, ever as stubborn as I am, does not want to sleep in his easy chair where it is easier to breathe, but wants to go to bed.
My brother calls me when they have just put dad to bed and tells me the nurse thinks he won’t make it through the night. It is too late for my sister or I to fly there from 1,200 miles away, so we can only cry from afar.
My dad doesn’t wake in the morning. It is expected. It is the day after Veteran’s Day and 12 days before I was to fly home to visit him.
Since my Father passed, I have thought about that pain and have been hard on myself for not understanding what was going on. Why didn’t I know it was about my Dad? Why didn’t I realize that it was my Dad’s time so I could get a plane ticket and fly home Monday to see him before he passed? I’ve been very hard on myself for not knowing the signals, for not interpreting the signs, for not being in touch with the ‘otherworld’ that I am so much a part of. Why hadn’t I called him Monday night? Even if he couldn’t talk for lack of breath, I could have talked to him…
My sweet cousin calls me when she is told the news. I had called my Uncle to let him know. I tell her about the pain, and she said for as long as I’ve known you, you were always in touch with the otherworld. But she encourages me to be gentle with myself for not knowing what it meant. Even you cannot always understand the signs, she said. (Methinks she is the KWAN YIN, Goddess of compassion that I so needed at the moment, and who appeared to me when we pulled Goddess cards at class November 9th.)
When I tell my SO how disappointed in myself I am that I did not put 2 and 2 together, he says, maybe you should look at this differently. “Maybe it was your Dad saying good bye to you the only way he could.” (Perhaps he is my Kwan Yin too…)
Tonight I read this excerpt from Mama Donna Henes and break into hard tears…
“The relentless bombardment of losses that batters us in every area of our lives in midlife effectively strips us of any unrealistic, immature confidence that we once might have had that we were safe in an unchanging and dependable world. Though we may have been shielded by our youthful sense of indestructibility as well as by our notoriously death-denying culture, we now understand, because we have experienced it, that nothing and no one stays the same forever, that all things must end sometime, that shit does, indeed, happen. We have seen what we have seen.”
Death is the shadow of life and we have seen what we have seen.
Embrace today. It is all we have.
This too, shall pass…
Tree of Knowledge Coven 