thoughts on a rainy Sunday evening in May

Seasonally, I suppose, I'm in the September of my years. Assuming that favorable genetics and good luck might yield a man 80 years, or about 30,000 days, I've used up about 21,000 so far, or 2/3 of the allotment. Translating that into a 12 month year, I'm in about the 8th or 9th month, or August/September. I haven't seen a horoscope of day-counting, which is remarkable given the general consuming interest in all things occult. What I mean is, I suppose you could count days, translate the days into the sort of fraction I've just calculated, and figure where you are against that 30,000 day approximate allotment. So although I'm an Aquarius, maybe right now I'm in the Virgo with Libra rising stage of my life. Here's a reading from the LA Times for Libra today: "We dance around the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -- Robert Frost

I can't get much out of that either. Nice, though, to come across something from Frost I hadn't seen before. As the years go by, you learn things just as well as in your youth, I've found. And it's always knowledge tempered with the wisdom of experience, so you're not so quick to credit something you read with infallibility just because it's in print. You've learned that people write and say things for all kinds of reasons, and authoritative assuredness is not often the motivating reason. Quite often it's a projection of what someone needs to believe for very personal reasons. As an immediate example, if someone told me exactly what that Frost quote was supposed to mean for me, right now, I would view it with a high degree of suspicion. Look at all the assumptions built into the interpretation: that this "moving through horoscopic stages" thing I've just made up has some validity, that astrology means something despite the precession of the equinoxes, that the positon of constellations at the moment some guy was born in a rural area in Decatur, Alabama on a cold February morning in 1948 is decisive in his day-to-day reality.

Although I admit - I am a classic Aquarian, as I understand the type. Idealistic, artistic, somewhat aloof, more intellectual than emotional. Yet -- harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding...

I have learned that there is something to this idea of "stages," even to the Gail Sheehy concept of passages. Intuitively it sets in, around 40 or so. You learn that things go away and never come back, that they belong to a certain age, an appropriate energy level, to an enabling naivete. I could cite many examples but I won't. You know what I mean, if you're in July or so. Leo or thereabouts.