Dancing with Duality under the Moon

As the sweet, left-handed, man with the perfect penmanship used to say,

“perception - it’s 9/10ths of the law”.

The knowing comes and goes. Like the ocean waves around their ankles. Like the air in and out of your lungs. Like the blood in and out of my heart. Rhythmic. Never constant, but dependable nonetheless. Money in and out of her pocket. Compassion in and out of his eyes. Like the Moon in and out of the sky.

I slipped the black travel notebook back into the basket at my feet before I stood up and brushed the sand off my ass. My gaze returned to the journal for a long moment. It was nondescript. Easy to overlook. And yet it had only one job really, one that it embraced with a steadfastness that can be hard to come by in this ever-changing life: It held space. Space for hope and for fear; for experiences and for fantasy; for the grief of being human, as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tide. Between its leather bound covers was a secret place where the magic of putting pen to paper could thrive unmolested by our digitized, multi-tasking, socially influenced existence. I let out the breath that I didn’t fully realize I had been holding. It caught at the end in what could have been the birth of either a chuckle or a sob, but turned out to be neither. With the wry smile of deep compassion for what is, I turned my back to the ocean and stepped into the forest.

When a disseminating moon is visiting 0 degrees of Libra in the 5th house at the moment of your birth, it sometimes feels as if you have thrown pottery onto the wheel that never feels quite ready for the kiln. Mercury is passing the baton to Venus in the never ending relay race of communication amongst the Gods. She has not yet grasped it quite firmly, he has not quite yet released his grasp. Their fingertips nearly touching, wicked sharp intuition crackles in the air. Accurate AF, but ungrounded from logical proof. If you have been born under a moon that is compelled to share her message, and yet exists betwixt and between the temples of Mercury and Venus, your life may be molded by unprovable certainty. Instant recognition of the complementary polarities and divine counterparts that saturate the earth and yet, like two sides of the same coin, can never quite be caught on the same page. These are the realms of 1+2+3+4=10. The places of art and music and geometry. The halls in which you grok well the complicated simplicity of the cycles of creation that words alone struggle to convey. The birthplace of both critical thinking and the archetype of the tormented artist. The land before the schism between science and religion.

You may often want to quit this slippery and Sisyphean task of self expression, but the 5th house demands manifestation. And so, although you may at times feel sick to your soul of being ever misunderstood, time and again you straighten your shoulders, remember to breathe, and reach for the joy of being alive that you know will sustain you, against all odds.

Sweat trickled down the back of my neck as I pressed uphill through the underbrush flanking the forested slopes of the dune. I paused to survey my path forward and saw that I was nearly to the top. I caught a flash of the orange-y, curling bark. The ancient Pacific Madrone was still mostly hidden by the temperate jungle but glittered so brightly in the late afternoon sun that she gave her position away. I smiled, and my chest softened a bit with the love and peace that I always felt near her. This tree was my lifelong friend. My daughter’s namesake. Although I had never before attempted this western approach to her, I knew I would be safe in her arms. I adjusted the weight of the basket across my back and took another look around me. This part of the forest always gave me small butterflies in my stomach and mild tingles up the backs of my legs. A feeling of trespassing somehow, even though this territory has been my stomping grounds for as long as my memory lives. Well, onwards and upwards they say. Wiping sweat from my head and picking some twigs from my hair, I remind myself that following your intuitive guidance is not for the faint of heart.

Pushing my way through a thicket of salal that is over my head and dripping with white, pink-tinged faery blossoms, I step into the small clearing where the sprawling tree grows. Thick orange and brown barked limbs snake through the overstory, displaying stretches of light green where the bark has peeled away. Her always-green leaves rustle in the breeze. I am home. Setting down my basket, I lean into her strength for a moment, cooling my forehead against her cool trunk. I take large gulps of cool water from the bottle in my basket, still breathing a little heavily, as I turn to take in the area behind me. I freeze in place, my chest gripped by the strong startle response of an overactive nervous system long habituated to shocks. Directly in front of me, not far from where I entered the copse, is an impossibly round opening in the thick wall of understory. It is at least three feet in diameter and has a smooth, well worn path that curves back into the forest. There is a figure moving towards me from the dark tunnel.

I stop the initial panic and flight response only by remembering the words of the sweet, left-handed man with perfect penmanship. In each moment we have a choice about how we see the experience in front of us. Choice of perception is our superpower, and where free will truly resides.

In a moment that feels like it lasts for lightyears, I force myself to breathe and will my feet to stay planted where they are. When the figure in front of me opens its mouth to speak, despite myself, I feel my knees buckle and my ass hits the earth. Thankfully my back is against the Tree.

This creature is all at once completely familiar and unbelievably unknown. It is very clearly in the form of what we call a rough skinned newt around these parts. Totally common in this forest. But it is the size of a small dog. And as it steps through the mouth of the tunnel and into the sunlight I see that it has small wings on its back, like the Komodo from across the Pacific Ocean.

At first my surprise hampers my ability to understand language. I feel I am in an underwater movie and words are merely sound waves. I begin to understand that color is being spoken of but I have nowhere to ground the information. He pauses and coughs.

“Are you sufficiently recovered to understand me now?”

I nod. The only response I can own at this moment.

“Good. I am glad you have finally come. Yes it takes time to rise above the limitations of how your work will be received by other humans. However, you are a stubborn one child. Your mission is to write. To do this you must stop caring about how many layers of meanings that words have been burdened by. Look at your beloved Tree. The guidebooks call this color red and yet you can see plainly that they mean red in the wholly inaccurate way that they also call your hair red. That they may call my chest and belly red. It is not yours to worry about how others will interpret your words. Let them own their own perception, your job is to own yours..”

Uhm, okay. “How can these colors be called red in a world where the word orange also exists?”

“Are you still so stubborn? The sweet, left-handed man with the perfect penmanship left a gift with us intended to help you beyond this next valley should you have the courage to arrive here”, he continued in his somehow gravelly yet honeyed voice.

He lifted his head to the tops of the tree, my gaze couldn't help but to follow. Fluttering down was a simple index card. I let it continue its wayward journey until it landed between my feet. I stared at the markings on the card for a hot minute, my mind attempting to make sense of the alpha-numeric seed key in front of me. For an extra mind fuck, my favorite notation was encoded beneath it, the twiddle mark. ~20k it said.

I looked up at the creature in front of me and spoke the only words I could summon…

“Dragons use cryptocurrency?!?”