Welcome to Mirror in the Sky!
When I started Undersky, I knew I wanted a place to post words and images that inspire me in the work of astrology. I struggled to come up with a name for this blog, but one day when I was listening to music in the car– inspiration suddenly struck!
Mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tide?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in Colorado in the mid 1970s before she hit it big with Fleetwood Mac. In the song, she is at a major point of change in her life– wondering if she should keep following her dream to make music, or if she should change paths instead. I talk to people every day who are facing those pivot points in their lives, just like Stevie. She found some kind of solace in asking the moon, that mirror in the sky, for deeper guidance, and she went on to embrace her destiny as one of the witchiest women ever to make rock music. When you are faced with one of those points of change, and you are looking for a sign, what will you do?
I am tantalized by the idea of the sky as a kind of mirror for us. In his formidable textbook Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, Chris Brennan overviews many of the philosophical issues in ancient astrology, discussing at length the sorts of positions that astrologers took toward how the planets and stars act on the affairs of men. Are they signs of some deeper meaning, some larger order in the universe, or are the positions of the stars the literal causes of the things that happen to us? We could talk about this for ever probably, but no book has influenced my thinking on this question more than Richard Tarnas’ monumental work on archetypal astrology, Cosmos and Psyche. In that work, Tarnas muses that the universe may be full with a certain kind of consciousness and order that we cannot fully perceive. Much like the hands on a clock indicating the time, what if the positions of the planets and stars are telling us what time it is in the universe– a time for turbulence, a time for reconciliation, a time for bravery, a time for dreaming?
Let’s discover what the stars are saying to us. I am excited to explore the mirror in the sky with you through Undersky.