Living in the Fifth House

There’s going to be a mix of astrology and not astrology in this post… you have been warned.

And I’m going to ramble, but you know I do that…

(and you also know that I like my dot dot dots… those indicate for me when I:

1. pause for thought
2. get distracted
3. get interrupted
4. take a break
5.  ……………………………….. (stop it!)
6.  … to be continued

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Last night,

while still high on the brain crack that is the latest video game which I’ve just started playing – The Witness – which basically places you on an island that is absolutely beautiful, vibrantly coloured,

I’d live there if I could (which I sort of can while playing),

gives you no rules, no instructions, no tutorial, you have to figure out what to do by yourself (kind of like with life),

is deserted (except for statues of people that may not be statues at all… something weird happened in this place, perhaps, before you arrived),

and is filled with all these puzzles, some of which are a piece of piss to do and others that…

have caused a few arguments between me and my partner (we’re both very competitive when we play together, we try to be respectful of the other’s style and stuff but sometimes the other is bloody annoying – especially when they talk, think out loud, while you’re trying to think something through and figure out what you’re supposed to do)

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I couldn’t sleep, my mind was racing like a jacked up turtle, and when it is like that all those random associations it is always making whether I want it to or not can come up with an idea which strikes me as genius even if it’s the spark of a fool who is about to burn a house down while trying to keep it warm.

I often burn my house down, metaphorically… mostly metaphorically. There was that one time (not the time when my mother accused me of smelling of candy floss but it was actually the building on fire) when the wood lintel above the fireplace started to smoke like an old style train.

I was the one who’d started the fire. I was nine or some age like that and my parents let me do it (be nine or something like that…) because… they were pretty shitty parents or something like that.

No one had bothered to teach me the rules of fire building and subsequent lighting. No one taught me how to use matches… unless it was the matches who taught me (by why would they do that).

I’d been doing this kind of thing for awhile without incident, my parents thought it was cute or something like that, and we all enjoyed the lickety-split-spitting of a roaring fireplace fire while tempers flared as we watched TV at night all together like normal families do.

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I used to build firewood buildings on the hearth, then burn them down, and keep feeding those flames because they were beautiful… warm… welcoming…

One night the fireplace had had enough and objected.

My mother was the first to notice things were amiss because of her very delicate nose (the snout of a Lady) and her perfectly precise ability to spot what was wrong with everyone and everything and point it out with a blow horn in case you’d missed it.

The moment my mother paid attention to a flaw, I would react as though I’d been shot and needed to stem the bleeding of guilt of the person who had shot me. Quick, make haste, STAT!, take the blame for everything before someone else has to strenuously work hard to get you to accept it.

My father roared his eyes (no, that should not read as rolled) at my mother and her jumpy minion (me, through his view) – what was the fuss about now and why couldn’t these witches stop brewing up pots of broiling and broiling waters while he was attempting to relax flicking from channel to channel watching bits and pieces of this film and that (changing from one to the other just as you got involved in the story and wanted to know what happened nex………

An argument ensued while the house burned to the ground (it would have if it hadn’t been built of stone) about whether or not there was actually masses of thick smoke emanating from the lintel (there was but evidence… that kind of thing doesn’t prove anything!), and whose fault it was if there was (admitting that there was depended to an extent on whose fault it was).

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Where is the astrology in this?

An astrology chart is made up of sections known as houses, each house represents a segment of life – the 5th house is associated with creativity in all its forms, including children and romance. It is the house ruled by Leo, the Sun, and the element of Fire…

In my natal chart, the 5th house is the home of my ego (the Sun) and of my mind (Mercury), and those two planets are aspected by other planets in other houses,

aspects are connections, a bit like pipes or wires which allow something to flow from one place to another – how it flows and how it is received depends on the kind of aspect.

I recently bled the radiators in my new house and one radiator could have filled a hot air balloon, which explains why it remained stone cold even when the other radiators could have fried eggs.

In the fifth house planets like to play

(I think it was Linda Goodman who described this house as a sandbox, and talked about each planet’s style of play in the sandbox, comparing it to other styles of play of the other planets and how they played together).

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I do like to play,

with ideas, with life, with identity, with myself (rudely and otherwise), with others (which can get me into trouble, especially when they think I’m being serious and I’m not… that deadpan humor addiction is a bit of a curse), with creativity in all of its forms,

that playing isn’t always play, it’s more than that, it’s a way to learn about anything, everything, anyone and everyone… particularly myself.

I play with both ego and mind, which don’t always play together that well,

I have the Sun in Capricorn and Mercury in Aquarius, a typical conversation or word play between these two goes something like this:

Cap: I have decided that we’re going to build a sand castle.

Aqu: Whatever…

Cap: Here is a bucket, a spade, and some wet sand, and here are some guidelines (pulls out a blueprint for a sand mansion).

Aqu: Hmmm… everyone uses those tools and builds those kind of mansions, what if we did things a bit differently to see what happens when you… use your feet instead of hands, and dig down instead of up, or let the sand build itself into a castle… maybe it doesn’t want to be shaped that way, have you thought of that?

Cap: You’re not taking this seriously and this is causing me some consternation. I think I should be in charge of this. Take this bucket and fill it with sand, while I measure out the foundations…

Aqu: Sure thing, I’ll get right on it! (takes bucket, puts it on head… it’s a helmet! Mimics Cap being a helmet-wearing bossy-boss… chuckles, esp as Cap didn’t notice… takes bucket off of head and stares into it as though it contains the universe within it… at some point tries to get inside of bucket… wet sand dries out while Aqu is messing around, but a small portion of moist clumped particles remains… it gets eaten by Aqu who for a moment thought it looked like cake, and did always wonder what sand tasted like anyway…)

Cap: I can’t do this, this is never going to work, these foundations are too unstable…

Aqu: But it’s a sand castle, it’s supposed to fall down… and return to the sea, the earth, the atoms form whence it came…

Cap: (glares at Aqu… but can see the logic in what has been pointed out… sand castles are a waste of time and energy) I’m done with playing.

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excerpt via Which Signs Are More Likely to Ghost You by Nadia Gilchrist for Sasstrology

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Capricorn and Aquarius, Sun and Mercury, aren’t the only players in the sandbox… there’s a bit of by proxy moxie going on too.

The pipes and wires between my fifth house planets and other planets elsewhere include ones to Pluto, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, Venus, North Node, and the Ascendant.

When I play there’s a lot going on between the parts who are consciously playing and the other parts who may not even approve of such an activity.

Like Saturn…

Saturn is square my Sun. It’s the parental figure who walks into your playroom and tells you that it’s a mess, you should be ashamed of such a mess and you must tidy and clean it up immediately or all hell will rain down on you. He’s the boss who monitors your internet activity and may have software on your office computer which blocks certain sites. He’s the person you panic about finding you out, and try to look officially busy for even when it’s your official break time. He’s the presence that is always looking over your shoulder and tut-tutting at whatever you’re doing.

Whatever it is… is never good enough.

He’s the one who tells you that this is for your own good and it hurts him more than it hurts you… you’d like to disagree but one look at his face and you realise that those lines tell a bitter and twisted tale which would eat into your playtime if you asked him about it.

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(my partner keeps playing this song, and it’s working its way into my membrane to become part of my inner soundtrack.

Gambling is sometimes associated with the fifth house… retribution isn’t really Saturn’s thing unless it’s karmic, consequences which have been brewing over a long time)

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As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been interrupted twice by deliveries… by real people rather than the ones inside my head and I’ve had to actually address the public, even though the address went a bit awry…

One was a neighbour whose house has a similar name to the one my house has, a letter for us was delivered to them and they kindly redirected it in person, while wondering if their missing mail had been delivered to us. It hasn’t. So where has it gone?

The other was the postman, and we chatted about this issue of mistaken house identities – the main posties know which house is which and who lives where, but a new person on this route may get confused…

sometimes knowing what is ours and what is not ours, what is our place and what is not our place, what is someone else’s place… can be confusing for us and for others…

this can happen quite a bit when we play because playing brings out a more effusive side, and our boundaries may cross over lines like a crayon which just can’t help itself from colouring where its colour is not seen as belonging.

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That’s the way that I learn more often than not… through trespassing by colouring over the lines,

it used to drive my mother to despair,

(everything and everyone did that, but I didn’t realise that until decades later)

even though it was none of her business what I did in my colouring books she it made her business.

She was a Leo…

[for those who think I talk more about her than my father… I do because she was always there (I once hid in a cupboard to get some privacy – that failed, I can still see her head on its very long neck poking through the clothes to get her face as close to mine as she could)… he was as absent as he could be without losing control of what belonged to him – his family – as he was a Cancer, and if you think the sign is all about caring… it is, just not always about you]

Leo’s are very generous, and my mother often bought me more colouring books than I actually needed. She did that because it made her feel good about herself (I know this because when she gave things to others I got to hear the behind the scenes about what her giving meant to her… and what she expected from it from others in return. If she didn’t get the return she expected for her investment in you… it often made her sad, mad and… her experience of those things was somethign she wanted to avoid and inspired her to try and control what you did with what she gave you. Hence her interference in my colouring business…)

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She was the disapproving boss of me. Everything I did and didn’t do was her business and she took it very seriously until I began to think that it did belong to her, more than that it (I) belonged to everyone, as she often used others as the reason why I should or shouldn’t do somethign, or why something I didn’t or didn’t do was wrong, but myself, and that my business was everyone else’s business but my own.

My trespassing started out with others trespassing… or did it?

From some angles the story of my creation has my very being as an interloper…

(if you start out that way, then how do you alter your course?)

and because I was born as an invader of someone else’s territory, I never had a home of my own. I was always living on borrowed space,

but I didn’t want that as the ground beneath my feet because I couldn’t build anything on it without it being seen as a potential fire hazard which could burn their house down, and if their house burned, so did mine (my temporary one… which was all I knew as a home).

My tendency to burn houses down could be seen as the juices of Pluto flowing along a pipe to my Sun. Good old Pluto, creating through destruction, playing a game which scares the shit out of others (and himself sometimes), because Hades can’t help it…

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I sometimes worry that I’ll… destroy the things which I create. It’s not an unfounded anxiety. I’ve done exactly that on many occasions, too many to count… but they do count.

I was ruminating on creativity, this house, the game (which includes houses that have been wrecked by something… but we’re not sure yet what that something is, most likely it was caused by humans playing with creation and ending up destroying because they got a bit carried away with the game…), and astrology…

As a new idea, a new way of seeing my own natal chart, flashed across my inner screen…

I fell asleep on it…

and woke up with the realisation that this house in which I am living

(and have to keep reminding myself is actually mine, and not a temporary home, or someone else’s territory…)

is the fifth house I saw while property hunting.

Although I browsed many houses online, I only went to see five of them… and shocked myself by buying the fifth.

(I don’t’ think I ever believed that I’d actually do it… that it would ever be anything other than a pipe dream to own a place of my own, one I could truly call home… I’m still not sure that I believe it)

One of the houses I saw was so similar to the one I almost burned to the ground when I was nine or… someone like that… I really wanted it, but luckily I didn’t get it…

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[NB. My partner, who keeps insisting on reading my posts even though I keep telling him in a reasonable voice (yelling) that he doesn’t need to do that (to show me that he loves me), just pointed out to me that we’re actually living in the 6th house – bloody Virgo! (sixth house is the house of Virgo, my partner is a Virgo…) I forgot about one of the houses we visited, the one we saw when we first started looking and which at the time was the only one I ever wanted because it was so perfect. How things change and how easily we forget those perfect things which we thought we couldn’t live without… living in them.]