Janus

Dec 29, 2024

It is that time of year when we look back at what happened and nearly the time when we look forward to the future. 2024 was a very challenging year for many people, including yours truly. Many people suffered various hardships, losses, and deaths among family and friends. To some extent, we would say this is normal, but the degree of suffering was, I believe, quite in excess of what is typical of life on Earth.

Janus, the Roman god of transitions for whom the month of January is named. He is sometimes depicted with one face that is old and the other that is young.

We saw senseless wars, destruction of infrastructure upon which people and industry depend, “natural” disasters with poor responses, deliberate deprivation of food and water to innocent victims of bad governance . . . and serious economic mismanagement causing crises for the working classes, not to mention the unemployed. On top of this, cultural conflicts accelerated to the breaking point in many countries. As a consequence, the pendulum began to swing wildly and move in the opposite direction so we can expect huge changes in 2025.

As for me personally, I am going through the third Saturn transit to my ascendant for this incarnation. This is often the time when people retire or reinvent themselves. I have sometimes used the analogy of an actress whose role has to change because the schedule for the coming time features different plays . . . or operas. Being more conversant with opera than Broadway, I might use Lady Macbeth as an example. She is typically portrayed as ambitious and the power behind the throne . . . though I once was friends with an actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company who, on stage, was a famous Lady Macbeth. I asked her how she interpreted the role. She said she did everything out of love for her husband. This is not how she comes across in Verdi’s Macbeth, an opera I have seen on stage quite a number of times.

Now, let’s say the actress has to learn a new role, like Desdemona from Othello/Otello. Both Rossini and Verdi wrote operas based on this Shakespearean play. Desdemona is young, rather on the naive side, innocent, pure hearted, and definitely a victim, not a perpetrator of crime.

If one is stereotyped and unable to craft a credible Desdemona, she will fail in the new role . . . which is why artists have to study the scripts and be coached before they can perfect the new roles.

Here is Anna Netrebko in the Sleepwalking scene from Macbeth.

It could also be argued that the opera Macbeth is somewhat “raw” compared to the sophistication of Otello. Macbeth belongs to the “early Verdi” period and has the strong martial energy of that period. Otello, on the other hand, belongs to the “late Verdi” period which was much more polished. Both operas are quite wonderful but very different.

Hopefully, these two examples help to make the transit clear. The old has come to the end of its journey, and the new is developing. In terms of how this applies to me, I looked back at the two previous transits. Obviously, retirement was not an option in my early twenties. However, there was an epidemic of mononucleosis that broke out in the women’s dining room of the bank where I worked. I was basically sent home for months. They paid my salary, but did not allow me to work. No treatment was prescribed. I was living in New York and started designing costumes and sets for stages of some operas, just kind of for fun. I had just become engaged, and my fiancé was as sweet as they come and apparently immune to mono as was my roommate. Neither came down with it. The marriage obviously never took place, and I ended up on leave from the bank while trying to stop the war in Vietnam through a new position with the State Department.

The second Saturn transit had some parallels to the first. My partner died. I was bereft and returned to Santa Fe, suffered multiple spider bites and was, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed for almost a year. As with the first transit, I recovered completely; but having recently met Gail Barber, became even more heavily involved with music therapy . . . and began writing lyrics to which she composed music for the harp.

Music therapy is probably the most important part of my work. Yes, I wear several hats, but I have developed a method for inducing a safe equivalent of a near death experience. There is no trauma so what is involved is free movement between various dimensions of consciousness where people can explore past lives, emotional patterns, and purposes of life and even of a series of incarnations. It cannot be done remotely which means it is time to build a healing community in which this is one of the modalities offered.

As for the other parallels, yes, I have had three separate injuries/accidents and one sudden infection when grocery shopping and exposed to construction dust. I was mostly bedridden for perhaps a month and still have some recovery to complete for the other injuries. I am not the only one growing older, one appliance after another broke: first the refrigerator, then the dishwasher, then the heater in bedroom, and now the washing machine. I am limping along with a little ice box sort of contraption. The dishwasher was relatively easy to fix, but the washing machine is toast. On top of this, a tree fell and smashed many sections of my fence and over the holidays, two more sections began to fail . . . and five websites were hacked. They are finally back up and running, but the number of issues seems rather excessive.

This said the reinvention has begun. There will be a major announcement regarding training in darkfield microscopy starting in March. I will provide the details within a fortnight because several people are on holiday now. The training will take place in Holland and be posted on a new website for those who cannot attend in person.

Funding has not covered costs so things move a bit more slowly than I would like. There are two people on my tech team and two on the graphics team. Obviously, none are full-time.

Substack is an important platform, and we are heading towards the two-year anniversary. Quite a few new subscribers have joined in recent days and I am grateful for the referrals and sharing. I know that some authors stick to a more narrow area of focus, but I do wear at least four hats which is why I might sometimes seem all over the the map. This said, I do not really identify with either Lady Macbeth or Desdemona. If I had to choose operas in which I do see myself, then my first Saturn transit was basically straight out of the second act of La Traviata and the current situation feels more like the last act of La Forza del Destino.

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Image Credit

Janus: Svetlana Pasechnaya | Dreamstime.com