Siberia/Mongolia: My emerging God intoxication

Note: This series is archived here.

I knew the journey would be life-altering. I just didn’t know how. Now I do. Or I’m beginning to. I am reminded of one of my heroes, Wilhelm Reich, who investigated, celebrated, invoked, and promoted, through various experiments, trainings, books, and devices, what he called “orgone energy” (taking its name from the human orgasm) as (what I have called) the primal life force that fills and fuels the universe. Unsurprisingly, given the predatory, and yet entropic tendency of institutional structures to corral and corrupt the freeflowing imagination and behavior of whole human beings, both Reich’s work and his own personal unbridled life force came under official state scrutiny, beginning in 1947 via a witch hunt by the FDA. Ten years later, his books burned and devices destroyed, Reich died in prison, of a broken heart.

Here’s one Reich quote that speaks to me now, as I slosh through the inrushing aftermath of what our guide American leader Bill so appropriately named, Journey of the Heart.

Yes, all our attempts to somehow capture “God” via religious dogmas, fail. There is no way to conceptualize that which underpins all creation, and which, once we begin to feel our own humming aliveness all the way through and forever, can drive us wild, crazy with desire. But for what, what?

Somehow, especially in Siberia, I resonated with a land so pristine that, at least for me, what we call nature throbbed with the sacred marriage between heaven and earth, the endless, intense cosmic dream vibrating energy into and out of  material form. Everywhere, beauty!

Majesty!

The play of strong light and shadow!

Solid exploding into the vastness,

— sun sinking beneath mountain horizon through layered clouds into starlight.

This morning I lay on the couch watching a video of Wilhelm Reich, and marveling at how the life force has been so powerfully activated within me. I wondered: “Wow, this feels like Pluto in Leo! (my generational signature, those born between 1938 and 1958: Pluto (power) in Leo (self)). Wouldn’t you know, in the last few days, I’ve been transcribing old articles from 30 years ago, a five-part series called “We Are the Me Generation: Pluto in Leo.” So yes, “Pluto in Leo” was definitely up anyway!

And then this morning, as I lay there on my back, laptop open on my belly, thankful that later today I would be outside, hands and feel sinking into soil, sun caressing my back, fussing in the garden, grounding this powerful aliveness that has invaded me on return from Siberia/Montgolia, And now, just now, I decided that before I went outside, I would look up the astrology of today. Would it give me any hints as to why this power not only feels so palpable during these weeks, but to why today, especially, I feel an almost obsessive need to give it voice, yes, yes, and more: to howl like a wolf, dance into oblivion!

Well, wouldn’t you know. The divine synchronicity offered up by a universe at play with itself at the very moment of my asking the question — well, I just laughed out loud.  All you need know is that my natal Pluto sits at 6°53 Leo. Then, take a look at the conjunction between Sun and Mars, today, both at 6° Leo (if the chart were a wall clock, then the conjunction is located at about 1 p.m. on this chart). Even more astonishing: at the very moment when I take a screenshot of the chart to include in this post, transit Sun sits exact upon the exact degree of Pluto: 6°53!

Sun moves at a rate of one degree per day; Mars at the rate of one degree every two days. Today is the only day when their conjunction is exact, and to reiterate: it just so happens to sit, this time around, precisely upon my natal Pluto.

As we say these days, “You can’t make this stuff up!” Indeed, given the continuous synchronicities that grace our lives, how could anyone, ever, think that the universe is not meaningful? That our own small lives are not of immense value? That we are not cradled, precisely, and always — willing or unwilling, ignorant or wise, “good” or “evil” — in the strong soft arms of the one big Love?

The naturally expansive territory of Mongolia/Siberia is matched by the natally expanding territory within my own soul — this primal, pulsating heartbeat I might as well call “God,” thrumming into gigantic dynamic aliveness, thrusting down through our bodies to the soil and up to the dancing laughing cosmos; all one, all one.