Here Come the Red-Eyed Monkey Demons

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Here you come dragging your exhausted but redeemed ass out of the deep dark forest of symbols. The red-eyed monkey demons fall off your back as you straggle toward the light. Your sunken eyes see wonders they were blind to before your ordeal. Your heart rages with a wild angelic love you've never tapped into before. And as you realize the magnitude of your tough miracle, you feel glimmers of gratitude for the rude tests you had to endure. Maybe you should get totally lost in limbo more often.

Easy for him to say.

This horoscope gets a hearty laugh from me, when just a few weeks ago it might have elicited an eager nod of hope and an expansive sense of participating in a noble transformative spiritual event. I'm not feeling bitter, but I am feeling less naive. I appreciate his intention, and there is truth there, no argument from me. I'm just not completely there yet, too much mired in the middle of it still.

I'm thinking my ass isn't quite redeemed yet; it's still too busy being exhausted.

Has anyone else noticed the subtle Selling of the Cancer Experience that goes on all around us? I'm not saying Brezsny refers to cancer in my horoscopes; I think he refers to more general hardships. But the cancer thing: everywhere we look in media, there's an uplifting and inspirational story of someone whose strength of spirit helped them overcome cancer. It catches on in the public imagination. Every sighting of a bald chemo patient stirs in us a respect and awe of the courage this person must have to endure such times of difficulty. Without noticing it, we adopt a judgmental attitude toward brave patients vs. negative patients, as if the quality of one's "patienthood" gives the end result deserved: brave patients earn their recoveries, negative patients earn their recurrences or worse. "She was always so negative about her chemo, I'm not surprised."

I felt this Selling even the same day I was diagnosed. I was aware of the expectations of others that I be brave and positive, diminish the appearance of fear, be a good cancer patient. I heard stories about women who were blamed for their disease or death due to not having the right attitude during treatment. It raised my hackles then and it does still.

I do still try to be a good patient; I put a positive spin on things because that's part of my nature. But equally a part of my nature is a feistiness that makes me want to shake up people's expectations, to make them question what they take for granted, to reserve for myself the right to be cranky and negative just in case I need to be sometime. Because I expect that I will need to be angry as hell somewhere down the line, and I don't want to be judged for it.

I think there are still a few of those monkey demons still clinging to my back, and it's still a long way to that light.

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning March 15
Copyright 2007 by Rob Brezsny
http://FreeWillAstrology.com