Thank you to my friend Sarah Fahey for the above poem via The Irish Way that she had posted in her Facebook group “Love Yourself First”. I feel like it is perfectly said, as we work to connect with our true selves, shedding the emotional wounds that have us vacillate between deflating and inflating in search of inner peace. For many of us, it isn’t just making sure to love ourselves first, but loving ourselves for the first time.
I had this whole idea of what I wanted to write about today, but after several hours of writing attempts, words just weren’t falling into place. It was all just off…coming from my mind and not my heart. I had a sense of what I should instead write about, but I wasn’t too excited to go there, yet here I am about to go there.
My career background is in accounting. I’m a Certified Public Accountant, though I haven’t practiced “public” accounting in two decades, instead working mostly for private companies, while dabbling in other work here and there, as well.
I worked in banking ten years prior to working primarily in accounting. It was there that I got the idea to change my major to accounting. I worked full-time and went to school part-time at night, for 8 years, to earn my bachelor’s degree. Then I spent the next 6 months studying for the CPA exam at night. You need to pass at least 2 of the 4 sections to get credit for the exam. Then you can take it again 6 months later, after which you get credit for any new section you pass until you’ve passed all 4. I passed 3 sections the first time. The section I didn’t pass was the section on laws. Due to lack of time, I had made the decision not to study for that section because it would be the most likely passable, not having studied at all. It was nice to only have that section to study for the second time around, and I did pass. It was by far, the most boring section to study for. Very dry.
There was a particular accounting firm that I wanted to work for, and I interviewed with the managing partner shortly after graduating. Ugh. I couldn’t stand him. Total misogynist, I wasn’t sure why he was bothering to interview women at all, other than there must have been some pressure to be diversified. I didn’t get the job. 1 year later, after I had passed the CPA exam, I got a call from a woman at the firm. I assumed (because she was a woman) that she worked in Human Resources. She wanted me to come in for an interview. I said, “I already interviewed with your firm (knowing by then that every firm had a “vibe” and I obviously wasn’t a fit for theirs) and wasn’t hired, so I’m not so sure I should bother coming in a second time.” She said this was for a different department and she was sure that she wanted me to come in. She was a CPA and the manager of that department, and she offered me the job. I loved her “vibe” and I accepted.
As I began work in the firm (required to work in public accounting for 2 years, in addition to passing the exam, to earn the certification) I quickly regretted my decision to have gotten a degree in accounting at all. Living in Michigan and not being a cold-weather enthusiast, I had imagined that I would work the expected 60+ hours a week during tax season (loosely January-April 15) and take off all my banked-up time during the summer, when Michigan is lovely. The problem was that there really is no time when it is considered acceptable to take off your banked up time, and even leaving more than an hour early during non-tax season entailed a walk of shame…praying no one sees or worse, calls you out as though you are slacking.
Most of the women employed there seemed to work endless amounts of hours just to register on the radar of (at the time) the all-male partners. The competition among the few was fierce, and I had no intention of ever working quite that hard. To be honest, the men never seemed to be working very hard at all. Perhaps they had put their time in during their younger years, and now they could sort of kick back and delegate.
I could see all the energy at play there and I didn’t like it. The younger men working for the firm were either super charming, jumping through hoops to be everything to everyone and often on the “social committee” of schmoozing prospective and existing clients, or they came with a family name (i.e. a large network of connections in the business world), in which case the partners, were schmoozing them. I saw similar dynamics with the more physically attractive female employees at the firm. It seemed common for them to be farmed out to charm the older, primarily white business owners the firm wanted to attract or retain. If one didn’t have the schmooze factor, they best be at their desk mulling through stacks of files or knee deep in research in the tax law library. Knowing I didn’t have schmooze, I was surely destined to die a slow death in the tax library if I wanted to move up.
The manager who was training me was the woman who hired me. She was amazing. Patient, brilliant, and worked a gazillion hours. She barely ever left her desk. In my opinion, the partners at the firm treated her as a work horse, no problem piling it on with very little acknowledgement for what she accomplished. As though that was her place. Why would someone churning out so much of the behind the scenes work, that went into the accolades they would eventually get from their clients, be that little regarded?
It didn’t take me long to figure out that our clients didn’t just get wealthy by working 9-5 jobs. They owned businesses. They owned real estate investments. They owned stocks. I had read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and I understood the power of passive income. Most people can’t work enough to become wealthy on wages they collect for every hour they personally contribute to the work force.
I had already started to accumulate wealth from all the passive streams I mentioned above, but it would take a couple more years to get to a point of realizing all the money in the world can’t buy happiness. Not that I had all the money in the world, but I had more than I ever thought I would, and I was still not loving life, nor did I think having a boat load more would make it any better.
I think we are here to grow as humans, and having more money would have likely made me isolate more, never having to engage with anyone. As good as that sounds some days, I don’t really think that would have had me evolve in the ways I have the 25 years since.
Over the 10 years that followed that chapter, I added a couple more chapters, that ultimately left me with a home equity loan just under $90,000, all of which had been invested into a business that I had thought was my spiritual destiny. I had two business partners (as well as less directly, all of our spouses), but none of them had equity to invest, and we were so sure that the business would be successful, I just kept funding the business thinking when we made it big, we would pay it off first before reaping the rewards personally. Also, my partners were my favorite people on the planet, and I loved the idea of us all succeeding together. No doubt, some of this fairy tale thinking resulted from how easily everything had happened for me prior to that point. It isn’t that I hadn’t worked hard, but I also just happened to have made the right choices at the right time repeatedly. Everything in my life had rather magically unfolded prior to 1998. Yet, the choices I had made since that time had resulted in me cashing in/spending everything, with no passive income sources remaining whatsoever.
Why I want to talk about this is because it all came to a head in 2008, which is when Pluto transitioned into Capricorn, where it stayed until yesterday, January 20, 2024.
While my financial situation declined dramatically, the responsibility, maturity, and resilience I gained is priceless. How much is a backbone worth these days, anyways? It cost me significantly. The start of the decline in one area of my life was directly related to no longer wanting to participate in the “money” game I had finally learned the rules of, but apparently, I was going to have to experience the extreme opposite of success to come into balance. I say this because no matter what situations you have experienced in your life, it is possible to rebound, and will likely involve some vacillating back and forth to arrive at the center of who you really are. Try not to judge those things as bad or good, but rather as necessary experiences outside of yourself to calibrate into your true, internal, soul directed, self.
Most “investments”, at their core, involve some level of someone taking less for someone to get more.
· Real estate house “flipping” (where buying a downtrodden property to improve and sell at a profit is the result of someone having let a property decline for what could be a variety of reasons in which they lost something).
· Rental properties (where someone not able to purchase a house, rents for more than it would cost to buy, so the person who could afford not just a house to live in but an extra one to rent to someone else can profit).
· The stock market (where corporations cater to the investors, otherwise they won’t have investors).
· Owning a business that you make money at over and above just the hours you personally work (hiring people who work for less than you can earn elsewhere and/or purchasing things made cheaply in other countries to sell for a much higher amount in this country, etc. so the owner can make the most profit possible).
Every single one of these has someone on the downside for someone else to be on the upside. In SOME of these situations it truly is win-win, but that is not most commonly the case, and the greedier people become, the more disparity there is among the situations necessary for them to acquire what they want.
At first, I felt completely justified in that. I had a degree in business administration and loved the concept of economics. It’s survival of the fittest. Anyone could do what I had done, right?! Yay capitalism. Except in my core, I knew it wasn’t right. Necessary, perhaps to have all the things and go to all the places I wanted to experience, but could I live with it? In my mind, I justified, yes; in my gut, no. The inequities really bothered me. Not only in the higher echelon, but even among those I rose above in terms of wealth and what it could buy me. I wasn’t any happier stepping on the backs of others to get where I wanted to go, then I was unhappy about the people stepping on my back to get where they were going. From an astrological standpoint, I can thank my Cancer moon for that. It’s in my 7th house of personal resources (money, possessions, values, and skills). It is said your moon sign (your mushy center) rules your emotions as it is, and Cancer is the most emotional of the signs. It’s no mistake that many millionaires are psychopaths with little empathy. Me on the other hand, was drowning in empathy. I was resentful of people who seemed to think they were better than me because of their financial situation, yet fearful of coming across as though I thought I was better than anyone who was in a lesser financial position than me. Truly, I was a hot mess of inferiority.
As of Saturday, Pluto has now transitioned into Aquarius.
Even though I don’t know much about astrology in terms of explaining it in detail to another person, I do feel there is no way astrology isn’t an intricate system of knowledge that was designed to be accessible to help us navigate our lives.
It would be interesting for you to note where the last 15 years has gotten you, while Pluto was traveling through the sign of Capricorn.
It is worthwhile to run your birth chart, if you haven’t already, and to start to get familiar with it, to understand what planets are in the 12 different houses of your chart (and what the houses even mean) not only at the time you were born, but also how their current placements in the sky are affecting your life at any given time. Over the last 25 years, I have gone from knowing what my sun sign is (Sagittarius) and thinking how accurately it described me at my inner self/core, eventually to realizing that my rising sign (Gemini) was equally accurate in describing my personality/identity.
You can run your such charts for free at Astro.com, but also you might want to speak with an astrologer. I put a couple resources below of astrologers I have recently worked with.
Some planets are more personal as they relate to one’s chart, but Pluto affects the collective of people on the planet. Pluto varies to how long it is in any given sign, but it will be in Aquarius for the next 20 years (except for a short period this fall when it retrogrades back into Capricorn for a hot minute…ending a short time after the election, before getting back into Aquarius for the next 19 years).
The theme of Pluto in Capricorn had a flavor of “taking responsibility” for our lives and getting in tune with our priorities. The theme of Pluto in Aquarius will have us become more aware of inequality and injustice. I’ve heard it described as our focus narrowing even more toward independence and freedom, emancipation, renewal, decentralization and networking. Essentially we will move away from individualism from an egoic perspective/comparison/competition and personal accumulation of wealth and power in favor of a society that supports the collective, in which everyone has the possibility of finding their personal peace. That will be accomplished with breakthroughs and science and psychology. Personally, I think this will happen with people being able to heal their childhood wounds and become more emotionally aware. The insights are already far beyond what was talked about even a couple years ago, and our understanding of how the brain developed and can essentially be re-wired has progressed lightyears in a short amount of time. Minds and mental structures will be transformed in a blink of an eye. A spiritual big bang that will transform the inhabitants of our planet in a way another big bang once created it. We will save ourselves through the arrival of Christ consciousness one person popping at a time. Maybe not next week, but increasingly as time passes.
When my ex-husband and I bought my dream house in 2002, my oldest daughter was 4 months old. It was in foreclosure, and we paid $50,000 below market value because the owners were in the process of foreclosing. They had an equity line of credit (also known as a second mortgage that allows the owner to borrow on the increased value of the home over and above the amount of the mortgage loan they acquired when they purchased the property). The bank who had funded the second mortgage agreed to take pennies on the dollar to pay it off, which enabled them to sell it for just enough to pay off their 1st mortgage.
It isn’t common knowledge, but banks make a fortune on these kinds of loans and the rewards outweigh the risks in a reasonably growing market. But, it was just this type of lending (among other shifty practices), that would eventually get banks into the situation they found themselves in when the housing bubble collapsed 6 years later (which is notably NOW right back to, if not worse, than where it was back then). Banks became quite loose in the appraisals they considered as accurate value on homes. Because it seemed as though real estate prices were skyrocketing, some people felt more comfortable than they otherwise would have been to purchase in a market that seemed like the sky was the limit. If someone had bought a home for $100,000, suddenly 5 years later it was now valued at $200,000 and the homeowner might be allowed to borrow around $80,000 extra on the increase in value. But when the housing bubble collapsed, it wouldn’t have been uncommon to suddenly only be valued at $90,000, not even enough to cover the original $100,000 owed on it, much less the $80,000 extra someone had borrowed to start a business or remodel or pay off other credit cards with higher interest rates, etc.
I apologize, in advance, if the next few paragraphs are too “number-y” but it’s a pertinent rabbit hole of information.
In addition to the $50,000 below value price we paid, we also put $50,000 down on the purchase of the house, which meant we had $100,000 of equity. The house was valued at $250,000 and we owed $150,000 in the form of the first mortgage. A year into owning the house, supposedly it had gone up in value to $300,000. That was based on what other similar houses in the area were currently selling for. The mortgage company offered us an equity line of credit in the amount of $90,000. $300,000 x 80% = $240,000 less the $150,000 we owed. It was a far lower interest rate than a credit card would be, and I had the (not so) brilliant idea that we could use this as start-up capital for a new business that friends and I had been discussing, sure it was going to be a success.
Three years later, we had accumulated a balance on that equity line of credit of $45,000, which I felt panicked about because the way things were going in the business, we were never going to be able to repay that amount of money. I decided we should double our efforts and go big or go home (note: we should have gone home). We did another print run of all our products, including an additional version of our book geared toward boys (vs. our original book which featured all girl characters). We started carrying other like-minded people’s children’s products to help everyone get where we were trying to go, and created a magazine/catelog (which was absolutely gorgeous) full of articles about kids, spirituality, and the entering of the Aquarian age, that we printed/shipped out at our expense all over the country. Surely that would increase our exposure, and we were prepared to be filling orders like crazy. Except the orders never came in anywhere near our expectations. I had used the equity line to pay a couple people to help do our busy work, so we could be on the phones reaching out to new potential stores in hopes they would carry our products. Shipping costs were killing us. We brought on a business consultant (using $28,000 I had in an old 401K and $2,000 one of my partners had in theirs). That is a whole other story, part of which I’ve shared before, and didn’t end up turning our business around, but rather resulted in us realizing our increased efforts were futile, which led to a decision to wrap up our operations entirely.
So, after 5 years of efforts, the inventory now sat gathering dust in our office in my basement. My ex-husband and I had a $90,000 balance on our home equity line of credit. I had returned to work as an accountant for a restaurant who had been tasked by their silent investors to come up with a budget for the following year, something they had not had to do in the past.
Meanwhile, each of us former partners in our new-age business was making a $100 monthly contribution into the now defunct business, to go toward paying off the debt, which was never going to make even a dent in the balance. At that point I was just making the interest payment, which was just less than half of what I was collecting, and building the rest in our business checking account while obsessing to come up with a better strategy to get it paid off.
Interestingly, after creating the annual budget for the restaurant, I realized there was no way they were going to be able to stay in business. The owner was collecting payroll taxes from the employees and not making the tax payments to the state and federal institutions to which they were due. I couldn’t see how they could even be in a positive cashflow position (since their monthly expenses exceeded their monthly revenue), much less pay those back taxes. In addition, the owner was kiting checks, meaning he was depositing checks, that he knew would bounce, into an account at another bank then the check was written on and taking advantage of the couple of days it took for them to realize the funds weren’t available to cover the check, so he could access funds to pay other bills. That’s a cycle that can only last so long. I didn’t want to end up being the fall guy for any of that activity and I put in my resignation. I thought for sure there would be a lock on the door one day and a note to the employees that the business had been shut down and they no longer had a job. That did eventually happen, but 18 months or so past when I thought it would. Again, it wasn’t for lack of good intentions. They showed up and worked their butts off every day, but when the ego is in the way of considering more prudent decisions, the house of cards will eventually collapse (and we are going to see that in major corporations and government institutions in the coming times).
Meanwhile, I got a job at a company very close to my daughters’ school and I loved that I could drop them off and drive just a mile over to work. I was also making significantly more money. I didn’t get off in time to pick them up, but I started to pay my mom to grocery shop for me and pick the girls up from school and take them back to the house, where she would food prep for me so that when I got home from work, dinner was made and prepped for the next couple of days, as well.
I was tasked with a challenging job at the new company that entailed doing due diligence on a company they wanted to purchase. I was to examine the books and learn their accounting processes and merge them into the completely different accounting processes of the company who hired me. I couldn’t figure out why the books made absolutely no sense. Vendors were calling about unpaid bills, but they weren’t on the books, so I had no idea what was going on. I started finding unopened mail stashed all over the office and took home about a 24” stack that I started opening and sorting a couple hours every evening. Mostly due to lack of transparency on the part of the owners, it took several months for me to get their books in order and reach the conclusion that they, too, were insolvent.
It had appeared as though they had a ton of inventory, but most of it was obsolete (meaning their customers had no interest in purchasing it) so it was sitting on the shelves of the warehouse gathering dust. They were living the high life personally and running many of their home remodeling and entertainment expenses through the business. They barely had enough money to operate, and after entering many of the unopened invoices from suppliers, I found that the minimum payments owed was more than the amount of money they were bringing in from sales, much less be able to buy new inventory. Many of their suppliers were on the verge of no longer selling to them. That was going to be a problem because their customers would not be able to get the products they wanted, because it wouldn’t be in stock, so they would likely purchase it elsewhere.
The biggest problem of all is that they had only been able to keep their current operations going because they had a line of credit (sort of like a business credit card) from the bank. This was secured with collateral in the form of their personal investment portfolio of stocks. Every single day, any receipts they had collected from customers would be paid down on the line of credit, and the spread between what they owed and 75% of what the stock portfolio was valued at that day is what they could borrow the next day.
Every day, they borrowed every penny that was available. This was the last piece of the accounting processes that the owner, reluctantly, handed over to me to be able to handle daily, so that I could finally move their operations over to headquarters. The plan was that they would be staying on as employees to manage the business. I was totally capable of making such calculations, since I had been a bank auditor for a couple years prior to working in public accounting and the thing I used to primarily audit was the validity of the collateral securing customer’s lines of credit.
The first day was smooth.
The second day the stock market crashed.
At first we didn’t realize it, and the owner was furious at me, screaming obscenities at me about how I must have fucked up and I better get it figured out because they needed money that day to be able to operate.
Just for example purposes, I will explain it in round numbers. Say the stock portfolio had been worth $300,000. The bank would lend up to 75% of that amount just to give some wiggle room for the fact that the portfolio could go up and down in value on any given day. Ideally, the bank wants to make sure that the value of the portfolio is at least as much as is owed on the loan, so there is essentially no risk on their part to loan out the money. The loan was capped all the time at $225,000. If they collected $10,000 from customers one day, it was applied automatically by the bank to the loan, taking down the balance to $215,000 and the next day they would borrow the $10,000 back again, taking the balance back to the maximum $225,000.
They day the stock market crashed, the $300,000 portfolio was suddenly valued at $185,000. That not only meant that there was no more money available to borrow, but also that the maximum loan amount allowed to be outstanding was 75% of the $185,000 or $138,750…so the difference between that and the $225,000 that was outstanding was to be repaid immediately. They couldn’t touch it, because essentially all of it was due to the bank, if the bank decided to call the loan, which they had the right to do, meaning it was due in full immediately. A month prior, I had given my recommendation to the company who hired me, that they should not buy this company, but also had asked them (at their own risk of never getting that investment back) for $50,000 to keep them afloat lest their suppliers back out. I knew at the time, I was essentially eliminating my job, which was disappointing, because I really liked the owner and the other staff who worked in the headquarters I was supposed to eventually work at.
Why is all of this pertinent?
When the stock market crashed, Pluto had just gone into Capricorn. That was 15 years ago. It has been in Capricorn all this time, and though it might not look like it on the surface, banks and many corporations are a skittishly reconstructed house of cards rebuilt over that time. IMO, to make it look like they recovered, and all is “business as usual” so next time they could try to control the way the cards fell. Not that they didn’t find ways to take advantage of the way they fell the first time.
The company who hired me decided not to purchase this other company, and put me to work doing the books for another side entity that they owned, but because the revenue of that entity was reliant on advertisers, and with the downturn in the economy, no one had the budget to advertise, eventually the company had to lay me off.
I was in shock. I had never been let go from a job in my entire life. The owner handled it so professionally and assured me it had nothing to do with me personally, that I had merely been the last of the accounting staff to be hired, and the entity to whom I had been assigned was basically having to shift gears to stay afloat, and the minor accounting that would be involved would have to be absorbed by other staff. I still felt incredibly ashamed as I packed up personal items in a box and left the office once and for all. I felt like it was somehow my fault, even though there is nothing I could have done differently to stay. I told my boss I wasn’t going to look for another job, but rather hold tight until they were able to re-hire me, assuming business would be back to normal in no time.
I had no idea how wrong I was. Houses in my beautiful neighborhood were starting to look worse for wear, and I knew many people were struggling to make ends meet. It was only a matter of time before it was obvious that several homes had been vacated altogether. People were angry at their own naivety but blaming the banks who allowed for it to happen. Honestly, the system is designed to be evasive, so naivety is not an accurate word when one is purposely led astray.
I, in turn, laid my mother off. Thankfully, she was happy for the break. I had one payment left on my van’s lifetime warranty, and after that, no longer paying my mom, I was breaking even by collecting unemployment. I decided not to look for another job right away. I started volunteering at my daughters’ school, which was something I had always wished I could do (envious of the mothers who did)…and that was something I would grow to have a love/hate relationship with, but again, that’s a whole other story.
I was still anxiety ridden over my own $90,000 debt and I knew it was adding pressure to my already mundane marriage. We had never had any personal debt, other than a mortgage on one home or another, always with plenty of equity, the entire 22 years we had been together. I had even paid off my school loans prior to graduating from college.
I went out one evening with a friend of mine and other than knowing we had a great time re-connecting after not having seen each other in quite awhile, I’m not even sure what we did, but it was some sort of “spiritual” social event. At some point we were talking, and she mentioned that her sister was working as a mortgage debt consultant, helping people to get out from underwater mortgage situations. What?! My soul did a double flip flop. I knew I was to pay close attention. I hadn’t mentioned my situation, because it was a dark secret I was immensely humiliated by, but my friend had been talking about how her sister had helped her to eliminate her own similar situation. I called her the next day. She helped me understand what I hadn’t quite understood when we had bought our home in the first place, yet I had known the seller’s second mortgage company had essentially forgiven their debt for them to be able to sell it. It turns out in a foreclosure situation, a second mortgage company rarely gets any of the proceeds when the house is finally sold, usually at a sheriff’s sale.
I stopped making the payments on the equity loan. They threatened foreclosure, but they have no right to foreclose, because they are second in line to the first mortgage, and I was making the first mortgage payments.
I started to gather information of houses sitting vacant, in foreclosure (because people either couldn’t afford to make their payments or sell, since they owed more than the houses were valued at). I found many similar houses that had recently sold for a fraction of their value merely a year ago (keep in mind…many of these now super low value houses were bought up by corporate investor groups and now trade on the stock market which is a big part of the reason rents are so high…to keep investors profiting…and other individuals who happened to own houses they rented out got to keep up with these new Joneses on the block and the resulting rapid rise of fair market rental prices…as almost anyone would do if they could).
Eventually, we determined that the second mortgagee wasn’t too worried about losing their interest since we were still making the first mortgage payments. If nothing else, they would get paid when we sold the house someday, provided it went back up in value. So, I stopped making the first mortgage payments so they would realize they were now at risk at never getting any portion of their $90,000. If the house went into foreclosure, they would entirely lose their interest. I also wrote a letter that included the market research I had done, noting that if my numbers were right, the house wouldn’t even sell for the $125,000 we still owed on the first mortgage. Finally, they agreed to settle for $9,000, which was more than they would get if we ultimately foreclosed.
Now where to get $9,000? I had been trying to sell the remaining inventory that we had from our now closed company for $50,000, as it had a cost of appx. $25,000 and with a retail markup should have been worth $75,000. However, it was hard to “sell” to anyone since our growth had been minimal year to year. But by the grace of God, through a connection we had made in the industry, we made a deal with a wholesaler who was willing to buy it for $6,500. To be honest, that was a freaking miracle because I don’t think there was another person on the planet who would’ve bought it otherwise. I had accumulated our combined $1,500 in the business checking account. The last $1,000 came from my ex-husband from a small share of stock that he had inherited that could be sold for the exact balance we needed to total the $9,000. I also loved that numerologically, 9’s represent completion, and 0’s are God force energy…and being able to eliminate the debt that had been wreaking havoc on my soul, truly felt like a gift from God.
The whole process about killed me. We had credit scores in the high 800’s and now not only did they tank, but one of the worst things you can have on a credit report is a late mortgage payment. I was filled with shame. If you can’t pay your mortgage…you are essentially showing you cannot afford to pay your basic living expenses…and you are bad news in the making. Our mortgage company agreed to absorb the three missed payments and add them to the end of the term and consider the loan current.
I had never been so relieved in all my life.
The release of the stored emotional energy was tremendous. I started to purge like crazy. It was such a relief to have a pallet worth of our old products out of my house. I loaded up my van with boxes and boxes of our old catalog and promotional materials and dumped it all in a dumpster behind a local pharmacy. I loaded my van with old toys the girls had outgrown and donated them to a friend who was now babysitting her grandchildren and didn’t have the funds to buy things for them to play with. I took droves of other items to a local thrift store. I sold things on eBay and Craigslist. I filled our garbage can every week.
I didn’t know when I would return to the workforce, but I wanted my life to be tremendously simplified by the time I did. I had been given a huge gift from the universe and I wanted to live from a higher level of consciousness, and not get sucked back into the havoc that giving into my ego (and the grandiose ideas we had for the “spiritual” business we started) had gotten me. I really wanted to sell our house and move closer to the girls’ school. I wanted to not have to drive 20 minutes each way anymore. I wanted to have a smaller house that would not allow for the accumulating of things that we didn’t need on a regular basis. I had done this once before, a couple houses prior to having kids, moving from a ridiculously large house into one much easier to maintain, and yet somehow I had repeated the pattern on an even grander scale this time around. I didn’t think I was a greedy person, but surely, I had allowed my desires for us to have what everyone around us seemed to have, to suck me back in.
I have always had this rather miraculous way of finding the most perfect home I could dream of and this time was no different. We made a low-ball offer with the seller’s realtor on a home already priced below market value. Instead of the realtor calling me back, the wife of the owner of the house called me. Turns out she was a mortgage broker who owned her own company, and the realtor was her good friend. I told her we loved the house, but I didn’t think we could qualify for a mortgage now that our credit reports were marred, and I told her the entirety of what had happened. I also said now that we had kids, I didn’t want to deal with buying the house on the contingency of our current house selling, especially considering the market. I wanted to be in a new house before school started and then put our house up for sale. She said that if we paid the full price, her (new) husband would be willing to sell it on a land contract, meaning we would make the payments to him.
Meanwhile, my husband told me of an investment he had since long before we were even dating that was in his name only. He was willing to cash it in and pay it down on the house. I was relieved he hadn’t told me about it prior, because I felt if he had cashed it in to pay off what I felt was my debt alone (as though there had been no one else involved), our marriage would not have survived the resentment of him having done so. The deal with the seller was that we would make interest only payments of $225/month for the next two years, and would thereafter have a balance of $20,000 to pay in full and we would be debt free. It was a dream come true. A simple life, no debt, ego interrupted hopefully for good this time.
We started to move all but what would have our old house look perfectly staged to be shown to potential buyers. Of primary importance to me was having the girls’ bedrooms put together as they would be starting school in a few days, and I wanted them to start fresh only traveling to and from the new house without having the emotional attachment to the old house causing any upset. Their new bedrooms were much smaller, and I had found fun loft beds on Craigslist. My friends had come to help paint their rooms fun colors and put their beds together. The day they started school, we put the house on the market. We had three showings the first day, and the third person that came through made an offer. It would allow us to pay off the first mortgage in full, with $18,000 leftover. We could save that and add to it over the next two years to be able to pay off the land contract, which was a huge relief, as well. I didn’t think it would appraise for that high though, given my prior research, but it turned out the buyer was going to put $100,000 cash down, so an appraisal wouldn’t be required. That was a miracle for a seller in 2010. Interestingly, it turned out that he owned a bank. He was buying the house for his daughter, and the balance that remained to be mortgaged (by his bank) was such that it would be affordable for her.
I thought I would live happily ever after. But almost a year to the day later, we were selling that house and getting a divorce. The drama that entailed was something I never, in a million years, thought would happen in my life.
I found my next house in a most miraculous way, as well. Once again, beyond what my most wild imagination could have ever conjured. Long story short, I lived there as a single mother with my daughters while my ex-husband proceeded to get married two more times. Those four years are also a whole story in and of itself, but I finally decided it was too stressful to manage the house and yard on my own, so I sold it and rented a condo for a year while I figured out what to do next.
I then moved the three of us 1,700 miles across country where we lived for the last 6-1/2 of 14 of the 15 years Pluto has been in Capricorn. During that time, I truly got to experience the total opposite end of the spectrum. Personal greed and the manipulation one engages in for the accumulation of wealth and status left me regularly on the short end of the dick.
It was toward the end of this time that I had a full “come to Jesus” moment over the fact that I couldn’t shake the feeling I was supposed to be in a committed relationship. Prior to divorcing, I had been together with my ex-husband for almost 25 years, not including 5 years prior to that when he was showing me the exact kind of person he was, as a partner, that I chose to ignore.
I didn’t know how to be single, and I didn’t want to be. At the same time, each relationship I engaged in thereafter, was worse than the one before it. And, having tried so many things, I was at a complete loss as to what I was supposed to do about it.
The financial success I had early in my life had been overshadowed by what felt like a barrage of mistakes I had made in my later years. I felt like I couldn’t trust myself to make it on my own, yet I continued to pour my energy into helping various men succeed. I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. I was merely to have a supporting role in the life of some man. But what man? Not any of those I had met, yet I had a void of longing in my gut and that made me feel incredibly vulnerable. As a result, I shape shifted into whomever I thought they wanted to be, and while I was at least in a relationship of sorts, I was miserable because I knew their quest for money or the extreme lack of emotional capacity was not aligned with my soul. How was I going to reconcile this? How was I going to break free? How was I going to learn to make it on my own. Was it even possible to?
The last year has been full of reconciling that within myself, and the cherry on top was realizing that my longing was far deeper than that which could be filled by being in a relationship with a man.
I had been longing for love, approval, nurturing, protection, and guidance since I was in my mother’s womb. Never having a deep connection with my mother had left me scrambling for those things outside of myself, trying to compensate for having an extreme sense of unworthiness.
The only thing that was ever going to fill that void was learning to love myself for the first time in my entire life. It was a shock to me that I could love, approve of, nurture, protect and guide (with my higher self) my own self. Not only could I, but it was imperative that I did.
As I begin this new chapter, the havoc that Pluto in Capricorn brought to my ego (and the ego of America) is being replaced with Pluto moving into Aquarius. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was 1778-1798. Pluto is the planet of death and rebirth. From that perspective, myself as I knew me, died and was reborn multiple times in the last 15 years, and believe it or not, you just got the short story here. Pluto is endings/beginnings, giving/taking, and starting/stopping. Pluto dredges up the truth and for me it was having to face things that weren’t working in my life and the reasons why, along with multiple new opportunities to try again.
I came to terms with eliminating debt in a way that I would have judged others for at an earlier time in my life. To do that I had to go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of what I had once believed. Many wealthy people pay big bucks to learn about loopholes. Many millionaires have filed for bankruptcy numerous times. They know how to protect their assets through those loopholes. The biggest differences in the haves and have nots come down to what one knows is possible vs. what one doesn’t know. This isn’t by mistake. The current powers that be know how to manipulate the masses via a morality police campaign of sorts, while they do whatever the fuck they need to get ahead and stay there. But that is going to start to shift.
Pluto gave us a taste of what life would be like in Aquarius when it visited for a moment in March 23- May 1 of last year, so whatever was happening for you during that time might lend an indication of what is to come. That happens to be the time I hit the road to return to the US from Mexico (starting with the attempted carjacking) and ended with me making the decision to move from the place I called home for the almost 6 years prior. I knew it was time to move on and things aligned to make it a relatively smooth transition (though there were definitely a few small bumps along the way). It meant leaving my youngest daughter to live with her boyfriend, and not be the over-doer of a mother I can tend to be, even though my soul assures me that is not what a mother’s job is…it is what my ego thinks it should do (but then also be a martyr about it when I do).
The last time Pluto was in Capricorn was 1762 to 1778, which was the time of the American Revolution and the birth of our nation. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was 1778-1798 which was a time of settling into a new way of life.
The good news is we have 20 years for this next phase to unfold and whatever is happening at any given point in time, know “this too shall pass”, as we move onto brighter days ahead. There is going to be a lot of crumbling in the wake, all of which is necessary for us to move forward to a time more equitable for all. Every single human deserves to experience peace on earth.
We will be moving more strongly toward the elimination of everything that is in the way of that... and the best thing you can do as an individual is to be in tune with your soul’s guidance. Know thyself. Recognizing where we are deflating or inflating into the subconscious patterns our brain developed to survive our early life, and keep our emotions suppressed.
If you are relatively new to astrology and want to learn more by talking to an astrologist, I can recommend one that I have consulted for current “weather reports” as I like to call them, so I know what planetary things may be happening in my chart soon. I also have consulted Meg as to my Astrocartograhpy, to discover where I have certain planetary alignments of places that are good to live, work, vacation in or avoid altogether. You can get a 75 minute reading for $111 or a 60 minute reading for $88. Her website is TheExpatAstrologer.com.
A little more costly at $250, but an amazing deep dive, particularly if you are already familiar with astrology and what signs are in which houses, and what the houses generally mean, is a WayShower reading with my friend Norma Tarango, and you can contact her at navigadora@protonmail.com.
You can also run a free chart at Astro.com, and also get a good basic description of what it means with your specific planets in your specific houses. You will need the date, time, and place you were born. Google is great for looking up additional information, as well.
Hang in there my friends and I do apologize for any typographical or grammatical errors you may find. This is me at 4:55 a.m. as I finish up this writing, after attempting to write it for most of the day. I had a cup of coffee at 7 p.m. and don’t think I have to worry about it keeping me awake at this point.
Much Love!