Six October 18, 2023 #2
It appears she has more time-travelling in store. “Any idea why these specific dates were chosen for the atlas?”
“Given the conjunctions on these charts—”
“Conjunctions?”
“Planet alignments,” he says. “Conjunctions typically signify the end of old cycles and the beginning of new ones. So, I would guess the dates on each of these pages are major crossroads in your life, turning points.”
Crossroads. “The date for the first page is October 15, 2018,” she says.
Zander takes a minute to check his astrology software. “How did you know?” he asks her.
“It’s the day Mom died. And the central map location is the lookout, where she died.”
“Do the locations on the maps all mean something to you?”
“Some, but not all.” Elsie reaches over to turn the pages, pointing out the maps as she lists off the locations. “The lookout, my dad’s offices, Joe’s Café—”
“A restaurant?” Zander asks.
“Where Marcus and I hung out.”
“Marcus?” He lifts his chin. “Ah. The old boyfriend.”
Elsie flips to the next page. “The fourth map is the house where we lived before our parents’ divorce.
Then it’s some stranger’s place in Chemainus.
I have no idea what that’s about. But then it’s Dad’s house.
A beach in Victoria. Then—” She pauses, looking up at him. “Then it’s your place, Zander.”
“Mine? In which chart?”
“The eighth.”
Zander sits back on his stool as he stares down at the chart. “The eighth house.”
“Why is that important?”
He pulls at his earlobe. (A gesture Elsie would come to know as his tell.) “I think we need to work through this thing one page at a time,” he says.
“Can we start with the second house?”
“Sure. Let me look up the date for that chart.”
“April 29, 2019,” Elsie says.
Zander types and, looking up from his screen, says, “How did you guess that one?”
“I remember an incident at work on that day. The second house map is for my father’s offices. It was my first week on the job.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened there?”
She shakes her head. How could she possibly explain the time travel? And then it occurs to her: “When did the moon move into the second house?” she asks.
Zander checks the transit in his astrology program. “Tuesday at three A.M.”
Maybe that explains why opening the atlas didn’t trigger a vision at work on Monday but did on Tuesday. The moon had to move into the second house first.
“What’s the second house about?” Elsie asks Zander. She pauses as she recalls the word Bailey used. “What does it govern.”
“The second house is all about money, income, assets and, like the title of the page says, possessions.”
“Then it makes sense that the map on that page is for my workplace.”
Zander rolls his head from side to side. “Yes and no. It’s more about what we value, what we choose to do with our possessions.”
“But I don’t own anything,” Elsie says. Except her car. And it constantly needs repairs.
“Possessions aren’t just the things you own,” he says. “You also own the talents, skills and traits that are inherently yours. You possess your empathy, your intelligence, your creativity, your capacity to problem solve. Speaking in those terms, you clearly possess a whole lot.”
She turns and turns her empty teacup. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“You do. I know you do.” He taps the page, her birth chart. “Like we discussed during your session last year, you’ve got a cluster of planets in the second house, so there’s a lot going on there.”
But of course, she’s forgotten most of what he told her. She really didn’t pay much attention at the time. “I recognize that symbol,” Elsie says, pointing. “That’s Venus.”
“Yeah, Venus in your second house amplifies what’s already happening there.” He drags his stool over to hers so they can look at the page together. His arm, his shoulder next to hers. “Venus is all about what you value,” he says, “what you love. What you value about yourself.”
“And that’s Mars,” Elsie says.
“Mars brings energy to all of this.”
Elsie points at another symbol. “What’s that one?” Like a weird number four.
“That’s Jupiter. Placed in the second house, it offers an opportunity to learn how to use what you own, to be generous with what you’ve got.”
“I don’t have any money either.” Her father insists Elsie and Bailey make their own way. Elsie lives paycheque to paycheque.
“Again, possessions are about more than money, the things we own. We also own our talents and skills that, maybe up until now, you haven’t fully explored.”
She snorts out a laugh. “I make maps for forestry companies,” she says. “Not a whole lot to explore there.”
“You’re capable of a lot more. With Venus, Mars and Jupiter all in your second house, you have a highly artistic temperament and a lot of Mars energy to express it.”
But she hasn’t been expressing it. She hasn’t drawn or painted anything in years.
That temporal map she’d created back in 2019 to show the potential of automating road layout and design was the last big thing she’s worked on, at her own initiative.
And her father had shut that down. Would she have recovered sooner if she’d continued to work on the projects she’d loved, like that river restoration project, the homeless initiative she did at university?
“And that one?” Elsie asks, pointing at a symbol that looks like a little man throwing up his arms in joy, or alarm.
Zander makes a face. “Yeah, that’s Pluto. The disruptor. Pluto blows any given situation apart, shatters the ego.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pluto helps us reinvent ourselves by disrupting everything we think we know.”
She’s been time-travelling, for god’s sake. Consider her disrupted. But why? Who was behind it all? Perhaps she’ll get a better sense when she opens the third house chart again at Joe’s Café, but at the right time.
Elsie turns the page to the third chart titled “The Third House: Communication.”
“When does the moon go through this house?” she asks.
Zander types and scans his screen. “Tomorrow, Thursday, starting just before three P.M.”
“What does the third house govern? Is it just like the title says, communication?”