On the Seventh House
the house of the other
Geese at night honk, sure, but they also chitter and gab and buzz, a whole chorus of sounds that, in the dark, might be coming from some other gaggle of creatures. I can’t see them or the water their bodies are splashing around in, but I imagine wild, round, large-bodied insects or fish turned into floaty, conversational things. I appreciate the wild familiarity of the sounds, the otherness of the night, my sightlessness. I’ve started taking my local woods walks just after dusk, where I can cry without being spotted, where I can listen without having to see.
Here’s the routine: I wait until Mars and Jupiter have both risen, and I walk beneath them without other light. I need to feel the weight of my body in the dark, I need to feel unfamiliar to myself. I need to feel the press of the cold and call it shadow, the shuffle of my footfall and call it going somewhere.
Really I’m just walking a half-mile or so, down the path to Lickinghole Basin, while the geese honk and fly overhead. They always beat me to the water, but I make it eventually to a bench that boyscouts-of-bygones-past built. Bundled up in an ankle-length puffer coat, a beanie, gloves gifted to me from my mother-in-law, I sit there pinned between the God of War to the southeast and the God of Luck above the basin’s western ridge, and I think of instagrammable Mary Oliver poems.
I listen to this neighborhood spot turn wolfish and January and blue, a dog could be a coyote, a goose could be a sea-goat, the whole world, my body included, turned other and imaginary for short, cold, important moments.
I want to write about the Seventh House of the natal chart as completely other in this way, as that humbling moment when you realize the world you thought you knew has a second skin, makes sounds you can’t identify. This is, after all, what love opens us up to: the paradox of knowing someone and still having their particularities surprise us, make us catch our breath, in both wonderful and terrible ways. I’ve thought about this all week as I’ve caught Kiernan glancing in confused wonder at my changed face—an explosive pimple has accentuated my steroid-stretched cheeks, the waning eyebrows—and felt the crush of his hugs, the ferocity of his kisses.
Your illness will be harder on him, an astrologer told me back in September. I thought it kind of presumptuous then, but now I see its truth: What I can manage right now includes walks at dark in the woods, planning out my classes for the spring semester between naps, hiding my panic attacks from my kid, breathing exercises during sleepless, pain-filled nights. Most everything else is left up to him. Mars has been retrograde in my Seventh House since October, there since August.
In both the ancient and modern astrological traditions, the Seventh House is the house of the other, the partner, the lover. As Demetra George writes, “marriage is the primary meaning for the seventh sector of human experience throughout the historical tradition. As each house reflects some of the principles of the house that opposes it, the seventh-house spouse forms the complementary opposite of the first-house self.”
Marriage, of course, is just one of the many partnerships we form in modern life, and so the Seventh House has also come to encompass nearly anyone we find ourselves in one-on-one interactions with: business partners, enemies, best friends, the sibling who is most like-unlike us, the book club friend we shoot the shit with after the meeting’s over. These are the people who most intimately reflect our own personhoods back to us, the ones who help us recover our own sense of strangeness, too, much like the point of my new walking routine with its goose sounds in the night.
I began the series on the astrological houses wanting to write about my life, our move, my knowing the cancer was back, but to come at it slant, woo, abstract, other. I wanted my “I” to bring “you” along, too, another Seventh House urge. I’m not sure how well I’ve succeeded, but I’ve appreciated you reading along all the same. The morning this last post in the series is published, Kiernan and I will be making our way to what may be my last chemo appointment. I have this vision of never saying the words cancer or chemo in this newsletter ever again, but I’m pretty sure it’s a false one. That being said, I am excited next week to write a bit more philosophically about the lie of progress—I’ve been reading Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, and its reminders about the importance of limits, the usefulness of despair, and the difference between hope and optimism have been a balm for me during these long January nights. Finally, below are links to the essays on the houses in order; I bounced around while writing them, and so figured it’d be good to have them in their right and proper place somewhere on here!
On The Seventh House (here you are!)
This is beautiful, thanks and good luck