Running for cover from Neptune's Storm; The Montana House

The Shadowbox Memoirs, chapter 4

This chapter could easily have no words.

Alternatively, this chapter could have one word:

pretend Neptune is a girl

Before I moved to Asheville I remember imagining; I am a bioluminescent alien of the ocean trenches. I will go to the trenches and find my fellow aliens of the deep. Those truly weird humans, the strangers who hide on the margins because their dire weirdness is just too much for the waking world.

Some thoughts are prayers in disguise.

Some prayers are answered quickly.

I never set out to live in an artist community, it never occurred to me. I was just a fellow strange creature, flinging myself out like light over this plain, like Rumi told me to:

“Everything begs with the silent rocks
for you to be flung out like light
over this plain…”

“A moth flying into the flame says with its wingfire, ‘try this.’”

Moving into an artist community in Asheville, North Carolina with Neptune two degrees away from meeting my natal Sun was the most primal thing I’ve ever done. Like an animal sensing an unseen storm runs for her burrow, I ran. Across the country, through harrowing relational dramas, with meager personal resources, from a land I loved to the last place on earth I wanted to be, I ran for sanctuary.

And before I got there, lightning struck and I had an idea - the idea that would lead me through the rest of my life. 

The StarMaps. 

The natal chart as fine art. There would be two options: one as an original fine art painting, very slow to produce, very costly. And the second, well I had to figure that one out, but I knew I needed to make them quickly, while the native sat with me and Spirit spoke through the act of creation, with them there to witness and receive their revelation. 

As it turns out, Mercury moves much more quickly than Saturn and Neptune, and as Neptune conjoined my natal Sun, it also opposed my natal Saturn and it felt exactly how it sounds. 

“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.” - Rick Levine

I had been feeling it coming, the storm of my life chasing me down, the raw, electric edge of revelation, and it had been taking all of my conscious composure not to surrender to its madness. When I got to the Montana House ~ we’re all mad here ~ I let it take me. 

And to deal, I painted. I painted 14 hours a day. I let no one in my room. I ate psychedelics instead of food. I lost myself in the reverie of the abyss, wept in wonder at the beauty of terror, as an ocean poured down through top of my head and I stood. I held it. I let it pour into me and I worshipped. 

So I painted, not for others, but for me. I painted my inspirations and I did my best to sell them and I sold a lot of art but I was a moon doctor, not a sun doctor. I couldn’t be expected to function in the top side world in such a state.

A peek into my finances:

When I needed to check in on my cash flow, first I looked to my weed stash to make sure I had enough for the coming week. Then, I checked my bank balance to be assured there was enough money to buy espresso every day for the next few. Finally, I opened my wallet hoping to find a couple one-dollar bills for bus fare to the Portico where I sold my art and if all of that was in order, I got high and started painting.

I played with painting StarMaps quick with espresso in the coffee shop, while the person sat with me and realized quickly that I couldn’t handle the humanity of it. 

I was flung out in the abyss, remember, gazing into the beautiful void, when suddenly some small, stupid human would be sitting in front of me fretting about their girlfriend or their silly job and I could not understand why they were upset when,

the Cosmos.

I would tell them about how amazing an alignment in their chart was and they would say, “cool, but what does it mean?” And I would want to scream and pull my hair out and shake my fists at the heavens because it was so obvious what it meant I couldn’t bear the question. 

I could not bear the blindness to beauty apparently everyone but me shared, and so I couldn’t hold it. I could hold the razor edge revelation slicing through me every night, but I couldn’t hold my own destiny. I could hold their infinitely precious sacred geometry in my hands but I couldn’t hold their fragile humanity.

I could not sit with them, because I couldn’t sit with myself, and this was the crucible making me into the person I was becoming. The slow, excruciating breaking me open into human tenderness. The mills of the gods grind slowly indeed.

During these years, fate sent me a few, fellow Neptunian souls who wanted the art and didn’t need the reading. They didn’t need me to tell them what it meant, they instinctively understood the significance of their natal chart as fine art, and as I crafted their StarMaps, all the insanity stilled. I felt my spirit, somatically experienced my spirit move into my center, in perfect alignment with my purpose. My soul stilled and dancing at once, exalting in the thrill of this act, this unspeakable privilege to express the beauty of the natal chart, and successfully communicate it to another.

And it has been the shock of my life that these works don’t sell themselves. To this day I struggle to understand why everyone, literally everyone in the world isn’t clamoring at my door for one. Why artist upon artist hasn’t followed my lead and all of us made our fortunes, though I suspect it’s to do with me getting out of Its way. Learning how to be the conduit and not the controller is certainly a game worth playing here.

It took me several years before I chilled out enough to put my first StarMap on the internet. I was terrified some wily wizard would use it against me in dark magick, I feared my enemies would gain the intel to see my weakest weaknesses, and most of all, I cowered to know that one day, everyone would want one, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold them.

Moon head, by Facebook lol