“We are expected to grow up to be empathic, caring, respectful, or honest when these qualities are not demonstrated in how we are treated, nor are we given room to find from within who we are. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that most of us carry so much shame given how much and how often children are shamed by others.” Miki Kashtan.

”Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.” Richard Mitchell.

“Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.” Montaigne, Essais, I.

You probably cannot understand what it means to receive inspiration from the Sun in Gemini unless you have crossed the Acheron into the Underworld, trudged through vanity and perfectionism, braved the ghosts of love haunting the Circlet of Pisces, evaded treachery in the badlands of Aries and the herd of brides offered on eBay by lowing Aldebaran, and waded past the ablutions of seductive Saiph, one glance towards whom could have you up before the Sexism and Racism Commissariat. It’s hell, Hell, and it’s somewhat of a comfort to forget you’re there, and why you’re there. Karma is a factitious disorder beyond belief: like Baron Munchausen you have pulled yourself from the mire of Tropical Astrology by your own hair. Welcome to social eternity, where community withdraws from the defeats of history, and celebrates the visible mercy of silence.

And welcome to good company. In living memory, and for any living person’s foreseeable future, Lethe season and June Solstice coincide, within a day or two, even if their precedence reversed in 1998. In the Southern Hemisphere the June Solstice is the Sun’s surrender, the New Sun, and so this first Moon tries to temper its relative brilliance with an appropriate show of delicacy, if not self-effacement. Prorsum et semper honeste, quoth the Southern Hemisphere to its Underworld, its Other.

You will think I’m terrible, and I know that Western Civilization is underpinned by the perennial struggle for freedom, but I believe that the majority of those who sacrificed their lives for freedom didn’t have much of an idea what it was. I suggested as much to my Father after I’d read Bullock, and he as much as told me to shut my mouth lest I defile the memory of the fallen with a repeat of my suggestion that pre-war American, British and Australian boys, and indeed he, seem to have been raised with something similar to Hitler Youth values.

Out of responsibility, freedom; out of freedom, forgetting; out of forgetting, responsibility. That is what baby-boomers learned by associating the meaning of their parents’ language and behaviour. Their grandchildren have also been born into a Great Forgetting, of the caring responsiveness we know as responsibility, to fly like a bird through the rights and obligations woven into the fledgling nest by a thousand socialist institutions.

Does God know in advance every wing beat of every bird? No ego, no matter how inflated, could rationally make such a claim. After all, every bird is itself responsible for the joy of its unique capacity, like dreaming humans, to swim through the air. We share the species-memory of birds, and no omniscience was ever created by human ego which could predict a dream, as no form of government was ever born of human competition which could create responsibility.

As society can survive civil war, so love can survive limerence, and humanity’s adaptation to climate change will continue, but freedom can only flourish in the renewal of community which clings to the forgotten woe of individuality like the Jordan to the baptized. Irresponsibility? Forget it, as the adult bird said to its fledgling: “You were hatched to fly, girl, so fly!” And what is that planet with her toes in the Lethe? The Sun does not go anywhere without her retinue, and that includes us, and all our divine beings.