Gasping for Air: Gemini in the Eighth House

As far as I can remember, I have always lived near the sea. I have always lived along the margins, edging further and further away from the center. Like the sea, I have eluded the cartographer's clean lines, neat parallels, and distinct borders. I have learned to fear the clever demarcation of countries: the rigid latitudes and longitudes of life. From the Baltic to the Pacific, I have taken from the sea, and it has taken from me.

Pocketing bits of amber along the Baltic shore, as a child I shamelessly hoarded these arcane talismans of the Letts. Skipping into the ruddy sunsets of childhood, I embraced the vast stretches of shoreline--marveling at the desolation and remoteness of seaside resorts like Jurmala. The communists had ineptly advertised them as resorts, when in fact much of the locals had boarded up their summer homes and left. And tourists tended to favor the flashier resorts along the Black Sea like Sochi. The lure of Sochi with its balmy weather, palm trees, and oleander bushes evoked a western exoticism--a hint of California and Florida, which the party leaders and proletariat who vacationed there wouldn't dare to admit.

But the Baltic shore is harsher, colder, and less hospitable to Western comparisons. Dotted with thick pine trees and black sand--its shoreline is more ominous, more suited for long walks and contemplation than sunbathing or swimming.

My relationship with the sea is a complex one. The sea has allowed me to cast my contemplative nets and to pull from it a cosmic sense of beginning and return. My beginning was spent collecting, petrified bits of tree sap, a mausoleum of insects trapped in them from another time. My return took place along the calm shores of Malibu, pushed under by a rip tide, gasping for breath, struggling to keep my consciousness. Drowning for those of you who have not experienced it, is much like dreaming, the lull of trashing water giving way to a paralyzed stillness is oddly comforting, womb-like; the concept of death is the only thing keeping you fighting to stay on the side of the Beginning, rather than the Return. The Return from what I have sampled, is much like the Beginning: a fetal cocoon of utter resignation to a force pushing you out and into yet another dimension. Perhaps Nietzsche's eternal return is not such a preposterous idea. In life we keep returning, we keep beginning-again and again and again. In and out, in and out--these are the tides of life.

I never fully understood this drowning experience of mine until I was in college. Over a plate full of shiitake enchiladas, at my favorite Mexican restaurant--Ranchos, with the prophetic eyes of Frieda Kahlo staring down at me from the walls, the confusion of that moment resolved itself. Dovid, a skinny little Kabbalist, who my Free Mason friend had introduced me to that same day, leaned over, bits of avocado dripping from his wispy, white bread, and smiled inquisitively. He seemed excited by my recounting of the drowning. In an all-knowing manner he stated--"sounds like a classic case of Gemini in the eighth house". I didn't now what that meant, but Dovid offered to do my complete natal chart. And as it turned out, my eighth house is dominated by Gemini. Natives with Gemini in their eighth house-the house that rules death, have a penchant for dying in a certain manner. For someone with Gemini in their eighth house, death usually is due to cessation of breath or resparitory failure.

Now doesn't that leave you gasping for air!