God Is In The Detail: Jupiter in Virgo Part One

Tuesday August 18th 2015

Detail from a Van Gogh self portrait. 1896

Jupiter in Virgo — August 11, 2015 – 9 September 2016

When the planet of expansion spends a year in a sign that’s all about detail, you might expect things to get a little distorted, or even out of proportion.

But this change in perspective can be soul-awakening on a personal level. Jupiter in Virgo is Zen. It’s about diving right into everyday minutiae, and instead of seeing it as boring and trivial, understanding that getting the porridge absolutely perfect is actually another route to the divine.

Virgo is the sign of craftsmanship: the cobbler, the potter, the weaver. Every inch of the shoe, the jar, the carpet must be just so. If you have ever thrown a pot, you will know how you are drawn in to the pattern of ridges your fingers make as the clay spins. You have to pay absolute attention. And in that attention, you achieve absolute mindfulness.

Jupiter in Virgo has the potential to magnify that mindfulness.

If you have ever looked after a toddler, you will know all about this. For the umpteenth time your child asks you to read The Hungry Caterpillar or bark like a dog or “carry me”. Are you bored? Or frustrated? No, you just have to “be here now”, and embrace the small. You realise that your “real” job, as a Wall Street shark or garbage collector is actually not important at all beside this moment of full attention to a little life..

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins