mirror

when something exists so close to you it is no longer in your periphery. like the chain of not gold that was my grandmothers that i wear around my neck. it is short and sits tight around the base of my neck thus high on my collarbone. it sits there under my shirts and in my sleep and under the water in the shower. i do not think of its presence every day. in the mirror i hardly observe it as external from my form. this happens with tattoos, too (though they are by their very nature imbedded, become, your form.)

this is true in astrology. with conjunctions. and with venus most of all, i believe. when it is close to the self. in astrology selfhood is found in the luminaries: the sun and its washed-muted-blue-softened reflector, the moon. the glyph of venus is a mirror. this is an amused and sometimes actually funny nod to a self-aware vanity, which is actually itself really just self-awareness so it is to be aware of ones own awareness of oneself, which venusian motivations and qualities are laced and embroidered and gilded and studded with. 

when it is close up, holding the mirror right at against your face, you can only be looking at the details. the pores, the hairs, the lines. obsessing. perspective is minute and focused and the figure is held outside the frame while a sample of it stands to render the whole. the further away the mirror gets, the more of the entire form can fit inside the reflection. that is physical reality. like, actually. that is just how things work here on this plane of existence. and just as astrology is the mapping, timing, and pattern recognition of the very real material planets in this solar system shared with earth as the only planet currently known by earth to hold any autonomous life let alone sentient life. astrology is the physical realities of the physical universe metamorphosed into meaning as set in the parameters of human archetypal experience. astrology is the universe at human scale, soaked in human emotion. so all of the understanding of symbols attributed is the same: taking physical phenomena and using it to translate murky internal and subjective experiences into intuitive processes known by existing in material reality. so when one moves further from a reflective surface, more information is legible on that surface because one has distance to gain a larger, broader view of the surface. if venus is a mirror, the closer it is to the self, the harder it can be to see the whole self, or the self as it is in the whole. 

my venus is so close. so close to the sun that it seems there is nothing but radiant hot reflection. maybe sometimes it is actually too much to even look at. maybe the sun kind of melts it. this smelted blinding locket around my neck.