Think about your favorite TV show, the characters and the interactions.

Notice something missing?

What’s missing are all the things we do in our daily lives.

If we track the hours of a day spent preparing food, eating food, cleaning up food, sleeping, commuting, working and engaging in other mundane life activities (balancing the checkbook, getting an oil change, buying light bulbs), we find we have little precious “leisure time.”

Yet when watching our favorite TV shows we are seeing our character friends exclusively in their leisure time. If not, then we are seeing them in work that is 100% engaging 100% of the time (hospital ER, courtroom, crime scene).

We don’t watch our TV characters clip coupons and rearrange the cupboards. They don’t change the sheets and wash the windows. They never, ever, clean the dryer lint trap.

Why not?

TV emphasizes the interactions that contain meaning. In TV land, laundry and work and making toast are emphasized only if it provides meaning to the interactions.

We don’t see people washing dishes simply because dishes must be washed.

Virgo and Pisces

Virgo rules work and routine (and the 6th house) and its opposite sign Pisces rules sacrifice and spiritual states (the 12th house). Barbara Hand Clow describes this polarity in “Alchemy of Nine Dimensions” as “be here now” (6th) and “bliss” (12th).

Virgo is the discriminating mind and Pisces the uncritical mind.

Virgo is analysis, Pisces synthesis.

Virgo is many, Pisces is one.

This article on the five regrets of the dying sparked this blog and suggests that on our deathbeds, we think more in terms of Pisces than Virgo.

Sensitivity and Detail

Both Pisces and Virgo are sensitive signs. I think of the folktale of the Princess and the Pea as relating to this polarity.

Based on the Wikipedia summary, the prince is looking for a princess and can find no suitable candidate. A woman spends the night claiming to be the princess but is not believed. Only after sleeping on a 20-mattress buffer to a small pea and declaring she couldn’t sleep due to a hard object does the prince believe her.

Virgo is the picky prince who can’t find the perfect mate and is unbelieving of the princesses’ divine heritage. The princess is a Pisces who can feel the subtlest stimuli from the farthest distance.

Virgo picks at everything and Pisces feels everything.

If you have a friend who can’t eat your dinner because of allergies, changes chairs because of a draft, asks you to turn off the light because of the glare and then pulls out a decaffeinated tea bag, you know you have Virgo/Pisces energy in the room.

Reality and Imagination

I believe there is great bliss in doing meaningful work of any sort, from washing dishes to computer programming, but our world requires that we engage mostly in activity that provides no real meaning to our spiritual selves.

As with TV shows, our imaginative lives do not include mowing the lawn unless our fantasy involves a meaning around mowing the lawn, such as the fantasy of a lawn that cuts itself while you sit on the deck drinking martinis and watching the sunset.

Imagination is the meaning without the details and reality is the details without the meaning.

Imagination is the bubble and reality is the pin. Come up with an imaginative idea and tell people and the first thing they will do is pull out the pins.

Merging Virgo (Reality) and Pisces (Imagination)

A merging of Virgo and Pisces is creating a blissful state in every detail of our lives.

I believe that is the goal of meditation and why in a meditation retreat you remove the details that are not necessary for the weekend’s survival and then focus exclusively on the details of each moment including sitting, breathing, walking, chewing and thinking.

What is called “mindfulness” then may be the merging of Virgo and Pisces energy.

Neptune in Pisces

Neptune has just begun its 15-year transit of the sign it rules, Pisces. Mars is currently retrograde in Virgo until mid-summer.

Neptune in Pisces will be seeking meaning in life and probably begin rejecting some of those many extraneous details of our everyday lives.

As Mars transits Virgo, which it will do many times in the next 15 years, it says, “Bliss sounds nice, but who’s paying the rent this month?”

As all the other planets continue on their paths and people engage in their everyday activities, Neptune will hang out above them and say, “But what does it mean? On your deathbed will this activity have mattered?”