STARFIRE

August 2009

August 2009 - Toni Morrison: A Life of Triumph, but Not a Life of Ease
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Toni Morrison: A Life of Triumph, but Not a Life of Ease

Sometimes the difference between mere talent and accomplishment is adversity–and that may be especially true when the talent is creative. Creativity is, at its root, a problem-solving ability, and a life without problems would be a life without opportunity.

 Now I’m not recommending you go in search of adversity.

I am suggesting you tackle the adversity in your path or use your creative abilities to forge a way around, above, below, or through it.

Toni Morrison’s chart is distinctively lacking in ease and comfort, but it is the chart of a Nobel laureate–the first black woman to achieve that status. Eight of the eleven major aspects in her chart are either challenging squares or oppositions requiring careful balance and coming to terms with one’s own inner conflicts. Two of the major aspects are sextiles, which only bring ease when one learns to work with or cooperate with other people and with life conditions. A single trine between the Moon and Jupiter does promise ease through growth and learning and emotional understanding.

If we go deeper into the chart, we find four yods, which bring creative gifts through stress and tension and growth. A sesquiquadrate (135 degree orb) and three semisquares (45 degree orbs) add to the tension.

It is a chart that promises success, but not ease, not comfort. Ease and comfort will have to be earned, and the work that earns them will be more important than the ease itself.

Any astrologer would predict writing for Toni Morrison. Mercury is the most elevated planet in her chart, and Mercury and the Sun together promise success through her vocation or career.

Toni has Aquarius on her midheaven, and Aquarius supports innovation and breakthroughs of all kinds. It might have been more difficult to predict from the chart alone that she’d become a Nobel laureate because of her groundbreaking stories about black lives, but it would be easy to predict she’d take an unconventional path and find recognition for making changes in her world.

Although Toni’s Sun is in Aquarius, the overall tone of her chart is Cancer. You find the tone by sorting the ten planets into their four elements and three modes. For Toni, the water (emotional) element is strongest, and the cardinal (initiating) mode. So while her emotions are strong, you’d expect her to take action about her feelings, not just wallow in them.

According to her biography at astrodata bank, /http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Morrison%2C_Toni/ Toni began writing fiction in her thirties, as her marriage was failing. About that time, Toni is quoted as saying: “It was [as] though I had nothing left but my imagination. I had no will, no judgment, no perspective, now power, no authority, no self; just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy and a trembling respect for words. I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Compulsively. Secretly. Slyly.”

In those words we see the Cancer overall tone of her chart in the depths of her melancholy–and we see the initiative to write. Neptune balances or opposes her Moon (emotional needs), so the sense that she wrote like someone addicted is appropriate.

What makes all the difference here is that she chose a useful addiction.

She didn’t choose adversity. When it found her, she wrote her way through it. And it didn’t matter that she wrote to escape, that she wrote as if addicted. What mattered was that she did something creative and life-giving and did it with her whole being.

From that platform of adversity used well, her talents flowered and led her to success.

Toni’s chart has complex T-squares, configurations of powerful and unbalanced energy, involving Jupiter (publishing), Pluto (transformation) and Uranus (creativity and innovation). Why writing? Perhaps Mercury’s elevation. Or perhaps because her one trine releases some of the pent-up T-square energy through emotional expression (Moon in Pisces). Or we could credit her fifth house, which contains the karmic degree, the point opposite Uranus in her T-squares. Uranus in the eleventh house is the odd planet or point of the square, challenging the opposing planet pairs (Jupiter-Saturn, Jupiter-Venus, Pluto-Saturn, Pluto-Venus). Its release point in the fifth house would make a creative outlet the natural solution to her problems.

The difficulties of her life don’t stop with the squares and challenges. Her Venus-Saturn conjunction portends loneliness and the melancholy she found in marriage. Although money was easier than relationships, everything granted had to be earned.

Joy, when it came to Toni, came through transformation and change. What many people try to resist and avoid created her success.

Pioneers like Toni go where others have been reluctant to step. And while we celebrate her work, we also need to applaud the courage and tenacity–the guts that transformed Chloe Ardelia Wofford into the acclaimed Toni Morrison.

Mary O’Gara, Ph.D.