Hudson Valley Astrologer

“The killer in me is the killer in you.”

~ Billy Corgan

Someone once told me that I reminded them of the pied piper in the way that kids become entranced by my antics. The truth is that I love the child like state and can enter the child’s world view in an instant. I love being with kids! Coaching, teaching, and counseling kids of all ages.

But when you read the origin story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, it isn’t exactly clear that you want this guy for your kid’s soccer coach or as their 5th grade teacher.

As an aside, how nice would it be to hire the Pied Piper to clean up Washington? He could move in and clean up all the rats like he did in the story. But we’d have to pay him because if we don’t, then history might repeat itself and all the children will be led away and disappear forever. According to the story, the Pied Piper is not exactly a term of endearment. He is capable of revenge and pulling off a grand deceit that can lead the vulnerable astray.

I think the colloquial term, “hey! You’re like the Pied Piper,” means you have a certain je ne sais quoi with kids that seems irresistible to them. It is meant to be endearing.

We all have a story. Many years ago I had turned on the television to a show already in progress. There was an adult woman sitting in a chair holding a teddy bear and a well groomed genteel man asking what seemed like innocent questions, but his soft pleasant voice belied that razors edge of the inquiry which opened this woman’s heart and soul. She began to cry, cathartically, emotion came pouring out of her the way it does after a heavy rain up by the spillway on the southern tip of the Ashokan Reservoir.

His name was John Bradshaw and he wrote a book called The Child Within. I wasn’t holding a stuffed animal at the time. I was holding my daughter. The flood gates opened, I’d temporarily lost the metaphorical flute I was holding or at the very least I lost the tune I was playing. This episode was the beginning of a long journey. I picked up the book at a local book shop and also bought Children Who Carry our Pain, along with Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, not “Piper.” The 25th anniversary edition was published just before COVID-19 hit and co-authored with her daughter, Sara Gilliam.

As amazing as Bradshaw’s Inner Child Work was, or Pipher’s culturally informed therapy was/is, and its focus on understanding the societal pressures on individuals (especially adolescent girls), I was utterly gobsmacked to learn there are patterns in the horoscope that suggest some similar version of our own story. The natal chart seems to depict an outline, as it were, for a story to be told, and that through disclosure, and sometimes revelation, we can discover self-healing.

I still love kids! Kids of all ages! My work has led me to see the child that resides in all of us, and while not explicitly doing Inner Child Work there is an acknowledgment of the efficacy of such a construct.

Billy Corgan’s song Disarm brings the idea of Inner Child Work poignantly to life, where he dramatically makes an almost universal appeal that there is urgency in this conversation, and that we need to keep the conversation going. (Reviving Ophelia and Disarm were both released in 1994: ♅☌♆)

There is a lot at stake! Our very lives might depend on it!!

HVA

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