New Mexico

As soon as I saw it — that was my country.
—Georgia O’Keeffe

The landscape was what attracted her in the first place. The wide spaces, the mountains, the vegetation, the rocks. ‘This is my land’ she exclaimed, and the sound of her voice reverberated into the ground bidding her welcome with its echo.

Perhaps she’d been there in previous lifetimes. One could easily get that impression. She loved the diverse earth-coloured layers of the New Mexico Mountains, the vast and wide sky.

The transit of Uranus opposing her Venus-Uranus conjunction was, as we heard earlier, awakening her need for freedom and open space.

Moving there was a great shift for her and ‘the hardest decision’ she ever made, as she would later recall. Her husband could not follow along, in fact was advised not to, due to his health conditions; but there was something deeper too separating them at this time.

His Moon-Saturn conjunction, as we know, had manifested as a constant need to be surrounded by family, friends, fellow artists, his mistress, etc. She — on the other hand — had the Venus-Uranus conjunction at the same place in the Zodiac, and this was about liberation from convention and formal obligations.

For the next many years, they would stay together during the winter, and she would leave for New Mexico every summer. But before New Mexico, she would go to Lake George and prepare the family house and garden for the season. As married to the eldest son, she felt it was her responsibility to do so.

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Her new land was a native American area with a history of less oppression of the ingenious people, the Pueblo Indians and their culture, than what had taken place in the part of the country where she was born, and where land had been appropriated for farming.

There was also a Spanish community with a long colonial history, and in the atmosphere she felt a ‘veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape’¹ which she, perhaps inspired by her friend Beck Strand, would paint as a large cross, posing tall and heavy in front of the landscapes.

Georgia had been there on a short visit with one of her sisters, 12 years earlier, and since then she was ‘always on [her] way back’.² This time, in 1929, she stayed for 3-4 months.

An oft-cited correspondence between her and her husband clearly expresses the archetypes of the Uranus-Venus and the Saturn-Moon.

After a few months in New Mexico, she wrote to him:

“There is so much life in me. It makes me feel I’m growing very tall, and straight inside, and very still.
Maybe you will not love me for it, but for me, it seems the best thing I can do for you.(…) I hope this letter carries no hurt to you. It is the last thing I want to do in the world “.

And he answered:
“I am broken”.³

When she left New York in 1929, transit Jupiter — the planet of expansion and long-distance travelling — was crossing her Descendant, moving through her 7^th house (long-time contractual partnerships) and it would transit her Neptune-Pluto conjunction during her stay in New Mexico.

She was accompanied by Rebecca Strand, the wife to photographer Paul Strand, and they would meet quite a range of new people in Taos — the area of an artist’s colony, where local inhabitants and artists from all over the world were invited to gather in the home of a renowned art patron and her Indian Pueblo husband.

Georgia and Beck learned how to drive, and Georgia bought her first car — a new step on her path to independence. They would visit many different places around the area with their new friends, and Georgia fell in love with the landscape.

Transit Neptune was crossing her MC, the upper end of the vertical axis, which like a spine symbolizes our roots and the direction we are heading for with regard to career and public role. The archetypal symbolism of Neptune is about merging with a larger consciousness — a transpersonal feeling of oneness with everything as an inner spiritual reality.

And for Georgia the painter, Neptune as the art of imagination, was the direct connection to Source. It was as if her soul was instantly merging with the spirit(s) of the land that was to become her home later, and eventually for the rest of her life.

Furthermore transit Pluto was trining her natal Jupiter and Ascendant and thus sextiling her Descendant (cusp of the 7^th house). This transit from Pluto would be trining all her planets in Scorpio through the next decade, symbolising an ongoing transformation of her sense of self vs. others.

Moon-Saturn contacts can be experienced as emotional insecurity and a fear, easily triggered by the prospect of separation. Her husband’s three words answering her excitement about her newly found soul expansion and inner peace, seemed to be expressing this archetypal complex.

According to Tim Gihring, she made the following deal with Alfred when she, four months later, was back from New Mexico:

“I’ll stay with you part of every year
I’ll feed you, I’ll feed your friends
I’ll show up to your parties
I’ll even look the other way at your other women
You be you
But then, I’m gone the rest of the year”⁴

There is a tone in these words that resonates into the realm of myth — calling to mind archetypes like Persephone, Inanna — all the great tales about the Soul’s journey with its changing seasons of descent/ascent.

And Roxana Robinson’s biography⁵reveals yet deeper nuances with regard to the depth and difficulty of Georgia’s decision to leave, which was never made without Alfred’s consent, every year.

Was O’Keeffe living the myth of Persephone or Inanna — or was she co-creating a new and different myth about life on Earth?

She seemed to really love…. people, nature, colours, music, nuances of light and dark, the wind, the stars, the open spaces, the city, her work… and her feelings were deep.

To be continued….

Background picture:
Black Mesa Landscape
New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II
1930, by Georgia O’Keeffe

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