Everything in that song speaks to me.

And it speaks to a very specific part of me. The deepest part of me, the part I have never really understood. The part that gets deeply moved by seemingly random things. The part that makes me feel my beliefs with every fiber of my being. The part of me that embraces deep compassion and what the words ascribed to Christ really mean.

The Pisces part of me, basically. Mars in Pisces.

It’s the part of me that makes me a shapeshifter. That flexible sense of self. It gives me the ability to (metaphorically) open doors by flowing like water into the lock then solidifying momentarily into a perfect key.

This is why I say mysterious things like “the lock implies the key” or “the shape of the lock is the shape of the key”. It’s the closest I have come to finding a way to explain how my particular genius works.

Still pretty confusing, I know.

Back to the song. One of the lines that really strikes me deeply at the moment is “but I was a fool / playing by the rules”.

I know that feeling well. The feeling that you have been a chump for playing by someone else’s rules and trying to be normal when you know damned well you could chuck those rules whenever you want and play by your own.

It makes me feel like I tricked myself into being stupid and tiny and limited when I am a maker of rules, not a follower of them. I am the type who sees past the rules and the limitations of others in order to see the truth.

Speaking of being a maker of rules……

That’s another song that resonates deeply with that deep and secret part of me. It expresses the bizarre combination of passive Pisces and angry Mars better than anything I have ever seen or heard.

It makes for a very strange and spooky kind of anger. Even I get kind of freaked out by myself when I get into that mode. It gives me enormous power because I act from such a deep sense of how things work that it can seem like magic to those with a smaller and narrower point of view.

My sister Anne is a much more straightforward person than I, and would sometimes be rather freaked out by the deeply devious and intricate way my mind works.

She would say to me, “nobody should be able to do that”. Which was weird to hear as an innocent kid just doing what came naturally.

And she’s no dummy. She’s extremely intelligent. But there is a quality to my mind that is not present in hers and it freaks her out.

I sometimes suspect it freaks my friends out a little too. They’re just used to it.

I will try to come up with some specific examples before I return after the break.

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It occurs to me that the phrase “I am the maker of rules” requires some explanation.

See, most people follow rules set out for them without even knowing it. They are playing someone else’s game, and they are doing it so unconsciously that to them, the rules seem like reality.

But they aren’t. They’re just rules.

Even smart, ambitious, resourceful people get caught in this trap because they think the idea is to win the game, which they call “success”.

But it’s still someone else’s game. And these people realize that when they get all the things they worked so hard for and they are still not happy.

Happiness is the only meaningful definition of success.

The secret to being a maker of rules, then, starts with the realization that there is a reason for rules, and from there you gain the ability to judge rules.

Good rules are needed and perform a function. Bad rules are unnecessary and serve only to make life stupider and worse.

Once you can make that kind of judgment, you realize that there are a lot of bad rules out there and that people suffer a great deal from the restrictions and delusions imposed by these bad rules and you become determined not to let that happen to you so you pursue a larger view of the world.

And that is when you are on the precipice of true power, because once you can see the flies trapped in the web of lies about the world and you can escape from that web yourself, you can see the power of being able to spin your own web,.

Even the ability to move in and out of the web at will brings great power. From the point of view of the flies, you move in and out of reality like you are three dimensional and they are 2D. Your ability to simply shrug off social restrictions that they themselves view as reality makes you a powerful (and terrifying) wizard in their eyes.

Or as it’s more commonly known, it makes you “weird”.

I’ve often thought of myself as some kind of wizard. I can see why others in my position feel like they have access to a hidden plane of reality from which they draw power.

Metaphorically speaking, it’s true.

So when you are a “maker of rules”, you are a secret master of reality because you can reweave those webs to suit yourself. You can control and manipulate social reality, and social reality is the only reality most people know.

It is an enormous amount of power to have and thus can be quite terrifying to the individual wizard who was, after all, just trying to figure out what is really going on.

Most get a glimpse of this power and then steel doors slam down in their mind to protect them from the enormity of it all.

It’s only demented weirdos like myself who remain fully conscious of the power and the possibilities, and even I am too scared to use my powers much.

I may stand outside social reality, but that doesn’t mean I have some other, superior reality in which to live.

It’s just me, out there in the darkness, looking in on all the people and their lives, and wishing I could be a part of them,.

But that’s a spell I may never learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.