When we fall in love our heart becomes the blooming rose. A profusion of petals opening wider and wider under the kiss of the sun. We feel the rose in our chest expanding from the inside out to meet our beloveds.

We don’t fall forever. We have to land. Once on earth we grow and change so our love must, too. When we flow with this shifting love, the heart becomes a snake.

The snake is a shapeshifter, moves forward with sinuous motion, sometimes curving its body entirely into nested circles. To grow it sheds its skin, leaves its no longer needed layers behind. Across time and cultures, this behaviour has imbued the snake with symbolic meanings of healing, renewal, transformation, and even eternal life.

When our hearts are snakes, we are blessed with renewing love. This is a love that changes. A love that has both times of dark and light, but that renews itself over and over again. In renewing love, the beloveds grow and change, letting each expand as they need.

But even as our snake hearts sustain our love, they challenge us as along the Lovers’ path. Because, for many of us, snakes are scary!

They are my own phobia creature. As a little girl I could not even look at a picture of a snake, and they still appear in nightmares. My snake phobia was surely influenced by the snake’s other meanings through time: evil, darkness, deception. Snakes can be death bringers; many are venomous, others could squeeze us to death. But growing up in suburban New England, I rarely encountered snakes at all and certainly not deadly ones. My feelings about snakes were a 9 of Swords experience. I didn’t face any immediate real threat, but my fears were still powerful.

I now attempt to be more accepting of snakes. Garter snakes visit my porch to sun themselves and I welcome them. I know they are good for the garden, eating up pesky critters. I’ve found beauty in the yellow strips along their backs swirling. They still startle, but in my relationships to snakes, I am  working on“feeling the fear and doing it anyway.” Here I am mirroring the Knight of Swords,committed to the quest and ready to move through any fears and negative thoughts.

My story about snakes could also be applied to love. Love is scary!

When we risk love, we make yourself vulnerable to others. Like a snake sheds it skin, we must take off our defenses and show our true selves: the beauty at our center, but also the shadows we’ve been trying to hide.

In mutually loving relationships, we open to the fullness of the other person and also to the fullness of ourselves. All become more Whole. And once we’ve lived and loved in this way, we can’t go back. Even if the relationship ends – by mutual decision, one-sided break up, or death – the skin we had to shed to love no longer fits. Love changes us. And to live, we must change.

This moonth’s astro-Tarot correspondence show us the Lovers’ path passing through the 9 of Swords inviting us to look at the places where love and its demands scare us. Our wayshower through this territory is the Knight of Swords. This Knight supports us to rise about the emotion of fear to better understand its source, and then to poke holes in the weak spots. The Knight may not entirely conquer the fear, but in the commitment to the quest can show us how to feel the fear but find our way to love in all its beauty, in all its forms.