Author Archives: Eric Francis

Earth, stationing direct…

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good Tuesday to you. Mercury, after being retrograde since April 18, stations direct in Taurus today at 6:26 pm in NY, 3:26 pm in California and 11:26 pm in England. It has been a heck of a retrograde for life on the planet: a volcano, an oil volcano, a bitterly fought election in the UK, massive flooding in Tennessee and other states, tornados in Oklahoma, banking fraud by Goldman Sachs exposed, a 1,000 point dive in the stock market and an attempted terrorist attack in New York City. A Supreme Court nominee was announced the day before Mercury stations — that nomination, well, let’s just say that it has issues.

Mercury in a modern incarnation: the rock star Freddie Mercury.

Back in spiritual boot camp, we used to think of this stuff, still decades off, as Earth Changes. Taurus is an Earth sign, Mercury is about communications and we have definitely heard from the Earth. As mentioned, Mercury is stationing direct within one degree of where Chiron was discovered in 1977, which partly accounts for the extreme intensity of this retrograde. Notably, within the same phase, Chiron made a rare sign-change into Pisces.

Len Wallick has written an excellent article about this retrograde, which is posted here. I am currently into the June monthly horoscopes, the ones that cover Jupiter conjunct Uranus on the Aries Point — the cosmic equinox. So in the interest of efficiency I am going to make this a short message. I covered most of what I have to say about the station direct in last Tuesday’s message, a little early, to make sure we were prepared.

Mercury station direct can have the theme of “the truth comes out,” and there is a lot I would like to know the truth about, vis a vis what has happened on the planet during the past six weeks that we’ve been under the retrograde effect (three weeks of Mercury echo phase, and three of the actual retrograde). The second echo phase (where Mercury goes back over the degrees where it was retrograde) ends on May 28, fairly close to when Mars leaves the degrees where it was retrograde earlier in the year. Notably, both have been retrograde in fixed signs — Mars in Leo and Mercury in Taurus.

The two are currently in a square, having a kind of dialog, which we’ve experienced twice so far — the third meeting is June 11, after both planets have changed signs (to Gemini and Virgo), and under the full strength of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.

As I’ve said a good few times, there is nothing normal and everything extraordinary about this season. Stay tuned.

Yours & truly,

PS, reminder: there are two new audio presentations: Taurus birthdays and a 12-sign presentation on Chiron in Pisces.

Tales from Topographic Oceans

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What happened to wonders we once knew so well?
Did we forget what happened, surely we can tell.
— Jon Anderson, Yes

As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill approaches the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, at least 2,000 pairs of brown pelicans are nesting on islands in the refuge. Although their nests are generally located far enough from the shoreline to avoid direct contamination from the oil slick, the pelicans can become covered in oil if they dive into slick-covered waters to catch fish. Photo: Bill Stripling/Audubon. Related videos here.

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

It’s ominous to me that the explosion aboard the BP/Transocean/Mitsubishi oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico happened within hours of Chiron entering Pisces on April 20. Chiron, a planet that has a knack for revealing the weakness in a system, ingressed Pisces at about 1:31 am CDT; by 10 PM the oil rig was in flames and 210,000 gallons a day of crude was leaking into the gulf. A survivor said in an interview that the workers had about five minutes to evacuate.

Two days later the burning rig sank, taking 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel with it, leaving a snarled tangle of metal over the wellhead on the sea floor a mile down. All work that happens from this point on will be done by robotic submarines, working in the dark, in the midst of a gushing flow of crude oil.

Many frightening questions remain unanswered, and many are not being asked by the cosmetic journalism that is covering this story, or rather covering it up: for example, how much oil can we dump into one ocean and not threaten life in the rest of them? How little does it take to disrupt the ecosystems of the Earth and make our one and only planet unsuitable for life?

As Jonathan Schell said in The Fate of the Earth, we don’t have another planet to experiment on, so we don’t want to take too many chances. But we are taking many. I never thought I would be writing an obituary for the Gulf of Mexico. With this event, the world as we know it has changed irrevocably. It is on the level of an undersea Chernobyl — the 24th anniversary of which passed on April 27, as this event was in its early days. The impact of that event, too, has been grossly minimized: a new book has come out presenting evidence that the death toll was not 4,000 but closer to one million. The ‘story of the environment’ — any story, and all of them added up — looks one way when it’s told by industry or government, and another way when it’s looked at honestly.

Meanwhile, if anybody knows how the explosion, which likely involved natural gas found in oil wells, actually happened, nobody is saying. There is speculation that it was an accident, that it was terrorism or that it was sabotage. It may have been the result of shoddy work by Halliburton and I read one report that said BP understated the depth of the well, therefore misrepresenting the pressures that would be involved. What we do know was that Halliburton was in the process of capping the well around the time the incident occurred; that has become a discussion point. What does the astrology say about all of this? In the second half of this article, I will look at the chart for the incident.

Drilling for Oil in a Mine Field

First I have news: a Planet Waves investigation has revealed that the entire vicinity of the explosion was a widespread debris field for unexploded ordnance that was dumped as ships were returning to port from various wars. Some 31 million pounds of unexploded ordnance was dumped into oceans and seas, much of it near United States coastlines — with many such areas in the Gulf of Mexico. While some are indicated on maps, many are not — and things under open water tend to drift over the years and decades.

The issue of unexploded ordnance doesn’t affect only the Gulf of Mexico — it is a worldwide problem. Here is a photo of a possible G-Series WWII German ground mine resting in 157 feet of water, adjacent to a pipeline in the North Sea. Photo from Samuel-Herbert PDF.

The U.S. Government’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) warned oil companies who leased blocks of land about the hazard, in one document saying, “The U.S. Air Force has released an indeterminable amount of unexploded ordnance throughout Eglin Water Test Areas. The exact location of the unexploded ordnance is unknown, and lessees are advised that all lease blocks included in this sale within these water test areas should be considered potentially hazardous to drilling and platform and pipeline placement.”

The issue was the subject of at least one discussion at an oil industry Offshore Technology Conference held three years ago last week. Lynn Samuel and John Herbert presented a talk on imaging systems that are used to identify where the unexploded bombs and torpedoes are located. In their paper, they wrote, “Two of the latest directives from the Minerals Management Service indicate a growing concern about Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) located in close proximity to deepwater exploration and development sites within the Gulf of Mexico.”

The authors explain the history: “From 1946 through 1970, military ordnance was dumped in the Gulf of Mexico by the U.S. armed forces, and it was the primary disposal site for the excess munitions originating from a number of large ordnance houses in the Southeastern United States. That ordnance included, but was not limited to, projectiles, bombs and chemical ordnance.

“As [the oil] industry continues to progress into deeper and deeper water, it will continue to encounter the world’s munitions dumping grounds, charted and uncharted. Because records were poorly kept and navigation was not as precise as it is today, ordnance has and will be encountered outside known munitions dumping grounds. Many of these munitions may be either armed or in such an unstable condition that a minor influence could detonate them.” Notably, the authors say that dumping was banned in the mid-Sixties, but it continued for six more years until 1970. The implication is that those old bombs could be anywhere, because after the ban it’s unlikely that any rules were followed, or that any records were kept.

Stacked WWII 1,000-pound bombs. They came in 250, 500 and 1,000 pound sizes. Many excess bombs were dumped overboard from ships returning to port, in all more than 31 million pounds of them.

Just in case you’re wondering how I figured this out, it started over the weekend, when I was looking for the location of the oil drilling platform that burned down. I didn’t want to use a shore point for the coordinates. So I started looking around the Internet and came up with a map published by a government agency called NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which was published in Wikipedia. This map specifically mentions ordnance dumping grounds. I re-published the document to Planet Waves, referencing the underwater bomb dump sites. Meanwhile, Tracy Delaney, my collaborator in Wales, came up with the coordinates from documents associated with the government lease of the oil field to BP, and with the location confirmed, we had a good chart.

A few days later, Planet Waves editor Carol van Strum was reading our main blog [Daily Astrology & Adventure], found the map and my mention of the explosives, and went ballistic. Carol has a knack for locating obscure government and corporate documents, and started to turn up the gems I’ve quoted above. As of Thursday, no other media have picked up the story: BP was digging for oil in the middle of a mine field. Madame Arcati, whose blog is read furiously by the U.K. tabloids and U.S. media folk, posted a link to the story. One of our readers re-posted it to a Daily Show discussion forum. But so far nobody has called or emailed.

This does not solve the current problem, of course. And it is a very, very serious problem. We are not being told the extent of the issue; the situation is unprecedented. Nobody knows how much oil is down there, surfacing at the rate of at least a million gallons every five days (If the current estimates are honest, that’s one Exxon Valdez worth every six weeks, till it is stopped). There are numerous wildlife sanctuaries in the area, put in place in the day of Teddy Roosevelt. Yet if unchecked, this spill could far exceed the relative containment of the Gulf of Mexico. We are in hurricane season, which could frustrate cleanup efforts and make all those pathetic little yellow oil booms more pointless than they are now. The sad truth is, once the oil is in the water, it’s in the water. Estimates of how much motor oil can contaminate a million gallons of sea water are as low as one quart — per million gallons of water. So with a million gallons of oil going into the gulf every five days, how long before the entire thing is contaminated? In truth it may already be.

Meanwhile, the Gold Man was at it again. It was widely reported yesterday that Fabio Tourre of Goldman Sachs, whose face we saw last week, bet on such a disaster — the spirit of enterprise here in the land of 2012. “One oil rig goes down and we’re going to be rolling in dough,” Mr. Tourre wrote in one email. “Suck it, fishies and birdies!” This sums up America’s attitude succinctly: the environment is always put second to money and jobs; the two are always pitted against one another. I watched Thursday’s impressive Mercury retrograde stock market roller coaster all afternoon on CNBC, and there was not one mention of the oil spill.

Atlantis, Sphinx, Arachne: Can We Handle Our Technology?

Now, what would the chart for such a thing look like? Well, here it is. I am not finding this to be a particularly easy chart to interpret, in this form; so I will describe the main features, and then move onto a level where things seem a little more obvious. The chart has Sagittarius rising, suggesting a global event. The Moon is in Cancer in the 8th house of a life or death crisis. Cancer is the sign of home; which is eco — ecology and economy are studies of home. The Moon’s last aspect, involving what I will call a ‘major point’, was a simultaneous square to Eris and trine to Jupiter — big chaos. The presence of Eris is disturbing, suggesting subterfuge and an agenda — particularly in a square aspect. The exact trine to Jupiter is like a big flow of energy, or in this case, oil (which is a form of energy).

Chart for BP rig explosion on April 20, 2010. Note, I just revised this chart from the one I originally published, to apply the day/night rule for the Part of Fortune, which puts it on the MC — the corporate and government angle. This raises the question: how do these entities benefit from the events represented by the chart?

The Moon is in the 8th house and it rules the 8th house — death, crisis, and the resources of others. The South Node is there, suggesting an old story of the abuse of power.

Capricorn is on the 2nd house cusp (money, wealth, resources). There is currently a long conjunction in Capricorn: Ceres conjunct Pluto. These planets are about one degree from one another and will be conjunct all year. Retrograde in Capricorn, they suggest a cheap and miserly quality, lending credence to how the shoddy work of Halliburton may have contributed. There is the suggestion here of the exploitation of the Earth’s resources: Earth being Ceres and Capricorn, and exploitation being Pluto.

On the midheaven of the chart — the corporate and government angle — we have Virgo. Virgo points us to Mercury, which is retrograde in Taurus (this is because Mercury rules Virgo, so the two are connected). The retrograde suggests many possibilities, none of them honest.

Now let’s look at some minor planets. This situation reeks of an asteroid called Atlantis. The modern mythology of Atlantis is a technologically advanced situation that lacked the ethical capacity to handle its own technology. The “lost continent” of Atlantis is an old theme. It’s first mentioned in the dialogs of Plato.

In its modern form, the society that self-destructs is a mirror of our own. There is a reference to this in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Whoever you think ‘God’ may be in this conversation, the description is precisely what I think of when I consider the Atlantis factor. It’s about ethics, on the one hand, and becoming the products of our technology, on the other. [Note, I used this quote a couple of years ago in The Atlantis Factor.]

“As I have said, this isn’t the first time your civilization has been at this brink,” God says. “I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself.”

Kronos	4 Cancer 25′
Ceres	4 Capricorn 27
Pluto-Charon Rx	5 Capricorn 22
Nemesis	5 Cancer 37′
Pelion	7 Aries 12′
Arachne	7 Aries 32′
Sphinx	8 Cancer 19′
Atlantis	8 Cancer 24′
Industria	8 Aries 37′
Karma	9 Capricorn 14′
Niobe	9 Cancer 34′

Now let’s cast Atlantis into the chart. I found the position using the ephemeris at Serennu.com. I sorted so that it would arrange the planets in a 90-degree configuration: that is to say, it would find Atlantis, and anything nearby making a conjunction, square or opposition. These are the points most likely to be working together with Atlantis. Here is what the sort looks like. Note that the degrees of all of these minor planets are aligned with what I am calling the 2012 alignment — the cardinal T-square — that stretches from right about now through well past 2012. This alignment will be standing in the early cardinal signs like a some UXO submerged beneath the sea floor.

Atlantis appears in a conjunction: with the asteroid Sphinx. Both are in Cancer, a water sign. So we have the issue of technology connected with the asteroid Sphinx — a kind of eternal mystery. Sphinx is something that we’re unlikely to get to the bottom of, or that is so old the truth is lost. The Great Sphinx in Egypt is much older than we are being told — there is water damage and there are repairs dating from the Old Kingdom, when the thing was supposedly brand new.

Arachne is making a very close square to this conjunction; that is about a story that’s woven. Anything aspecting Arachne can be associated with a conspiracy or web of intrigue. For example, if you have Venus conjunct Arachne in your natal chart, your love affairs may all have plots like a spy thriller. So we have that feeling here. Arachne is in a conjunction with Industria, which stands in for all things of an industrial nature, and we are clearly in that territory. The third planet in the conjunction is Pelion, a centaur (named for a mountain) about aspiration and also about the land itself; the land is the scene of the industrial conspiracy. And Atlantis/Arachne/Pelion is opposed by the asteroid Karma. Do we need to know more?

There are a few other bits. The Ceres-Pluto conjunction is right there; as is asteroid Nemesis, whose name says enough for our purposes. Finally, we have Niobe. That’s the story about being so proud of your creations that you forget everything else.

So, we have some hints of terrorism or sabotage in this chart. We have hints of a miserly approach to business, which is about greed and a profit motive. We have a good bit of hubris. And we have the karma of the industrialized world showing up, along with our agonizing failure to have the ethics and morality to handle our technology without destroying our planet. In 2006, BP moved about $265 billion worth of product, making a profit of about $22 billion. But I ask: what exactly makes the oil under the surface of the Earth private property? Why isn’t it the property of the people of the planet? How did a profit motive get involved? These and other questions — many others — are the ones we need to be asking now.

Yours & truly,

Catching Up To Good Sense

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Perhaps the Mercury retrograde has defined the last few weeks of frustration for me, although more likely that’s the hook I hang my hat on because it’s convenient. But blaming the Winged Messenger for systemic troubles would be like the lazy thinking that got us into this global emergency. As outlined here at Planet Waves, a potent brew of shifting planetary influence asks us to take responsibility for our actions, but we’re lethargic. We’re gripped with a sense of unease and confusion because what used to work efficiently has failed us, and as yet we’re unable to pin down the cause or solution. Every snarl in circumstance or communication seems to produce new complications as fast as we try to untangle them. Nothing is simple and straightforward anymore. It feels as though humankind has gone fumble-fingered, trying to do brain surgery with a butter knife.

The Gulf Of Mexico is experiencing the worst disaster since Katrina and the world’s worst oil spill since the Exxon Valdez incident. Photo: Gather.com

An obvious illustration would be the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. With some 42,000 gallons of oil erupting daily from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, local, state and national agencies have joined volunteers attempting to minimize the impact of the spill on the fragile coastlines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. California Governor Schwarzenegger has changed his mind about drilling off his coast now, seemingly aware for the first time of the potential hazard. As we’re learning in the Gulf, the risk of drilling off the Pacific should have the approval of citizens in the entire region, including Canada and Mexico. Oil does not stay put. It crosses borders with the currents and tides.

Apparently missing the larger point, we focus primarily on how to stop a destruction of what we can see and utilize for our pleasure and profit. Those who are concerned about the ocean itself, for example, are out-shouted by those whose primary worry is for the loss of the seafood industry and drilling possibilities in Gulf waters. What about the ocean floor, that great undiscovered frontier about which we know so little? Capitalism to the rescue. It seems we are testing a new substance to break up the oil slick that threatens birds and sea creatures fouled by the surface oil. Essentially, this disaster has become a proving ground for a new mix of chemicals called ‘dispersants’ that keep the oil balls suspended in the water, to be consumed by bacteria that will eventually pass toxins up the food chain. The dispersants have not yet been approved for general use.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, May 7, 2010, #815 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries Confidential

Hold off on financial decisions till late next week, preferably after Mercury has stationed direct on Tuesday and the Taurus New Moon on Thursday. Those events represent information coming to the surface, and you will need that information to make wholesome decisions. One thing that’s clear is that you’re burning with creativity, ideas and determination; all those things are positives and certainly befitting your reputation as an Aries. What you need is data. The other thing you need is insight into yourself, and this too is available, thanks to Chiron’s recent ingress to Pisces. The more you know about yourself, the more your values will shift toward what you’re aspiring to rather than where you’ve been in the past. Think of entering unknown inner territory as your portal to the future. As such, it’s the best way to liberate yourself from past entanglements.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Taurus Confidential

Two key events take place in your sign during the next seven days: Mercury retrograde ends, and a New Moon. One interesting thing about the forthcoming Mercury station direct is that it happens close to the degree where Chiron was discovered in your sign, not so long ago, in 1977. The suggestion here is that you’re dealing with awareness of a tension point or long-term struggle; with something trying to get your attention; and most significantly, with a key that can unlock your potential. This key comes through a revelation of the mind first — that being Mercury. Something you’ve been attempting to work through nearly forever is ready to give way. Though you may have all the information and ingredients you need, you’re the one who gets to enact the future. You do this by letting go of the old belief and taking action based on the new one. It really is that simple; and the momentum is carrying you precisely in that direction.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Gemini Confidential

So, is it possible to keep a secret from yourself? That would be called denial. If you feel under some kind of mental pressure, if something seems to be bugging you, if you’re feeling restless and you don’t know why — you might investigate whether you’re keeping something from yourself. That bit of information, be it a feeling, an opinion or a need, is doing everything to make itself known. But it has no life apart from you: you’re the one trying to get your own attention. That would mean you already know and, to some degree, you’ve embodied the information. I suggest you review what a spouse or close partner told you a few days ago; they seem to actually have a clue, and you would be well advised to consider the wisdom of their opinion. Of course, you already know what is true, and you might want to investigate your reasons for imagining that it’s not.

Cancer Confidential

We spend a lot of time trying to create a public image, and for the most part it is time wasted. People will have the opinion of us that they have, and that opinion says as much (or more) about their own values than it does about anything else. If you want to project an image, here are some suggestions: do it by making decisions that are in accord with what you hold dear and true. Demonstrate that you can change your mind. Show that you’re dedicated to being fair and negotiable about money — and that includes fair and negotiable with yourself. For those who depend on their talents rather than their labor to make a living, you are in a position to create a better deal for yourself, and that will be based on how you feel about yourself. In fact, how you feel about yourself is the very thing that projects your public image the most vividly — so feel good.

Leo Confidential

Make sure there’s such a thing as good enough; make sure you take good opportunities when you see them. True, you can always hold out for something better, but then one pretty good choice can lead to another. You’re not usually the type to sit on your hands, but I see a moment of hesitation. And, for sure, take that moment. Feel the cosmos move around you. Then as the next week progresses, notice how options and possibilities open up, and notice how they match your inner potential. That’s the thing to feel out, to notice and to act on: a match between what is available and what you experience inwardly. In order to see that you may need to change your mind, adjust a goal, or allow these things to unfold; you may feel some resistance, but once you let go of that, your personal effort will be minimal.

Virgo Confidential

Not enough is said about the power of belief. We all know that just because you believe something doesn’t make it true; but what we don’t quite acknowledge is that it makes it true for us, in terms of how we respond and what information we allow in. Lowbrow religion takes advantage of this property of human nature; healthy spirituality is based on noticing and ultimately choosing our beliefs. You tend to have fixed beliefs, and a fixed idea of what is possible. At times you really struggle with this, particularly when you find yourself trapped believing things that you know are not true. Yet it’s frustrating to be caught in that zone of not being able to change what you believe. Right now you have some leverage to help you with this issue. You don’t need to strain, but I do suggest you feel the tension and the discomfort vividly — in part so you’ll notice, palpably, when you change your mind and feel that much better.

Libra Confidential

Why do we have relationships? Borrowing from The Eagles, some dance to remember, and some dance to forget. Some get together to change and grow; some get together to hunker down and stay stuck. As this season progresses, a theme develops, which is that your relationships, partnerships and encounters with the world are all about not just change, but revolution. You have new people to meet, and new places to meet them. They all have something to teach you. One skill you can master now is identifying the shared territory that makes a relationship real. Almost always, this is about what values you have in common with a person. You both might be musicians, painters or have a love of dancing, but it’s the value that you put on those ‘things’ that establishes the connection point. You don’t even need to search for that; all you need to do is look. It’s either there or it’s not.

Scorpio Confidential

Notice if others define themselves based on what they are not. This is a defensive reaction to existence. Notice, as well, when people shift their orientation and begin to assert their presence based on who and what they are. The words you’re listening for are specifically I am. While you’re at it, practice those words yourself. Notice how you feel when you claim whatever it is that you are. You may be making this claim in the face of a relationship or partnership that seems to obscure your awareness or sense of presence in your own life. Remember, this is not the only option; if you keep saying I am, you may notice that someone (or more) close by responds Yes, you are. That’s who you want to spend your time with; that’s the kind of environmental support you need, as you prepare to become yourself on an unprecedented level.

Sagittarius Confidential

Focus on a money question that has persisted for a while. Get your facts together; gather all the information you can get. Don’t be satisfied that you have enough. Then, begin the process of analyzing it. Get help from someone you trust who is not emotionally involved in the issue or puzzle. Keep working the data. It may take about a week, though if you persist and give it at least that long, you will learn not only what you need to know now; you will have enough information to plan your next phase of an enterprise. Pluto in Capricorn is here to remind you that you have vastly greater financial potential than you ever imagined, and it’s here to remind you that money flows toward structure: so work with structure. Ceres in Capricorn is here to say that all wealth comes from the Earth. You may wonder how that applies to you, but if it applies to anyone, you’re it.

Capricorn Confidential

You are changing so fast it makes you queasy sometimes. It’s true that you’re accustomed to directing most of your energy inwardly; it may feel like that is the case now, and I would not be surprised if you counted this as a particularly frustrated moment of expressing yourself, your ideas, or your passion. If this is true, it’s not a meaningless struggle, and by that I mean you are making progress toward a goal you may not understand, but which exists. Remember that expression is a translation process. Something moves from an inner idea or impulse, and seeks to find existence in the outer world in the nearest possible form appropriate to its purpose. At the moment you are experimenting with both the idea itself, and the best possible form with which to express it. Give this love and patience and you will see that in this instance, content and form are one and the same.

Aquarius Confidential

If you have experienced delays or setbacks on matters of profession or reputation the past few weeks, get ready to let go of them. You are likely to decide that the delays worked for you, and that you learned more than you could have any other way. The crucial point at this stage of your growth is that you constantly draw the equations between power and ethics; between success and vision; between influence and purpose. To be driven by humanitarian causes, as you so clearly are, is to say that you are aware of your values, and that you honor them with every breath you take. I know that you’ve been inclined to scrutinize yourself in recent years, and that you have started looking closely again. You’ve reached the phase of ethics where you can trust yourself to make decisions, and then go back and review what you’ve done. At this moment, trust is the key component of ethics — not the other way around.

Aquarius birthday audio is coming soon — thanks for all the emails!

Pisces Confidential

Let’s pretend you’re a rock band. That sounds like fun. One moment you’re playing in a small venue: focused on what you’re doing, with peole you love. You and your bandmates have devoted themselves to countless hours of practice. You’re connecting with one another, with the music and with the audience; humble as the room is, you’re actually getting to be a musician. Then, a moment later (it seems) you’re standing on the stage of a sports arena, playing the same music, with the same people, only a much larger audience. What is different? I mean, what is really different? Are you any better a musician? Do you perform better in a larger space, reaching more people, with all that energy? Are you nervous and more concerned about potentially messing up? Here’s what I suggest: you treat them as exactly the same thing. They are, because they have the same purpose. They are, because you are the same person.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury, stationing direct, and…

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Mercury stations direct in Taurus on Tuesday or overnight Tuesday to Wednesday in most time zones in our readership. This retrograde began April 18. Two days later, a BP/Transocean/Mitsubishi oil platform exploded, creating a high-pressure undersea oil gusher which is slowly turning the Gulf of Mexico black. There was a failed terrorism attempt in Times Square. A credit crisis has been spreading throughout Europe, and we’ve learned that Goldman Sachss helped engineer the recession.

Carribean Blue Angelfish, Gulf of Mexico, a delicate, magnificent aquatic environment. Photo by Underwater Photos.

If we finally wake up as a result of these incidents, it may be the first time in history. Taurus is about values, and possessions (and thus related to greed), which seems to be one of those things humanity clings to as a precious thing in itself. To get out of this psychological mess will require a level of intimacy and cooperation to a depth and scale that is indeed unusual on our planet, though I have no doubt that it’s possible.

It’s just that we get so stuck in expecting things to be the way they were yesterday that we can barely envision them another way. That’s a process of waking up; of noticing our unconscious patterns; of making adjustments first to our thinking and then to our conduct. Mercury retrograde in Taurus seems to be an investigation of our seemingly intractable thought processes; of the dysfunctional values in which we hunker down and camp out. The thing about values is that they get stronger with exercise. The more we use the values we want to have and know we’re capable of, the more access we’ll have to them.

Mercury’s station-direct is Tuesday, May 11 at 3:26 pm PDT (California), 6:26 pm EDT (New York) and 11:26 pm BST/GMD (London). Though this doesn’t happen for nearly a week, that’s good timing to prepare for the shift in energy. It’s possible to feel this happening; astrology is not all about charts and concepts, though they can help (they can also do a fine job getting in the way). Experience is the best teacher with Mercury retrograde, and we have plenty of it. If you’re 50 years old you’ve been through something like this about 150 times. It’s about time we got the hang of it.

When Mercury is stationing in either direction, it helps to tread lightly on the Earth, on your life and on your relationships, and let the processes of change and rearrangement sort themselves out. Our main role is to remain alert and make conscious choices rather than acting on impulse.

Gulf of Mexico. Photo by Nature’s Portaits.

You may have to consciously muster up patience, as an act of will. You may notice that you’re getting antsy that something is not being acknowledged. The shifting emphasis or energy when Mercury changes directions can help you bring things to the surface; it’s one of those aspects about how we actually can change our minds.

What I’ve noticed is that many who know about the Mercury retrograde effect don’t take that extra step of ‘believing in it’ enough to do what they need to do. It’s like part of the effect is to tempt us to deny the effect. You know it’s there and you grant yourself an exemption. That’s the thing about awareness: we have it so we can use it to take action.

There’s a process of reversal at work. A planet close to us, and critical in our lives, will appear to reverse directions. This simple metaphor looked at one way, is a visual illusion as seen from Earth. Seen another way it’s also about relative movement and in the reality-mirage-maya of astrology, it counts. Think of Mercury retrograde as a massive magnet passing between the Earth and the Sun. We measure its movement in longitude. During the retrograde the longitude decreases in number; at the moment of the station/direct, in a flash, the longitude begins to increase. That is a critical moment. One of my favorite effects of Mercury stationing, either retrograde or direct, is the feeling of the truth coming out. It’s a moment of transparency, and what lacks integrity seems to betray itself when this happens.

For about two days on either side is something that’s come to be known as the Mercury storm — when Mercury is moving the slowest, and preparing to turn around. This is a moment of potential and a touch of danger; back up your disk drives outside this window, if you can, and if you can’t be especially careful. Keep duplicates. Call people and make sure they got your email before you get pissed off that they didn’t answer. Pause and allow projects to follow their current inertia — better not to push or pull; finesse a bit if you must, but most things can wait a few days.

The reason this is an ill-advised time to sign contracts is because something is about to reverse; and the idea of a contract is to fulfill your intention. Most things you buy during this time, you’re unlikely to really need. Save your money. This is easy astrology to work with, in the scheme of things. If you ‘absolutely must’ do something, keep Plan B handy. That insinuates planning, at all, though plans have a reduced likelihood of going, you know, as planned.

Chevron’s Jack #2 offshore oil platform, similar to this rig, discovered oil some 27,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 200 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The press lauded it as the answer to America’s energy needs, but the reality is that it will be only a ‘blip’ in the context of the nation’s energy demand. Still, drilling in the Gulf remains an obsession. For some ridiculous energy statistics, see this Wikipedia page.

One interesting feature of this Mercury event is that it’s within one degree of where Chiron was discovered. Chiron was first sighted at 3+ Taurus and on Sunday Mercury stations at 2+ Taurus. So it’s making prolonged contact with the discovery degree, which puts us into direct mental contact with the idea and the reality of Chiron.

We’ve been getting some extra focus on this, actually — because Chiron is in the midst of a sign change into Pisces. As mentioned previously, we get a warm-up between April 20 and July 20, and then Chiron re-enters Pisces in February 2011 to stay for about eight years. This is one of many outer-planet sign changes that tell us we’re heading into a new reality — with all the challenges, adventures and privileges thereof. This happens from time to time — many slow planets changing signs at once. In the current setup, many of them are making aspects to one another.

We know that Pluto has recently moved from Sagittarius to Capricorn (2007-2009), putting incredible stress on world infrastructure. I’ve said a lot about Chiron ingressing Pisces (2010-2011). Others include:

Saturn changing signs from Virgo to Libra (2009-2010). It makes a square to Pluto, opposes Uranus for the 5th and final time and is opposed by Jupiter.

Uranus changing signs from Pisces to Aries (2010-2011). It’s being opposed by Saturn, conjoined by Jupiter, and is about to make a square to Pluto (technically beginning in 2012, but in effect now). That square will have effects through 2020 and is one of the peak astrological events of our lifetimes.

Jupiter changing signs from Pisces to Aries (2010), making a conjunction to Uranus on the Aries Point, a square to Pluto and an opposition to Saturn. The Jupiter-Saturn opposition is interesting — Marc Edmund Jones described it as living two lifetimes in one.

Neptune is changing signs from Aquarius to Pisces (2011-2012), close on the heels of Chiron. That is a chart to see — here is what the alignment looks like when Neptune dips into Pisces for the first time, on April 4, 2011.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto together, create a T-square in alignment with the Aries Point — and the result is a lot of change, in a concentrated phase of time, of which we are now getting caught in the current. Meanwhile there are many aspects between recently-discovered outer planets that we haven’t covered — including Varuna square Eris, which sums up the energy of our moment in history: massive, incomprehensible changes behind the scenes.

Neptune’s first ingress into Pisces, on April 4, 2011. Neptune is represented by the blue trident on top of the chart. Chiron has arrived two months earlier. Next door in Aries, there’s a precise Mars/Uranus conjunction at the time, aligned with the Black Moon Lilith (all three on the Aries Point), with five other planets in Aries. Mandatory integrity indeed.

The question we face as individuals is whether to take this passively or to participate actively in whatever these aspects represent. Yet while we may view it as a choice, we will have to respond; we are responding, one way or another. The question is how, and what intention we bring to the choices we make. One reader described this outer planet setup to me as being about mandatory integrity.

It’s interesting how Neptune is mixed up in the current setup: at 28+ Aquarius, aspecting Uranus and Saturn (semi-sextile and quincunx, both known as ‘inconjunct’ aspects). Perhaps this represents the lies we tell ourselves, or that we believe when we’re told. After all, it’s convenient. Neptune in Aquarius may represent the sum total of all we think we’re denying. Chiron, now making its brief visit to Pisces, is running vanguard for Neptune, as if checking out the territory and inviting us to pay attention. Simply put, the great risk of anything involving Pisces and Neptune is a lapse of attention, or the intentional denial of the truth. Fortunately Chiron works the opposite way, compelling us to pay attention — but it can seem really, really inconvenient at the time.

Is it really that expensive? It would help if we notice that the alternative is a lot worse — and that we have an option. Let’s get used to the idea that we have a lot of changes to make, and that we can create this into the planetary adventure of our lifetimes.

Yours & truly,

Dear Taurus or Taurus Rising:

Last week I completed the Taurus birthday audio presentation for 2010. This is a combination of astrology and tarot, suitable for Taurus Sun, Moon or rising. I’ve really enjoyed creating this recording — it’s got a personal feel and I had the sense of you being right in the room (that’s my Venus in Taurus doing her thing). As you know, we are in times of change and reformation, and this state of rapid movement is affecting every person on the planet.

Your Taurus reading is a careful look at your astrology through 2010. I’ve focused mostly on the spectacular outer planet transits we are experiencing — Chiron in Pisces, Uranus moving into Aries, and a good review of Pluto in Capricorn. And I’ve given a new interpretation of the recent Mars retrograde and the ways in which this is helping you clear out the past, drawing old business to a close and creating space for a new chapter in your life.

One of the most intriguing transits is the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Aries, which takes place in June. My take on this is that it reveals your “hidden self” — the bold, creative person you are, whose attributes you try to access, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Jupiter and Uranus form a rare conjunction on the Aries Point. Imagine this is like discovering a whole new dimension of yourself — one that was always there, but which was concealed by a kind of veil.

I’ve included a 20-minute tarot card reading, using the Voyager deck by James Wanless. You can order now and get instant access. This is high-quality stereo audio which you can listen to as many times as you like, for as long as you like — these files will be preserved in their original location. It’s priced to be affordable — $14.95 for about 90 minutes of material (this is an extra-long edition of birthday audio).

Because my astrology writing is focused on the houses, I recommend this audio for Taurus rising as well. (In particular for Taurus, I also recommend those with Moon placements there because the two are so closely connected.) This audio report makes an excellent companion to Taurus Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, which is in written form.

Thanks for your participation, and for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

It’s Eleven Fifty-Nine

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Dear Friend and Subscriber:

We’ve just been through one of those weeks that’s going to look really interesting in a historical chronology 10 years from now. The overall effect is a series of events that call attention to all of the most meaningful global issues we are facing at our current moment of transition. Astrologically, it was stuffed with opposition energy, and an emphasis on water. In the background is the exact Saturn-Uranus opposition, the rare aspect that’s now highlighting the tension between progressive and conservative, movement and structure, the future and the past. This aspect involves Virgo and Pisces, calling attention to the tense relationship between manmade structures and the oceans. It was also the first full week of Chiron in Pisces, which has the same attention-focusing effect.

Waves wash over booms deployed along the Louisiana coastline Thursday, April 29, 2010 as oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion approaches land. (AP Photo/Liz Condo, Pool).

Mercury was (and still is) retrograde in Taurus. An unusual Scorpio Full Moon peaked Wednesday morning, bringing a crest of energy. (The Moon opposed an exact Sun-Mercury conjunction, and was directly aligned with three planets and points representing the god of the sea [Poseidon], the Greek version of Noah [Deucalion] and a primal sea monster [Ceto] for good measure). In short, the week reflected the astrology perfectly.

On a Scorpio theme (the resources of others) banking fat cats who helped engineer the global recession took a perp walk before the U.S. Senate, revealing to the American public what they’re really made of: not much. Republicans gave up and finally allowed debate to proceed on banking reform designed to protect the economy.

We learned that a BP (‘Beyond Petroleum’) oil well has been pouring 5,000 barrels of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico from three different leaks, after a platform exploded and sank. The incident, which killed 11 workers, occurred the day that Chiron entered Pisces, calling attention to aquatic environments. On Wednesday, the Coast Guard intentionally set the spill on fire. That worked to reduce the amount of oil headed for land. Strong winds and choppy waters prevented another controlled burn on Thursday. The massive oil slick, which could eclipse what was caused by the Exxon Valdez, was expected to make landfall on the Louisiana coastline Friday, with devastating effects. it could take weeks to cap the well. This is a wakeup call to the realities of off-shore drilling advocated by both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. [Meanwhile, an oil refinery fire in Memphis was threatening to spill into the Mississippi River on Thursday.]

The Greek debt crisis is spreading like Ebola and Europe must act quickly, the OECD warned. The Parthenon in Athens, pictured beneath an EU flag. Photo: EPA.

A debt crisis spread across Europe this week as credit downgrades of Greece, Portugal and Spain caused the euro’s value to tumble (Mercury retrograde in Taurus — a bit of shrinking value there). Greece’s debt was demoted to junk bond status, a first for a euro-zone member. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Thursday said it would chip in an extra 75 billion euros over the next three years, temporarily easing the slide of the European currency and helping stock markets on the continent to rebound a bit.

A new Arizona law making it questionably legal to be Mexican got lots of national attention, and the federal government considered bringing legal action to stop the legislation. This had one helpful effect: it pushed immigration reform to the top of the national agenda (along with banking reform and election finance issues raised by the Citizens’ United case).

An Arizona police officer filed a federal lawsuit against the state Thursday, asking that local police be exempt from enforcing what is usually the job of the feds. CNN reported that the officer, Martin H. Escobar, said there are no “race-neutral criteria or basis to suspect or identify who is lawfully in the United States,” including a person’s proximity to the Mexican border, linguistic characteristics and capabilities, skin color, clothing worn or the type of vehicle driven. In other words, he knows that if he tries to enforce the law, he is violating a person’s constitutional rights and thus the oath he swore on becoming an officer.

NASA lost a Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle somewhere on the planet — that is, an experimental unmanned rocket-launched glider/bomber that was flown at 20 times the speed of sound (13,000 mph). What is this thing for? Its job is to bomb anywhere on the planet in a matter of minutes. The device, launched on its maiden voyage Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, lost contact with ground control after about 10 minutes and wasn’t recovered. And to think, ETs promised Obama they wouldn’t pluck our toys from space again.

Then there was Boobquake. Tens of thousands of women conducted an experiment Monday to see if exposing a little cleavage could cause an earthquake, based on the theory of an Iranian imam. The event became so popular that its Facebook page now has close to 100,000 fans.

Gold Man Sacks Government Coffers

Fabio Tourre of Goldman Sachs testifies before the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. He said, ”I have been the target of unfounded attacks on my character and motives.” Photo: AP. See video here.

Let’s look a little more closely at the banking issue, in case you haven’t been poring over The Wall Street Journal. Executives from lose-your-investment bank Goldman Sachs testified before the Senate on Tuesday, making no admission that their gambling away billions of dollars of investors’ money, then taking huge federal bailouts, was in any way wrong or harmful.

Goldman executives proudly testified that the company’s primary role is to help the public and support the American economy. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan summed up that position most eloquently, saying that it was like a Las Vegas casino claiming that its primary function is to serve affordable buffet dinners to the elderly.

Democrats kept trying to open debate on a banking reform package to prevent such abuses in the future. After three days of votes to block debate — with the hearings getting tons of attention on TV, stoking up public outrage — Senate Republicans finally caved and allowed debate to proceed. Remember, to get anything done in the Senate currently takes 60 votes. That a ‘super majority’ is needed to conduct business basically means the minority rules, if all it wants to do is obstruct.

Foreclosures of both houses and farms were commonplace during the Great Depression.

We learned last Friday in a lawsuit filed by the SEC (which allegedly oversees Wall Street) that Goldman Sachs conspired to design a hedge fund that would decline in value, so that its clients could bet against it and cash in (called short selling). This is what they got caught doing; obviously the place was run like Enron, on a far grander scale.

Thus we got one of many clues about how the recession happened: it was created, just like we’ve heard over and over again that the stock market crash of 1929 was manipulated so that some would lose big and others would gain big. Suddenly that doesn’t seem so ridiculous. The brokerage firm then collected billions in federal bailouts. It’s finally starting to seem ridiculous that an investment bank would be given federal assistance.

Nobody that I’ve heard lately has mentioned that Henry Paulson, Bush’s treasury secretary and someone instrumental in the bailout of Wall Street, was once CEO of Goldman. The firm was also Obama’s biggest campaign contributor (giving nearly $1 million to his presidential campaign, and donating to his earlier Senate run as well), and his administration is loaded with former execs of the company. Goldman just hired former White House council Greg Craig to defend itself against the SEC lawsuit.

And Introducing Jennifer McCreight

In the midst of these gradually spreading tragedies, my favorite story of the week was Boobquake. With little planning or even forethought, Purdue University senior Jennifer McCreight thought she would test the theory of Iranian holy man Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi that immodest women cause earthquakes. McCreight is majoring in evolutionary biology and genetics. Sedighi is majoring in theological tectonic geology, with a minor in misogyny.

Boobquake was treated to a full segment on the Colbert Report this week, which certifies Jen McCreight’s 15 minutes of world fame as socially relevant and as a renewable resource. Screen shot from Comedy Central.

“Many women who dress inappropriately…cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society,” the imam said in an April 16 sermon, “which increases earthquakes.”

Iran has a lot of those, which are often devastating. Tehran itself has a latticework of fault lines running through it, and geologists have long been predicting a big one, even going so far as suggesting that the government move the capital to another city. So you can’t blame the holy men for wanting to take action before it’s too late. McCreight went into action herself, having no clue that her joke would turn into a worldwide media event. Every blog and online news source did the story. She even ended up with a full segment on the Colbert Report.

All of this activity drew more than 800,000 new visitors to her blog, and she said her name was the 72nd most popular search in Google this week, which she thought was hilarious.

Top of the Chart: Jennifer has Saturn as her most elevated traditional planet, on the midheaven, conjunct the Great Attractor. The Great Attractor is a gigantic vortex of gravity that’s drawing a million galaxies toward it at about 24 million miles a day. She has considerable power to influence government and corporate culture, particularly if religion is an issue. Note her Sun-Pluto conjunction in Scorpio (exact to two arc minutes!), and Mars in the 8th house. Uranus is on the Galactic Center, granting her the gifts of foresight and innovation. And one last — don’t miss Pallas Athene way up there to the right of the thick black line — providing wisdom, protection and political skills that would work well on an international scale.

Despite her scientific leanings, McCreight was kind enough to provide her birth data to Planet Waves and invite us to do her chart (as long as we don’t post her data, so I won’t).

And as you might imagine, she’s got it all going on — a Sun-Pluto conjunction in Scorpio, in the 8th house (she jokingly described herself as a sex-obsessed Scorpio, though her precise Sun-Pluto conjunction in the 8th house turns up the heat by a few orders of magnitude). This powerful alignment is conjunct the asteroid Astraea, the goddess of justice. So this is passion driven by a sense of balance and integrity.

Boobquake was planned for Monday, when the Full Moon happened to be fast approaching, carrying lots of momentum — with the Moon itself reaching full phase exactly conjunct her natal Sun/Pluto conjunction. So she was in the cosmic spotlight as well as the regular one. The Full Moon so personally aspected against her chart provided a sense of emotional presence, which is why this event, while funny, was taken seriously.

She has a prominent Aries Point placement (the lunar nodes are exactly there, waiting impatiently for the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction), which connects her with public consciousness in a significant way. I’ve written here many times that the Aries Point works as an intersection between individuals and society. It gives large events a personal feeling and personal events a sense of being meaningful on a greater scale. Notice how this works with something so influential (and also connected to the public) as the lunar nodes.

The Aries Point. Jennifer has the Moon conjunct the North Node on the Aries Point (top left side of diagram). The Aries Moon has a dauntless quality. Moon on the node is persistent and at times overbearing, yet has the ability to focus relentlessly on her boldest direction. Jen will experience the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on her North Node, opening up a new dimension of her life and her financial potential. The Moon is square Neptune — one of her greatest challenges is keeping a clear sense of who she is in the midst of a high public profile.

She has Saturn in Sagittarius on the very top of her chart in the 10th house — conjunct the Great Attractor. If she thought her Google rank this week was funny, imagine if she turns out to be the subtle vector that topples the Iranian government — by getting everyone to laugh at it. Of interest, the asteroid Hekate (the wisdom of women) is right there on top of her chart, conjunct the Great Attractor (the biggest object known in the universe, located in mid-Sagittarius). McCreight is a force to be reckoned with. In order to emerge as some kind of profound force for change later in life, she needs only to be prepared and aware, and take a small step when she gets the guidance to do so — much like what happened this week.

Meanwhile, the current Saturn-Uranus opposition, exact for the 4th time on Tuesday, stretched across 28+ Virgo/Pisces — exactly square McCreight’s natal Chiron (at 28+ Gemini). So this got her natal Chiron going, and that’s the planet that likes to do things differently, experiment — and in Gemini, explore the nature of ideas, paradoxes and dichotomies.

Chiron makes one more spectacular appearance: transiting Chiron in Pisces about to go over her early Pisces ascendant. The asteroid Aphrodite (the Greek version of Venus) is exactly in her ascendant by birth — meaning that she’s coming into her own and figuring out who she is in that stand-out way that is so distinctly unique to Chiron. Here we have Chiron activating the Goddess power of Aphrodite, which she identifies with closely.

Her concept for an experiment / commentary / protest was an elegant example of using the background tension (Saturn-Uranus) in combination with personal factors (natal Chiron and a Chiron transit) as a social force for revolution. The revolution is indeed being born now, and it will be brought to fruition through odd, unexpected events like this. Odd but not random: Jen McCreight is an example of being the change you want to see in the world; of waking up and realizing it’s possible to do something both fun and useful.

Other forms of change may seem to be more difficult, though they’re based on the same basic idea, which is the intentional use of knowledge, focusing it into choice: that is, a decision or creative act. Every one of the news events that has emerged since Chiron entered Pisces can be seen as a matter of personal choice that can gather into collective awareness and action. You just need to slow down long enough to notice it’s possible, and at first focus on what you’re doing more than the results you want to get.

Yours & truly,

Additional Research: Tracy Delaney provided data on the minor planets, and Amanda Painter provided news and astrology research on Boobquake.

Dear Taurus or Taurus Rising:

A few minutes ago I completed the Taurus birthday audio presentation for 2010. This is a combination of astrology and tarot, suitable for Taurus Sun, Moon or rising. I’ve really enjoyed creating this recording — it’s got a personal feel and I had the sense of you being right in the room (that’s my Venus in Taurus doing her thing). As you know, we are in times of change and reformation, and this state of rapid movement is affecting every person on the planet.

I’ve included a 20 minute tarot card reading, using the Voyager deck by James Wanless. You can order now and get instant access. This is high-quality stereo audio which you can listen to as many times as you like, for as long as you like — these files will be preserved in their original location. It’s priced to be affordable — $14.95 for about 90 minutes of material (this is an extra-long edition of birthday audio).

Thanks for your participation, and for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“My great grandfather didn’t travel 4,000 miles across the ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland.”
— faux-Republican satirist, Stephen Colbert

If you’ve never witnessed a lightning storm over Arizona, you’ve missed an extraordinary sight, thrilling and dangerous all at once. The state itself is a place of fragile détente between the desert and those who inhabit it. As the tribal home of the fierce Apache, the proud Navajo and the prophetic Hopi, it is a modern marvel that Americanos can thrive there. At the Northern gateway to the Sonoran Desert, it’s also the birthplace to generations of Mexican-Americans with loyalties split between nation and heritage. This is a place of vast scrub and cactus-covered vistas, a historical mingling of cultures, as well as a particularly virulent form of white nationalism dressed in cowboy boots with a gun strapped on its hip.

Burning Tucson. Photo by KinoShaman.

I lived in Tucson for several years. Having moved from the San Diego area, where immigration problems are legion, I was surprised at how integrated and peaceable the amalgam of Arizona citizens seemed. The most obvious strain among races was not between white and Hispanic, but instead was directed at the small African-American population, which kept its head low. Arizona voters finally approved a form of the Martin Luther King holiday in 1992, but only after a much publicized battle and a crippling tourist boycott. I found Arizona to be one of those “Yes, but …” places. Yes, extraordinary in its subtle beauty and energy, but difficult to abide on a daily basis. Yes, a place peaceful enough to the untrained eye, but constantly alert at its interior. Yes, homogeneous in its workplaces and neighborhoods, but tightly controlled by an ‘old white guy’ ruling class that remained invisible and inflexible.

The storm broke over Arizona last week with passage of a bill that declared undocumented aliens to be criminals, requiring police to check the papers of anyone considered suspect. The law targets nearly half of Arizona’s population, which is only 58 percent caucasian. You know there’s psychic weather brewing when the neo-Nazi website, Stormfront, announces “more good news out of Arizona!” (Prior good news included the pending Birther Bill and vigilante-like militias guarding the border.) Arizona’s carry law requires no license to carry a gun, and many citizens are armed. Encouraged by the new legislation, one militia organizer now recruits “combat veterans, with kill records, to camp out and patrol the border.”

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 30, 2010, #814 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Though I didn’t quite use the words, we left off last week with one version of ‘action is the fruit of knowledge’. If you’re feeling pent up, frustrated or like you want to burst into flames, consider that you know something you’re not acting on. One form that lack of action may be taking is the refusal to admit the knowledge in question. That in turn may relate to something you know is important to you, but which either circumstances or mental frustration prevent you from handling consciously. Now is the time, though I suggest you move incrementally. Recent events may have clued you in to what happens when you try to clear something all at once — but you will feel more resolved if you move past the illusion of being caught in your own inertia. And you can turn that around with one decision.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Aspects this week suggest you’re involved in heroic efforts to set yourself free, though do you feel free yet? Your emotions seem more willing to go there than your mind. This said, I suggest you study the nature of that particular instrument. Your mind is not you; it’s a tool that you can use to navigate through time, space and potential. Your mind often seems to ‘think its own thoughts’, contradict your feelings and send you odd messages; and it would be distressing if you confuse that entity with ‘yourself’. Part of how you can tell you’re doing this is because you are either obsessed with the past, or with ignoring the past. Either way it amounts to the same thing. You seem intent on denying the fact that you’re angry about something, and I propose this is no formula for freedom. But admitting it is a great place to start.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Are you being asked to commit to something that you don’t want, or are you giving yourself over willingly and knowingly? The aspect of you that wants to yield, submit or surrender has an alien quality, as if it’s not really you: and as if the only part that is really you is the one with the power to deny or contradict. To say yes still feels like compromise, no matter how much you may benefit, or regardless of the mutual benefit available in the situation. There are plenty of things worth doing for their own sake, but saying no (to yourself) is not one of them. Why would you do this? It looks like you’re hiding your motives from yourself. You may feel that if you admit one inner truth you will open yourself up to admitting much more that for whatever reason you have chosen to conceal. This leads to a question — is it possible to keep a secret from yourself?

The continuing momentum of this week’s Scorpio Full Moon is likely to have you feeling confident and thirsty for life. You know there are real possibilities, and you know that you have the option to sink your lips and teeth into some of life’s must nourishing fruit. One possible hitch is worrying what other people will think about you — other people as in your circle of friends, your acquaintances or your social set. If your solar chart is any indication, you seem to be grappling with the question of, “What if my deepest truths were known to everyone?” And I would ask you in earnest: What if your deepest truths were known to everyone? Play out that scenario as fiction. Choose one or two of those truths and imagine that they are sent to your whole address book. What would be some potential scenarios? How would you feel?

Success rarely happens as we plan it; there are always twists in the plot. Yet generally, it still helps to have a plan and work the plan, amending day by day as you proceed. You are making a series of discoveries that you may not have been suspecting; you’re learning about your own talents, and you seem to have developed a new passion for persisting in the face of both adversity and unusual circumstances. This is a confidence-building project, which is a good thing because that’s the active ingredient, the yeast that makes the bread rise. And for you, at the moment, the other key ingredient is partnership. There is something high-visibility suggested, with a lot of energy behind it, a strong evolutionary impulse and a quality of clear communication: and it’s immediate, not in the distant future.

What’s new on the horizon? I mean, what has recently appeared in your life that has no precedent, no sense of familiarity and an entirely new message? There is something, or someone, that is prompting you to wonder about life and yourself and relationships. You’ve had hints of this in the past; what you are experiencing now is different: more focused, a bit stranger and with greater potential to both heal you and, it would seem, to harm you. How you handle yourself will account for how those potentials shake out. I suggest you drop your expectations. Forget about distinctions such as ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’. This situation exists to help you open up to pleasure, and to aspects of life that you tend to deny; and to help you heal something about your lack of willingness to be vulnerable. Your fears in this area are complex, and this relates to certain ways in which you doubt your own perception. Your doubt can hurt you more than anything.

What an amazing moment to re-align with your commitment to yourself, which is the foundation of sanity and balance. I know this idea gets tossed around self-help literature, yet there are so many opposing forces and influences that it’s worth pausing on for a moment. The notion of a relationship to oneself is often considered weird, as if the only thing we can relate to is another person. We are conditioned to seek The Other, who supposedly possesses all these amazing qualities that we don’t have. Here is what I propose: what you are seeking in another, you have within yourself. The more you draw in your inner strength and gifts, the more you’re free to experience others as playmates and collaborators instead of someone who you hope would make you whole.

The important thing is what you want, not what someone else wants. Yes, what they want is important to them — if they have a clue what it is, and who knows, they may indeed. By most indications, someone in your life is acting committed and determined and certain. Your Scorpio intuition has its doubts. The more meaningful revelation would be you admitting what you want, to you. Your desire may be a shade of gray compared to what appears as black and white to someone else. If so, get out your pencils and sketch that particular shade. Or, you may feel clear that despite anyone’s reservations, you are going to take leadership in your own life. You want no part of the hesitancy that consumed your life earlier in the year and late last year. Therefore do not focus on the hesitancy of others. Remind yourself of your heart’s desire and be content to take action on what is right for you.

You may be the one making a situation seem more complex than it needs to be. True, it’s surfacing in a relationship, but is it the relationship in your mind, or the relationship in reality? I suggest you get that issue sorted out. The relationship in your mind seems to be mired in questions. The relationship in reality has a sense of clarity, directness and potentially frightening degree of commitment. This may make you nervous because you want to keep your options open. You feel a burst of freedom coming on and quite possibly the season of your dreams approaching rapidly. Okay then — keep your options open. You don’t need to impress people with that fact; know, quietly and with authentic certainty, that you are the one who chooses. And at this particular moment in history, one choice doesn’t preclude another.

You seem to be having a difficult time trusting someone. This is an old story: an old reason for not trusting. You may feel that some element of your fate hangs in the balance on their judgment, power or influence. Sometimes it seems like they have the power to push you ahead or hold you back. You are giving who or whatever this is way too much credit. Part of your freedom will come from the acknowledgement that you influence these things yourself. You have what you need, in particular an innovative quality that you rarely give yourself credit for. Don’t invest your energy in paranoia or any form of lack of faith. Try telling yourself that you have great ideas, and that every problem has a creative solution. The particular puzzle you’re working out is an easy riddle, if you seek to solve it yourself.

For the past couple of years, you’ve been trying to work out a relationship, or rather, a relationship situation. This has been calling on you to cultivate flexibility, and you may have been surprised how challenging this has been. Once again you’re going through another layer, or another dimension, of the work on this issue, and yet it seems to be persisting, threatening to drag on forever (though you secretly suspect this isn’t true). The thing to remember is that ‘it’ is not going to change; you are the agent of change, and the one who will take the step that moves you to the next place, space or stage of your journey. You’ve learned a lot the past few weeks; I cannot imagine how much. And you seem resolved to stick it out as long as you can. However, you seem determined to make at least two significant moves in the next few months, which are designed to shift the situation totally, open up a new reality, and embark on the future with a vivid new agenda.

Aquarius birthday audio is coming soon — thanks for all the emails!

Saturn in Virgo has taught you something about the power of structure. For quite a while — at least for the duration of Uranus in your sign, which started around 2004 — you’ve been driven by ideas, and you’ve even manifested some of them. Then Saturn ingressed your opposite sign and you had the chance to start building: relationships, concepts, business structures, or some combination of the three. The series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions through Virgo and Pisces may have felt like building a Moon-base: incredible challenges and occasional setbacks, though every small success counts for a lot. It’s time to look back at what you built, and what you learned building it. It’s time to integrate your knowledge, because you are, at this time, beginning to embody both the innovation aspect and the structure aspect in a whole new way: one beautiful gift of Chiron in Pisces.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Planet Waves Inner Space Horoscope – May 2010

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Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

Today is the eve of the Scorpio Full Moon. We have this once a year (rarely, twice within a month) when the Sun is in Taurus. This is a [Northern Hemisphere] springtime herald, reflecting the deep core of erotic energy pulsing through the Earth and our bodies at this time of year. This particular event stands out because Mercury and the Sun are in an exact conjunction (called a combust aspect) when the Moon reaches opposition to both. Mercury is retrograde, in a string of orbs through space: Sun, Mercury, Earth, Moon. I cover that in this week’s free audio.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Mercury is retrograde through May 11. This condition, which is in effect for a spell three times a year, has new meaning in the modern world because we sit surrounded by mercurial devices: cars that talk, computers in our pockets, Skype and Magic Jack. Kids send 3,000 texts a month, with some adults close behind. What to watch for cautiously this time around is the long square between Mercury and Mars, which took center stage on Sunday. This is the frustration-obsession aspect of Mercury retrograde in Taurus working itself out against the friction of Mars in Leo: natural results could be the expressions of passion, anger, and internal complexity that wants to be unraveled.

In other truly meaningful news, Chiron is now in Pisces for the first time since the late 1960s. We get 90 days of this energy before Chiron retreats back into Aquarius in July, then returns to Pisces in February 2011. Discovered in 1977, Chiron is still considered a new influence on astrology, but its spiritual themes have, in the past 33 years, gradually infused the work even of astrologers who have never heard of it. In Pisces, Chiron is calling us to acknowledge the reality of the soul; the inherently creative nature of what it means to be human; and the practical way we can manifest our deepest, most intimate fantasies.

I have prepared some Chiron in Pisces audio for all 12 signs, with a lengthy introduction. There is another summary included with the May monthly Planet Waves horoscope.

See you Friday.

Yours & truly,

PS: I’ve been asked what the difference is between the forthcoming Cosmic Confidential Chiron audio (next up, after Uranus) and the audio product I’m offering here. The Chiron audio included with Cosmic Confidential is about lifetime Chiron transits (such as the Chiron return), no matter what your Sun sign. The current audio describes Chiron through the houses and signs for the 12 Sun signs and ascendants. — efc

Your life may be cast with a vague sense of the unfamiliar: as if you’re seeing places you’ve visited before for the first time. Beneath this is your process of assigning new meaning to your existence. We tend to think that life is definitive; we tend to forget that most of what we experience is our interpretation rather than something objective or factual. You’ll fare better if you fly by intuition rather than by seeking proof-positive or concrete validation. You’ll have a greater sense of freedom and potential, especially from the confines of one particular situation that you were certain was holding you back. Now that you have some breathing room, you get to test that theory.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Are you having an odd illusion of living two lives at once? Perhaps in two places, or with two people in separate worlds, or one version of yourself from the past and one from the future? Your charts tell such a story, and if you’re having this sensation I suggest you either experiment with it boldly, or collect yourself in one place. It’s not the kind of thing I suggest you just let slide unconsciously. The opportunity is too beautiful, and the creative potential sufficiently strange and unusual to allow you some authentic originality. One way to describe the setup is to say that you are gaining a new sense: as in a sixth sense, or an expanded sense of yourself.

Coming This Week — Taurus Birthday Audio.

Significant, rare planetary events show a picture of you stretching your capabilities in every direction. Yet I suggest that despite so much happening, you remind yourself of your first priority: your primary goal. You know, the one you normally can’t quite get a grasp on. For the next few weeks you will be able to keep that goal in sight and in mind long enough to evaluate it carefully. You’re likely to feel some sense of discomfort initially, or of mild crisis, as if you’re remembering something vitally important but long forgotten. You might be concerned about how many years it’s been since you remembered, but maybe you’ll feel better if I said we may be talking about lifetimes.

Remember that you cannot control, only influence, how people perceive you, and this must be done in subtle ways. Over the next few weeks you may have the feeling that you’re projecting an image opposite of what you are intending. For example, you may express yourself as a relatively simple person and be seen as complex. Ideas that are clear to you may be incomprehensible to others. You may tell the truth, and others might doubt you to your face. I suggest that you not get emotionally involved in these responses. Let people be responsible for what they see, while you are responsible for what you feel. You need this boundary, and you’ll benefit from having it available as a tool.

Leadership is the ability to be creative under unpredictable or confusing circumstances. In our time, leadership is about ideas. You’re poised to be a source of approaches or concepts that will qualify as one of a kind, and potentially once in a lifetime. Your mind is working with a kind of logic all its own, and I suggest you put no energy at all into doubting yourself. Even if you think something that seems like it’s not even vaguely applicable, or have ideas that don’t seem to apply to the situation, assume you’re working on a good hunch. Trust yourself; trust your perception; and moreover trust that you can treat any problem as a puzzle that, if solved, can improve life for everyone.

Nobody tests your faith except for you. If the planets mean anything, you seem poised on the verge of significant progress in both your personal life and your professional life. Yet I suspect you’re experiencing this more as a crisis. Step one is making some contact with the faith you have in yourself. It doesn’t matter how you get there: remembering your past achievements, reminding yourself who thinks you’re amazing, or following an inner sense of what is possible. However you manage it, remember that faith in yourself is an essential ingredient right now. Second remember that you have options: not eventual options, but ones that are immediately available; the kind you can exercise right now.

In the long discussion of ‘reuniting sexuality and spirituality’ we might ask how they got separated in the first place. The answer would involve the perception of sex as a source of power rather than pleasure, considering people as property rather than partners, and other related concepts such as jealousy. Even though we know that intellectually these things are not necessary, we continually come up against two things: our own emotional programming, and a lack of options for what else is possible. An unusual alignment in your solar chart this month gives you some beautiful opportunities to get past these obstacles, and to embrace your relationships in a new way as sources of healing, comfort and pleasure.

Are you really that tangled up in the life of another person? Or are you just in one of those emotional situations where you’ve lost track of who is who and what is what? Yes, someone close to you is working out something that looks complicated and difficult to discern; fortunately, it’s their stuff and not yours. You, on the other hand, are moving into new emotional territory for the first time in many months, which is another way of saying you’re finding your confidence. As for who is wrapped up in whom, it’s a partner or close associate who doesn’t know what to make of you, or their emotional involvement with you. Nor is it easy for them to face the fact that you know you’re fundamentally free.

A past work partnership may prove to be vital this month. Look for who, from the back pages of history, turns up or has recently turned up in your life, and make sure you don’t bring your old prejudices about the relationship. What you have with this person is an unusual depth of contact on the elusive theme of values. Yet the planets suggest a change of roles; someone who was once your boss could become your employee; someone who was once your student could take over a crucial project; someone who was strictly a professional contact could become a significant personal acquaintance. The overall theme is to maintain your flexibility and stay firmly in the present, no matter how old the story may be.

Take advantage of being relieved of some responsibility (or your overdeveloped sense of responsibility) and indulge in some self-expression, romance or art: basically, trade in some work for some play. If I must lure you with the prospect of productivity, I promise you that you will feed the tree of accomplishment. Through most of the year, your pendulum has been swinging far in the direction of taking the world onto your shoulders, and it’s about time you put it down for a while. True, many people succeed at great accomplishments without much balance in their lives, and some of them are even happy. You, personally, need to work both sides of your brain, in honor of the fabulous challenges that are ahead.

You’re starting to get a taste of what it’s like to not be under constant pressure to improve yourself. For certain phases of life, it’s necessary to define existence in terms of a healing agenda, and that can seem like the ‘whole purpose’ of existence. Mysteriously, that changes and some new purpose takes up life in your heart and mind. You’re now in a brief spell of experimenting with that new agenda, a new vision for yourself. This will come with the revelation of priorities you have not considered, and which have often slipped out of your grasp. You may not be able to put all of them into action; I suggest being grateful for the opportunity to experiment in real life with one new priority.

Coming next week — Aquarius Audio.

For a long time I’ve been describing your life as the attempt to see around a corner, or to peer into a veiled dimension. Along with this is a sense of being hidden from yourself. This month, Chiron enters your birth sign, potentially for the first time in your life, or for the first time since you were a child. This will bring new experiences and a new sense of self-awareness; Chiron is famous for its focusing power, particularly where Pisces is concerned. Think of it this way: you’re like a bottle of ink that finally has a pen; a projector that finally has a lens; a question that at long last is graced with a question mark.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Pisces, Chiron and Whole-System Thinking

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Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

To celebrate Earth Day, I took Thursday morning off and went to the Grandmother Land, a place I’m friendly with that’s tucked away in the mountains of central Ulster County. My day-to-day work has me looking into glowing rectangles much of the time, they are hypnotic and I’m aware that part of my soul lives on the Internet. Grounding into the Earth discharges that energy and gradually brings me to my senses. Usually I hang out on top of the waterfall; this time I went to the lower part of the falls, got as close to the water as I could, and lay down on the cool rock. The Sun tucked in and out between the clouds.

Moss and other plants inhabit a rock crevice to the east side of the waterfall on the Grandmother Land in High Falls, New York. (This waterfall is not the one that got the town its name. That one is somewhere else.) Photo by Eric Francis.

One of the things I value about this spot is that it’s like a clock that moves only with the seasons. From year to year, the landscape is beautifully consistent; there’s nothing industrial around, it has no business purpose and at this time in history there are few visitors. In this place I can feel back to the end of the last ice age, a sensation which slows down the experience of time passing. The approximately 6,500 days since I arrived there for the first time are like a minute or two passing if you put things in the context of geological time.

I find this reassuring. Even astrology is not suited to handle such large passages of time, or at least Western astrology isn’t (Mayan astrology is much better suited for super-long timespans). Yet we do get the chance to witness changes, especially if we remember the holographic quality of astrology: the whole is contained in the parts. Movements in small cycles can signify movements in much larger ones. If you’re familiar with the concept of a fractal, consider that astrology is the original application of that concept. A fractal is like a sample of time that tells the whole story.

Chiron made an impressive show ingressing Pisces this week. Now that Chiron is moving slowly through the signs and living as an outer planet — at this point, it’s moving through the signs slower than Uranus — these sign changes are more significant. Each one comes with a revelation. I’m counting the immediate zone of the ingress as going back to the Aries New Moon last week, which coincided within a few hours with a chunk of an asteroid lighting up skies over the American Midwest. And as it happened, that was the day that Eyjafjallajokull went off for the second time in 2010. (By the way — I am equally impressed by these two events, though the meteor hardly got the attention it deserved. If you’re wondering what this might be about astrologically, think of it as a very, very precise conjunction.)

Photo by Eric Francis.

As Mercury went into storm phase (for its station-retrograde in Taurus on the 18th), we saw something that’s never happened before — air traffic across Europe and the United Kingdom was shut down. Governments and scientists were concerned that the volcanic ash would melt inside jet engines and cause them to seize up. BBC reported that by April 21, an astonishing 95,000 flights had been canceled. Anyone who has flown knows how stressed and indeed how complex the air travel system is; how slim profits are; how challenging it is to keep 100 tons of people, aluminum and titanium safely in the air. But this was not your average Mercury retrograde air travel delay. It was the revelation of something on a much greater scale, revealing something inherent about life on our planet.

Chiron was one of the first astrological factors, if not the very first (besides astrology itself) to call attention to holistic ideas and methods. It’s a whole-system factor; in other words, Chiron has local manifestations, and implications that affect everything around it and many things that seem unrelated. I once asked Rob Hand what he thought of Chiron. I wanted his opinion because he’s so focused on traditional astrology. He basically offered me an idea he got from Kim Rogers-Gallagher, that he had converted into his own language: Chiron represents the factor in any complex system that can point to a problem; and if you address the problem, the system will be efficient and stable, and if you don’t, it will collapse. (This is one really brilliant delineation of Chiron; there are others.)

As Chiron was making its move, there’s been an aspect forming in the background that highlights the story. Chiron’s orbit is between that of Saturn and Uranus, so it serves as a kind of balancing factor between those two planets. At the moment they happen to be within a fraction of a degree of opposition to one another [please see related story below], which you can look at as a confrontation or as an attempt to reconcile two entirely different visions of reality: the steadfast structure of Saturn and the raw energy of Uranus.

Wide perspective of the falls on the Grandmother Land. Obviously in previous eras this was a much wider waterfall that dates to considerably before the last ice age — though it did a great job draining ice meltoff when the glaciers thawed most recently. And it will be there when they thaw again. Photo by Eric Francis.

Currently, Chiron is working the imaginary line between Aquarius and Pisces, which resonates strongly with the whole-system concept. I say this because as the last two signs, they tend to cover large ideas, institutions and areas. Imagine that Aquarius can signify the technosphere and Pisces can represent all the world’s oceans. Big stuff; and there is a meeting place, where these two signs meet, between what we think of as ‘manmade’ and ‘natural’ systems.

Here is the thing — we tend not to think about this stuff. Chiron is like a clock hand that points to what we need to pay attention to. So here we have this marvelous image of a natural event impacting a vast dimension of technology. Think of all those airplanes sitting on the ground due to the eruption of a little tiny volcano. If we take a hypothetical average of 175 people per flight, times 95,000 flights equals more than 16 million trips canceled in just one week. This in turn points to the scale of global air travel. This event originated in one region of the world, though of course the effects ripple out through the whole air traffic system. Even if a single hub like O’Hare ices over it can wreak havoc around the system. So this touched every major air traffic center in the world.

The beauty of it was that this was a natural event. I’m willing to blame the Asian tsunami on oil drilling and the big hurricanes that got New Orleans on weather control, climate change and/or something unnatural busting open the levee. Maybe I’m not being suspicious enough but a volcano going off in Iceland seems as natural as a dandelion.

Somewhat less natural was the lawsuit filed Friday against Goldman Sachs, which was involved in another whole-system issue — the global economic meltdown of late 2008. The federal government is saying that this massive investment bank, which has many of its former executives involved in the American economy in positions of public power, created false companies that were designed to fail; this way, their clients could make money by betting that their stock would go down. Given the scale of what happened in ’08 and ’09 and that the Fed committed more than $3 trillion in resources toward the bailout, this evidence that the meltdown was based on fraud is damning. I associate this with both Chiron changing signs and the “truth comes out” attribute of Mercury stationing.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Let’s flash back to when Chiron entered Capricorn on Dec. 11, 2001, nine days after Enron filed bankruptcy. That was just the opening move of a game that would go on straight through the entire transit through Capricorn. Chiron went through the halls of power with a giant lancet and popped government and corporate abscesses: Enron came crashing down, as did its accounting firm Arthur Andersen; Worldcom collapsed; there was a massive round of Catholic sex scandals. By May 2002, it came out that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance, and that no airliner had crashed at the Pentagon. (I am from time to time contacted by relatives and friends of those on that flight. I believe that it ended up on the Kentucky-West Virginia border.) As the transit progressed, the Bush administration used Sept. 11 to start two wars. They lied about not being able to find bin Laden; and they lied about weapons of mass destruction. Administration officials outed their own spy in revenge for somebody accusing them of lying. Scooter Libby and Karl Rove covered it up; Libby was convicted. After enduring a stolen election in 2000, we had another one ripped off by stealing Ohio in 2004 — confirmed by many independent reports…and so on, and on. Uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff was snagged under Chiron in Capricorn for bribing a long list of congressmen and is now in jail. And, like, we barely got the message.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Events at the beginning of the Chiron in Capricorn era foreshadowed the rest of the decade. Every problem that came out in the initial months of Chiron in Capricorn revealed something that would eventually be revealed as a vast problem — and notably a problem we could have solved, if anyone had the combination of commitment and awareness. Instead, we turned away, we pretended there wasn’t really an issue, and the problems got deeper. My sense at the time, in the early 2000s, was that we were getting a clue what we would be dealing with as Pluto transited Chiron (which it is doing now), only in miniature; we could solve it then, or we would have to work it out on a much greater scale under the influence of Pluto.

Chiron in Pisces is revealing a new dimension of awareness, or rather, pointing out what we need to be aware of. My take is that Chiron in Pisces is homing in on two things: one is natural systems, that is, what preexisted industrialism, and where these intersect with our technological systems. The other is what we think of as spirituality, and by that I mean we’re being pointed to a void of awareness of how our beliefs influence our reality; how interconnected we all are; and how dependent we are on the environment in which we live.

Chiron making a sign change has many personal implications, affecting many generations, and these themes deserve focus; we have some time to go over that subject matter, and I trust that the most helpful ideas will be born in conversations with those in the new wave of Chiron transits. Let’s keep that in mind for next week.

Yours & truly,

Sunday, April 25 Mercury in Taurus will retrograde into a square with Mars in Leo. This is the second of three squares — the first was April 5 (Mercury direct), the second is Sunday (Mercury retrograde) and the third will be June 11 (Mercury direct). This is an aspect that requires careful handling, and could lead to significant errors in judgment if we’re not careful. I would suggest that it needs to be handled like a psychological bomb. The mix of fixed signs, personal planets and retrograde Mercury is the perfect setup for misunderstanding, overreaction and projection of inner guilt as outer blame.

Young tadpoles inhabit a puddle on the Grandmother Land. There are dozens of these ecosystems scattered across a rock plateau beneath the falls. Photo by Eric Francis.

Notably, the same day, the Moon passes through a very close opposition between Saturn and Uranus (that event is exact Monday), which brings a raft load of personal emotions, needs and ideas (Moon in Virgo) into a much larger cultural process developing between distant planets. So let’s just say that the heat is on this weekend, and it would be an excellent time to stand back from situations that push your buttons and figure out how to make constructive use of the planetary setup.

And what might that be? First, be careful with kids. They may seem belligerent and stubborn, and they will need patience, love and friendship. For adults, this astrology looks great for inner process: a retreat of some kind, a moment of reflection on life, an assessment of the restructuring that is going on in our private lives and in the world around us. We have a lot to learn about how to navigate our own psychology, what to do with past hurts and how to move forward without the constant fear that we’re going to offend someone by what amounts to breathing. Sunday will be an interesting epicenter.

Dear Cousin and Client:

My Australian colleague Yasmin Boland called me up last week and suggested that I do a set of audio recordings for Chiron in Pisces. She knows I’ve been writing about Chiron for 15 years and that good information is difficult to come by. After writing several other articles about this transit, including the May monthly horoscope, I dove into the audio — and it’s now ready.

Eric Francis.

Chiron in Pisces promises to be an extremely interesting transit — and for those of us who are attuned to the feminine side of life, to nature, to our emotional world, to spirituality and to the planet as a whole entity, this is transit is welcome news. We now get about three months of Chiron in Pisces before it retrogrades back into Aquarius on July 20. It will then return to Pisces to stay for eight years in February 2011. This is our test run; our first experiment; our opportunity to explore this energy and find out what role it’s going to have in our lives.

This audio set is an awesome, economically priced product that gives you a wholesome introduction to both Chiron and Chiron in Pisces (about 20 minutes) and then takes on the 12 signs in individual recordings of about six to eight minutes in length. I go through the implications and my theory of Chiron in Pisces through each of the 12 solar houses. I suggest you listen to your Sun, your rising sign and your Moon sign — though there is good information for everyone, in each of the recordings.

We’ve priced this to be affordable — $14.99 for all 12 signs and the intro, which you can listen to as many times as you want. It’s like a mini-audio book on Chiron in Pisces. Remember, this is the beginning of the conversation, a kind of welcome wagon — this will be an exciting, long-term transit that will change the world in subtle, beautiful ways.

Please use this link to order. Delivery is instant. And please let me know how you like it.

Thanks for checking it out.

Yours & truly,

Dear Friend and Pisces:

Pisces has been under particularly bold astrology for the past year, with most major events coming from or being influenced by your sign. Let’s see: first there was the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune; that involved the two rulers of Pisces. Then there’s been the Saturn-Uranus opposition, which directly involved Pisces. Speaking of, Saturn in Virgo has had a profound effect on Pisces relationships.

Now we have Jupiter in Pisces, Chiron about to make its way into your sign next week, and finally, the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus on June 8, again involving a Pisces planet.

And…what does it all mean? I’ve created an extended audio presentation for Pisces birthdays that gets into all this astrology in the kind of imaginative detail that you want. In one full segment of about 20 minutes, I look closely at Chiron in Pisces. And I’ve added a tarot card spread for Pisces, using the amazing Voyager deck by James Wanless.

This audio is available now. After the amazing success of the Aries birthday audio in March [please see feedback here], I thought I would cover Pisces before getting into Taurus (which will be next week). This audio reviews your transits going back to last year, and covers well into 2011. In all, it’s the length of one of my professional consultations, about 70+ minutes of astrology and tarot. I’ve been doing tarot for seven years longer than I’ve been doing astrology, and these birthday readings have been ringing the bell.

It’s presented in an easy-to-use audio format, divided into four sections. We’ve had very good success with this device working for all of our clients.

So if you’re a Pisces, treat yourself to a late birthday present. This audio is also great for Pisces rising and should be informative and helpful to anyone with a Pisces Moon; or a Pisces significant other who you’re trying to figure out. It’s priced to be affordable — the whole thing for just $14.99.

Here’s your sign-up link — and happy birthday, Pisces.

Your astrologer,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

We’re an angry nation. All the polls say so. In the earlier part of the century it was apparent that when the public finally shook off its lethargy and discovered the gravity of its situation, there would be repercussions. Progressives already had eight years of anger under their belt. The anger escalated with each new assault: yellowcake uranium, Shock and Awe, the Patriot Act, FISA intelligence gathering, Abu Ghraib and torture, radical conservative Justices John Roberts and Sam Alito. We spoke of taking the country back, loosening the militaristic and corporatist grip the government had on our lives and futures. When Bush won a second term, I fretted that the Neocon meme would be coded into our consciousness to taint a generation. Lefties worried that the public seemed dazed and compliant. A new word made its way into blogs and articles: sheeple.

Tea Baggers and “Populist Anger”.

After eight years of anger, the resolve to change the nation’s direction came too late to avoid the systemic meltdown that Bush handed over to the new president. Suddenly, from the seemingly content void on the right, arose the sounds of anger. Disproportionate waves of disdain and hatred — toward the government, toward the liberals and especially toward Barack Obama — filled the airwaves. Calling themselves a populist uprising, Tea Baggers now gather to express how angry they are. One might almost think they have much in common with progressives. The basic tenets of populism that pit little folks against the ruling elite should resonate with all of us.

Baggers ooze with hostility for those who corrupt the Constitution and take advantage of the average citizen. They speak passionately about being “we, the people,” but their commonalities with the average citizen end there. They are far less concerned about corporate power than about governmental redistribution of wealth. They are far less disturbed by militarism than by personal tax obligation. They’re vehement about their constitutional right to bear weapons but indifferent to judicial activism that gives corporations the rights of personhood. The explanation is simple. They’re not populists; they’re well-off conservatives in sheeple’s clothing.

Polls indicate that Tea Party activists do not fit the demographic that we think of as working class: 20 percent have incomes in excess of $100,000 and 37 percent hold college or graduate degrees. Followers of this ‘populist uprising’ are also doing quite well: 55 percent of supporters enjoy incomes of $50,000 or more and only 19 percent earn less than $30,000. When it was announced that 95 percent of Americans paid lower taxes this year while almost half paid nothing at all, Tea Baggers raged that low-lifes and lay-abouts received handouts from the government again. Grover Norquist — who famously articulated the conservative intention to whittle government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” — gave Baggers their rallying cry at a D.C. gathering on Tax Day: “Leave our earnings alone!”

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 23, 2010, #813 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

You seem to be in a tight spot financially, though I suggest you check your facts and figures. If anything there is some kind of an error, though it may take you a few days to get to the bottom of it. Till then I suggest that you not panic, get angry or even lose sleep over it, but rather collect information and possibly seek the advice of someone who knows more than you about these things. Their opinion will prove to be enlightening, if not declarative. The main thing you need to beware of is your mind getting caught in its own concern and negativity and thus suspending itself from constructive thought. Rather than not doing something, I suggest you explore ways to direct any anger, frustration or supposedly too-hot motivation in creative ways; look for them and you won’t need to look far.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Have you considered that your lack of confidence is not authentic? I’m not saying you’re faking, rather that you have more reasons to be confident than you give yourself credit for, and more than enough experience to remind you what you’re capable of. So why exactly would you doubt yourself? If this points to something from the past, you’re about to get significant insight into its origins. Meanwhile, I have an idea for an art therapy project that might give you a visual image; your solar chart at the moment says seeing is believing. Using a webcam or a digital camera, photograph yourself when you’re feeling insecure. Who do you look like? Then photograph yourself when you’re feeling solid, strong and determined. Who do you look like then? As for a journaling project: going back as far as you can remember, what is your association between marriage and money?

Coming Soon! Taurus Birthday Audio.

You run the risk of papering over a complex situation by not saying anything about it. This won’t resolve matters, or even do much to keep the peace, though you need to start by being clear with what’s bothering you; you may be masking this even from yourself. Check your motives here; you seem to be closely identified with your role in a relationship that rather precisely contradicts your deeper values. That motive could provide you with a basis for handling the situation with denial. Hence the most obvious issue may be the most difficult to see. Your chart suggests that, if you focus your attention, and make a series of plain statements to yourself about the basic facts and then use what you learn, you will discover a workable solution to the issue in a fairly short time.

Beware of your tendency to get weighted down by the past. Being as emotionally driven as you are, you’re not the type to easily let go, but your solar chart suggests that you are in an extended phase of purging self-concepts that no longer serve you. With that, you are free to drop the emotional trappings connected with those concepts, whatever they might be. At the moment, it looks like your past self is having some issues with mental frustration that can be translated into tangible action. Your past orientation on relationships tends to emphasize structure, permanence and predictability; you now have the option to focus on immediacy and being real in the moment. Yet beyond any specific expressions is the fact itself — that you have spent more time looking back than you have looking forward. Despite any lingering uncertainty, it is safe to face the future boldly.

You will get a lot done this weekend, if you do things one at a time. If you get confused or find yourself slipping, go back to single-tasking. While I’m doling out easy advice, someone who offers help may not end up being that helpful and may indeed create a distraction. But someone who you seek for assistance is likely to be very helpful, generous and thoughtful. The distinction is significant — you are the one who initiates seeking assistance when you need it, this way you can be sure of the motives involved. Meanwhile, beware of using any methods that have failed repeatedly in the past. They may seem worth one more try, but the way your chart is set up at the moment, what has not worked before is not likely to work now. However, discovering a new technique is likely to boost your confidence, and set you on a quest to develop new inventions.

You seem uncertain who or what to believe in, and you’re taking this out on yourself. That is not helping your judgment any, and it’s distracting you from the first thing you need to remember, which is if you need to believe in anyone, that someone is yourself. This is particularly true if you have recently set about the goal of turning over a new leaf in your intimate relationships. It may be easier than ever to see yourself in someone else, or for them to see themselves in you — and as a result you might get caught in a haze of projection and reflections of reflections. I suggest you reduce all of this down to one fairly simple question: what are you looking for? Not who, but what? One thing I can tell you is that possibilities are open now that were secluded well below the horizon years or even months ago.

You may think you’re obsessing over sex or going from one emotional high to the next, and who knows what the people around you think. What I see in your solar chart is that you’re craving pleasure and healing in a way that suits your desire nature well, and that you’re actually making contact with a side of your nature you haven’t been able to reach any other way. The main risk is that of attachment to someone who is not exactly who you think they are; so while you’re exploring, make sure you leave room for the story to take any number of turns — and give yourself room to explore. Said another way, what you’re doing is diving into your experience rather than creating something designed to be ‘permanent’. If there is something stable that you’re building, it’s your relationship to yourself. This is true, no matter who you’re with — remember.

If someone throws you a curve, catch it and toss it to the side — don’t throw it back. The moment someone pushes your buttons, questions your authority, or if you find a relationship situation interfering with work, step back — and keep your cool. No matter how persistent or insistent the provocateur may seem, they have no clue what they’re really thinking, they are motivated by aggression and it looks like the whole situation is designed for sport. You have more important things on your mind than to be someone’s goal post or punching bag. And, of note, there are people around you who are willing to assist you and cooperate with you on some of your most meaningful goals. Therefore, invest your energy in people who are supportive and withdraw it immediately from anyone you discover is playing any form of trickster.

You sense something big is coming on — a revelation in the true sense; a creative burst; the opportunity to have an experience you’ve wanted for a long time. That moment has not quite arrived, but it’s inevitable. Meanwhile, this would be an excellent moment to reflect on how restless you’ve been for how long. You’ve spent much of your energy in recent years adapting to your own emotional instability, and that constant adaptation has eaten up a lot of energy. You’ve been encountering a series of stabilizing forces that have given you a chance to relax and put some of your resources into more creative endeavors, and I suggest you keep up with that process. You face a risk that you can head off early on, which is the potential to respond defensively to an opportunity from which you will only benefit.

About your mother. You’re finally getting around to confronting her narrow and judgmental side with some fresh ideas about your life. One of the things you learn as an astrologer is that people’s parents can dog them for as long as the planets keep spinning around the Sun — until we intervene and do so boldly. But it’s not enough to say no. That was her issue. It’s not enough to change your mind as if what came before didn’t matter. It’s not enough to reduce everything down to the details and prove that it’s irrelevant. What is necessary is to say yes with every cell in your body, to experiment with ideas that nobody you know would ever consider, and most of all, to feel yourself until you figure out that you’re alive. If the next few weeks are filled with tension, let it be that of seducing yourself into authentic liberation.

Imagine you’re standing between two mirrors. You want to see the front of you and the back of you at the same time. But you’re in the way, no matter how you do it, and you’re starting to get frustrated. What would happen if you got out of the way and allowed the mirrors to reflect one another? That would open up a seemingly infinite space, into which you could see in two distinct directions. Now, observe that this is all a metaphor. The ‘body’ is your ego consciousness; your sense of ‘I’. The mirrors may be two philosophies, two situations, two people, or most likely of all, your ongoing confrontation between the past and the future. If you get out of the way, they can have an authentic dialog. You’ll be able to make subtle adjustments and see their perspectives accurately. You’ll be able to feel your way down the two time tunnels, and sense which is the most authentically you.

If you’re born under the sign Aquarius or Aquarius rising and would like a belated audio entry for your sign please let me know!

How does it feel to have Chiron in your sign? This is a brief visit — we get 90 days, until the full eight-year stint begins in early 2011. Here is my take: Chiron has that crisis/critical point thing that it’s so famous for, and the game is to deal with everything immediately as it arises. Chiron focuses awareness; your job is to be alert to that ‘on the air’ light, notice what you’re noticing, and address it immediately. That will clear the water waves and the airwaves for new information, new experiences and a new sense of purpose. Chiron in your sign concentrates attention on you, and (as a transiting factor, rather than a natal factor) accelerates the pace of manifestation. Therefore, stay alert to what you want, and embrace it with love and pleasure when it arrives. And please remember this: suddenly others may perceive you as a force to be reckoned with. You’re not used to this; and I don’t suggest you get used to it either. Be judicious.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Chiron in Pisces: Special Edition Monthly Horoscope

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Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

For those who appreciate the concept ‘holistic’, I have some astrology news for you — Chiron in Pisces. We think of holistic as something like going to a naturopathic doctor, though it has much wider implications. Here is a succinct Wikipedia definition. The concept of holistic (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, whole, entire, total) is the idea that the properties of a given system (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave. Or, looked at another way, every ‘part’ contains the whole or represents an accurate picture of the whole system.

The Earth is the original holos, a complex system of interrelationships that adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

As of Tuesday morning, April 20, Chiron is now in Pisces for the first time since the 1960s. It made its ingress within hours of the Sun entering Taurus. Still considered a new element by most astrologers, this small body was discovered orbiting our Sun in 1977. Chiron has a strange orbit; it spends just 18 months in a sign when close to the Sun (as it did in the mid-1990s) and seven to nine years in a sign when distant from the Sun (as it is doing now). This makes a sign-change a particularly special occasion at this point, and Chiron in Pisces arrives with a new feeling, shifted sense of reality and a new healing agenda.

The Aquarius-Pisces cusp, where Chiron is now (on the Pisces side, as of today), is a part of the zodiac that is about whole-systems consciousness. These are signs near the end of the story of the zodiac, and as a result they take on vast topics and have a long history. The mental/intellectual quality of Aquarius and the creative/intuitive attribute of Pisces together expand our awareness and help us see ourselves and our issues from a viewpoint that is distinct from what we think of as individual. Chiron’s presence here calls our attention to the necessity to see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves, and subtler than the physical world.

At first these shifts may be difficult to discern, though they are likely to be a new form of a message you’ve been getting for a while. Chiron is, for many, a background presence. Consider that for the five years that Chiron was in Aquarius, we saw a gradual explosion of Internet use — but the change is subtle unless you consider it all at once. Most places it’s more than doubled the past few years, and the number of portable devices seems to be growing faster than anyone can keep track. Usage of Facebook has surpassed Google. That’s an image of Chiron in Aquarius: a vast web of interconnectivity.

Pisces addresses even larger systems, which don’t necessarily need as much technology to hold them up, and Chiron tends to enhance our experience of any sign that it’s transiting. Think of the Internet as a simplistic model of something that already exists: the subtle sphere of consciousness that is biopsychic — the web of life that connects everything and everyone. What if we tuned into our ability to connect with that level of awareness, as a natural experience?

Garbage from around the world ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, a patch of trash — mostly plastic — the size of Texas. This image, though unidentified, is probably Hawaii, which experiences plastic beaches like this as a result of garbage flow through the gyre.

In many respects, Chiron in Aquarius has been a study in form — the particular form that communication takes, such as what kind of device or networking system is used. Pisces is about the content; the creative dimension, which will be emphasized by Chiron’s presence here. Many people fear that they’re not creative; Chiron says it’s about consciously wanting the experience, and then directing one’s awareness there.

This creativity factor involves our relationship to what we think of as God or to our spiritual source. We tend to live as if separated from that source (something easily discerned by observing ourselves and others as we make decisions). Chiron is calling us to full awareness of either direct contact, or our sense that we lack contact. This way we can start taking steps to get what we need and healing issues that can only be resolved through a full-awareness approach.

On the way there, we’re likely to encounter the denial factor, which is the shadow side of Pisces. We know that we deny plenty just to get through the day, and much else besides because it’s inconvenient or threatens our concept of the world. Chiron in Pisces is likely to serve as a force that pulls back the veil and reveals the truth of many issues we would prefer not to look at. Most of them involve the interrelationships between the levels of society and ecology: how advertising pushes us toward ecological destruction; how abuse of mood stabilizers alters our involvement in politics or the economy; how many of us shape our self-image through video games, fashion ads and TV commercials, and aren’t even especially concerned about this. Yet are these really the exemplars we want to be using? And if not, what do we want to hold as an example?

Through July 20, we have a warm-up of Chiron in Pisces. Then Chiron will retrograde back into Aquarius, where it will stay until February 2011, when it returns to Pisces for the next eight years — to be our constant companion through whatever it is that we are calling 2012.

Yours & truly,

PS: This brief essay is just an introduction; I went into greater depth in last week’s edition. I am currently working on sign-by-sign audio about Chiron in Pisces and will be sending out an announcement shortly. Your May monthly horoscope offers an introduction to what this transit means for each of the 12 astrological signs.

PPS: For those readers of Planet Waves Astrology News who have not purchased Cosmic Confidential, here is some news. I’ve begun to post the Key Life Transit sections, as audio, beginning with the Saturn return. I’ll follow up with the Uranian opposition, the Chiron return and several key Pluto transits. On Friday we will begin selling the Key Life Transits audio sections as separate products. This week is your last chance to subscribe to Cosmic Confidential with all sections included. What is $19.95 today will be just under $100 on Friday — please take advantage of this offer.

Dear Cousin and Client:

Eric Francis.

Please use this link to order. Delivery is instant. And please let me know how you like it.

Thanks for checking it out.

Yours & truly,

In many ways you live an existence driven by idealism and fantasy, but this fact is often veiled from your awareness. You’re more likely to consider yourself a pragmatist or someone bent on achievement, and lately you’ve been true to form, bringing new determination to the idea of meaningful success. With Chiron transiting into Pisces, your focus shifts to seeking understanding on the deepest levels of your psychology: your hidden life and your spiritual dimension. Chiron in Pisces is an awakening point to delve into what you may think of as the ‘other side of your personality’ but which is really a deep inner well that is as much part of you as the aspects of yourself that you encounter in normal consciousness. You may have noticed that in recent years, despite your focus on your adult priorities, your imagination has become more like that of a child. Images mean as much as words. The harder you work the more you need to escape. Yet it’s often been difficult to concentrate the energy in a productive way. You’ve become more curious about the nature of your soul, yet it’s often challenging to find a practical home for this quest in the world. Chiron in Pisces is an opportunity to open up dependable access to those dimensions of yourself. If you feel slightly uncomfortable at the prospect of this, or if your early experiences make you stop and question your reality, you’re on the right track.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

In the background of your life for as long as you can remember, you’ve struggled to fit into the world. This experience has been so pervasive that it’s tended to disappear, punctuated with moments of mystery about why you could not find your way. Then the intensity of the issue began to grow, and at times focused into outright crisis. What should you be doing, and if you have an idea of what, then how? Chiron in Pisces is here to help you focus your aspirations in a way that combines three elements of life: expressing your most authentic dreams, tapping into your financial potential for your true career, and taking part actively as an authentic part of a group or subculture. What we think of as ‘community’ is an integration point: the key element and not a luxury. This quest requires that instead of being judgmental of your ideas, creative efforts and past experiences, it’s time to open up and allow the energy to flow through you. You have kept many of your most creative ideas secret for a long time, literally blocking energy, and you’re now being summoned into public view. The purpose of what is commonly called creativity is not merely to develop yourself and your mind, but also to help create a shared experience that allows you and others to open up to life. The goal is not perfection, success or applause but rather a shared meeting space where everyone can thrive.

Coming Soon! Taurus Birthday Audio.

You may be aware of how you would live boldly in a perfect world, rather than the edgy, competitive place we find ourselves at the moment. You are suited for leadership in a place that honors the softer aspects of human nature; that makes space for the hidden life we all possess; that is less concerned with profits than it is with embracing love and peace. Chiron in Pisces is here to awaken you to the fact that whatever state the world may be in, your life needs to be oriented on these subtler attributes of existence. In particular, the work you do every day would benefit from harmonizing with the spiritually or creatively oriented energy of Pisces. The chances are you already have a vision for a professional life that would be something like this, but you don’t necessarily say anything about it. Part of you may be too cynical to believe it’s possible. In your belief system, it may not be possible all at once, but it’s something you’ll be steadily growing toward over the next 10 years, as you move from a kind of active dream state to enacting concrete ideas. Here is an image: Imagine you live near a river, in a time when rivers were safe and clean. Every day you go to the river and gather water and bring it to where you live. Then one day you figure out that you can build a pipe and divert a little of that water on a constant basis, and have it transported to where you need it.

We all have issues with faith. We live on a planet and in a society where a lot can go wrong, and most of how we defend ourselves is by the prowess of intellect: planning, analysis and efforts aimed at control. Yet your usual methods are giving way to a process of visioning the possibilities, and in particular, the possibility you want to manifest. Chiron in Pisces is another way of saying vivid imagery. Therefore, focus on envisioning exactly what you want to manifest, create or become. And among them is a vision of yourself, which rightfully would begin with the feeling of what it’s like to live guided by faith in yourself. This transit will help you tune into the emotional cycle wherein you seem to lose and gain that faith. Vision and faith will feed and support one another. They are habits, and because the sign involved is Pisces, once you get them going they will be enmeshed deeply in who you are. And while challenging, they are such dependable techniques that you will want to use them. We tend to be so dependent on our mental faculties that they take over our minds. Like a computer, your mind makes an excellent slave and a terrible master. Allow your higher power to take over. Said another way, your quest is to go from belief to faith. To do this, you will need to distinguish the two.

All of life consists of relationships, and looked at one way, those relationships consist of agreements. Since this is true on one level, let’s start there. You tend to be idealistic about those agreements, and Chiron transiting into Pisces is calling on you to be practical, grounded and focused. This is a time to create written contracts where verbal ones existed in the past. It’s a time to see if the goals of longstanding partnerships add up to the results you want at this time in your life, and notice whether they are pointing you toward your objectives for the next phase of your life. Do they honor the person you are becoming, as well as the person you are now? Deeper down, closer to the truth of the matter, is that relationships are based on a shared reality that is much softer and more intuitive than an agreement. They thrive on a shared vision. Indeed, our world’s insistence on agreements is a substitute for precisely this intuitive and visionary factor: a mutual sense of perspective; a common spiritual orientation; the subtle understanding that relationships are for mutual benefit. Chiron in Pisces is going to work like a clarifying filter on both dimensions: of contracts and of your shared vision, guiding you toward that place where the two become one thing, which is a dimension beyond either. Chiron will be keeping your sex life pretty hot as well.

You tend to be discriminating — in fact, to a fault. You hold both yourself and the world to high standards, sometimes ones that are impossible to attain. This seems to be the direct result of past disappointments in relationships, events that have gradually cultivated in you a subtle lack of trust of others that you seem to spend a lot of time and energy fighting with. It’s now time to heal that particular issue, and in the process, renew your faith in relationships and in yourself. Here is a question: Was your trust hurt because your expectations were unrelated to the person you were actually dealing with? It’s time to size up how you look at others, and why. Chiron in your 7th solar house is about noticing where you were perceiving people in unrealistic ways, as well as where you lost contact with a common language. Part of regaining that is about learning how to listen in new ways. Indeed, learning a language, hearing comes before speaking. Can you think of important events in your life where you decided it was time to shut your ears and stop paying attention to what others were saying? Imagine Chiron as one of those old-fashioned hearing aid funnels that gathers sound and presents it to you in a focused way. The key to translating is to seek understanding, rather than judgment. Once you know what someone is getting at, you will know what to do with the information.

Many times in life you were certain your efforts were going nowhere or adding up to less than the energy you put out. Still, one thing you can be grateful for is your willingness to be helpful. It’s not that you’re ‘nice’ (you probably are) but rather that your mind is grounded in knowing that part of why we’re alive is to be supportive of our environment. Within our society there’s no commonly accepted concept of whole or holistic: ‘home’ has nothing to do with ‘work’; creativity and earning money are divided from one another; friendships and relationships are put into different categories, and so on. Then we’re conditioned to see health and wellbeing as separate from these other factors of life. Chiron in Pisces, your 6th solar house, is about taking a whole-systems approach to your existence. Now is the moment of making sure that all the parts of your life work together and are designed to support one another. Look for the common ground that everything in your world shares (which is you). Observing how you feel, seeing where your energy goes, considering your purpose for doing anything — all of these will offer clues to how to integrate that which seems to be separate, out of place or challenging. Remember, what you are shifting awareness of is not ‘your life’ but rather yourself. The deepest gift you receive will be confidence in your purpose here.

You have a powerful fantasy life. Oh my goddess: you do know how to let your imagination run free. You take many risks there that [you think] you would never take in real life. This involves the Pisces angle of your chart, and Chiron has now arrived there, representing a cosmic-scale craving to turn fantasy into experience. It could be any kind of fantasy you like, from the art you want to make to the love you want to make to some risk you want to indulge, but remember — we’re talking Pisces styled. Often, fantasy itself is satisfying and serves a nourishing purpose. Chiron has a different objective, which is some form of actuality and fully incarnated experience. I recognize we live in a time when the difference between ‘real life’ and ‘the imagination’ is being played down or intentionally blurred. I also recognize that experience is supposedly scary: it challenges our current, often delicate state of affairs. There is the element of potential failure involved. Other forms of risk show up when you leave the confines of your inner mind. I suggest you consider the extent to which dwelling on your imagination is an indulgence for your conservative side. Conversely, I propose that your desire for experience is about exploring the side of your nature that wants nothing more than liberation. One of the first questions that comes up under this transit is, how attached to your limitations are you?

Those born under your sign tend to be some of the boldest in the neighborhood, but then you pay for it with a deep, abiding insecurity. Which one is really you? Well, the two spheres of consciousness co-create one another. Anyone with a shred of spiritual awareness, and you definitely qualify, has noticed a few times that the human ego is extremely frail and terrified of its own potential lack of existence. There are those times when you recognize that what we call life is about as solid as taking a ride on a soap bubble that can burst at any moment. And what is beyond that? What is the existence beyond the ride on the bubble? You’re vividly aware of this dimension as well, and it’s where some of your most useful information comes from — you know, the stuff that “you don’t know how you know it, but you do.” Chiron in Pisces is here to help you tap into the mystery of your inner core. It’s here to remind you of what is beyond the transience of experience. Most significantly, Chiron will remind you that the basis of your reality is not your ego structure and all the ways you try to define yourself, but rather your growing awareness of your soul. I don’t mean soul in the mystical sense, but rather the most pragmatic: your inner being and the actual foundation on which your existence is built.

Going back at least a year, you’ve been under such pressure to change that it’s amazing you’ve had time for anything else. This pressure has been coming from so many different directions that it’s been difficult to keep your mental focus. But let’s turn the clock back beyond the past year — my question is, how many of your ideas have you acted on? They come flying in; you’re gifted with insight and foresight: but what about some measure of consistent action developing them? Chiron in Pisces will have some interesting, even intense, mental effects, the first of which we could describe as a crisis of focus. You may be overwhelmed with the need to sort yourself out; to get your priorities in order; to understand the rational basis for your intuition. At other times you will be confronted by how little you know, which is a healthy response to existence. Sometimes you feel like your entire thought process is a dream. Imagine that you’re going from a dream to a lucid dream: one where you can consciously choose what you experience. Think of this as being given a power tool, one that is potentially dangerous because it bestows your mind with certain properties of clarity that you’re unaccustomed to. This might arrive with the sense of waking up to how out of it you were. Remember to wake up now, rather than worrying about what you failed to notice in the past.

Financial independence is one of those themes that never seems to go away, and which affects everything in your world. Yet the notions of ‘financial’ and ‘independence’ are outer forms of a deeper question, which concerns how you feel about yourself. If you’re in feel-good mode, nothing can shake your confidence; you tap into an infinite depth of love. If your inner climate changes, you can be wracked with doubts about your purpose, your worthiness, and whether you have enough energy (or money) to accomplish what is most important to you. One of the first tasks of Chiron in Pisces is to tune you into the dualism involved: to get the two sides of your mind in communication with one another. The ‘two ways you feel about yourself’ tend to be mutually exclusive and, in a sense, unrelated. They seem to have so little in common, you might go mad from cognitive dissonance if you tried to think of them at the same time. Yet they have something crucial in common, which is that they’re elements of your potential. There is wisdom in your confidence, and another kind of wisdom in your insecurity. The two add up to something beyond the sum of the parts, which is an understanding of the source of your power; which is your spiritual grounding; which is your self-esteem; which relates directly to money. You don’t need to integrate them — only to notice that they’re attributes of the same thing.

Few concepts in astrology evoke the seeming paradox of existence like Pisces, and one of them is Chiron. Both ask the deepest questions, such as those concerning the relationship between soul and body, or between a person and existence. These are topics of rampant speculation, which usually gets categorized as ‘spirituality’. Yet if we go beyond theory, and beyond the religious concepts designed to abuse human doubt, we come to the fact of life as a journey of experience. And that, in a phrase, is the nature of Chiron’s arrival in your birth sign. This holds true for your relationships, your creative process, your experience of growth, and what you want to do every day. What they all have in common is experience, and as Chiron makes its way through your sign — first for a few months through late July, then for eight years starting in 2011 — I suggest you use the concept of experience to trump your doubts and your misgivings. Experience is the most fundamental bottom line of existence, which places you on equal footing with everyone around you, and at the center of your life. Among the many things we can say about Chiron transiting one’s own birth sign, particularly the mysterious last sign, is that you have some strong encouragement to choose based on who and what you want to experience. If your response is: “Really? Is that okay?” then you can see precisely why it’s true.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Chiron in Pisces: The Missing Piece

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Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

On April 20th Chiron enters Pisces for the first time since it left in 1969. In a recent edition of Planet Waves, I described our current era as the anti-Sixties, but Chiron in Pisces is very much a true-to-Sixties factor. Think of it as being a little like the Beatles. The Sixties were a tumultuous, often frightening time in history, featuring social upheaval, protests, lots of people taking weird drugs, assassinations of beloved leaders, nonstop war in Southeast Asia, and students at protests getting shot. But in the background, there were the Beatles, putting out a constant stream of peace and love. The Sixties would have sucked without the Beatles, and they would have sucked without Chiron in Pisces.

The famous first live performance of “All You Need is Love” at Abbey Road Studio, on June 25, 1967 — also the first-ever worldwide television performance, called “Our World.” Every country participating got to contribute something; this was England’s contribution. Chiron was in the last degree of Pisces that night, beginning its process of ingressing Aries.

In case you’re not familiar with this odd little planet that goes round our Sun every 51 years, I will cover the basics in a moment — but first let’s review the basics of Sixties astrology. What we usually think of the Sixties was the product of a conjunction: Uranus conjunct Pluto. This meeting of two ‘modern planets’ — planets discovered by science, rather than planets of antiquity — is a cycle of revolution and innovation. Uranus bestows a surge forward. Pluto grants depth, intensity and soul. Put them together and you get an era like the one that brought the French Revolution.

In the Sixties, Uranus and Pluto were conjunct in Virgo, with explosive results. Yes there were many positive developments, but always that constant sense of change and tension and the fear of where it was all going.

Across the sky in Pisces — unknown to astronomers or astrologers at the time — was a small planet called Chiron. Though it would not be discovered until 1977, planets are active long before we’re aware of them, and Chiron’s influence in this era was a protective spiritual backdrop that provided a kind of refuge, a source of inspiration and focal point within all the madness that could make a song like “All You Need is Love” meaningful. If you were born in the Sixties, Chiron in Pisces is likely to be a prominent factor in your astrology, and you’ve been working with it all your life.

Think of Chiron as a condensing device, gathering the viewpoint, imagery, sensations, feelings and the soulful quality of Pisces and concentrating these things into something tangible: call it a sense of contact with the world beyond this one, no matter how mad this world becomes.

In an earlier article on this subect, I write, “In Pisces, Chiron calls us toward the numinous, the mystical, the unknown. Barbara Hand Clow described it beautifully as a Siren’s voice calling from the ocean, beckoning us nearer to God or cosmic consciousness, but as a direct experience rather than as a theory. Chiron serves mainly to focus awareness, but it always does so through experience…The lessons of Chiron in Pisces, if we may call them that, are distinctly spiritual in nature, involving the life beyond the body, the vast mysteries and the surrender of concrete definitions.”

Chiron Basics

Let’s go over the very basics of Chiron, with which (thanks to Laurie Burnett) I’ve been working since my first days as an astrologer. Though Chiron was actually discovered in 1977, there are photographic plates on file going back to 1895 where Chiron can be seen. These are called pre-discovery photos, and the year 1895 is interesting because that’s when D.D. Palmer discovered or invented chiropractic — named for the centaur from Greek mythology. Chiron was a physician, surgeon and herbalist. The French word for surgery is still chirurgie, and the actual meaning of Chiron from old Greek seems to be “one who has hands.” However, by the time of the discovery in the late ’70s, the mythology of Chiron and the other centaurs was a meek footnote to classical literature.

The Education of Achilles by the Centaur Chiron, by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (French, 1754-1829). Chiron mentored a generation of the greatest Greek heroes, including Jason and Heracles. Part of his delineation includes the idea of mentorship.

Then came our awareness of [the minor planet] Chiron and, true to form, information started coming to the surface. Charles Kowal made his discovery the morning of Nov. 1, 1977 using what is called a blink microscope, a tool astronomers use to analyze photos of the sky for movement. The new body was the size of an asteroid, it had the orbit and composition of a comet, and it was described in a popular journalism article as a planet with an orbit between Saturn and Uranus. This made sure it got unusual attention. It was given minor planet catalog number 2,060 (in order of discovery) and, somewhat miraculously, astrology took notice.

Kowal — an astronomer, not an astrologer — gave Chiron its first keyword when he said, “This thing is a maverick.” Among other discoveries, Chiron stood out as highly unusual and as it works out, people with Chiron prominent in their charts also tend to stand out. They do things their own way. They thrive on being different.

He named it after a centaur presumably due to its hybrid nature; a centaur is a morph of a horse and a man. Naming it after the famous physician of Greek myth, the one who taught medicine to Asclepius, the god of medicine, brought in the dimension of healing. Chiron, an immortal, was injured in a battle, and this brought in the paradox of the wound or injury factor that is so often involved with Chiron, and so often misunderstood. On one level, we have an image of what we face as ‘spiritual beings’ inhabiting the mortal coil, rarely having that sense of being all the way here.

Remembering that mythology is based in symbolism, the ‘wound’ in most situations is the sense of imperfection and spiritual disconnection that we often drag around here on the physical plane. Where Chiron stands in our charts describes how and where this sense of imperfection might manifest, with lots of intensity, drama, effort and focus. Because Chiron is a centaur, we have an image of the paradox of whether a human is an animal or, you know, something else. Notably it was Chiron’s animal half that got hurt, suggesting that the injury we carry involves our deeper, older, primal and instinctual nature.

Charles Kowal, the discoverer of Chiron.

Yet this has another dimension. Under Chiron’s influence, often the things that seem to hurt us or challenge us make us not only strong, but also able to excel in some outstanding way. Chiron can represent the sense of debility, of not fitting in, or of constant struggle that brings out our greatest talents and develops our strongest character traits. In essence, Chiron is where we’re doing the most significant work on our human potential — or where we get hung up over and over again. Each time we have a Chiron event in our astrology is an opportunity to refocus the cycle.

In careful readings of Chiron in thousands of my clients’ charts, I’ve noticed a few other properties. One involves the holistic nature of Chiron; it wants us to take a whole system approach to any issue, such as our own lives. This also makes it an environmental harbinger: what we think of as ecology is about taking a holistic approach to life on our planet. Another is about raising awareness, which (not coincidentally) is often related to seeing the whole as opposed to a collection of parts. Chiron wants us to see the connections. Chiron transits are often described as ‘intense’ but that which is so intense is the attention factor. There is always a call to action, but it might take us quite a while to get there.

Where we have Chiron in our chart is a place where we tend to put enormous energy, often thinking we’re getting nowhere. Then we find out just how much progress we have made; how much we have learned, developed and given to the world.

A profoundly influential 20th century astrologer named Al Morrison noticed that often, significant benefit came from Chiron events, but that it often arrived with a challenge: so he called it the inconvenient benefic.

Chiron is an intense influence: it accelerates processes, it pushes us to be independent, to look at ourselves, and to deal with our growth. Chiron will try to get our attention gradually; if we ignore the messages, eventually we will experience a collapse of some kind. Then if an astrologer checks the chart he or she might blame Chiron. This is why it’s necessary to look at the whole Chiron cycle when working with this body, which will reveal a hidden pattern of experience and bring together events that we previously thought were unrelated. I cover this in an earlier article called, “When Astrology Listens.”

Chiron in Pisces: Focusing a Vision

Chiron has an egg-shaped orbit that lasts about 51 years. Because of how stretched out the ellipse is, when Chiron is close to the Sun it will cover a sign in about 18 months. When it’s far from the Sun, it will take between seven and nine years. Chiron was close to the Sun in the mid-1990s as it passed through Virgo and Libra, so we all had a rapid succession of Chiron transits then.

This diagram shows the orbit of Chiron, in blue. Note how Chiron crosses the orbit of Saturn for part of its trip around the Sun, then extends out nearly to the orbit of Uranus. Nearly all centaurs cross the orbit of other planets, providing a symbol or image for many of their qualities. The first orbit-crossing body ever discovered was Pluto, in 1930. Graphic courtesy of Serennu.com.

Now Chiron is approaching its most distant point to the Sun, so it will take about eight years for Chiron to cover Pisces. Chiron enters Pisces for a 90-day visit on April 20, retrogrades back into Aquarius on July 20, then returns to Pisces to stay on Feb. 8, 2011. So this spring and summer we get a 90-day introduction to what this energy feels like.

If you like synchronicity, here is something interesting. Through all of 2009 and part of 2010, Chiron was in a conjunction with both the ancient and modern rulers of Pisces — Jupiter and Neptune in late Aquarius. So Chiron enters Pisces all charged up on Pisces energy, and we have been getting wave pulses of this combination for many months. The combination of Chiron with any Pisces factor is focusing that which was previously invisible.

So what do we think of when we think of Pisces? What is our experience of this energy? It’s a fairly wide spectrum, ranging from the highest reaches of the imagination to our direct experience of God or soul to the most liberating and soulful erotic pleasure; to the depths of denial, deception, drink and drugs. (Neptune has a lot of keywords starting with the letter D.) In all, Chiron in Pisces is about helping us see what we have been missing or not paying attention to.

If we focus the strengths of Pisces, that would feel like clarifying our vision for our lives. Most of us have a really hard time with this; many people have no interest at all. Pisces is full of ideas, ideals, and the desire to transcend physicality. Which of these work and which do not? Chiron is calling for a sober assessment of these, to test for what are authentic values and which are things we see through our rosy, New Age glasses.

To put it bluntly, we might discover that we’re not as spiritual as we thought, in the sense that we need to apply our beliefs and ideals to the world in a real way. Chiron calls for a practical approach to whatever it touches. If you believe you’re spiritual, what is the working end of that equation? Where does that quality make contact with society — not just your altar or your yoga mat? You could look at Chiron in Pisces as the focusing of dharma: acting as if to hold the world together. Chiron takes us out of the theoretical realm and directly into what comes with evidence and documentation.

Many people find that the whole spiritual thing is really elusive. Chiron in Pisces draws this ‘elusive’ quality into focus. It’s about making conscious contact with the deepest level of who we are, be it soul, or our true creative impulse, our deepest emotions or our erotic core.

The Missing Piece

Does it ever seem like something is missing from the world? Does there seem to be a lack of compassion, or empathy, or contact with the deeper nature of existence? We see all kinds of evidence of this, in contradictions like: someone opposes abortion allegedly for spiritual reasons, then they support war and the death penalty. That ‘missing thing’ is often the ability to see the whole picture.

Pisces is one of the most erotically focused signs. Aquarius gets you there on an intellectual level, in theory first. Pisces gets you there in the senses, in fantasy and with imagination. Chiron in Aquarius has given us the theory to back up being horny. Chiron in Pisces is saying sex is of the soul, so let’s go there. Illustration from Imago.

We live in an impressive — though certainly not unprecedented — time when many religions are bashing it out for political supremacy; waging war; are involved in child sex scandals; and spending as much time taking advantage of the poor as they are taking care of them. And five years of Chiron in Aquarius has certainly brought us deeper into the digital dimension.

You could say that the missing piece is the actual experience of God or the human spiritual attribute. Of course, mood-stabilizing drugs are being sold by the kiloton to mask over the spiritual or psychological progress that we need to make, which is an attribute of toxic Pisces. So, too, is the raw, unabashed negativity we get on networks like Fox, to which tens of millions of people are addicted, watching for hours and hours a day, thinking they are being informed. (Toxic Chiron in Aquarius.)

And in a time when we need to be working together and focusing on our common interests, our culture continues to push us toward false individuality and separatism every day. The more we indulge these things, the more we really can believe that we don’t have anything in common; that we gain no real benefit from cooperation. Chiron in Pisces is here to open our hearts and our eyes to these factors and to provide options so that we can see we have a choice in the matter of how we perceive and live our lives on the planet together.

Characteristic of Chiron, as the denial becomes transparent, this may come with a crisis. The crisis seems like it will be about noticing what is missing — perhaps what has been missing for a long time, and then wanting to do something about it. But if we’re talking about spiritual, then it’s right within reach: compassion, cooperation, and helping out a little when you see something needs to be done. Love is always available. We have the option to dismiss the notion of ‘separate’ interests. We have the option to act on our creative ideas and desires and not just hang out thinking about doing so. And you who have done a thousand yoga classes, gone to retreats and intensives and trained in different healing modalities who isn’t quite doing anything with all those gifts: I’m here as Chiron’s personal spokesperson to let you know it’s time to get busy.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Examples abound of politics being personal in these challenging times. They are also local. Here in Southern Missouri, I belong to a Political Action Committee that holds a yearly contest for high school kids. In each of several counties, participating students are asked to write an essay on “Why We Should Vote.” We had a sizeable turnout last year, given the presidential election; this year there were not so many. Still, reading through forty essays that all sound alike is a brain-numbing experience. The talking points obviously reflected their teachers’ instruction, and a thread of militarism disguised as patriotic duty ran through every submission. The repeated, effusive honoring of those who “died for our freedom” exposes the deep taproot of American nationalism.

In the end, choosing a winner came down to selecting an entry with a bit of originality and a unique presentation. There weren’t many contenders. We haven’t raised taxes for schools in decades, and it shows.

Yes, politics are local. We read the news to get the larger national picture, but in this age of information deluge, we get a big dose of local politics with every link we open. West Virginia comes to mind. The recent disaster at Massey Energy Company’s Upper Big Branch mine snuffed out the lives of 29 miners, filling our screens with photos and film coverage of anxious, grieving families awaiting news of their loved ones. Sadly, those not killed by the explosion perished from toxic levels of methane gas. The inherent dangers of coal mining became national news, exposing the political machinery that begets such tragedy and the systemic lack of worker protections that threatens us all.

The Sago Mine disaster in 2006 killed 12 and sparked calls for more safety regulation and industrial safeguards. Bush gave lip service to reform without enforcing mine safety laws — or any other laws distasteful to his corporate cronies. Aided by the Chamber of Commerce, coal companies have used loopholes to file appeals on 18,000 pending citations, leaving $210 million in contested penalties yet unpaid. While an appeal is pending, business goes on as usual and the resulting profits more than cover any eventual fines. As recently as March, Massey was twice cited for a build-up of lethal coal dust and a failure to conduct inspections. Massey appealed at least 37 of the 50 citations issued against the company for serious safety violations last year. Massey Energy Company is the current poster child for classist, corporate greed resulting in deadly mismanagement.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 16, 2010, #812 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries Confidential

Face your challenges over the next few weeks as inner mental puzzles rather than opportunities for contention. You could take this astrology either way, depending on your theory of growth or personality. What is coming into conflict are two different aspects or levels of your mind, one of which would be better described as emotional and the other more appropriately called intellectual. Yet there is another dimension that is opening up for you that goes beyond both. You have had tastes of this over the past year, but you’ve been so busy trying to stay oriented that you may have missed some of the subtler aspects of the hidden world trying to get your attention. Beyond mind, personality and emotion is imagination. Humans are mainly limited by what we can envision, and some of those limits are about to disappear.

Taurus Confidential

I just checked the classifieds and there are no jobs available for moss growing on a rock. You will have to strike that off your list of potential careers. However, you have a few other possibilities: author of love letters or erotic novels; antique dealer; folk historian; marriage counselor or sex therapist; social coordinator. You would see many more, if you chose to be less critical of your creative talents and instead let them guide you to a productive place. For the next few weeks I suggest you conduct a review and inventory of your talents and skills, as well as the desires you’ve previously hidden from yourself but now, for whatever reason, you have the confidence or at least the need to embrace.

Gemini Confidential

You need to keep a line of communication open within a relationship or partnership, which will provide an opportunity to talk about matters that are usually too sensitive or embarrassing to bring up. You or someone close to you may be keeping secrets; the aspect structure calls for an even exchange of hidden material. I suggest beginning the conversation with an understanding of amnesty; even if you cannot make that request, you can, in your heart, agree to let go of whatever you learn. The changes are excellent, if everyone is honest, that you will come out of the conversation closer rather than more distant. Yet the seeming paradox is that you will be more distinctly individual: in other words, a space of both closer and more liberated. That’s not a paradox at all: it’s a formula.

Cancer Confidential

Any career move you make in the coming weeks needs to meet one qualification: that it be authentically you. By this I mean based on your actual talent; your true values; and what you want to be doing with your time. It’s likely that you’ve been aware of what that is for a long time; you’ve said the words and you understand the values involved. What you’re about to experience is the opportunity to make visceral contact with those values and move forward with the sense that you are embodying what matters to you rather than ‘trying to be’ something. It’s not even necessary that you believe in yourself; rather, all you really need to do is be honest with yourself. And I suggest you trust that those who have the power to help you will also have the inclination, though you will need to initiate the discussion.

Leo Confidential

You tend to be the keeper of faith; this has been true lately, and now you’re going to be the keeper of putting faith into action. As you do this, your role involves being conscious of the past while helping orient on the future. Being aware of the past will have the obvious benefit of avoiding the errors strewn there, but also learning from what you’ve done right. Yet this analytical exercise will have another benefit, which is to focus your mind on the question in a new way. One way to look at this involves agreements. Yet what you are really looking for is a way to frame the issue in a way that lends itself to the best solution. In other words, remember that the answer to any puzzle, problem or situation depends mostly on how you phrase the question.

Virgo Confidential

Making long-term plans needs to be an exercise in creating the future rather than determining in advance what you think is possible. If you’re thinking reductively, that is, crossing things off the list to see what you’re left with, I suggest you go the other way and see if you can make the list as interesting as possible. You will come up against some stuck thinking as you do this; you may feel like you’re violating someone’s rules for how you should be; mostly you will encounter your need to stretch your creative muscles. For too long you have existed within a limited set of beliefs of what is possible, and haven’t yet acknowledged that these are a collection of past relics belonging to people you’ve never met, who left the planet long ago.

Libra Confidential

You seem to be trying with all your energy to get beyond an issue that has been lingering for years. There is an optical illusion quality to this: some ways you look at the situation, it seems entirely to your benefit. Other ways you look at it, you see a lingering problem that defies rationality, communication or normal means of effort. When one feels true, the other doesn’t exist; and it makes no sense that something could be helpful and detrimental at the same time. As you move back and forth between perspectives, ask yourself where the process is taking you. Are you learning anything from considering the different possibilities? Are there circumstances you’ve noticed that present a tendency toward one viewpoint or the other? What if you were to get out of your own way?

Scorpio Confidential

Nobody can challenge your authority — if you remember that all you have is authority over yourself. From the look of your charts, people will try. Certain individuals may want to go back on agreements, and they may imply a creative interpretation from the past that didn’t really exist. All you need to do is hold steady: you don’t need to defend yourself, nor do you need to engage in much discussion. The more energy you feed into the situation, the more someone will think they may be right. In fact you have the option to ignore any communication that you’re pretty sure doesn’t actually impact your life. Be conscious of your own obligations: ask yourself, quietly: do I owe anything to this situation? Have I lived up to what I promised? Even if you determine that you have not, you have time to take care of business. Don’t let anyone rush you.

Sagittarius Confidential

I’m sure I’ve told the story at least once of how my first web developer, then-16-year-old Jordan Laughlin, created a new sign — Sagittaurus. Part of why this is funny is due to the wildly differing nature of these two signs: freewheeling Sagg and cautious Taurus. This week his vision comes true. Jupiter and Venus are in an unusual dialog right now, feeding one another’s potential. The key is to let the energy or impulse you feel move quickly into manifestation. You won’t finish everything you start, but you’ll get a feel for how different ideas translate from concept to expression. Where you sense unpleasant tension, try something else; where you sense an easy energy flow, see where it leads. You’re looking for the sweet spot that translates approximately to emotionally satisfying work.

Capricorn Confidential

How do you respond to people who seem less stable than yourself? People who seem erratic, unpredictable or a bit flaky? There seems to be someone of this nature in your environment, and you seem to be getting your buttons pushed. The difficult part is, you don’t have direct power in this situation. Your emotional responses and mental judgments don’t translate well to situations where your authority means anything. And it’s difficult for you to see precisely where your responsibility exists. How about this: it involves how you learned to deal with someone in the distant past. You seem to have had at least one parent who specialized in being extremely self-critical and therefore judgmental, which was papered over by charm and a nice outfit. You are now peeking behind the veil to let go of any similar tendencies you may discover in yourself.

Aquarius Confidential

You seem to be longing for some old version of yourself, but you’re swiftly being carried away from even the memory of who that was. Yet one situation remains, where the prior and future “editions” of you stand in a face-to-face standoff. Take your time with this. Notice who, in your life, supports what you consider to be the direction of your desired growth, progress and creativity. There is never a compromise between good and evil, but fortunately this situation is not so black and white. You are in a process of synthesizing elements of past and future; inner and outer; structure and energy. The result — who you become — will be significantly different than any of the constituents.

Pisces Confidential

You struggle with being different, though you persist in doing precisely that. What you have yet to discover is how different you really are, and how productive that can be, including in the financial sense. What happens over the next week is designed to focus your energy on the most creative and innovative attributes of who you are, and I suggest you never duck from that distinction. Rather, keep firmly in mind how far you’ve veered from a conventional life, and more significantly, why you have done so. The person you are on the inside is often different than who you present yourself to be on the outside, though as Chiron makes its way into your birth sign, the two are being united in a way that has never quite happened before, and that has never succeeded this well before. Allow every event over the next few days to teach you how to become the person you know you’re destined to be.