Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

Wednesday’s New Moon in Aries arrives at a time when many transitions are brewing. The Moon and Sun will be conjunct Wednesday at 8:29 am EDT (New York daylight time) and 1:29 pm GMD/BST (London daylight time). This is the first New Moon of the astronomical and astrological year, and it takes place conjunct an outer planet that you won’t see listed in your usual ephemeris, astrology chart or read about anywhere else except an astrophysics journal: that is 1992 QB1.

Radharani is one of the most important incarnations of Goddess Lakshmi.

It’s strange that a minor planet (yes, orbiting our own Sun) that was discovered in 1992 still hasn’t been named — particularly one so historically significant. QB1 was the first object discovered orbiting our Sun beyond Pluto. It has an orbit of 289 years and is properly known as (15760) 1992 QB1. Today we know about Varuna, Chaos, Makemake and many others in this region of space; but QB1 was the very first, discovered in none other than the first degree of Aries: the Aries Point (technically, the sidereal vernal point).

The discovery was the confirmation of the existence of what is known as the Kuiper Belt, the vast region in space where Pluto resides. For this extraordinary discovery, I have proposed the name Radharani, the supreme goddess of Hindu mythology and the consort to Lord Krishna.

Let’s go over a few basics of this New Moon, and then add a few thoughts about 1992 QB1.

First, this New Moon marks a profound moment of transition, of many events about to happen. Saturn and Uranus are lining up for their next-to-last opposition for this cycle. That is a tense aspect between two wildly different kinds of energies. Many are feeling the tension and the pressure as the impetus to make radical changes. For some this is showing up as frustration and for others intense bursts of creative friction. These oppositions spark up the psyche, release energy and help us see what is what in our supposedly dualistic world of opposites. Carl Jung observed that no real progress came without this kind of opposition energy; let’s make the most of it.

Meanwhile, Chiron is about to ingress Pisces for the first time since 1969, which is a powerfully spiritualizing influence. Chiron’s role is to focus that soul energy of Pisces, with a lot of practice during a long conjunction to Neptune. Both Jupiter and Uranus are about to make a sign change into Aries and form a spectacular conjunction. Closer to home, Mercury is getting ready to station retrograde in Taurus (on the 18th) and the Sun is about to enter Taurus (on the 20th). [We covered that last week.]

Many rams adorn the Karnak temple complex, Luxor, Egypt. Rams have long been a symbol of vitality and strength. Photo by Pierluigi Ricci.

So we have a time of anticipated movement; of big transitions and small ones; a moment of reshuffling and rearranging; of tectonic forces way beyond our control, which we can use to help shape our lives. In the midst of this, the New Moon is a time of setting intentions and focusing energy.

Any event in Aries reminds us that Mars, the ruler of Aries, is in direct motion: we need to keep remembering that, and recalling that we are still in the process of working out everything that happened during the Mars retrograde in Leo between Dec. 20 and March 10. Mars is slowly coming up to speed, reconnecting us with our creative fire, our sense of self and our sense of direction.

Mercury, as it tracks back through Taurus, will make a series of squares to Mars. This is tricky because we have a hot, impetuous aspect happening between two fixed signs (Taurus and Leo), so this may feel like coming up against some of your own stubbornness, or your own desire to bust out of whatever is holding you back. Mark down these dates: April 5, April 25 and June 11. These are the dates when Mercury and Mars [were/will be] in a square aspect. You will need to guard against getting frustrated with yourself, losing your temper or wanting too much to change too fast. Note how much is already in progress and add a little trust that the universe is going to produce some results, if you do your part and stay awake.

As for the conjunction to QB1, which is the closest aspect this New Moon makes. I have described QB1 as representing the archetype of the thresholder. That is the person who helps others make major transitions; I associate her with midwives, doulas, hospice workers, orgasm coaches, grief counselors and everyone who steps in at that moment of total transition and offers themselves in service. Many nurses function in this capacity without getting acknowledgement. There are highly skilled, trained volunteers who show up at the scenes of fires and crime scenes and help the survivors. These are all the thresholders.

Dr. Jane X. Luu, co-discoverer of 1992 QB1, and thus of the Kuiper Belt.

This is an appropriate planet to have conjunct a New Moon on the cusp of so much change. In Aries, we get the clue that this really is about guiding our own processes of reinventing ourselves, and supporting the similar experiences of others; of letting go of an old form and an old pattern of energy and transitioning into something entirely new, liberated from constrictions that seem so daunting today — particularly those of the human ego.

As mentioned, I have proposed the name Radharani. Based on its classification, 1992 QB1 will be named for a deity of creation or resurrection. Despite some incredible name depletion that has occurred because there have been so many discoveries in recent years, but only a limited number of deities to name things after, Radharani is still available. One of the reasons that I think a Vedic creation goddess is appropriate is that QB1 was discovered on the Aries Point — which is the place where the Vedic (or sidereal) zodiac used in India is reckoned against the tropical zodiac used in the West. This point, as I’ve suggested before, is an intersection of the public and the private spheres of existence.

I just called the co-discoverer of 1992 QB1, Dr. Jane X. Luu, at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. We’ve spoken before; she knows that QB1 is one of my favorite discoveries, and I’ve shared my naming theory with her. I began by mentioning that there was a New Moon conjunct QB1 on Wednesday (which she didn’t know about, since astronomers don’t usually follow this kind of thing), and it turns out that that day she is giving her first talk on the Kuiper Belt in ages, at a small private college in Massachusetts. (I would go, but I have another commitment that night. But she promised to share the PowerPoint presentation.)

Here is what I learned from her today. She said that most astronomers thought that the region beyond Pluto was completely empty. Gerard Kuiper, the astronomer for whom that region of space was eventually named, was speculating when he said it wasn’t empty. In other words, he didn’t have evidence. Previously, an astronomer named Kenneth Edgeworth had speculated (in 1943) that there was lots of stuff out there too. But neither had data to support their theory. It was more like a hunch. She and her colleagues investigated and found QB1 — a monumental discovery, if you ask me. This seems to have opened the floodgates to many truly meaningful discoveries.

[Note that Dr. Brian Marsden of the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) said that an astronomer named Fred Whipple deserves to have the belt named after him, as he proposed its existence first. I couldn’t get Dr. Marsden on the phone today but I have an email in; this will surely be interesting.]

Dr. Luu, the co-discoverer of 1992 QB1, said that every now and then she’s contacted about choosing a name but doesn’t have any tangible ideas and isn’t in a big hurry. She’s not calling a press conference to make an announcement any time soon; she’s the more modest kind of astronomer who does not seek fanfare. This is consistent with those signified by this small planet, most of whom you never hear of. QB1 has been there for a while and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, except eventually into Taurus. Let’s see what this rare New Moon precisely conjunct QB1 brings. Perhaps the synchronicity will speak.

Till Friday

Yours & truly,

Further Reading:
Her Name is Radha!
Delineation of 1992 QB1
The Radha-Eris Conjunction

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

This weekend, the Sun is conjunct the newly discovered planet Eris. I know that I mention a lot of newly discovered planets, but Eris (discovered and named between 2003 and 2006) so magnificently qualified as the official ’10th planet’ that its discovery compelled astronomers to shake up their organizational model of the solar system, create a new category, ‘demote’ Pluto and define the word planet for the first time. Technically Eris and Pluto (and Ceres, along with a few others) are now known as drwarf planets.

Rachel Maddow has political leanings.

Amidst the literally hundreds of thousands of bits, bobs and blobs orbiting our Sun, Eris stands tall as a key discovery: a genuine scientific breakthrough. She’s bigger and brighter than Pluto, and is currently (because her orbit is so egg-shaped) the most distant object orbiting our Sun known to science. Given that we’ve only known about Eris, by name and reputation, since late 2006, we have not had much time to make up our minds about what it’s about, though I have some ideas.

How do astrologers develop the meaning of newly discovered bodies? On the simplest level, the name (chosen by the discovery team) evokes a myth. Eris was the goddess of discord and has a positively terrible reputation in Greek mythology as the one who started the Trojan War. Going directly from the mythology to the delineation doesn’t usually work in astrology; looked at one way, the myth has to be understood in a fairly complex way and the elements of the story applied to ‘real life’. Sometimes, though, the mythology carries through pretty well. With Eris my hunch is that it would be wise to take a more circumspect approach.

My take is that Eris, the astrological concept, uses the ‘chaos’, war and discord factor as a personality metaphor. Eris is in Aries for nearly every person on the planet, except for a few folks still around who were born in the early 20th century. Aries is the sign of identity; the sign of “I Am.” One thing you can say about our time in history is that there’s a lot of confusion going around on the ‘who we are’ theme. This is a long-term transit, which will have lasted about 110 years when it finally ends.

The goddess of discord certainly seems to have arrived at a time of rampant chaos on the planet, but I think that most of that chaos is in the psyche; it is internal, on the level of identity, self-awareness and a kind of mental chaos that we live with as if it were normal. One of the discoverers, Chad Trujillo, said that the discovery team agreed that it was the perfect name to give a major discovery at this time in history because the world is in such madness; but he didn’t specify what kind.

Delineating the qualities of this point on the personal level, Eris seems to walk the edge between the personality/identity anarchy we live with now (an Aries factor), and the authentic clarity of one’s existence and mission that’s also accessible when we get done with the game of ‘confusion’ or of not knowing (also an Aries factor).

Astrologers involved in the process use many techniques to get at the delineation of a new discovery, though of course, we must verify our theories with experience. The myth can turn out to be a small, or significant, piece of the story: it depends from body to body. We must also look to the physical properties of a planet itself (such as the length of the orbit); fancy things like the perihelion and planetary nodes; the discovery chart; the time in history of the discovery; specific historical events where the new point shows up in the chart; and perhaps most productively, the lives of people with the new item prominent in their natal charts.

A Unique Case: Rachel Maddow

Considering Eris, I have a spectacular example, my personal favorite so far: Rachel Maddow, who currently broadcasts on MSNBC. Over the past few years, Maddow has made an impressive ascent to prominence from small-town radio host to national news anchor. She’s not only the first openly lesbian top newscaster in American history, she was the first openly lesbian Rhodes scholar. She is an unabashed intellect in an era when that supposedly ain’t the coolest thing to be, she’s wickedly funny and by my standards a brave and free-thinking journalist.

Rachel Maddow covered the violence and threats of violence against lawmakers who recently supported the health insurance reform law. Click for video.

In other words, she stands out; she is a leader in her field; she is a pioneer and an innovator.

Maddow, whose 37th birthday was April 1, has the Sun conjunct Eris. Since she was born at the time of the Chiron-Eris conjunction of the early 1970s, she actually has the Sun conjunct both of those points. Venus is also in the mix, offering a touch of elegance and the kind of intelligence that can only come from a deep connection to goddess energy or at least the feminine principle.

In an earlier article called Eris Notebook: Dancing with Discord, I described the Chiron-Eris conjunction of the early 1970s as the astrology of the feminist watershed. Between May 1971 and December 1972 there were three exact conjunctions of Chiron and Eris in Aries — their first-ever meeting in Aries by the way. There will be one last series in Aries between 2025-2026. These were intense years for many reasons, but the feminist movement was becoming defined as a self-aware entity, running on the awareness power of Chiron and the soul of the feminine quality of Eris.

It is often the case that people born during an era bring in the energy of that time better than the people who were responding or reacting to it at the time. After all, a native of that era has the full-time project of living with that astrology and bringing it into manifestation. If you’re actually alive, your own chart never goes out of style, for you.

Maddow recently did a piece on how Republican lawmakers who speak openly against stimulus spending then go home to their districts and act like heroes who brought home lots of federal money for their districts. She titled the piece, “They’re not even embarrassed.” Click for video.

Maddow was born in 1973, while the conjunction was still very close, and at that moment joined by the Sun and Venus. To my thinking, nobody embodies what 70s feminism was trying to do better than Maddow.

While I am not the biggest fan of how most 70s-styled women’s lib presented itself, I understand the theme and the principles involved: that women have equivalent potential as men, are entitled to the same rights and privileges, and at the same time are entitled to still be women. I recognize that part of the 70s feminist movement was driven by lesbian separatists, but that was not going to work for the many women who wanted to honor some of their traditionally female roles and honor their bonding with men, while being able to earn the respect normally afforded only to men. As such, Maddow went through the glass ceiling like a boulder being ejected from a volcano.

Nobody endorsed Maddow’s place in society better than Scott Brown, the somewhat infamous 41st Republican senator who now has Ted Kennedy’s old seat. (He was the one who offered one of his daughters as a sacrifice-for-marriage in his acceptance speech.) Recently, Brown tried to frighten his constituents into writing campaign checks by claiming that Maddow was running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, where she lives part time. I can see where that would be really, really scary to some people and I am sure plenty reached for their checkbooks. (Notably, it’s not true. Rachel is way too smart and to my perception, way too honest to be a senator.)

Chiron Activating Eris

From Maddow’s natal chart, note the Pisces Moon conjunct Mercury on the left, and then the conjunction to her Sun in the third house of writing and communication. The Aries planets from left to right are Venus, Sun, Eris and Chiron. Asteroid Sappho, not shown, is a little to the right of Eris. Click for full chart.

One of my ideas about how Chiron works is that it brings out the nature of what is already there. While Chiron has distinct qualities of its own (strong individuality, a maverick quality, a sense of rejection, and thriving on adversity), it can focus the energy of any planet it contacts, giving it a means of expression.

Unlike many planetary energies, Chiron is highly utilitarian, and thrives when it’s put to productive use, which is pretty much how Maddow describes herself. It’s an excellent planet to have in aspect pattern because it offers contact with the world. Yet this contact is often experienced only if there are personal planets involved: Venus, Mars, Mercury, the Sun or the Moon.

With Venus and the Sun conjunct Chiron and Eris, Maddow clearly qualifies. Then she has a surprise — the asteroid Sappho in a one-degree conjunction to Eris. In theory, Sappho isn’t supposed to have anything to do with lesbians (it’s supposed to be more about platonic love and ‘getting people together’) but here is an example where it shows up in literal form. Historically, Sappho was also the first Western woman whose writing we have fragments of. Most of them are love poems to women.

One thing I have noticed about Eris is the property of the truthteller. Maddow is the rare journalist who is not afraid to tell it like it is. It is true that she has toned down her journalism since her days as a radio broadcaster, but still she is doing an impressive job on a network owned jointly by Microsoft and GE (the parent company of NBC).

Planetary positions at the moment Maddow’s program went on the air. Note the close opposition of Libra planets (including Venus, Mars and Mercury) aligning with her natal Aries planets.

Let’s look at some elements of her biography, as revealed in an interview with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, one of the foundation beams of the liberal British press. Doing astrology, it’s good to get a sense of who someone was as a child.

“I was a weird, depressive little kid who never really thought they would get to be an adult. I never thought I’d reach drinking age,” she said. This is an interesting comment, describing an alienation and difficulty envisioning the future: a bit of an existential crisis that could easily be attributed to the Sun combined with Chiron or Eris. The ‘depressive’ piece is illustrated in her Pisces Moon square Saturn, which describes both sensitivity and loneliness.

She had taught herself to read by the time she was four years old, which speaks of all that Aries independence and determination.

Let’s see how The Guardian described her process of coming out as lesbian — as they come, an extraordinary story:

Maddow came out at Stanford, aged 17, six months after she realised she was gay. “I knew there was something. My whole childhood I knew there was something, but I didn’t know it was that.” The only other woman she knew who was gay was the daughter of a Liberian fundamentalist Christian minister. “I thought: if she can do it, so can I.” However, appalled by the casual homophobia she’d encountered on campus, she outed herself by broadcasting the fact on handmade posters which she pinned up in all the bathrooms in the student accommodation in the sure knowledge that by the end of the day everyone would have seen the poster at least once.

“It was confrontational, funny, theatrical. On-my-own-terms aggressive,” she said. The student newspaper covered the incident, and then someone sent a copy of the story to her parents, to whom she had not yet come out. I think here we have an excellent illustration of how her Aries conjunction works. Notably, she is a deeply private person now, but at the time she chose to come out in a public way — a bit reminiscent of the Aries Point: the personal is political. Her coming out process, apropos of Chiron/Eris, was not just a personal statement but also a response to the “casual homophobia” that she experienced.

The story of how she found her career has the opposite sense. Rather than being deliberate, it was more a series of happy accidents which helped her find her special place in the world. The Guardianreported:

It was a friend who persuaded her to go for an audition as the sidekick for a morning show at the local radio station for a dare “and because we thought it might pay more than the minimum wage.” As soon as she was on air, something clicked. “I’d never done anything like it before but I can remember thinking: ‘I like this’.” In the early days the station would make her do stunts like dress up as an inflatable calculator (how this worked on radio I’m not entirely sure). Ten years later she’s being courted by the likes of Vanity Fair and Newsweek. She’s clearly relishing having her own serious platform on which to debate the issues of the day, but the last thing she seems to be interested in is being on television for the sake of it. “I don’t think being on television, in and of itself, has any value. The only reason to be on TV is to say something worthwhile.”

So you mean she’s not in to power for its own sake? Hey wait that’s not how we usually do things here. I have a theory — she’s a visitor from the future, showing us a more evolved version of ourselves.

One of my approaches to astrology is to use people and events to explain astrology concepts, rather than using the astrology to explain people. Searching our chart files, here is who came up with a close Sun-Eris conjunction: James Caan (who played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather), Marcel Marceau (one of the great mimes of the 20th century) and Susan Boyle (the British woman who rose from total obscurity to world fame based on her singing talent about a year ago). And, as you will see in the next article, Joe Francis, another broadcaster of sorts: the founder of Girls Gone Wild.

With Maddow, we have an example of a truly unique woman who has made her way in the world. That story is reflected in her chart in tangible ways, though predominantly we see a chart that describes a self-aware person who feels that it’s her prerogative to actually be who she is rather than someone who she’s told she is. It may take us a while to have a solid feeling for what Eris is about, but we do have some clues. In the form of Rachel Maddow we have an example of someone expressing the energy clearly, authentically and in a way that challenges us to wake up and pay attention.

Yours & truly,

Additional research: Tracy Delaney, Amanda Painter.

Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, was born the same day and year as Rachel Maddow. So the same planetary placements that give us the impeccable, politically savvy broadcast journalist also serve up the guy who sells DVDs of young women flashing their breasts on 4 am infomercials.

Joe Francis, founder of Girls Gone Wild.

How exactly do we explain this? Birth time gives one possibility. So far I haven’t been able to chase down Joe’s exact birth data, though it’s out there looking for me.

But let’s pretend that Aries cluster were to turn up in the 5th house. That could give him Scorpio or Sagittarius rising — freewheeling and out of control, and emphasizing the sexual experience of that cluster rather than the sexual identity quality, or the emphasis on writing bestowed by the 3rd house.

Actually, I would bet that’s how Joe’s chart shakes out. He definitely seems like the 5th house type, with a knack for business, among other things. Joe is notirious for getting arrested, mixing himself up with drunk underage girls, evading taxes, being accused by the cops of bribing cops, alleged violence toward women, farting in court and various other acts of good citizenship.

Joe has an untouchable quality that he is able to push to the max. Heck, he has even survived his Saturn return and most of his Pluto square.

Another way to explain it, skipping the part about the birth time and houses, it is that they do have something in common: they like women. Okay just kidding. What they have in common is that they are performers; they’re extremely independent; and in a certain way, they’re opposites. That’s an important quality in a supposedly dualistic universe; and it reveals that there are many ways to express similar astrology.

Or, you know, it could just be a coincidence.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s intriguing how our brains can compartmentalize memories, stuffing them into folders deep in our subconscious filing system until a smell, a sound, a phrase resurrects them. It seems that no experience is ever deleted in this personal computer we can call mind, quietly waiting to be triggered by an association. I bumped into one of those time capsules this week.

The Tenth Amendment (Amendment X) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. The Tenth Amendment restates the Constitution’s principle of Federalism by providing that powers not granted to the national government nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or the people.

Because life is cyclic, the current level of demagoguery should come as no surprise. We may think we’ve outgrown the kind of xenophobic, ideological fear that grips the loudest members of our citizenry, but we haven’t. This week, a single word triggered childhood memories of a relative’s brief flirtation with the John Birch Society and the McCarthyism that fostered it. The word was “collectivism,” used in a Republican rant about the Tenth Amendment. This amendment reiterates the sovereignty of states’ rights; according to Wikipedia, it “restates the Constitution’s principle of federalism ….” The Tenth Amendment added nothing to the Constitution except reassurance of states’ rights for wary Federalists; it functions as a rarely used deterrent against ‘forced participation.’ That’s why we’re hearing about it now, as Tea Baggers complain that health care reform and a routine census interfere with their rights as citizens. In essence, they’re spitting in the eye of government and growling, “Make me!”

The Tenth Amendment was passed in 1791, prior to any perceived assaults upon states’ rights. We obviously come by our American paranoia honestly. I was born into it. My introduction to politics occurred in 1952 when my after-school cartoons were replaced on the TV screen by the Eisenhower Nominating Convention. I was six years old and disappointed, unaware of Cold War rhetoric that would soon interrupt kiddy programming on a regular basis. A year later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, featuring Senator Joe McCarthy, began televised Senate hearings investigating Communist activities.

In confrontation after confrontation, McCarthy cajoled, insinuated and insulted those who came before him. He accused the Dems of “twenty years of treason”, and called the American Civil Liberties Union a front for the Communist party. He waved sheets of paper that he said contained names of Communist infiltrators of schools and government, claims that he seldom proved. I still recall the theatrical drone of his voice and the perennial sweat dripping from his moon-face. Years later, I was unable to warm to Nixon as a presidential candidate because he reminded me so much of Joe.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 9, 2010, #811 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

The point is not to be different for its own sake, but rather to recognize that you are a distinct entity, and that is the truth of who you are. Acknowledging this can send plenty of people into a tailspin; for you, ignoring the simple fact that you’re different, that you have something to say and that you have an agenda for your life, are much likelier to cause you to lose your grip on the road. The confusing part is that you don’t necessarily feel like one person all the time; you have so many personas and facets of yourself that you may not be sure which one is true. What is true, initially, is what these facets of self have in common. Beneath the surface level of experience, there is one solid core of existence that you are being invited to tap into right now.

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

You seem to be running to catch up with some part of yourself that you feel is leaving you behind. The image is of a split between an aspect of your mental focus and the movement of ‘who you really are’. The split is an illusion; you are experiencing bold contrast between who you were in the past and who you are today. By who you were, I mean your state of mind, your mental outlook on life and your sense of identity in the past. Who did you think you were, and when did you decide you were someone different? If you pay attention over the next few weeks, you will be taken through a kind of museum of past self-concepts. Note that this has little to do with who you are today, except for the fact that each of those in turn led to where you are now.

Your imagination may be running away from you, which is fine if you’re thinking beautiful thoughts or solving problems. It’s a little more difficult if you have anxiety irritating your mind, or if you’re feeling obsessive in any way. Yet any fear or mental duress you now experience are being offered to you as examples for discovering the nature of those feelings. Here is a synopsis: Gemini has a reputation for being this fleeting, quick-changing kind of archetype. Beneath that layer is a slow-vibrating, high-density layer that can be extremely stubborn. Stubborn can be useful, but it can also translate to stuck. The thing we tend to get stuck on are ideas about how life is supposed to be; you have a few of those that you don’t need, and a few old but good ones that you would benefit from remembering.

Some people are more cooperative than others. Some people you know are more open to the fact that you’re a trailblazer than others. Some are uncooperative because you seem to them like the person who is having all the fun, or who has nothing holding you back. None of this matters. What does matter is that there are people around you who indeed support you; who offer their friendship in deep and substantial ways; who are looking out for your interests. What matters is that you focus on expressing what is truly individualistic and unique about you, and making sure you never forget what that is. Life is not a popularity contest. If it is any kind of a contest, it’s about who can facilitate the most authentic cooperation, which includes supporting authentic cooperation.

The world has exceedingly few relationship models where both parties profit from a shared arrangement, and many examples of where one party steals from or takes advantage of the other (or a third party, such as kids in the Philippines). For the past few years, you’ve been getting a complex tour of how relationships work and how they do not work; of what factors constitute fairness; of how to make decisions that benefit more than just one party. You’re way ahead of the game here; most people have no idea of what, to you, is a common sense concept. This means you’ll be doing some educating of the people around you, particularly new people that you meet. To them it may seem like you’re proposing that they can walk on water. Explain that it’s more like breathing air — which for most is enough of a challenge to keep them busy.

One of the things you wrestle with is having fixed concepts where you need flexible ones. Part of why this is true is because you have extremely flexible concepts where you need some more tangible ones. I cannot tell you what should be what, but I can suggest looking at where you hold firm principles and questioning whether you can use some additional flex, and looking at where you have moving boundaries or work-in-progress theories and asking if you need to get clear with yourself. The potentially confusing bit is that all these concepts fit into the ‘who am I really?’ line of thought, and you may not have distinguished the different shades of that concept. Your charts suggest at least this much: you are carrying around some outdated beliefs; those beliefs are based on outdated values; and those values actually belong to someone else.

For the next couple of months, some of the pressure you’ve been feeling lightens up: pressure to deal with the past; to address the problems given to you by your parents; to live up to your potential. What you’ve just been through amounts to a practice round of self-actualization. What you experience between now and early June appears to be a reflection process about what you do with impulses to change, no matter what their source. You might start to make distinctions: does change mean grow, or alter your life course, or react, or respond? When is the influence internal, when is it external, and when do the two match up? Pay attention to this last one. You’re going to need your own ideas about how and why you want to grow, to match with a lot of information and influence coming from what seem to be external sources.

You are making progress in a relationship, though you need to give someone close to you several more opportunities to see things from another point of view. Basically, so far as I can tell, they are involved in an elimination process, deciding what is true on the basis of what they determine is not true. This involves trying on some of the possibilities, and that involves being indecisive. However, you may find that they are committed to different possibilities at different times in ways that seem pretty conclusive. I suggest you assess the situation and see what agreements you require in the long run; size up whether you’re being confronted with things that prove themselves to be deal-breakers. Also, I suggest you set a limit: for example, if someone hasn’t figured their stuff out by the next equinox, that’s too long for you. Be specific with yourself.

Paul Simon said that food is the bottom line for everyone. This appears to be true for you now. If you live in the United States or the UK, you can be sure that you live in a culture with a lot of food issues, such as: is the food actually food? Is it nourishing? Is it contaminated? What’s in there and why? I recommend taking a couple of weeks of focusing on noticing your dietary habits; your eating habits; on reading the ingredients on every package; and in closely studying what your mother taught you about food. Take up the issue of ‘comfort food’ and see if you can discern why you need it, and it’s actual effect on your mood. See if you can find food substituting for other things in your life. I know this is a lot to consider, but that alone makes an interesting meditation. Food is indeed the bottom line.

Is there any way to live in a balanced way in our society? Closer to home, is there any way to live a balanced life when you’re under as much pressure to grow as you are now? Here is what I suggest, for the time being: investigate who and what throws you off-balance. Be honest about this. The person may not be present — it may just be their ideas that skew your reality. Your charts have shifted significantly from where they were even last week, and some new factors have entered the picture. The simplest way to say this is that vital influences that were acting behind the scenes are now much more obvious and accessible. Your ‘subconscious’ is suddenly available; emotional dimensions that generally lurk out of reach are right where you can notice and do something about them.

Several influences are summoning you to be more flexible than you’re accustomed to. You are accustomed to the kind of flexibility where you can consider any idea, as an abstraction. Think of this as a symbol. What would it mean to make the symbol into an actuality? In other words, what does the symbol stand for, and what do you feel compelled to do as a result of that actuality? Consider that in the process of determining who you are, noticing that you are the thoughts that you think is a vital step along the way to freedom. You need precision here, which is the precision of honesty. Tell yourself the truth about everything you tend to question or consider in an abstract way. I know we live in a time when ‘there is no truth’ but there is absolutely, certainly your personal truth — and you need to know it.

You’re about to make some radical decisions about money, which have everything to do with your sense of self-worth. At this particular phase of your life, you have a better sense of who you are than you’ve ever had before. You’ve met the preliminary requirement for the next step, which is to focus that knowledge into a value that obviates everything that, by logic, must no longer be true. I suggest you use a scientific method more than a philosophical one. If something is true for you today, then it is so on the basis that it invalidates what was true yesterday. The thought of the hour is that you have no room for conflicting belief systems, and indeed exceedingly little room for belief systems at all. What you need is knowledge, and at the moment, much of that knowledge involves being extremely clear about how much your ideas, your time and your labor are worth.

For April and May 2010 — By Eric Francis — PlanetWaves.net

This guide is designed to be printed and put on your bulletin board or fridge. Print extras and tack to office or community bulletin boards and get people hip to the fact that the astrological weather changes constantly. Knowing and being aware of the dates of a sequence of astrological events can be very helpful for planning. Note the vocabulary word ‘station’ means change of apparent direction by Mercury, the god of the mind. Nothing actually changes directions — it just looks that way because Mercury is close to the Earth. This giant magnet affects all our electronic stuff, but mostly it affects our awareness.

The fleeting androgynous god Mercury is associated with the planet Mercury, which changes apparent directions faster than any other planet, and is retrograde three times a year. Note the caduceus — he is one of the original gods of healing, associated with Virgo and also with Gemini.

Mercury retrograde used to be counted as just the 23 days of the exact retrograde. Then astrologers gradually began explaining that the effect actually spreads out for nearly two months, if you include all the time that Mercury is in the degrees of the retrograde, both before and after. These are called echo or shadow phases.
If you read this carefully and follow some of the basic ideas, your life will go smoother the next couple of months. The key to Mercury retrograde is to slow down and finish old stuff. Catch up with yourself. Mercury’s penchant for problems with mechanical and technical devices is usually a trick effect; things are rarely as broken as they seem (though sometimes they are, but you have to figure this out). Work problems out slowly and carefully. Wait to get that iPad or the new cell phone contract. Avoid doing what you can until after the station direct, and if possible, after the echo phase.

We have a relatively simple Mercury retrograde this time around as compared to the last one in early winter, which happened in the midst of the holidays, Mars retrograde and two eclipses.

This Mercury retrograde occurs exclusively in Taurus, which emphasizes a Venus-like flavor: a focus on values, resources and decisions based on those things. During the retrograde cycle, there are two other highly significant planetary events: Saturn opposite Uranus and Chiron entering Pisces for the first time since the 1960s. Those ‘other events’ are listed below. The one highly distinguishing characteristic of this retrograde is how close to the Chiron discovery degree the station-direct is (which coincides with Chiron changing signs and the Chiron-like contact of Saturn and Uranus. This is interesting stuff and I will detail this in an upcoming Friday edition. There is occasional coverage on Daily Astrology & Adventure, especially around the times of the stations direct and retrograde.

Readers in Southern Hemisphere, please check local times against UT or your pocket planner.

Key Dates This Cycle

People have been fascinated with Mercury since it was discovered. Oh wait, it was always here! This is a 1949 Mercury, named for the planet and the androgynous god. Photo by Serious Wheels.

Sunday, April 4 — Venus also in Taurus, Mercury in Taurus entered echo phase (sometimes called shadow phase). This is when Mercury enters the degrees when it will be retrograde. Some of the effect begins. Depending on your chart, you feel more of the effect. This is when to slow down spending money, avoiding large purchases, starting new projects and making decisions that you don’t plan to reevaluate after the retrograde ends.

Sunday, April 18 — Mercury stations retrograde in mid-Taurus at 12:06 am EDT  / 4:06 UT. The day of the station and the days immediately surrounding it can bring some of the most interesting effects, a sense of change, and instability. Things begun (for the first time) immediately before the station can have a tendency to be temporary, subject to revision or subject to reversal.

Tuesday, May 11 — Mercury stations direct in early Taurus at 6:26 pm EDT / 22:26 UT. Again, the days surrounding the retrograde can be some of the strangest, with events like ‘the truth comes out’, ‘the cause is determined’, and ‘here is a totally new way to look at this’.

Friday, May 28 — Mercury echo phase ends as Mercury leaves the degrees where it was retrograde. The beginning and ending echo phases have different feelings; one is about gradually getting into something and one is about gradually moving on.

Other key dates:
April 14 — Aries New Moon conjunct Eris, and even more precisely conjunct 1992 QB1
April 20 — Sun enters Taurus
April 20 — Chiron enters Pisces
April 26 — Saturn opposes Uranus for the 4th time since late 2008
April 28 — Scorpio Full Moon with the Sun conjunct Mercury.
May 20 — Sun enters Gemini

Goddamn well I declare! Have you seen the like?
Their walls are filled with cannonballs,
Their motto is ‘Don’t tread on me’
— Grateful Dead, Uncle John’s Band

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

I’ve been staying in Portland, Maine, for a couple of weeks. After enduring pouring down rain for just about the whole time (it was the rainiest March on record in Portland history), the clouds parted and on a beautiful April 1, Barack Obama showed up to stump for health care reform. So I postponed my day scheduled to write about Eris in the natal chart of MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow. She gave me her data last year, and I’ve been saving it for her birthday, which was the 1st; you will probably see that article next week. Instead, I went with my friend Amanda to drop in on the Saturn-Uranus opposition.

Flowers on the a barricade set up for Obama’s arrival in Portland, Maine. Photo by Eric Francis.

By that, I mean the cultural divide that has taken hold in the United States concurrent with the first exact opposition of Saturn (stability, structure, the order of reality) and Uranus (revolution, forward–thinking, invention), which was on Election Day 2008.

This aspect happens in a little cluster of events every 35 years, and we are toward the end of one of those clusters now. The synchronicity of the aspect forming exactly on Election Day characterized the vibe of the country perfectly: the outbreak of pluralism versus conservatism that characterized the campaign, and that we’re still seeing in the form of the Tea Party movement (vigorously anti-Obama) versus the health insurance reform advocates (generally, pro-Obama).

I was curious to mix myself up amongst the Teabaggers and hear firsthand what they had going on. It was an interesting mix of energies: first of all they were all ringing bells endlessly (loud ones, torturing dogs and other critters), which I discovered was about ‘letting freedom ring’. They recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang “God Bless America.” Some of them were quite angry with an in-your-face kind of flair. Many were indeed associating health reform with tyranny and socialism but seemed to lack any historical context to make the assertion. Many were absolutely convinced that “the government had taken over one sixth of the economy.” Others objected to a compulsory purchase of health insurance, which takes place in a couple of years. Many were flying the Gadsden flag — DONT TREAD ON ME [sic].

There were religious overtones. I met a couple of ladies who said they were praying for the United States. I asked, “What about Canada?” to which they said, “We love Canada! We pray for Canada too!” And what about Mexico? “Oh yes we pray for Mexico!” And so on.

It was a pretty good crowd for a small town where Obama overwhelmingly took the 2008 election — about 200 on the Tea Party, bell-ringing side of the barricade, I would guess.

Happy kid with a peace sign on his shirt. Photo by Eric Francis.

The Obama supporters were behind another barricade at a right angle, on an adjoining street; there were fewer of them because most were queued up on line about half a mile long to see him speak (the room held about 3,000 and the rumor was that about 4,000 tickets were given out). There was a “thank you for health reform” faction and an immigration reform faction (racially diverse, making the Tea Party seem a bit Caucasian), organized by different progressive groups. The vibe was mellow; it was younger but still age diverse; there were lots of kids and the barricade blocking the intersection was decorated with flowers.

A few from either ‘side’ of the issues were mingling in one another’s territory. For a while, I wandered around with my digital recorder asking Teabaggers what they thought about car insurance, since in most states this is a mandatory purchase. I was disappointed to hear them say that driving isn’t really necessary and besides, it’s a privilege and not a right. You don’t have to have a car. (I was disappointed that this was their scripted comeback. In rural areas, that is a ridiculous notion. As far as I’m concerned, an authentic libertarian position is going to honor movement across the countryside as a fundamental right and object to mandatory car insurance as a penalty imposed before the fact. But I digress.) There is a lot of energy in the Tea Party movement, but it’s extremely chaotic. A lot of it feels like old anger that they are suddenly letting out now that Obama is president.

It’s tempting to think that because we have Saturn and Uranus facing off, and two ‘sides’ facing off, that it’s obvious which planet goes to which side of the issue. We might say that the side that wants to keep the status quo would be about Saturn and the one that wants reform would be Uranus.

Saturn is about the established order, but it can bring a new order of reality. Uranus generally has no concept of an order at all; it wants change for the sake of change and sometimes chaos for the sake of chaos. That said, it’s often a strong force in the charts of new inventions. It’s true that the health reform movement is pushing for change, and that the Tea Party movement wants things to stay the same or go backwards. But if I had to assign the planets to the polarity based on an energy reading, the Tea Party would get Uranus and the reform movement would get Saturn. The signs fit, too — the idealism of Uranus in Pisces (get rid of the government) and the pragmatism of Saturn in Virgo (restructure a Virgo entity, the health establishment).

One sign in the Tea Bag party camp accusing Obama of being a tyrant. Another announces that Jesus is the lord. Photo by Amanda Painter.

Both planets are associated with Aquarius, the sign of community, groups and the ideas that shape society. Saturn is the traditional ruler of Aquarius and Uranus is the modern ruler. So it’s like we have these two images of Aquarius seeking one another out, confronting one another and perhaps exchanging some information. This is a series of five oppositions between Nov. 2008 and July 2010, so these two archetypes are doing a lot of talking. We have one coming up soon, on April 26 — the 4th of five*. It’s the last one across Saturn in Virgo and Uranus in Pisces; both planets are in the process of sign changes.

Now, planets in a powerful mutual aspect like this are going to influence every natal chart at the same time they’re influencing society. One way that astrology works is many individual changes adding up to collective change. The image is one of tension, of polarity, and of viewpoints both becoming distinct and trying to influence one another. This tension may be reflected in your life right now, potentially as situations you’ve been trying to reconcile or work out for a long time. With Saturn (often a key indicator of career) under some intense pressure from Uranus, many people are feeling clueless about what to do with their careers. And Saturn has a potent influence on relationships (which we experience as mental and social structures), which are getting stretched and pulled and compelled to update their files.

Whatever the situations this aspect signifies in your life, they seem to come to another peak in late April and then have a total change of tenor when the opposition changes signs in July, then begins to separate and move toward a conjunction coming up on June 28, 2032.

Anti-health care reform activist faces off with a guy challenging the notion that the health reform bill is socialism. Photo by Eric Francis.

I know this aspect doesn’t win any awards from Car & Driver for the smoothest ride or easiest handling, but it’s productive, mostly because it suggests real contact. And this bit about both planets representing Aquarius is worth noting: we have two facets of this crucial collective sign engaging one another. Ideas are clashing; versions of progress are clashing. There is a sense that the old order is rapidly aging — but not so much agreement on what the new order should be. Aquarius is basically putting up a mandate that says we have to work this out together, or as together as we can — there is always a minority interest in a ‘majority rules’ system.

Saturn also represents Capricorn, a sign associated with the established structures we live within, our past beliefs, our history, our parents and a diversity of boundary concepts. We are definitely trying to stretch something about our concepts, our ideas and how we function as part of society; this kind of potent opposition really is a portent of change, and we are witnessing some actual evidence of that. It just doesn’t look like change at the moment, or not everywhere: it looks a bit like chaos, discord and contention. As Sariel recently commented on the Planet Waves blog, progress often looks like decay until the last moment.

Within our private worlds and the confines of our minds, most of us will experience these changes passively; that is, we tend to play the hand we’re dealt in life rather than stack the deck. To me, the resounding message is that this really is the time for conscious reform, invention and a bit of revolution. More than anything we’re being called to have a vision for our lives — and those are muscles that we may really need to warm up, stretch and get in shape.

Yours & truly,

*See if this list means anything to you: Nov. 4, 2008 (Saturn in Virgo-Uranus in Pisces), Feb. 5, 2009 (Virgo-Pisces), Sept. 15, 2009 (Virgo-Pisces), April 26, 2010 (Virgo-Pisces), and July 26, 2010 (Saturn in Libra, Uranus in Aries).

PS, for those who missed yesterday’s April Fool’s Day parody, here is a link to the infamous article about The Clan of the Skunk Mouse.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Truth is leaking out all over, revelations of the salacious, myth-busting kind. Of all the fascinating, eye-popping and gut-twisting developments out there, the one that intrigues and encourages me most is that “authority” — the kind that once called the shots now and forever — is faltering. Ultimately, public trust, a good PR firm and a cadre of true believers can’t compete with cold hard facts. One by one, icons of a fading age face their own version of Waterloo and unexpectedly find themselves on the defense.

Jesse James is starting to look like the new Tiger Woods, as stories are popping up revealing the biker king was unfaithful to wife Sandra Bullock more than once. Photo by Chris Pizzello, AP.

The public airing of racy sexting between Tiger Woods and his stable of women has impeded his return to family and corporate sponsorships. Bad Boy Jesse James broke the heart of our latest mythical ‘girl next door,’ Sandra Bullock, when his various mistresses came forward to reveal their tattoos and lovemaking details. Both men thus prove possession of a penis, a sexual appetite that transcends their marriage bed, and a general lack of discrimination, but revelations of their personal lives don’t impact us. Neither sought the public trust like John Edwards, who ran for president while leading a secret sex life, but their behavior belies standard mythologies such as “money will make you happy” and “marriage is forever.”

Paramahamsa Nithyananda, a Hindu holy man with an international following of over two million, recently resigned after a videotape was aired on television showing him in bed with two women. Where did he go wrong? One too many partners? Two? Or the taping itself? Our expectations of ‘holiness’ don’t include multiple sex partners, secret lives, or cover-ups. Nithyananda’s credibility is shattered. The Swami has given up his many ashrams and spiritual centers, announcing that he will “live a life of spiritual seclusion, for some indefinite time.” A hundred years from now, we might all laugh it off, but today I think the holy man showed a bit of class, folding his tent and slipping away.

Not so the former Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, believed by traditional Catholics to be the incarnation of St. Peter. He is accused of covering up decades of sexual abuse of children while protecting their abusers within the confines of Canon Law. His supporters insist that no one feels the pain of the victims — hundreds of deaf children in Wisconsin, for instance, over which Benedict had direct responsibility — as much as this pope, while others say he should step down as Papal leader. This prospect is unthinkable to believers, despite a growing flood of accusations from Italy, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, the U.S. and Switzerland. With reports of tens of thousands of sexually abused children in Ireland alone, the number of those victimized worldwide by the priesthood is as staggering as the silence of the church.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 2, 2010, #810 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Most of what has held you back this year has been in the realm of relationships. Your desire nature is hot, and you’re pushing for more freedom, more experience, more creative risks. Your relationship circumstances, at the moment, seem to be presenting you with quite the opposite equation: for every one of those things you want, there is an equal and opposite reaction — and it must be frustrating. Think of it this way. At least you have something to push against. You have a structure that can serve as a container. I know it doesn’t feel that way now. Before long, you’re going to have some experiences as if that barrier is not there. Whatever reasons or circumstances you have encountered and have seen as a cause or an excuse will temporarily shift out of the way, and you will get a chance to experiment with your passion and your energy. Observe carefully what you do.

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

Venus in your sign may feel like prying open a door. There is a sense of ease about this, and concurrently a sense of enforced growth, of necessity, of urgency that will build over the next few days. I would describe Venus square Mars, and trine Pluto, as an easy opportunity to do something challenging; to grow in a way that has perplexed or evaded you in the past. There is a spiritual component to this: that is to say, something that goes beyond the idea and reaches directly to the energy level, or to what may feel like the ‘nonphysical’. Of course this is all physical in this dimension, since it’s happening because for the moment we’ve taken up residence in bodies. Food remains a crucial theme — this goes for Taurus and all those with strong Taurus placements. Make your kitchen table into an altar. Plant seeds and gather flowers.

I often think of the idea of Donald Shimoda (Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach) that we teach what we most need to learn. This is really one of the most pragmatic spiritual equations of all times. Teaching is learning; teaching is consolidating one’s knowledge; teaching is offering yourself as an example and then having to live up to that. Teaching is a demonstration of your values, which for you means exploring those values in realtime, demonstrating them and basically noticing both how far you’ve come and how far you have to go. Get used to it: there’s no such thing as a private life. It’s true that there are places within ourselves that we can’t reveal directly, but much of what we consider personal or introspective, we dramatize from moment to moment. The world is your reflecting pool.

The price of success is faith in yourself. Okay does it really make sense to call that a price? Kind of, because it’s such an issue for so many people; it seems so hard won; and most of all we have to give up so much lack of faith and that, if you ask me, is what really constitutes the price. However, you’re getting to that point where success really is inevitable. You need to position yourself for it; and you need to get out of your own way. I don’t suggest striving or efforting any more than you have to, and as far as I can see there are always going to be alternatives and workarounds to stressing yourself out. Stress is not creative and creativity is the name of the tune these days. Borrowing from an old truism, don’t work hard — wake up.

Emphasize the visual. See your options, and illustrate your agreements. Draw diagrams; explain things in terms of color and texture rather than mere concepts. Explain things in terms of story; of narrative; of continuity of flow and more than anything, scenarios that are based on relationship. Remember this about all agreements: the contract has validity to the degree that both parties benefit. Acts of charity and altruism aside (and let’s be real, we do benefit from those), construct every story in such a way that the benefit is mutual and that each party profits from access to the other’s resources. This is not conceptual. It’s tangible, visible, real and most of all, reflective of an innovative approach. Where mutual profit is lacking, apply creativity: not liberally, specifically.

This whole thing about balancing the masculine and the feminine — it can come with a crisis, or what seems like one. If there was ever such a thing as an ‘identity crisis’, this is the real thing. An identity crisis involves either 1) discovering that you’ve changed and that you’re not who you were in the past or, more likely, 2) discovering who you are, which does not match with who you were told you were in the past. And the way things are going on the planet, and the way they’ve been going for a sodding long time, the underlying theme is gender identity. For a while, you will switch between one notion of yourself and another, back and forth, until you begin to reconcile the two. While you’re doing this, note what gender-based roles you ascribe to others. That will help you figure out what you’re trying to integrate yourself.

You may need to quickly seek another solution if someone close to you is being uncooperative. Note that you may think they are being stubborn, and you may be right. However, in the current situation, your values are the ones that are the sticking point; you are the one who could either reach a compromise, or make peace with the fact that you’re not going to compromise. Or, perhaps more accurately, that you are taking your time changing your mind about something. The next few days are an excellent time to pick up the pace on that project. What you resist will reveal something about you and how you see yourself. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but you’re attached to something about your public image and this is slowing you down. How others see you is their own business. Changing how you see yourself will change your life.

It’s more difficult for someone to adapt to your desires, intentions and goals than it is for you to adapt to theirs. If someone is making a fuss about this, trust that it’s accurate; that it’s meaningful. The idea is not for you to change, but rather to hold the door open for them to change. Here is a clue: A close partner seems to be in reaction to one thing about you — it looks like something in your outer life: some role, goal or objective. In fact, he or she is in crisis because you are in a process of changing your mind about yourself; you are revising ancient ways of thought, and this person knows that their role in your life has to change as long as you proceed on your current path. When you modernize your perspective, you will have no room for the old-fashioned jazz you’ve been putting up with.

There is no need to chase an ideal. The way you’re headed, you’re going to catch up with it fairly soon, and you’ve got no need to knock yourself out trying. I mean, you can if you want to, but the benefit will be the same either way, and in fact you may miss some vital creative and leadership opportunities if you try to sprint. I suggest rather than engaging in any kind of competition, strive for comfort and cooperation. I don’t mean the laid-back and going nowhere kind of comfort, but rather a sense of ease with movement and trust that your many ideas will have a series of opportunities to manifest in the world. At the moment your astrology is in gradually developing mode; soon enough it will shift into spontaneous action mode, and I have every faith you will know when you’re getting that cue.

You seem to be in a struggle for balance. A lot of us are. At the moment, plenty is being demanded of you, and you have spent most of the past three or four months feeling like you’ve got the weight of world karma balanced on your head. You understand how much responsibility you have, for how many people, events and for something else you cannot describe. In fact, you are personally responding to a global call for ethical leadership. This kind of leadership requires that you be willing to change internally every time you take a stand in the world. However, that pressure is starting to back off and give you some relief. For a while, you have more space to lead your life your way. And you do have some personal changes on the horizon, for which you’re beholden to nobody but yourself.

An impossible situation is starting to seem like something else. Your mental outlook is beginning to improve. You seem convinced that real change is possible. I know this because I’m looking at several ‘minor’ points that most astrologers don’t bother with; they are indeed subtle points and are likely to be reflected in your life through the subtle points. Most of these involve the way that your state of mind influences the human dynamics of your world. In the day and age in which we are alive, one that is defined by energy, by nonphysical communication and by the law of attraction, our thoughts and feelings are just about the most vital navigation tool we have. Therefore, the first step is gaining some skill in the navigation of one’s own mind, and yes, this should be taught to small children as a simple concept. At the moment, for you, it’s going to be about that easy to learn.

I assured you last week that you have all the evidence you need: evidence that you can actually shift your emotional pattern. Right now you’re under an illusion that everything in your life is bigger than it really is, which is designed to give you the opportunity to see what you’re dealing with. I sense you’re a bit intimidated by what seems like a state of excess, be it emoting, ambition, creative vision or desire to do what’s really right for you. There seem to be so many small matters; there is so much to negotiate, and everyone is demanding a fair deal, leaving you to wonder whether you’re getting anything of the kind. There is information in the planetary setup that develops over the next eight to 10 weeks, which suggests that many small issues (which look large now) are going to be resolved by a few simple, elegant innovations.

Dear Planet Waves Subscriber:

Tuesday’s chart for Pres. Obama signing the health insurance reform package settles at least one issue: what happened this week is in fact historically significant. After a century of failed proposals, speculation and hope, the U.S. has taken its first step toward all of its citizens having some form of health coverage. Many people have many issues with this law, but the page of history has turned.

On Sept. 25, 1957, nine students are escorted into Central High by the 101st Airborne, deployed by Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was in keeping with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. At the time, the Sun was on the Aries Point, joined by Mars and Jupiter. Photo by A. Y. Owen for Time/Life.

The at times stunning, at times embarrassing, at times agonizing partisan drama we’ve been witnessing for the past year, which continues this week (and indeed into the future), reveals the extreme polarization that has always characterized civil rights progress in the United States. Or more accurately, we’re getting another look at a vocal, angry, regressive minority whose position was best summed up a few days ago by Sarah Palin: “Don’t retreat, reload.”

My sense is that at the moment, the country is divided into four camps. The first is the one saying this legislation is the rise of fascism because it expands the government and takes away individual rights (though I cannot figure out which). This view is held by a split-off from what is politely called the Republican base, now known as the Teabagger movement. These are the conservative hippies who use terms like baby killer and faggot when speaking to an activist nun or distinguished gay congressman. This week, some of the more passionate members of this movement have taken to throwing bricks through the windows of Democratic congressional representatives; there have been at least five such incidents so far, including one with death threats against the children of a congressional representative from New York. These appear to be part of a coordinated message that includes a lot of rhetoric about firearms and the crosshairs as a visual symbol. These are not people whose motto is “the pen is mightier than the sword” or even “a stitch in time saves nine.” Many actually have guns, and they want us to know it.

This photo provided by the office of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, shows damage to her Tucson office, apparently in retaliation for her support of health insurance reform.

The second is a supposedly progressive faction that says this law doesn’t go nearly far enough. There is no public option, or even a Medicare buy-in for people between 55 and 65. Conservatives have taken yet another opportunity to make Democrats bargain away women’s right to abortion, which is rightfully outraging many progressives (but we might ask who let things go this far). This view holds that the new legislation is essentially a perk for the insurance companies, a sweetheart deal between Obama and big business and a rip-off of the American people. Among those with this position are various fringe elements living in progressive fantasyland, but this view also reaches into the liberal Democratic base that was instrumental in getting Obama elected. One camp for this movement is the blog FireDogLake.

Then there are those who understand this legislation in its historical context as being the most progress we’ve seen toward taking care of the American people in a couple of generations. To them it represents the beginning of a change in our national direction and one of the few things done by a congress or a president going back to the Sixties that does not involve starting a war or giving tax breaks to the rich. I’ve read that Noam Chomsky said that the mandatory health insurance provision is a necessary first step toward universal coverage.

Then there is everyone else, basically left wondering what the holy heck just happened and what it means, if anything. Many have no time to follow the details; it’s all going by in a blur, and it must be more ordinary Washington DC-styled nonsense. Many people who hate watching the news get good information from The Daily Show, so we can include a faction who has a clue or two.

Does that cover the spectrum?

I think we can learn more about our moment of history from these reactions than we can from some objective reading of the health insurance reform law. We’re seeing who’s who, what ideas are out there, and what sentiments, and we’re getting a sense of the psychic landscape going into the big astrology of the 2012 era. The insurance reform law is bringing out the underlying divisions in the population, which are likely to become more dramatic as the next couple of years unfold.

The Background: Saturn, Uranus, Pluto

It’s all in the chart for Obama signing the bill into law; we will come to that in a moment. Let’s remember that in the background to this issue are two longterm aspects involving Saturn. First is the Saturn-Uranus opposition that started precisely on Election Day 2008. This opposition describes the clash of ideologies, such as the populist versus conservative theme we’ve been seeing dramatized for the past few years. That opposition makes its next precise meeting on April 26, 2010 with the final meeting for this orbit of Saturn on July 26, 2010.

Aspects between Saturn and Pluto, as we are experiencing now, can come with a conservative backlash against progress, which we are seeing in the rise of the Teabager movement and may witness in other events this year. But in the background is the Uranus-Pluto square, which brings a cycle of revolution and liberation, coming to a peak in 2012, that is gradually dawning.

Then there is the ongoing Saturn-Pluto square, which is typically a conservative backlash — part of the cycle of contraction and reactionary political movement that fires up every time Saturn and Pluto get together in a conjunction, square or opposition. This has been going on since late 2009 (though we could feel it for a good while before the first exact aspect). The last time this cycle was active was during the summer of 2001, just a few weeks before Sept. 11.

And in the deep background is an aspect that says 2012 like nothing else — Uranus square Pluto, part of the cycle of revolution. These two planets make the first of seven exact squares on June 24, 2012, but once again, we can feel it happening now — it is the inevitable change that we sense coming, and have plenty of evidence is real.

These aspects between Saturn, Uranus and Pluto form the cardinal T-square of 2010-2011, which is shaping up to be a stress test for the United States (and its economy) and which will leave the world a different place once it’s over.

It is unusual to have so much happening at once, but that’s the theme of these years going into 2012 — everything, all at once. I’ve left out a few juicy aspects, to avoid the distraction (one of them is Jupiter conjunct Uranus in Aries, coming June 8, covered elsewhere, and which I will come back to).

So, that’s the background. Let’s zero in on the moment Obama signed the insurance reform bill into law Tuesday morning, because it’s a really cool chart.

The Crosshairs: Cardinal Grand Cross

I’ll start by using an extremely simplified version, with just four planets: Moon, Sun, Saturn and Pluto. Note how this setup resembles a crosshairs, which is an emblem of the struggle to get rid of health reform. This setup is so precise that it seems fragile, yet it’s a potent alignment that will stand up to the test of history. To see what I’m talking about, I will ask you to look at the numbers next to the planets I mention. This is not math; it’s using numbers as symbols.

This chart reveals what is called a “grand cross” or “grand square” at the exact moment the health insurance reform law is signed by Obama. Note the similarity to a crosshairs that has become the visual icon for the Teabagger movement. The planets involved are directly aligned with the  Aries Point — the early degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn. In the full chart, other factors are visible, such as Jupiter in Pisces on the midheaven, as well as aspects between Saturn, Uranus and Pluto that define our era in history. For full chart with caption, check this link.

If you’ve been reading Planet Waves for at least a week, you’ve heard me mention the Aries Point at least six times. This is the term for the Sun’s position on the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring, which is 00 Aries. The position works like a planet, and is activated when any other planet is there. The House of Representatives was in its final debate as the Sun itself passed this degree Saturday into Sunday, making an exact opposition to Saturn in early Libra.

Then the vote was taken Sunday night with the Sun and Saturn precisely aligned with one another and the Aries Point.

The Aries Point reaches to the other cardinal signs Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, and let’s say that it covers the early (first 10) degrees of each of those four signs. The term ‘Aries Point’ can be extended to the early degrees of any of the cardinal signs. But we’re going to be a lot more precise than that.

I sum up the effect of the Aries Point as “the personal is political,” a phrase I spirited from Carol Hanisch of the 1970s radical feminist group Redstockings. When you have activity around these degrees — and we do right now, lots of it — we get historical events that demonstrate that there is no private life that is not determined by some larger public life, and vice versa: what happens in the public sphere is the result of the private values that people inflict on others. We get big stuff like Sept. 11, the Asian tsunami and the passage of health insurance reform — and many other distinct events.

In this chart, all four angles of the cardinal cross are covered by major planets: the Moon, the Sun, Saturn and Pluto. This is called a grand cross, aligned from four directions with the Aries Point. Plus it’s aligned with the horizon (the dark horizontal lines on the left and right sides of the chart). On the far left of the chart, we see that 02 Cancer 56′ is rising. This is also called the ascendant. It moves one degree (large number) every four minutes — fast. The small numbers tick past extremely quickly.

Now look at the position of the Sun, at the top of the chart: 02 Aries 55′. The Sun is square the ascendant precisely as Obama signs this law — to one arc minute of precision (1/60th of a degree). This is ridiculously precise; so exact that it’s impossible to plan. This is a symbol of appropriateness and exactitude, and the Sun (the king) in the 10th house (executive power) represents the president himself, who is acting with precision.

Students enter Little Rock Central High School in Sept. 1957, escorted by the 101st Airborne.

Next, take a look at the Moon, which is rising (the left is the east side of the chart). The Moon at 05 Cancer 32′ is opposite Pluto at 05 Capricorn 22′. This opposition is exact to 10 arc minutes. Said simply, there is an exact Moon-Pluto opposition in this chart. The Moon represents several parts of the story. One is that it represents the question itself: the new law itself.

The Moon in any public chart represents the public. And the public, whichever sector you like, is being compelled to deal with the inevitable force of change.

That Moon-Pluto alignment is powerful, transformative and it also represents a threat. We could look at that threat several ways: that of imminent change or inevitable progress (Pluto in Cap) or the threat of death-obsessed people who want to hold back progress. (When you do astrology you have to get used to the fact that the same symbol can represent opposite concepts.) In any case, whatever public you’re thinking of, there is some pressure here, but there is also precision in that aspect. The precision is accentuated because the Moon is rising and Pluto is setting at the moment this bill becomes law. If you’re wondering why people are so emotional and freaked out, it’s because this particular issue has come to stand for all that they are attached to about their country.

We have one last planet to consider in this chart, which is Saturn. Because it’s part of the aspect pattern, Saturn is talking to the Moon, the Sun and to Pluto. Saturn is the structure itself; ‘the system’ or the ‘order of reality’, and notably it is 1) in a sign where it’s strong, Libra; and 2) it is retrograde, suggesting that (at the moment) we are really not talking about a wild ride of progress with this law but something traditional and common sense. However, this grand cross is a setup for many, many transits over the next couple of years. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto are going to transit this structure many times over the next two years, and that means a lot of changes — and changes in attitude.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education integrated the schools. Here, the first day of desegregation, on Sept. 8, 1954, at Fort Myer Elementary School in Fort Myer, VA. The moral of this photo is that what was unconscionable or impossible yesterday is commonplace today. Yet the second moral is that we still have many steps to take to break down the entrenched racism of our political system. Photo: Bettman Archive/Corbis.

Part of tradition and common sense involve adaptation and evolution. Part of the reason for the tribe is to take care of members of the tribe.

There’s just one problem with that — not everyone agrees that certain people are part of their tribe, or rightfully part of the nation. The racial issue has been ripping at the integrity of the United States of America since the first days. It’s enshrined in the Constitution as the three-fifths compromise, which says (in a tactful way) that a Negro slave shall be counted as three-fifths of a person.

I don’t think there is any question that the issue underlying the divisive politics of the health insurance reform law involves enfranchising people with less money and darker skin into the health care system. I would go so far as to say that we are looking at blatant racism, beneath the scrim of alleged budgetary concerns and political ideology. The kind of progress we are seeing, small though it may be, is a direct threat to the vision held by some of a male-dominated, tax-free white Amurika.

Mars, the Sun and Jupiter (center left) show up on the Aries Point, just in time for the 101st Airborne to arrive in Little Rock to enforce school segregation.

Let’s take a trip back along the Aries Point to a day in September 1957. At the right there is a sample of a chart that includes a collection of planets in Libra aspecting the Aries Point: Mars, the Sun and Jupiter.

The background is that two years earlier, a unanimous Supreme Court decision called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka held that separate school facilities for black and white students were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. This paved the way for school desegregation throughout the United States. Yes, as recently as the late 1950s, black and white students attended different schools.

Interestingly, Topeka’s middle schools had been integrated since 1941, and its high school since its founding in 1871. But the elementary schools were not integrated, and this was the basis of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court. Apparently, it wasn’t that big of a deal in Topeka when the decision came through.

However, the poo hit the turbines at full force elsewhere — such as in Little Rock, AR. The Little Rock school board had decided on a plan of gradual integration to begin during the school year ending in 1958. By the fall of 1957, the NAACP had registered nine black students to attend Central High, despite segregationist protests.

Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, a southern conservative Democrat seeking a third term, met strong opposition from his own party on his proposed compliance with the Supreme Court ruling. Several sources propose this as a motivating factor in his decision to go against his own values and block the nine black students registered to enroll — the “Little Rock Nine” — by deploying the Arkansas National Guard on Sept. 4, 1957.

That’s right. The governor used the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students from attending school. The next day, Woodrow Man, the Little Rock mayor, asked Pres. Dwight Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce integration and protect the nine students.

Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking command of all 10,000 members, taking it out of the hands of Faubus. Then on Sept. 24 he ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the Army to Little Rock, which took positions and the nine students entered school the next day. True, there were racial tensions through that year and for a while after. True, some people were outraged at these changes, and we have plenty of racists alive and breathing today. But they are like living fossils from another era in history. And for them, as for us, time and history go on.

Think of it this way. At the time of the Little Rock crisis, the thought of integrating a high school was such a big deal that both the governor and the president deployed the armed forces, which looks a little like the warm-up to civil war. Today in the same place, students of all races are educated together, and it’s just another day at school.

Yours & truly,

Additional research by Amanda Painter.

Dear Aries Cosmic Child (or friend of one):

It’s a new season, your birthday has arrived and I’ve created something new: Aries birthday audio. As you may be reading, the next few months bring some of the most extraordinary astrology of our lifetimes, and it’s focused on your birth sign.

Presented as an in-person astrology reading, in clear language with high-quality sound, the report goes into detail on the blossoming of self-awareness that’s all over the Aries charts this year; the evolution in your relationships; and your high-energy emphasis on your career. I have suggestions for bringing your personal life and professional life into alignment and into a space of mutual support.

The astrology section is about 45 minutes, followed by an Aries tarot reading using the Voyager deck. Use this link to get instant access and listen today — as many times as you want. It’s priced to be affordable — just $14.95.

I know when I’ve done good work — and these readings feel great. (This came out yesterday and inspiring reviews are also coming in.) But just to give you peace of mind, this reading is 100% guaranteed to be up to the quality you deserve. That said, I offer it with full confidence in the information I’ve brought through for you. Once again, here is the product description and the link to purchase. (This link will work for purchasing gifts for your Aries friend, cousin or significant other as well.)

Happy birthday and thank you for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

As the court of public opinion wrestled with the prospect of mandating or subsidizing health services for all Americans in recent weeks, those who objected put on quite a show. Rush Limbaugh threatened to leave the country if such a law was passed, prompting a liberal group to begin raising money to send him to Costa Rica. A Texas House representative told a group of Tea Baggers gathered on Capitol Hill that “demons — yes, demons — have invaded the Capitol (and likely the souls of Democrats), forcing lawmakers to mislead the public about the content of the health care bill.”

The crowd took his words as their marching orders. A rowdy group walked the halls of Congress, spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, called civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis a ‘nigger’ and Rep. Barney Frank a ‘faggot.’ Not to be left out, Rep. Ciro Rodriguez was branded a “wetback.” Rep. James Clyburn, third-highest ranking House member and civil rights icon, said he hadn’t witnessed such treatment since he led civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s. Karl Rove has dismissed these assaults as “unsophisticated.” Indeed!

Glenn Beck declared war on social justice, calling it a perversion of the Gospel and a “rallying cry on both the communist and the fascist front.” He urged his listeners to run screaming from the churches that preach it and “report” it to their Bishops. With social justice a basic tenet of Catholic and Protestant Christianity as well as Jewish and Muslim faiths, Beck’s attack on social justice proved to be his Rubicon.

Both liberal and conservative churches considered Beck’s stand a rejection of faith itself. His own church, The Latter Day Saints, issued a statement that social justice is essential to Mormonism. Beck countered by calling progressive Evangelical minister Jim Wallis a Marxist, and defended his stand against churches acting as “political arms” by asserting his belief in the separation of church and state. To appreciate the irony of that statement, visit Jon Stewart’s glorious send-up of Beck, showing that he uses logic as expertly as Sarah Palin uses language.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, March 26, 2010, #809 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

In the film Waking Life, the lead character finds himself in a lucid dream, from which he keeps waking up, into another dream. Each awakening arrives with a transformation, and with a new level of awareness, but he still cannot seem to actually come to full consciousness. Along the way he encounters many interesting people and continuously seeks out new knowledge, but a mystery persists, which is the mystery of what it means to be awake. There are some psychological theories consistent with his experience, defining consciousness itself as a trance. In these days of your life, I would propose that the measure of how awake you are is indicated by what you create. True enough, not everyone is the ‘creative type’ and we’re generally motivated to consume energy rather than to offer ourselves to the world in a sincere and daring way: which underscores my point.

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

Your mission seems to be assembling the scattered parts of yourself. That might look like guiding your life toward one goal, which will help, though that’s more of an external way to consider the issue. Viewed from an interior perspective, the question involves fear, in particular, the fear of not knowing who you are. I know this one is going around. I know people are developing strange coping mechanisms to deal with the uncertainty of self, though you might want to be on the lookout for two of the more common ones. The first is over-identifying with what you attach yourself to: that is, clinging. The second is by living in fantasy, or trying to. I suggest moving precisely the opposite direction: less emphasis on who or what you’re attached to, and more emphasis on seeing possibilities in yourself and experimenting with them for the sake of gaining actual experience.

You may be astounded at the lack of compassion that some people display, though I suggest you not reply in kind. It’s difficult enough to see and admit the truth of what human nature is capable of, though at the same time you need to figure out how to make your world warmer rather than colder. Warmer may include telling the truth as you perceive it, though be sure you direct your words carefully and don’t draw blood if you can avoid it. It will be adequate if you perceive certain individuals for who and what they are; that may even provide some incentive for them to evolve a bit. Remember, that you’re on a mission that involves being true to yourself and your own cause rather than correcting the ways of anyone else. Though it may seem to take forever, the best way to teach really is by example.

You’re doing everything you can to let go of past emotional patterns, though some of them seem determined to hold onto you. Or: are you just seeing and experiencing those patterns for what they are? This is a little like doing a cleanse. You start the process and all this stuff comes up on the way out. You get to experience the gunk at full-strength before you let it go. Meanwhile something else is happening, which is that you’re discovering how much turns on the thoughts you think, particularly about the goals that you have and that you act on. This level where concepts, ideas and objectives exist is where to focus your awareness during the next few days. You seem to be in the process of making a commitment to yourself about the direction of your life. This is the real thing: be honest with yourself and let the momentum of truth carry you forward.

Your long-term vision may have nothing to do with what you’re doing now; that is one potential. Or it may be a radical evolution of what you’re doing now, so totally transformed that you might never have expected that one would have emerged from the other. This is nothing other than how ideas evolve; they are living things, and they go through a series of meta-morphs into each new form. Or is it you who is changing? That is a more accurate description; your ideas, in particular, your ideas about your life, are like an effigy that you model yourself after. I suggest you experiment with some highly specific ideas about what you want to happen — the kind you think are too specific to apply to a future that has yet to manifest. Create a vision and describe it down to the subtle details, such as the weather and the pictures on the wall.

Peel back the layers of yourself, and reveal your truth to someone close to you. You seem to be doing this on the emotional level, experimenting with feeling all kinds of unusual or intense things in the presence of others. Now you can move to the mental level and put words to your feelings. At first you may feel extra vulnerable doing this, until you figure out that you can spring off of someone’s energy, or use it as a psychic magnet, to draw out parts of yourself that you never imagined existed. This is an actual transformative process, though in the form of play. Your ideal play partner may or may not be your significant other; there may be more than one. I suggest you experiment with someone same sex, and opposite sex. You are exploring both sides of your brain.

Your relationships have been full of surprises lately, but would you have them any other way? True, you have a stable side that loves when life is steady and predictable. Then there’s the rest of your psyche, which thrives on uncertainty. There are some things you’re hearing and experiencing which come across as pleasant and daring, and others which seem harsh and strange — at first. All you need to remember is that another person’s perception of you says more about them than it does about you. The interesting part is that you will learn something about your hidden nature. Some event a few days ago tipped you off that there was something to notice, and now the words to describe it are starting to formulate.

You need to find the one mistake you keep making. It’s the same one you forget that you keep making, so it may tend to slip away. When you rediscover what it is, I suggest you write it on the wall. Or better yet, immediately go through all your current plans, appointments, clients, lovers, dates and potential lovers and dates, and look for anyplace you see the least chance you might do it again. If you stop now and conduct a thorough investigation, you’ll actually be able to avoid the next iteration of this particular mistake, and potentially break the cycle entirely. The issue is one of awareness, but it’s also about making sure you know what your goals are and then making sure that every decision you make is in support of those goals. You’ve spent months reviewing your highest aspirations and making commitments to yourself; this is about honoring those promises.

Remember, don’t be a rebel for its own sake. Your values are more evolved than this, and you need to be cautious of the element of pride. Rebellion is a tool, and at times a weapon, that I suggest you use judiciously. Pride is dangerous when it’s not mixed with a good helping of awareness. If you find yourself getting caught up in the chaos of another person’s life, check in and see if you weren’t using one of these two factors to excess. It would help if you remember that there are some things about society that make no sense, and that you cannot do anything about, except ignore them and live your life your way. As you may soon discover, doing your thing because it’s what you want usually has far more influence on your environment than does trying to change the external world.

People do things for their own reasons. If you listen to them you may not get the idea that they’re good reasons, or that the person is being honest about their motives; but that’s a basic part of encountering the thought process of others. I suggest resisting the temptation to see anyone, including yourself, as a victim of circumstance, or a victim of the influences of another person. Nobody is under anyone’s thrall; credit yourself and others with the intelligence to make their own decisions. It’s true that those around you seem particularly mysterious right now. Hold the space for that mystery and invest your energy dipping into your own inner core; you’ll find plenty there to nourish your soul, and remind yourself that you do quite well independent of the desires and motives of others.

If you’re becoming aware of the darker angels in your nature, you don’t need to worry that this is who you actually are. Awareness is the key to being free of them, rather than enslaved by them. All darkness operates through luring us into unconsciousness, and light is the light of awareness. One of the seeming paradoxes of becoming aware is acknowledging all this stuff we don’t like, or don’t want to look at, or don’t believe is true. Note that much of it is the result of damage done to us in the past, rather than who we inherently are. Fortunately, patterns created by past events are no match for the underlying strength and truth of your being. If the thing that stands between you and the pain of this material is awareness, it’s not awareness of the passive kind, but more accurately a quality of maneuvering your mind with skill and precision, particularly when you find yourself in the dark.

You’ve been locked into a particular emotional pattern for a long time, and you’re starting to become aware of this fact. You will be even more aware of it when you suddenly discover yourself free of this pattern one day and you wonder how it is that it had such a grip on you. The reason is that you believed in it; or perhaps that you still do. I suggest you invest some energy looking into the power of belief, which is one of the elements that creates the shape and tenor of the reality we see. While it seems difficult to change our beliefs, it’s even more difficult for us to have an experience that violates our beliefs; in practice it’s easier to change the belief first and have the new experience second. In case you’re wondering whether you’re capable of this, or whether certain things are possible in the world, I assure you that you have all the evidence you need.

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

We’re about to experience a spring season like no other. It has an ordinary beginning, more or less. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring begins when the Sun’s rays square the equator, just past noon in the Eastern U.S. zone on Saturday, March 20. We’re currently in that brief phase where night and day are equal around the world. In the midst of this, the Sun enters the sign Aries and the new astronomical year begins. There are a few extra planets in Aries — at the moment, Venus and Mercury, and of course, ultra-longtime tenant Eris.

Late winter light near New Paltz, in Ulster Country, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Aries is a cardinal sign, which means if all goes well enough, it arrives with strength, determination and initiative. Think of all the energy rising out of the ground: seeds bursting into bloom, trees creating tens of thousands of new leaves to harvest the newly-available rays of the Sun, animals birthing and even people taking a moment to feel alive.

Part of our spring cleaning/revival is that Mars stationed direct on March 10. Mars is the ruler of Aries and the energy of the sky is now focused here. Despite a brief Mercury retrograde coming in a few weeks, and the fact that we will need to use some of that Mars direct energy cleaning up the mess made by Mars retrograde events, we are on solid ground. The thing to watch for is oppositions: you will have to do your part to sidestep needless contention and controversy. Keep your encounters real; choose well.

I say this recognizing how challenging life is for how many people right now, even the ones with homes and jobs and health insurance. The relentless 2012 quality of “everything, all at once” is still influencing our lives, and will be for a while — particularly as the energy picks up over the next two months and everyone of every psychic shape and vibration responds their own special way to the conditioning forces that surround us.

The Second Equinox

In addition to the usual fire-surge of spring, this particular season contains a planetary event that takes this energy to a cosmic scale. On June 8 there is a second equinox, where two of the largest and also most influential planets align exactly in the first degree of Aries — the Aries Point. Think of that degree as a kind of amplifier that makes an astrological event impossible to miss, resonating through the inner and outer worlds as if they were one thing, which of course they are.

Kepler did some of his best mathematical work confirming the nature of the solar system under a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. He also made his living as an astrologer. I once wrote a postcard from his writing table, in a German museum.

The planets involved are Jupiter (wisdom, expansion, culture, pleasure, exotic) and Uranus (spontaneous, disruptive, revolution, ingenious, forward-thinking). They meet up every 14 years, in a different sign (the last time was Aquarius, in February 1997). This is a conjunction that is often around for mysterious confluences of great breakthroughs in human progress: psychoanalysis, quantum theory and the Moon landing; and in much earlier eras, some of the greatest work by Kepler and Galileo — all of which happens at the time of other great discoveries, as documented by Rick Tarnas in his book Cosmos and Psyche.

And each comes with a distinct social environment, which feels like existence lighting up (and that light can throw a few shadows, too). Though any moment of astrology is unique in the world, it’s possible to make some comparisons to past events. If you’re old enough to remember 1969, you’ve felt something like this. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction happened that year, in very early Libra — precisely opposite of where it happens in the spring of 2010.

It was the year that opposition to the American war in Vietnam reached its peak. While 600,000 people marched on Washington to protest the war, another 100,000 demonstrated simultaneously in San Francisco. I’ve mentioned the Moon landing, which was in July — the first time that humans touched the surface of another planet. By some miracle, this was followed a few weeks later by the Woodstock Festival in August, which was like life on Earth turning into life on another planet. One aspect of the technology of the mid-to-late Sixties (and in particular Woodstock) was the wide-scale availability of LSD, a drug that leads people to be mellow, introspective and loving toward one another.

The year was not all jubilance. Nixon became president that January. Manson murders happened that summer. The Beatles broke up and went their separate ways. Yet every event had a quality of being personally significant, affecting many people. These were not abstract news items; they were palpable experiences that we cared about, and that came crashing into our living rooms. They have all left many visual impressions in our minds. It was a mythic time in history, larger than life, yet also in the flow of life.

There are odd little technology details from 1969. The Boeing 747 and Concorde made their first flights. A lot of nasty information came out about Vietnam, including the fact of an illegal war in Laos (Cambodia was the next year). A grief-stricken Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off of Dyke Bridge, killing a former campaign worker. All of this happened in a few short seasons; most of it focused on the summer.

What Time It Is

To understand a confluence of events that significant, it helps to look to astrology. There’s unlikely to be an explanation in conventional history or sociology, or not one that’s spiritually satisfying. Astrology is a matter of what time it is, and both the planets and world events help us see that. By 1969 it was time for people to get together; it was time for awareness of global issues to amount to something.

600,000 people march against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC on November 15, 1969.

In Libra style, there were three massive peace gatherings — the two antiwar protests and the historic pro-peace protest we think of as Woodstock. I have always considered Woodstock one of the most moving, poignant statements by the public against Vietnam; it’s always seemed like the best protest ever. I thought I would ask Michael Lang, the creator of the festival, if he agreed.

“The war was definitely at the center,” Lang said in a March 11 email. “Everyone’s thinking was focused on stop the war.”

What’s different about the astrology of ’10 as compared to ’69 is that the setup is a mirror image. For example, we are now in two Vietnam-like wars (they serve no actual purpose, they are expensive and we’re caught in tactical, political and ethical quagmires) but hardly anyone says a word. These wars, destroying the lives of many and causing incalculable grief, are nowhere near the center of public consciousness. They barely make the news. We are not paying attention, and when we look back and try to figure out how this happened, let the record reflect that on the day of the there was barely a conversation on the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

Where a conjunction occurs tells you something about how it’s going to feel, and how many people it will affect. In 1969, the conjunction took place in Libra, a sign that’s mellow on the exterior but with a lot of mojo coming out from deep inside. The themes of Libra include art, balance, beauty and relationship.

Footprint of Buzz Aldrin in the lunar surface, July 20, 1969. Photo by Neil Armstrong.

In 2010, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction takes place in the more impetuous sign Aries, a fire sign and the first sign of the zodiac. Aries tends to be self-centered and lacks the balance of Libra. It comes with a raw, unrefined and fiery quality. The two conjunctions have one thing in common, which is that they appear in the very early degrees of what are called cardinal signs — the signs that start the seasons.

That puts them in aspect to something called the Aries Point. When you think of the Aries Point, the summer of 1969 is a great example of the energy. Even though two enormous planets were opposite the Aries Point that summer, it worked just fine to stir up the full effect of that degree: what I describe as the personal is political.

The conjunction of 2010, which takes place in early June, will have a different flavor, a different-feeling tone. Aries not only lacks any sense of balance; it’s the opposite of balance: Aries is a surge of energy. By definition it is self-centered rather than other-centered. The energy is emotional (fiery, Aries) rather than mental (airy, Libra).

By 1969, the peak of Sixties astrology had already passed — the extremely rare Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1965-1966. Currently we are approaching the next peak of that cycle, which is the essence of 2012 — the Uranus-Pluto square. The energy of this square is now building; it hasn’t happened yet, but we are starting to feel the vibes. We have quite a few surprises in store, and they begin right about now.

The Anti-Sixties?

In some ways this spring looks like an anti-Sixties moment rather than any kind of replay of the Sixties. The outspoken activists of our day are conservatives. There is kind of a contra-hippie movement known as the Teabaggers. Their name pertains to anti-tax protests (the original Boston Tea Party of yore), but (in perfect anti-Sixties spirit) also refers to a sexual act that few of them seem to have heard of.

Spoof by The Onion on a protest by conservative activists such as the Teabag Movement. Read the related story here. Photo: The Onion.

Though they claim to be in favor of individual rights most of them are against a woman’s rights, and sex education, and the rights of gay people. So it’s an “individual rights for us, not for you” movement. Most Teabaggers are against government spending but in favor of war. But if you don’t cut the military budget, that leaves the relatively small portion of the budget spent on actual social programs to cut.

There is lots of subtle, festering anger, yet little in the way of expression and no corresponding spirit of celebration. In fact, though it’s taken me about 15 years to figure it out, there seems to be a perpetual retreat among many who have something to offer or share, unless they are convinced that it’s going to be absolutely nonthreatening to their neighbors or the authorities. It seems dangerous or foolish to care too much. Somebody might notice you.

There’s lots of talk about coming out and doing something together, then it seems like a big deal to have a drum circle. Clearly, many people are insecure, but many are riveted to their computers and iPods and that is the way they see the world: as an experience they observe remotely rather than participate in.

Injustice after injustice happens, and not only is there not a pushback, you barely hear a peep. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, women were gaining rights and recognition. Today that process is running in reverse. In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert on March 8 signed a law that makes it a crime for a woman or a girl to have a miscarriage. The law reads: “A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of her unborn child…is not caused by an intentional or knowing act of the woman.” Sorting out that convoluted language, if a pregnant woman falls down the stairs and loses her child, she can be put on trial for criminal homicide. The way the law is written sounds like she’s guilty until whatever happened is determined to have happened unintentionally.

I’m just wondering why the only place I’ve heard about this is from my news-scouring editorial assistant. This issue is not registering in public awareness. In another era, women would have been in the streets protesting. Now it’s high fashion to say, “That’s too bad, but what can I do about it?” — that is, if you’ve even heard about it.

Many people who identify as liberal have set up so many strict rules for themselves that it would be comical to describe them as liberated. Many seem terrified to so much as talk about sex. Spirituality imposes as many dictates as the pope, as does the mandate of having the perfect image. These conceptual structures, which to me feel like keeping oneself in a cage, are going to come under a lot of stress when this conjunction happens. It absolutely bursts with human potential — with the ‘I Am’ energy of Aries.

Reaching for Human Potential

Human potential and self-awareness are something we could do with a lot more of right now. I keep hearing people ask when everyone is going to wake up; this aspect looks a lot like an awakening. I would be more optimistic if I heard people ask about when they are going to wake up.

At Boeing Field in Seattle, two early 747 aircraft are parked. In 1969 there were three breakthroughs in aviation — the Moon landing, the Concorde and the 747. Technology is one expression of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, but so too are breakthroughs on the mental and spiritual levels of thought. And the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction has a lot to say about the cooperation that makes technology and other forms of human progress possible. Photo courtesy of Boeing Corporation.

I have a few concerns about this conjunction. Aries is a militant sign, and we live in an era when militants get most of the attention. It’s ruled by Mars, the ancient god of war. In the Sixties activists would put flowers into guns. Here in the anti-Sixties, “activists” carry guns. The modern equivalent of the back to the land movement is: start a militia.

This conjunction has a lot of Mars to it, and we’ve just come through a long, challenging Mars retrograde that covered the entire winter through March 10. This came with plenty of frustrated will and desire, still working itself out. However, over the next two months as we approach the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, the energy shifts in the direction of expression, of self-awareness and of some new kind of liberation, particularly for our era.

Here is the issue I’m having, if it’s not clear yet. It seems like the people who feel the most comfortable speaking up and claiming their space are the ones who would hold others down. My concern is that this conjunction is going to embolden them more than it’s going to speak to the people who wish they could stand up, express themselves and be free for its own sake. I understand that it can feel dangerous to do this, but I’m wondering how far into the basement, the closet or the corner we’re willing to be pushed before we push back or just take our space.

True, push doesn’t need to come to shove. It’s possible to simply be free, but I think that the fear of a confrontation, and the fear of being seen as different, is precisely what keeps many, many people locked in their house, typing on the Internet under a fake handle that can’t be traced back to them.

Here’s the silver lining. Clearly, we need more group consciousness in our culture; we’ve done just about everything we can do alone, from going bowling to imaginary sex to a DVD exercise program. Anything significant that we need to do as a society will take the combined efforts of many. Most of the really fun things we want to do, we do with others.

Yet groups are groups of individuals. A collection of people who are not individuals is a mass and not a group. A mass has completely different dynamics, such as the sum total of everyone who drinks Diet Pepsi, or the mentality of a mob.

A conjunction this strong in the first degree of Aries has individuality written all over it. The thing about this kind of individuality is that it calls on us to really be who we are, to say what we believe and express the energy and potential we contain. That, in turn, is an invitation to grow and change in obvious, expressive ways — in ways we might be seen and noticed. As of today, that is supposedly as scary as it gets.

Let’s see about tomorrow.

Yours & truly,

As usual, there’s all kinds of exciting stuff happening on Planet Waves websites. We’ve completely revamped the Planet Waves homepage, making us the easiest website to navigate since Netflix. This weekend Daily Astrology & Adventure will morph into a news blog, covering the latest details in the health reform vote taking place Sunday. I have posted one of the more significant charts and I am sure a discussion will emerge at that link. Then there’s the conversation about the astrological houses as they describe sex and relationships which continues, up to nearly 90 comments as of this writing. Eric has followed up with an entry about why some people get bristled by his articles on the topic, collecting comments as we speak. Len Wallick has done some excellent articles this week on the equinox, including one called Intimations and Speculations. Eric will have a more technical summary of the equinox at the Cosmic Confidential Diary.

Don’t miss our guide to site navigation for subscribers. That will come by email in a little while.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Early in this century, we discovered that our military had become dependent on the services of private contractors. We were surprised to learn that deals were being struck not only for goods and services, supplies and reconstruction, but also for protection and security. Enter Blackwater USA, a paramilitary organization that provided mercenaries — literally hired guns — to defend the new Iraqi Embassy, oversee their many subsidiaries, and provide services to the CIA. Controversy regarding Blackwater’s activities grew steadily until a shooting incident in 2007 left 14 civilians dead.

At the 6,000-acre training ground of Blackwater USA, scores of former military commandos, police officers and civilians are prepared each month to join the lucrative but often deadly work of providing security for corporations and governments in the toughest corners of the globe.

During the Bush years, the Coalition Provisional Authority compiled a list of 60 different firms providing security services. Blackwater was the second largest contractor in support of troops in Iraq. After changing their name to Blackwater Worldwide in 2007, they began offering their services internationally. The Department of Homeland Security used Blackwater in the relief effort during Hurricane Katrina at a cost of $240,000 a day; their heavily-armed presence drew sharp criticism during that anxious period. The Blackwater brand became an embarrassment. To sidestep the resulting bad press, the company changed its name to Xe Services in 2009, and its originator and president, Erik Prince, stepped down. The name change has not stuck with a wary public, however, and the press continues to call the company Blackwater. As Shakespeare’s Juliet murmured, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Or stink as badly, considering our topic. Yet this foul organization continues to thrive despite the Iraqi government denying it further permits to operate in that nation.

Make no mistake, private contracting is big business, critical to the U.S. military industrial complex. According to recent reports, we utilize about 250,000 armed or unarmed contractors in the Iraq and Afghanistan war theatres, approximately 50% of our total force. With the American footprint fading from Iraq, our attention has turned toward Afghanistan, and so has Blackwater’s. Obama has declared a major goal to be the training of the Afghani national police. This project was in the hands of DynCorp for the last several years, with little progress noted. The Department of Defense has now solicited bids on a new contract for this task.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, March 19, 2010, #808 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aah, the mysteries that spring from women. But I would ask: is it the girl, or the grown adult? Is it a mix of both? And what is their relationship? I suggest that you discern the difference between them. They may show up in the same place, with different needs and agendas. The girl needs protection. She has a fragile quality to her psyche and is touching her nascent sense of identity for what may feel like the first time. The woman has held down an enormous amount of energy and feels like she’s going to explode, melt down or go mad from lack of attention. Here is what’s going on a few layers down: the source of inner chaos is the sense that her gifts are not being received by the world, or that she lacks the courage to offer them.

You may be figuring out that there is a difference between who you think you are, and who you really are. To some extent this is true for everyone, but your sense of yourself seems to be rather fired up these days. You seem to be concerned about how you’re perceived, and you are doing your best to hold your attention on a concept of yourself that you want to emphasize and then broadcast that into the world. Here is what I am inclined to ask: are you angry about something? Does that something involve whether you feel safe? I suggest you address the safety issue first, which may involve some actual question about how you feel in your environment. Stick to practical issues rather than trying to compensate with the force of your personality. If you have something to say to someone, say it directly — not in fantasy.

“Friend” is the most trampled word in English, and Facebook is not helping matters. For you this word needs to be connected to an actual idea of what constitutes an authentic friend. Checking the history of this word, it is connected to the idea to love. So someone you love is one version of who you might consider a friend. If you can say the words to them, that is a good indication; if you can say what you love, that’s even better. Researching deeper, the word friend is indirectly related to fiend or enemy. It’s vital that you know the difference. Perhaps someone who causes a disruption in your life is a friend, but it’s not likely. It may be that someone centered on themselves is a friend, but that is even less likely. Someone who speaks the truth to you, sincerely and clearly: that is a friend.

You have all the luck you need to succeed; you have the talent; now you need focus and efficiency. If you’re going to begin anything this week, limit that to two items, preferably related to one another. You are in the mood to get things going, yet you need to be careful and discerning about your motives, and the speed with which you attempt to accomplish anything. Be mindful of people around you who stir up conflict or strive to get attention. One way you can cut back on this phenomenon is by being clear with yourself about who you are, and why you do what you do. This will set a boundary; your clarity will, at least, help you see when others are not clear, or when their agenda does not match yours. What you do with that information is another issue, but the fact that you will indeed need to have it is clear.

Your ideas about life are moving faster than your life, but that’s about the speed of things: fortunately ideas take time to manifest, because not all of them will serve you. Mars is moving slowly — and I would add, with extra potency — through your birth sign now. That is a clue to strive for progress one day at a time, but even that might be a bit too fast some days, because it would seem that your intention is to do deep work and lay a solid foundation. I suggest you set an agenda for the week, and contrast that with your agenda for some longer stretch of time, such as a year. Make sure the items on your weekly agenda match some items on your longer one. Then, yes, take existence one day at a time — and remember what happened yesterday.

You’ve been on quite a ride in the relationship department the past few weeks, but I would ask: what in life does not involve relationships? Even when you’re walking around your apartment alone at 3:30 am, you are in relationship to everything you see. The thing about your connection to a vase, a television or a book is that you know you bring the energy. You make up the story. This is more challenging to see in dynamic, live-action situations. That’s partly because they involve two or more people bringing their energy. Yet the same value holds: you continue to evaluate everyone around you. The question is, on what basis are you making that assessment? Or maybe this is the question: in what ways do you feel your mental state is compromised by a relationship in which you have a vast investment of ‘self’?

It may surprise you who turns out to have what opinion this week, or what experience you learn that someone close to you has been through. Whether you identify with it is another question, but I suggest you do your best to empathize in any event. That seems to be the whole point. The problem with allowing yourself true empathy with something you may not relate to is that you will reveal things about yourself (to yourself, and to others) that you were not expecting and that you may feel uncomfortable with. However, if you stick with the process, you will learn something about yourself — quite potentially, something that’s been eluding you for years. One of the core issues involves how you see yourself in your relationships: is your self-image the one with gifts, or one who brings problems?

Mark Twain joked about not letting one’s schoolin’ get in the way of one’s learnin’. I would say: don’t let your work get in the way of your professional aspirations; don’t let your professional aspirations get in the way of your ability to get things done. After considerable frustration and confusion, you can now get the two going in the same basic direction; at least tuned to the same key. You may have to do this in manual mode. I suggest you see where your smaller efforts add up to drive forward your larger objectives. See where your larger objectives can call on you to scale back what amounts to busy work — but not your dharma. That is, some things that feel like busy work are actually actual, authentic committed duties. Just because you don’t like doing something doesn’t mean that it’s not truly vital.

There seems to be some family or tribal drama threatening your peace of mind. Since I know how delicate that peace of mind has been for you, I’m feeling a little protective: and that’s who you need to surround yourself with. Meanwhile, you’re facing a complex psychological situation that you would be wise to handle mentally rather than emotionally. I am not saying you need to run from the emotional dimension, but rather that at this phase, your emotions are an indicator of what you can work out through awareness, analysis and most of all, through an understanding of your family history. What you are going through may feel like it’s ‘in the present’ but I would say it’s more of the ‘the past is the present’ variety of personal material. Where to begin? If you can, talk to your mother.

Make sure you’re kind to the people who feed you; make sure that you choose to feed the people who are kind to you. Make sure you feed yourself. This is the moment of the equinox, when night and day are balanced around the world, symbolic of a state of equilibrium. Ceres in your sign is suggesting strongly that you consciously balance out all the exchanges in your life. Evaluate carefully and be mindful of your prejudice. What you think is a loss might not be a loss. What you think is a gain might not be a gain. The basis on which you need to evaluate is on what nourishes or depletes you. Be clear about this. We are all accustomed to situations where we give more than we receive; where generosity works against us. Make your decisions with no hard feelings; just gratitude that you can indeed get your life in order.

You’re starting to understand what changes you need to make. The feeling has been intuitive till recently, and you’ve had some radiant moments of clarity. That’s different than observations that you can refer back to, which reveal what you’re actually experiencing. Even in considering your healing process, you’ve been idealizing matters in a way that has not, until now, stood up to the evidence. I’m describing a few of the properties of Chiron, which is gradually separating from its conjunction to Neptune. You’re encountering a new kind of clarity, and a new depth of intuition. Honoring this, I suggest that you have no opinion that you cannot support with data; that you have no hunch you cannot support without actual observation, preferably something that you’ve written on paper or typed in an email.

I know, you still can’t see around that corner — the one that seems to be behind you but is really in front of you; the one that seems to have defined a decade of your life, but which is really right in front of you. The way to work with this uneasy tension is to choose where you want to be. Get out of automatic mode and make your decisions with full awareness of what you are choosing, and what your options are. You have, at the moment, an overwhelming amount of potential, and this may not be making your life any easier. So you need to focus, and you need a basis for what you choose to focus on. You have three choices, approximately. One is what you perceive as necessity. One is what you perceive as crisis. The last is what you want, and that may be the most difficult to see — but it’s clearly the most important to look at.