Profiles in a crowd, waiting for a concert to begin in the gallery at 59 rue de Rivoli, in Paris.
Paris-based photographer Danielle Voirin travels the world and documents her experiences in photographs. She takes street photography and photojournalism a shade beyond even art, to the level of mysticism. You may see more of her work on her website DanielleVoirin.com, or her alt website, DaniVoirin.com.
Mars will enter Gemini shortly after 10:40 pm EDT Monday (02:40:12 UTC Tuesday). In doing so, Mars will symbolically be following the act of Venus, which is departing Gemini for Cancer later today (as discussed here earlier this week). The allegory of a following act is appropriate, because when a planet changes signs it is as if a performer were changing costumes, and (implicitly) roles.
That’s one way to anticipate what Mars in Gemini might offer for you. It will be a chance to grasp Mars and its role in your life as it takes on the raiment and role being relinquished by Venus.
Mars is not Venus, even when wearing the same metaphorical costume of expression through a given sign. For that reason, we can expect the Martian tenure in Gemini to correspond more with a departure from, rather than a repeat of, what Venus has been expressing over the last month or so.
Nether, however, can one consider Mars to be the opposite of Venus. Rather, the two astrological energies of Mars and Venus are complements.
As with all complementary principles, Mars and Venus can be fully understood only in relation to each other. Daylight would not mean as much as it does without the experience of darkness. Yin is only an abstract concept without the context Yang provides. Every coin requires two sides to be tangibly real.
Hence, perhaps the greatest opportunity while Mars is in Gemini until June 24 will be a chance to observe and compare how Venusian and Martian energies manifest in relation to you and your life.
Of course, not all things will be equal in Gemini or in the sky. While Venus traversed Gemini, it was getting brighter and higher in the sky with each successive night. The Martian tour of Gemini, on the other hand, begins just as Mars is disappearing into the glare of the setting Sun, not to become visible again until August.
Mars will also share outfitting with Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, which will be moving through its home sign in one of its famous retrogrades at the same time. Indeed, Mercury and Mars will meet in conjunction while moving in different directions at 10+ Gemini on May 27. Nothing like that happened for Venus as the act preceding Mars.
Nonetheless, Gemini remains much the same as any and all planets pass through. It remains an air sign. It continues to be a mutable sign. Its orientation to the other signs of the zodiac never changes. Mercury will always be its ruler. Mars will not alter any of that, any more than Venus did. Instead, it will be a question of what Mars will bring out of its role in Gemini garb. Also, and probably most importantly, it will be a matter of what you must bring in as a responsive and responsible child of the universe.
A lot will depend on how Gemini is placed in your personal astrology. Even so, there is one general guideline that will apply to almost everybody.
That guideline has to do with the fact that Mars is undeniably more about action than charismatic Venus. Therefore, expect doing to upstage being as regards to the field of Gemini’s expression for the remainder of this season. Just to cite one example, that field would include the use of words for communication. With Venus in Gemini, it was the value of what you said that probably mattered most.
With Mars in Gemini, expect a shift to prioritize the tone of your communication. Accordingly, you should make allowances by resolving to be even more careful with your expression than with your words. Even if you feel Mars in Gemini goading you to be brash, consider the advantages of occupying higher ground as opposed to including yourself among the unsavory things that tend to roll downhill.
Correspondingly, you should be prepared not to take overly energetic or assertive communications from others personally. For to do so would only perpetuate a vicious cycle counterproductive to the free and resilient exchange of ideas that represents some of the best of what Gemini is about.
Indeed, if you can remember just one thing about your role while Mars is in Gemini, it would be the time-honored proverb “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” If you can be as careful with your own words as you are in observing and making allowance for the possibility of careless communications from others, the act (and actions) that follow should work out to complement rather than undo all that has transpired before.
Offered In Service
Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.
A guitar steel pan, the mid-range in a steel drum band, hangs out on stage waiting to be played.
Paris-based photographer Danielle Voirin travels the world and documents her experiences in photographs. She takes street photography and photojournalism a shade beyond even art, to the level of mysticism. You may see more of her work on her website DanielleVoirin.com, or her alt website, DaniVoirin.com.
Dear Madame,
I just started waiting tables for the first time in my life, and I can tell you after one week, I’ve never had such a low opinion of humanity. Your letter last week got me thinking: if there’s an astrological reason for why people steal tips, is there astro wisdom for waiters, too? I get we’re there to help, but frequently I don’t even feel I qualify as human. I’m a Libra, by the way, and not the type who’s into drama, but this is bringing out the inner evil in me.
Thanks,
Nothing Fair Here
Dear NFH,
There’s a story in Chicago that in 1918 over a hundred waiters were taken in by police and four arrested for attempted poisoning of their customers. Whether waiters preyed on their diners, or justifiably loathed them thanks to their boorish behavior, is still a matter of speculation. I bring this to your attention to point out that your troubles have a long history in this country.
Astrologically, waiters fall under the domain of the 6th house, which was traditionally the purview of servants and day laborers. As a Libran, you naturally represent the 7th house of equal partnerships. As a waiter, you are not in one.
Now, the 1st house represents the customer. Note the location of the 1st to the 6th. In astrology, we say these houses are inconjunct. Or, more quaintly, they do not ‘behold’ one another.
When you say you’re not even noticed as a person while performing your role as a waiter, you are living astrology, my friend: your customer does not ‘behold’ you — you are, indeed, not seen because you are inconjunct the customer’s point of view. You will never be an ‘equal’ in this situation, and you as a Libran might not ever cope with that.
This also smacks of feudal blindness, but I’m not sure astrology got the memo about democracy.
We Americans, however, did get the democracy memo. Which is why we are affronted by noblesse snobbage at the local Red Lobster. Are they no better than we? Out on the street, yes. In the restaurant, playing the role of the waiter — no.
Problems arise, however, when we insist on Libran-styled equal footing — or plot to ‘get even’. Let’s turn the tables, or rather the chart, to see why. Pretend you’re still standing in the 6th house. When you twist the chart to put yourself 1st (in the 1st house), your equal partner’s house (the 7th from your 6th) turns out to be the customer’s original 12th house. (Are you following me? See the wheel of houses at the bottom of this post for a visual aid.)
Another way of saying this is that the 12th house is the opposite house from the 6th. Reaching back into astrology’s history again, the 12th house represents ‘hidden enemies’. Trying to be ‘equal’ to the person you’re serving therefore launches you into the customer’s hidden enemy territory.
This makes your customer very nervous. You might do something to them there. They’d prefer you stay ahead of them and just out of sight to the right, rather than in their blind spot. The old nobles knew this well enough: that their servants could easily be their saboteurs.
Of course, there’s history to this blind spot problem here in America, too. But it’s different. We simply don’t like undemocratic behavior, no matter what astrology says. “All men are equal,” including waiters to drinkers. And when we feel we’re treated as servants, well… The infamous Chicago invention, the Mickey Finn, for instance, was chloral hydrate slipped into drinks of customers — and why 100+ waiters ended up in a police station one year.
Why so many poisonings? Presumably the new American middle class didn’t yet know how to handle servants and needed a lesson in handling ‘the help’. Many of them still haven’t learned.
You’ve just started waiting tables, which means you’ve still got a lot to learn if you stick around. No, you won’t ever be anyone’s equal, but some people make a lifetime’s living waiting tables. Truly. Service has a long and distinguished (though largely forgotten) history that reaches into the most ancient stories. Hospitality is more than a degree at your local college, it was an ancient virtue — and the gold standard of one’s humanity (and sometimes immortality!).
Certainly some waiters and customers still value that virtue. I hope you run into a few of these types. When you do, remember they’re honoring something far, far older than the local Denny’s.
Unequally yours,
Madame Z.
A cyanotype from the series DesCollages under the loupe.
Paris-based photographer Danielle Voirin travels the world and documents her experiences in photographs. She takes street photography and photojournalism a shade beyond even art, to the level of mysticism. You may see more of her work on her website DanielleVoirin.com, or her alt website, DaniVoirin.com.
For most of human history people very much like you have known how act in participation with cycles of the Earth and sky. That knowledge comes down to you in the form of proverbs, which have been perpetuated in story and song. For every thing there is a season. Make hay while the Sun shines. Shine on harvest Moon.
Astrology also provides a clue for your place in participation with cycles of the planets. We are now entering a period when it would be to your advantage to heed those clues so as to mediate with the times and moderate less-than-optimal conditions.
The period in question might be said to begin in earnest when Venus leaves Gemini behind to enter Cancer (the sign of the Moon’s dominion) at 6:52 pm EDT (22:52 UTC) on Thursday.
Indications of the period now commencing are evident through what you can see of Venus with your own eyes. It is also evident through the metaphorically interpretive and contextual milieu of astrology.
With every evening now, Venus appears a little higher above the Western horizon, remaining visible later into each successive night. You can see that with your own eyes. The gradual and steady ascending will continue until Venus reaches what will be its highest point (what astronomy calls the “greatest eastern elongation”) on June 6. Meaningfully, that will be the night after Venus leaves tropical Cancer to enter Leo.
Those of you with binoculars or telescopes to augment what you can see with your own eyes will also note that the apparent area of the sunlit part of Venus (what astronomers call “brilliancy,” as discerned from “brightness”) is growing in size. In other words, Venus is waxing much as the Moon recently did before reaching fullness less than two days ago.
Venus always goes through phases like the Moon. In many cultures, Venus and the Moon have also always shared a mythical correspondence with the divine feminine. However, astronomical and cultural correlations between Venus and the Moon have not always been metaphorically extended through, and synchronized with, the contexts of astrology as denoted by the period about to begin when Venus enters Cancer on Thursday.
Hence, the clues you should heed in order to participate in productive harmony with the beginning of a period implied by the sky. As always, beginning in actual practice will be a matter of you working with and on yourself.
First among the clues indicated by Venus entering Cancer is an implicit imperative to mediate with your own feminine (Moon) values (Venus) rather than resist them. Look to metaphorically give birth to what has been growing in brilliance within you. Seek to nourish the ascendancy of your light in the world.
Yet, the impending tenure of Venus in tropical Cancer will also require that you must honor the cyclical nature of being — for no growth or rise continues forever. Moderation will require you to release attachment to and relinquish possessiveness toward what you bear into the world, so as not to stunt or hold it down.
To keep the receptive nature of Venus and the emotional priorities of Cancer in balance will also sometimes mean working without receiving immediate gratification or credit. Nearly always, and perhaps most important, it will be necessary to lead without feeling the need also to dominate. Likely required of you in addition will be an open and selfless heart that knows within itself that all hearts can yet be made one.
Those are some clues — though not about what is in store for you. Astrology is not destiny. Rather, offered here today are some clues about what will be required of you so as to take a conscious hand in your destiny as Venus enters Cancer.
For with the ingress of Venus into Cancer you will be entering a period when the tangible evidence available to your own eyes and the subtly symbolic hints of astrology are in unusual concordance. What happens as result, however, will in large part begin with how well you perceive your place in the solar system and how appropriately you respond to fill that role.
Offered In Service
Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.
The wall of a recently vacated artist studio on rue de la Tour des Dames in Paris. The last floor of this building was given to the artists of the squat at 59 Rivoli while the city did renovations. The hallway seen through the curtained door was painted by artist Sara Renaud.
Paris-based photographer Danielle Voirin travels the world and documents her experiences in photographs. She takes street photography and photojournalism a shade beyond even art, to the level of mysticism. You may see more of her work on her website DanielleVoirin.com, or her alt website, DaniVoirin.com.
I was caught by this week’s cover of Time magazine — a black and white photo of a young African American man being pursued by a large contingent of police in riot gear. The cover’s title reads: “America 1968” with the “1968” struck through and replaced with “2015.” It was a snapshot that would probably make Richard Tarnas, astrologer and author of Cosmos and Pysche nod in rueful agreement.
For me, Time‘s cover was a reminder that no matter how far we’ve advanced economically and technologically, there has been little distance from the problems we faced almost 50 years ago.
Whether that young man was from Baltimore, Ferguson, New York or Oakland, the stories start looking alike, and there are way too many of them. Freddy Grey’s Baltimore, literally and figuratively, has been on fire a long time — since the late 20th century and the War on Poverty: blue collar industry collapse, income inequality, a disaffected African American community prey to drug wars and the War on Drugs. One wonders after all the unrest over this last year alone that someone, somewhere, could start making the correlation that the cause of America’s urban unrest is systemic.
And yet Washington, only 40 miles away, is so focused on ending gay marriage, starting a war with Iran and forcing full-term pregnancies on rape victims that it won’t smell the smoke. During an interview last week on CNN, Wolf Blitzer tried incessantly to position Baltimore community activist Deray McKesson into saying that Baltimore’s protests should stay peaceful, to which McKesson responded that Baltimore’s demonstrations are peaceful, it’s the police who are violent. McKesson then turned the tables on Blitzer, indicting both him and the society we live in by saying that “we care more about broken glass than broken spines.”
We need a moment of silence over those words to pause and think. We stand guilty of valuing property over people, so much so that it’s imbedded through our materialistic culture and our policies. Policies that deny basic rights such as access to drinking water for poorer residents in Detroit and Baltimore for non-payment of water bills.
We see it in the massive sell-off of ethnically diverse neighborhoods like the Mission District (largely Latino and working class) to property developers in San Francisco, who are looking to cash in on the cash-rich Millennial who can afford a $4 cup of coffee and a $4,000 studio. Development is also enfolding choice parts of Oakland, San Francisco’s neighbor to the east, “reclaiming” the largely African-American working class city for those who have more than enough money to live there. We are treating the poorer areas of our cities as the developing world.
Over the last fifty years, America’s poor and working class had nowhere to stay but in the cities where jobs were. Now these jobs have thinned — if not disappeared altogether — from factories and are slow to replace. Manufacturers have exported jobs overseas to increase the bottom line. With our amazing technological advances, fewer of us see an increased standard of living, while the rest of us here and around the world are under the wheel of progress. We know this already. Now we’re seeing the full price close to home.
Last week, in response to events in Baltimore, President Obama called upon the country to engage in soul searching:
If we really wanted to solve the problem we could. It would require everybody to say this is important, this is significant and that we just don’t pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, when a young man is shot or when his spine is snapped … investment is needed in the communities to bring economic opportunity, including resources for early childhood education and criminal justice reform that breaks the school-to-prison pipeline that is rendering young men in these communities unemployable … [We need] job training programs as well as school reforms. That’s hard. It takes a kind of political motivation we haven’t seen in quite some time.
What the president is talking about is political will to address the inequity. This column is not an answer to our urban crisis, but a call to deliberately reassess our own values as we observe this phase of our collective history. Where are we at? If we continue to focus on the looting, the fires, the stones thrown at police — the only thing the mainstream media wants us to know — we will miss the point and opportunity of this crisis, and will be looking at not only Baltimore, but other cities down the road.
Many of us have stood by as social inequities crystallized over time. And now these inequities give people no other recourse than to explode in anger: cars bursting into flame, shattering glass are the images we see on screen and print. How many more cities will need to erupt before we stop and examine our part in the play? How many airstrips in remote and beautiful places can hedge fund managers buy to escape the urban unrest of the ‘Fire Next Time’ in the chic urban area they call home?
What and who do we value most? How much money do we need before we can rid ourselves of that terrible nagging sense of social responsibility to the rest of the community and the world? It’s going to take more than a Kickstarter campaign to do it. The clock is ticking.
As of this writing, Maryland’s State Attorney Marilyn Mosby has brought murder charges against the six police officers implicated in Freddie Gray’s death. This provides a temporary Band-Aid and some hope to the people of Baltimore. But the road is longer ahead, because the national wound is much deeper: our collective loss of soul.
In the face of human suffering paid for by all this economic and technological advancement, we don’t seem to have the massive political will yet — like a vast anti-war movement prevalent in the 1960s — to change our present-day inequity. There are some glimpses of hope, especially amongst Millennials, that something has to change, and they are attempting to change it one community at a time. But until the rest of us do, the unrest that horrifies us with its terrible ‘property damage’ will not be over any time soon. We need to feel the horror from a deeper place. We knew this problem existed nearly fifty years ago. High time to change it for the better.