Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.
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.
Getting the home fires burning.
Even if you do not celebrate Christmas, you probably have Friday off from work, and there’s a good chance your calendar may have a few social events penciled in between now and the weekend. This is always a crazy, busy, compressed-feeling season; this year, we have a Full Moon — plus Mercury slowing down ahead of its January retrograde — to keep things extra interesting.
Photo by Amanda Painter.
Mercury stations retrograde on Jan. 5 in Aquarius. Right now, it is in late Capricorn — a placement that might have you focusing on the details of holiday preparation, or comparisons with ‘how things used to be’ in terms of traditions.
You might be more concerned than usual that the material gifts you have chosen for others don’t quite fit the bill the way you wish, or worried you won’t get what you truly need or want — in which case it’s time to remind yourself that nobody is omniscient the way Santa Claus is portrayed. Cut yourself (and your loved ones) some slack. You can only do what you can do, and if you’re thinking with your heart, that’s not so shabby.
Mainly, Mercury slowing down in its pre-retrograde ‘shadow’ or ‘echo’ phase is a reminder to implement your usual retrograde protocol, especially if you are traveling this week or next: slow down; stop to double-check that you have everything you need before leaving; check the directions on everything from toys you’re assembling, to the driving route, to the recipe you’ve made a hundred times. I should not have to say this, but: don’t drink and drive.
If you notice you’re making assumptions, ask directly for confirmation. Most importantly, stay aware of surroundings while in transit, and focused on the task at hand. Between now and just after midnight EST Christmas Eve (that is, the morning of Dec. 25) the Moon is in Gemini, a sign Mercury rules — increasing the need to focus your thoughts, and to notice if your emotions are making that harder.
One other interesting thing about Mercury right now is that on the Day of the Full Moon (Friday), it is exactly square minor planet Eris in Aries. This looks to me like some inner tension between your ideas about upholding holiday traditions and the established order (in your family or any organized institution) versus your recognition of how those structures do not leave room for some facet of your identity.
That is, you might notice the urge to do something differently so it fits ‘all of you’ better. If so, see what happens when you communicate directly and bring your full self to the conversation, rather than ignoring that little voice and having it come out reactively or passive-aggressively.
As it is, the Cancer Full Moon brings emotions to the forefront Christmas Day. This is the Moon in Cancer opposite the Sun in Capricorn, exact at 6:11 am EST (11:11 UTC).
(Freddie) Mercury and the rest of Queen in holiday attire…
Around the zodiac in the four cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn), there’s a veritable stable of planetary critters in close aspect to the Sun and Moon. They include Vesta, Logos, Hebe, Makemake, Amycus and Chariklo, plus a hypothetical point called Hades.
Without delineating each of those objects separately, I see a general theme emerging apropos of gatherings of people where there may be a fair amount of ingrained behavioral and emotional patterning, for better or for worse. In part, the Full Moon configuration speaks of the potential for co-dependency and self-sacrifice — and its flip side: the potential to get to the heart of the matter of your emotions and of how things got to be the way they are; to hold space for others in ways both personal and impersonal; to understand healthy boundaries and the proper way to treat others, and the consequences of not doing so.
Best of all, with these planets early in cardinal signs, the emphasis is on initiative. That is, you can take the initiative in these matters should they crop up for you, dealing with them directly and clearly — whether within yourself or with others.
Emotional energy is building between now and Friday morning around the ideas of home, tradition, mother, caring for others in ‘domestic’ ways, and managing time and material resources. The intensity should ease up as the Moon moves out of alignment with the Sun, but the Moon will stay in Cancer until early Sunday morning.
Whether you see yourself as rational and another person as overly sensitive, or yourself as ‘the only one who cares’ and another person as ‘all business’, see if you can take a few steps back from anything polarizing to view the situation from the other person’s perspective. ‘Tis the season to cultivate peace in your heart, even if you do not see it widespread on Earth. After all, those early cardinal signs are where the personal meets the political or collective. Peace starts with you, but it certainly does not end there.
Eric is planning to publish the written readings for all 12 signs of Vision Quest, the 2016 annual edition from Planet Waves, by New Year’s Eve (audio readings and rune readings to follow in January). You can still order all 12 signs, which includes all audio, written and musical features, for the value price here. Or choose individual signs of Vision Quest here.
For most of you reading this, the Full Moon on Friday will be the first to take place on Christmas day since 1977. That’s nearly four decades. By most human standards 38 years is a long time — enough for a lot of metaphorical water to have passed under the proverbial bridge.
Adding extra meaning is that any Full Moon on Dec. 25 would (by definition) oppose the Capricorn Sun from Cancer — the water sign where the Moon rules supreme.
Hence, what we have coming up is a day with meaning for nearly anybody. It will be a major holiday, wrapped in astronomical significance inside of an implicitly powerful astrological event. By all indications then, it must be time to at least evaluate all that has taken place since there was last a Full Moon for Christmas, nearly half of an average human lifetime ago.
Jimmy Carter was spending his first Christmas as President of the U.S. in 1977. In many ways, it’s encouraging that he is still alive. Of course, there are many who have transitioned from earthly life since then. The cinema pioneer Charlie Chaplin, for example, passed away only hours before the Moon was precisely full over his Swiss home on the morning of Dec. 25, 1977.
Under the Christmas tree of more affluent households in 1977 you might have found one of the first home computers or gaming consoles. If you were in the U.S. and poor, Christmas dinner may have been made possible by food stamps.
Were you to go out for a holiday movie back then, you might have seen the very first Star Wars film (released in May, but still in some theaters at the end of the year). Or perhaps you would have gone to see Saturday Night Fever, which played a big role in disco going mainstream. Punk rock and improvisational artists rapping along to accompaniment by DJs and their rudimentary turntable setups were also emerging from the cultural underground into wider (and ever more commercial) popularity at that time.
Were you to look up at the Cancer Full Moon on Christmas night of 1977, it would have been a pretty sight with Jupiter right next to it in a Cancer conjunction. Contemplating that tableau, you might have been thinking about the two Voyager spacecraft launched earlier that year on their way to a grand tour of our solar system to take close-ups of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Or you may even have been among the few musing on Chiron, which was discovered less than two months beforehand.
For the Cancer Full Moon coming up on Friday morning at 6:11 am EST (11:11 UTC), Jupiter will once again be in the sky with it, but further East in Virgo. You will also have reason to think about the two Voyager spacecraft once again, as both are still working and sending us data from the edge of interstellar space. Chiron, in the interim, has earned a column of its own alongside the sign-ruling planets in the online Swiss Ephemeris — which is a pretty darned amazing distinction.
Because the parallels between the Cancer Full Moon of Dec. 25, 1977 and the one coming up on Friday are many and compelling, it may very well be worth your while to make some comparisons of your own. This is not just any Full Moon. It is one of those rare events featuring an astrological return in confluence with astronomy, the civil calendar, popular culture, economics, technology, art and ancient mysteries all looping around to intersect in ways that indicate, to any thoughtful person, that it must be time for something.
Precisely what it’s time for will be your privilege to help determine, because you have the good fortune to be alive now. Regardless of how you feel about Christmas, you might want to accept the gift of that privilege and put it to some good use. These days must certainly, in some way, be made into a special time by — and for — you.
Offered In Service
Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.
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.
Issi at home in front of the fireplace, full of expectations of Christmas treats.
Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.
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.
December 22nd, two years ago. The view from a bedroom window of Mom’s house, home for the holidays.
By Carol van Strum
Future archaeologists poring over the remains of our humble dwelling will discover a remarkable phenomenon. At exactly sunrise on the winter solstice, on the rare occasions when the Sun appears at all at this time of year, the sunlight pierces a small hole just below the roof peak. For precisely eight minutes, a broad sunbeam illuminates a wall of faded Red Dwarf stills, ending its bright passage on a sheet of 32-cent Comic Strip Classics postage stamps.
The geographic precision of this solar alignment with a minor flaw in exterior siding will no doubt have future anthropologists drooling, but their interpretations will be far off the mark. Even farther off are any religious or ritual connotations they might attribute to this annual spotlight on Lister, Rimmer, the effervescent Cat, and other Red Dwarf regulars, to say nothing of the perforated portraits of Popeye, Nancy, Dick Tracy, Blondie, Alley Oop, Krazy Kat, Barney Google and Prince Valiant.
To avoid such future misinterpretations, I hereby certify that the aforementioned hole in the siding was not intentional and has no astronomical or mythical connotation, being instead the result of a stage carpenter’s hapless attempt to build a real live house. The Red Dwarf photos lit by the solstice sunbeam are no more than my son’s exuberant experiments with early downloading software, our first color printer, and a tube of superglue. And the postage stamps? That’s a tough one to explain without revealing an entire family’s inability to tear a single comic hero from the glorious bunch.
So much for the solstice, which in these parts is just another grey winter day. The day worth celebrating is not December 21, but December 26, and no direct Sun is needed. The 26th, you see, is the day the chickens notice the extra minute and a half of daylight and respond accordingly.
In our supreme arrogance, we think we’re smarter than chickens and other bird-brains, but if the Sun didn’t appear to “stand still” for a few days as Earth tilted on its axis, I doubt if we humans would notice the lengthening days until mid-January or even February, the increase is so minimal at first. But the chickens notice almost immediately; within five days of the solstice, the hens rearrange the tired straw in their nests and start gobbling oyster shell, kale, and other sources of calcium; after lazing around for months, their stud rooster stocks up on worms and protein, oils up his crow for another season of strenuous, nonstop sex, and wakes the world at first light again.
By December 26, the changes are apparent: after only one or two eggs per day since mid-October, the number increases daily, at first punctuated by occasional “practice eggs” — huge double or triple yolkers, tiny yolkless wonders, and more rarely shell-less, wobbly membranes like jelly balloons, bulging with precious cargo. By mid-February, each hen is producing an egg almost every day.
Chickens are not the only birds that respond to minute changes in day length after solstice. Certain owls, for instance, build their nests in this dead-time of winter and lay their eggs while the world sleeps under blankets of snow. I’ve never eaten owl eggs, however, and chickens are easier to observe than owls. An important distinction is that these are not commercially-raised battery hens, living out their short, beakless lives under artificial lights without ever seeing the Sun or sky or seasonal changes in daylight, and never even dreaming of a rooster; their life span is measured in months. The chickens here are farmyard critters, with their own raccoon-proof house and yard, and access to unlimited greenstuff and bugs; their lives follow the seasons and so does their egg production.
Long ago, I tried installing lights in the chicken house and keeping it lit during the winter, which ensured constant high egg production through the year, but the hens only lived for a year or two, and I took the lights out; the oldest of our hens since then have lived fifteen years or more, some laying eggs seasonally right up to their last year before enjoying a well-deserved retirement. In return for our protection and care, they provide not only eggs but rich, organic manure for the garden, which in turn produces much of their greenstuff and many worms. Come winter, egg production shrinks with the shortening days and we turn to egg-less recipes, which makes December 26 a day to anticipate and celebrate:
Love and joy come to you
And to you an egg or two…
I’ve been home with my family for 24 hours and because of the cold, wet, wintry days, we’ve been either cooking, eating, punching the keyboard or wrestling with the dog. My niece’s dog Taz — a German Shepard-Labrador mix — is less than a year old and looks as though she’s big enough to eat my sister.
Because she is a puppy, she still thinks when she jumps up on you that you’d be happy enough to let her leap into your arms. But at 75 pounds and growing, we’re a bit past that point.
Our days together are peppered with intermittent screams of “Taz, don’t eat my shoes!” Or “Taz why do you have to be under all our feet while we’re trying to cook?” Or that desperate, searching, panicked question, “Taz, what is that in your mouth?”
If you haven’t guessed by now, the family gathering at my sister’s house for the holidays is a warm mash of love and chaos. And we like it that way. We’re in celebratory mode. Both my sister’s kids are newly employed in the ‘real world’ while our generation — their mom, pop and me — beam proudly, with a big sigh of relief to the side. My niece’s young man is celebrating his birthday with us, a Solstice Eve natal return. His fourth one in a row here.
We’re a family that’s growing and expanding, and this week we’re experiencing our gathering once more at the solstice fire. A busy eventful year has come to an end.
Witnessing my niece and nephew grow into adulthood, I still hold on to mementos from phases of our family’s history. I have a picture I took with my niece when she was just three years old in a photo booth at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. In my bathroom, I keep a hand-built ceramic vase my nephew made in his middle school art class. It’s been broken in a few places over the years and I have re-assembled it each time, repairing it kintsugi style: using epoxy and gold mica powder to fill the cracks, the repair of the vase making it more beautiful than it was before. Perfect in its imperfection.
Approaching the year’s end, you can’t do anything but think about time. How far we’ve come. What has been. Time, for me especially, continues to be observed and measured in children — actual and creative. These days as a dramaturg I’ve been either writing, editing, or looking at everything from scripts to videos that cover twenty years of my working in the Medea Project.
Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of myself on stage in a video shot twenty years ago. As I looked at that me on the tape, and then looked up at a mirror close by, I had a clear opportunity to see on my face where time did its work. Because I have allowed the creative to be expressed all my life, I was happy to see that time’s work was gentle. I felt appreciation, not regret, for the life and the choices I have made. And for that, I am grateful I never had any kids. Not physical ones. All my creations were my children, and I’ve been pregnant for a long time.
For me, the measurement of time — because I now have a body of work to look back upon — has begun to include the trueness of the art. Do my creations still have relevance or were they satisfactory just for the moment? What does my work say to me now? Does it still even need to say anything? Does it still make sense?
Then I realize I’m not just measuring time in duration but in meaning. I realize there is a pattern forming in my work and in my life that’s moving outward and growing. A seed planted long ago has become the tree, branching upward.
I’m putting away the past, reminding myself to stay in the present. I am a work in progress, a self-exploring, often doubtful, volatile-minded woman who is still trying to open more doors inside, to see what mysteries await there.
How much love is there to have? How many notes are there to sing? Does everything have to be meaningful? Can’t life just be? And then you realize there are still more questions, bigger questions that you need to ask — and to answer for yourself.
Throughout my life I’ve always wondered how I would reconcile my love of and attachment to family with my aspirations outward. But my chart drew it out for me long ago like a map. My 5th house South Node, Jupiter and Uranus in family-loving Cancer was reaching across the wheel to my 10th house Venus in Sagittarius and 11th house North Node in Capricorn.
My familia. We’ve held ourselves together by tradition, love, down-to-earthness, fun and nourishment. Some days I feel like running away from them. Others, I miss them so that I need them like a flower needing rain. I come home now to recharge the batteries as well as to stay in touch. I then go back to the city and to my life, ready to take the reins back and drive. I don’t forget that because my family is such a grounding force, I can fly.
It’s not always going to be like this. The kids will one day have their own kids and we will all be older. But today, reflecting on the past year this Solstice, a little love and chaos on the longest night on our half of the Earth isn’t at all bad, even with a dog with a history of questionable somethings in her mouth. It’s all family. And whether it’s your blood family, adopted family or preferred family, wherever you feel most comfortable being you in all your various facets, flaws and feelings, that is perfect even in its imperfection. It’s what I define as home.
See you in the comments.
Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.
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.
A young girl walks through Kris Ruhs‘s magical Hanging Garden exhibition with her parents, a restorative break on a busy shopping day in Paris.