Dear Friend and Reader:

Strange to imagine, but we’re already at the mid-spring holiday. That’s called Beltane. After April Fool’s Day, it’s my favorite ‘special’ day of the year, as it makes such a lovely point: of honoring the Earth and women as part of the divine feminine, which is to say, the basis of all life as we know it.

Some are starting to figure out what this is about, and some always knew. Yet in Western civ, imagining the divine feminine is a little like trying to conjure sprites and faeries while you’re walking around midtown Manhattan.

There’s a place and a time for everything, and in a forest or perhaps near the ocean is a natural place to feel how female the Earth and the cosmos are. As for the time, that would be Beltane.

This old holiday is commemorated by Druids, Pagans or us witchy types when the Sun reaches the midpoint of Taurus, one of two signs ruled by Venus, usually on May 5 (it’s mostly celebrated on April 30 or May 1, and some traditions have the party all month, known as The May).

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re now in the last week of Mercury retrograde, and what a tangled web it’s weaving. This won’t last forever, though it needs to be handled carefully now.

Because I’m writing a daily horoscope, I’ve had these aspects under a microscope, watching them go by day by day. It’s been interesting to observe.

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By Marc Lallanilla | Link to original

The appeal of the original Earth Day resonated far beyond its beginnings

Earth Day was born in 1970, into a world torn by political strife and emboldened by free-spirited activism. The times were a-changin’, and an unlikely confluence of people and events led to the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970.

But the seed of Earth Day was planted many years earlier, when a handful of scientists and conservationists became aware that the phenomenal post-war growth of American industry — and its attendant air and water pollution — was destroying much of the natural world.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

With Mercury stationing retrograde, a Full Moon passing through town and Venus getting ready to station direct, it’s been a rough week in the public sphere.

Let’s see: there was Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman, claiming — during Passover — that Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons. Then he bungled his various “apologies,” at one point calling the concentration camps “Holocaust centers.”

He added that he did not want his comments on Hitler to distract from Trump’s attempts “to destabilize the region.” Hey, at least this shows he’s capable of telling the truth.

United Airlines dragged one of its bumped passengers screaming from an overbooked plane, because he was picked by a computer to give up his seat and refused to do so, explaining that he was a doctor who had to get back to see his patients.

The first Muslim and African American woman judge on New York State’s highest court was found Wednesday floating in the Hudson River. Police are saying there’s no evidence of a crime. The chart suggests we may never know the cause of death. The New York Times is now reporting that it was suicide.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Over the next few days, there are two developments with retrograde inner planets, and an exciting alignment between the Sun and the Uranus-Eris conjunction. This is a vibrant, passionate series of events, interweaving the energies of three contiguous signs: Pisces, Aries and Taurus.

Let’s look at the basic facts, then I’ll offer some philosophy. In summary, we’re at one of the juncture events defining the watershed of our era: the Sun and Earth lining up with Uranus-Eris at the beginning of their new cycle; one of the final crescendo moments of Chiron in Pisces; and the first Mercury retrograde of the nascent ‘new order’ of the Trump administration.

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From Combined Wire Service Reports, proofread by Planet Waves

WASHINGTON, March 30 — Pres. Trump today signed an executive order ending April Fool’s Day once and for all. The annual unofficial holiday, first referenced in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in 1392, is traditionally reserved for pranks and hoaxes.

But now, there won’t be so much as a Whoopee Cushion or a Fart in a Can.

The president, reportedly traumatized by Alec Baldwin’s portrayals of him on Saturday Night Live, reached a snapping point this week. White House insiders said that he could not take it any more, and used his power to act.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, outraged by Melissa McCarthy’s satires of his press briefings, was in favor of the measure. “We’ll get the last laugh,” he said at Wednesday’s briefing. “We’ll show her who’s funny.”

Earlier this week, Trump sent a proposed law to Congress, the Take Yourself Seriously Act of 2017, that would have stopped the clock at 11:59 pm on March 31, staving off April 1 indefinitely. But the measure was held up in the House of Representatives in a fight over an amendment that would have banned poor people and grocery stores, while giving a tax break to multitrillionaires. Congressional representatives also bickered over what time zone the ban would begin in.

“This bill is dead on arrival in the Senate,” said minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “It will fit in well around here.”

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Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s been 10 years since I wrote my first gluten-free piece for Chronogram, called “Hold the Bread on that Sandwich Please.” As usual, we were way ahead of the wave. Gluten-free was an obscure topic in 2006. It’s now a bona fide trend. In fact, it’s become an industry. It’s become a controversy.

And it’s also become a joke: such as the person who goes to great lengths to make sure that their dinner is absolutely, entirely free from a single molecule of gluten, only to order the ordinary crumb cake for dessert. In case you’re one of those people, please stop. You’re free to inflame your cells, mess up your immune system, be an emotional mess and strip your upper intestine of its ability to absorb nutrients. But you have no right to make life more difficult for anyone else, or cast the rest of us as phonies.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Tomorrow (Friday), we’ll experience the last of the three exact contacts in the Uranus-Eris conjunction in Aries, at 2:44 am EDT (6:44 UTC). Uranus-Eris is the overarching event that we can look to as representative of much of the surprise, chaos (political chaos and identity chaos) and upheaval we’re currently experiencing in our digital age.

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