Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re building toward a Full Moon this Sunday, with the Moon in Virgo single-handedly opposing a whole school of fishy planets in Pisces (and that’s not all). If you feel like you’re trying to swim upstream; or like you’re caught in a whirlpool; or maybe like every time you turn around, some seemingly solid part of the world has melted and warped like a Salvador Dali painting, you’re not alone.

Pointillism Full Moon print by Sabrina Kaici.

For example, just this week I’ve read about an uptick in Canadian citizens being turned away at the U.S. border — including one woman born in Canada to Indian parents, with no flags on her file, turned away while trying to visit a Vermont day spa with two white friends. She’d had no previous difficulty visiting the U.S.

Living as I do in a state sharing a significant border with Canada, and which depends heavily on tourism (especially Canadian tourism), I’m hearing a lot of people express concern about what this might mean for the local economy. I know a few frustrated Canadians scrapping their travel plans to the U.S.

Or I could point to an important article making the rounds about the truly horrific, racist cartoons and ads Theodor Geisel — the beloved Dr. Seuss — once drew. As in, he drew African-Americans like monkeys (or as being for sale), and depicted all Japanese-Americans as just waiting for their moment to attack the U.S. from within during WWII. I had an extensive, thoughtful and thought-provoking conversation on Facebook about what this means for us now in terms of how we regard Seuss’ later work.

What is stronger: the harm he caused with those early cartoons, or how he’s inspired people with such stories as The Sneetches and Oh the Places You’ll Go? How do we reconcile these two facts about him? Does his shadow cancel out his light, or vice versa?

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“The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored; this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.”

— The Man on the Train, Waking Life

Dear Friend and Reader:

A few weeks after the 9/11 incident, an animated film called Waking Life was released to the public. You might think of it as a synchronous souvenir of the moment when things got really weird: when the nature of existence shifted, and a split occurred. The main aspect of the time was Saturn in Gemini (parallel realities) confronted by Pluto in Sagittarius (a belief bomb), all magnified by the Great Attractor (and directly connected to the U.S. birth chart).

Still from “Waking Life,” directed by Richard Linklater.

That split was best described at the time by “Bush’s brain,” Karl Rove, who told a New York Times reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

Waking Life follows a young man portrayed by Wiley Wiggins, who goes through existence awakening from one dream to the next. He begins to question whether he’s awake and alive, or asleep and dreaming. As he does, he meets a series of individuals who provide him with different ideas about the meaning of life. If you’ve ever been interested in existential philosophy, this film is an excellent introduction.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

There’s a question going around: how do we convey the social unrest in our nascent era of protest into a sustained movement? Both the United States and the world have a lot of problems that need addressing — and it would seem the powers that be are not so interested. It’s up to us. I want to take this up as a spiritual question: that is, as a question of the inner life.

Art by Dina Kravtsov.

When I was studying 20th-century women poets in graduate school at Rutgers, I was introduced to the idea from the Redstockings feminist collective that “the personal is political.” In the same class, I learned that poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) expanded this into the idea that there’s no private life that is not in some way dictated by the wider public life that surrounds us. For feminists and for all who are seeking liberation in some form, that relationship must be made obvious.

But how did this situation come to be? The seemingly different inner and outer lives (one’s personal reality, and world events, for example) have one thing in common, which is you. There’s no denying that you see the world you see because you exist. You think the thoughts you think because you are here now. You experience life because you are alive.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Wow, it’ll be a month tomorrow. It feels like it’s been years. Yes, I thought all of this would happen — in the first three months, not the first three weeks.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

What exactly are we supposed to do? That’s the question. It’s a little like The Onion’s fictional lady, Christine Pearson of Topeka, who baked an American flag cake after 9/11, just so she could do anything at all.

“I had to do something to force myself away from the TV,” said Pearson, 33, carefully laying rows of strawberry slices on the white-fudge-frosting-covered cake, The Onion reported in its first edition after the Sept. 11 incident. Note: The Onion is parody, not fake news; the difference is a matter of intent.

He has human DNA, really.

We can do better than a flag cake. It’s just that these flesh-eating zombies are everywhere: you know, the ones who still think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or who have Confederate flags flying from their pickup trucks (in Connecticut), or think that all three million people who voted illegally in California were undocumented Mexicans, or who think that the murder rate is the highest it’s ever been, or who are certain that Donald Trump is a thriving, self-made business genius. Hey, he sure is running the country like a business.

Or the women who don’t know what misogyny is, and who voted for someone who bragged about committing sexual assault. Or who think that there really was a terrorist attack in Bowling Green.

You know, the people deeply rooted in their world of alternative facts, who tell us that we are the ones who live in a bubble and laugh about how we didn’t realize what unmitigated assholes they are.

It is frustrating: this thing that sociologists call epistemic closure. There’s a term for it, which in essence means a closed information loop. Someone who watches Fox News and only Fox News, and is convinced that everyone else is deceived, and that no other facts are worth considering, has a closed epistemology. They might claim (and often do) that anything they don’t agree with is a lie.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s my policy as the editor of Planet Waves not to frighten my readers. Whatever we report on our pages, we explain in the most evenhanded way that we can, presenting options to choose from. When we think of the concept of freedom, it’s meaningful only in the context of the ability to choose. Conscious choice implies taking responsibility.

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Photo: New York Daily News.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Who knew?

Who dreamed that millions of women, and their friends, would take to the streets around the world on Saturday, Jan. 21, starting the New Regime with a roar? Well, someone did: urban legend is that it all started with a Facebook event page that went viral, and a permit for 1,000 protesters. Stranger things have happened.

There have been few times — I cannot remember many others — when I looked out at the world and was consciously grateful to have lived to see that day.

A seemingly ordinary night in New York City, 6th Ave. in the mid-50s. There was nothing ordinary about it. Photo by Eric Francis.

At around 5:30 Saturday evening, when the crowd from the women’s march on New York City was dispersing from Trump Tower one block away, I was floating in a sea of calm, confident and content faces of women.

It was like being on another planet. I was in bliss. The clever picket signs and the pink pussycat hats and the friendly vibes made 1/21 one of the happiest days of my life, and of my political journey.

At that moment, I had no idea what had happened in Washington, D.C., though. I got back to my hotel and, after a few hours, finally turned on the TV to stunning video of the rally in Washington. It was jaw dropping.

As for you, it was painful to endure 18 months of one man’s insults and accusations, which were directed at women, and at darker-skinned people, and the weak and disadvantaged.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

I just cannot wait for Donald Trump to place his hand on the Bible tomorrow. I’ve been anticipating this moment eagerly: both seeing whether he can actually touch the thing, and to witness the proper beginning of his administration.

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