Dear Friend and Reader:

The 2016 election was never closer than it is today, and that’s good news. Everyone wants it to be over. For two years we’ve been run through a nonstop political cyclone of vapid tirades, ignorant speculation and statistical prediction that vaporizes into raw emotion. Anything anyone says, whether political or not, is subject to being immediately reduced to a toxic substance, with just about everyone coming back in line for another cup.

Mention the weather and it can become a debate about global warming denial. Mention going for a hike and that can turn into a discussion about hunting, which turns into a fight over the Second Amendment. Is everyone darker than an albino a potential terrorist?

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Mosaicultures Internationales Montreal team for their 2013 exhibition. © Guy Boily.

Dear Friend and Reader:

So much is happening in the current astrology, and life reflected in the astrology, that it’s nearly impossible to keep up. When things move this fast — in the midst of a society that doesn’t even know how fast it’s going — it becomes difficult to adapt to our environment and circumstances.

There’s something in biology called homeostasis: a creature’s state of having successfully adapted to its environment. This is a relatively stable state of equilibrium that is necessary to attain for any measure of success as a living critter. When the pace of life moves so fast that it’s difficult to remember what day it is, much less what happened last week, then it’s nearly impossible to reach or maintain equilibrium.

Environmental art project made of sprawling trash from the federally protected Sian Ka’an Reserve, Mexico. Visit Alejandro’s site here.

We might say that the challenge we face is that of adapting to a constant state of being out of balance, overwhelmed or pushed to extremes. This exists on a personal level and also on cultural and planetary ones. While we’re here, we might ask what it means to never actually be living in a balanced state. We might begin to add up the many costs of this condition, be they emotional, physical or relational.

Is it possible to flip on a light switch or move the thermostat without thinking about global warming? Or the decrepit, failing nuclear power plant 50 miles away? Is it possible to pull a sandwich bag out of the box and not think about the vast gyres of plastic clogging up the Pacific Ocean and all its inhabitants? Have you even tried to reduce the amount of plastic in your life, and figured out how difficult it is?

When else in human history has there been so much ethical pressure placed on people about something as ordinary as making lunch for your kids?

While this is a fair description of our current moment, really it extends far into the past and promises to extend into the future. We have been living this way for a long time; we’re just creeping higher and higher along an exponential scale. Describing the astrology may provide a few metaphors, which might in turn help us map out various scenarios in our lives.

Eclipse in Pisces, Retrograde Mercury in Virgo

Many factors exist in the background of the astrology — numerous simultaneous long-term, slow-to-develop aspects that represent a reshaping of our total environment. I’ll come to some of those in a moment, in context (you’re probably familiar with some of them by now).

Environmental art installation by Alejandro Duran.

For today, for this moment, we’re in the mix of two factors. One is that on Friday afternoon, there will be an eclipse of the Moon in Pisces. This eclipse will be conjunct Chiron, giving it an extremely sensitive cast, and it’s making aspects to many other planets and points that illustrate a similar issue. The eclipse is square Mars and Pholus, which together are what one might modestly call volatile.

The eclipse is both a peak and a release point. That the peak is happening in Pisces is a caution about needing an ongoing reality check. This is hotly emotional energy — the heat coming mainly from Mars, and the emotion from the Moon and Pisces. The invitation is not about holding onto the anger indicated by Mars, but rather about letting it go. The problem is that the notion of letting go is likely to show up with the fear of unraveling or losing control.

At the same time, Mercury is retrograde in Virgo. This can be described in a word as mental. Mercury is exceptionally influential in Virgo, a sign it both rules and is exalted in (the only planet and sign combination to have this distinction).

Yet its retrograde condition feels intractable, and obsessed with the past. Many times, in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the condition of the digital prison in which we’re all living. Nearly everything we touch or do is conducted through the internet. That means several things: one involves the constant interrelation with robots; the internet is a robotic device.

Another is the grid implied by all things digital. I cannot sketch on the margins of the document I’m now typing into, and this condition prevails over all things digital. They are processed in binary code, and exist on an invisible grid. This is more maddening than it seems.

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Artist’s conception of details in the cloudcover over the surface of Jupiter.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When you look around at the world, and how so many people feel, you might get the idea that we could all use a little more balance and beauty. Our whole society, and indeed the world community, are straining for any sense of justice.

As everything around us seems to be pushed to some new extreme, and as taking becomes a way of life, we are all aching for some sense of equanimity: of goodwill, a bit of calm, some sense of mutuality. It’s a good thing, then, that Jupiter is about to ingress Libra. While it’s there, Jupiter will emphasize and help manifest all things related to this sign, or at least make them available for us to tap into.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re in one of those phases of time that can feel a little curious. Not as weird as Alice stepping through that looking glass, necessarily. But between Mercury having stationed retrograde Tuesday morning and a New Moon eclipse earlier this morning (the first of an eclipse pair), we’re experiencing a shift in perception.

Photo by Amanda Painter.

Shifts in perception subsequently alter how we view things like opportunities, challenges, synchronicities and the ‘meanings’ behind events in our life.

Kind of like how waking up from a dream can result in some new level of understanding about your life or a specific personal issue, thanks to the way its bizarre imagery and logic show you things that are hard (or impossible) to see while awake.

I’ll come back to the dreamtime in a moment. First, some basic astrological information to help you get oriented.

As mentioned, Mercury stationed retrograde Tuesday at 9:03 am EDT (13:03 UTC), in the very last degree of Virgo. It will continue in apparent retrograde motion until Sept. 22, when it stations direct in mid-Virgo.

Today, Mercury is in the next-to-last degree of Virgo, conjunct Jupiter. Jupiter is finishing up its year (approximately) in Virgo, and will move into Libra on Sept. 9.

I’ll consider Jupiter in Libra more closely next week (and you can get an even more in-depth, sign-by-sign perspective on it through Eric’s BALANCE Midyear Readings). For now, I’ll emphasize that retrograde Mercury is in a sign it rules and where it is strong, and this is directing your awareness inward and backward.

This could mean that your attention, should you choose to notice, is being drawn to things like: how you have manifested your ideas to create your reality (Oh — so that is how I got here!); the ways you’ve allowed self-criticism or perfectionism to hold you back from such creation; questions about what purposes and people you’ve served with your efforts, and whether that effort has served the higher good for all — or whether it’s served your creative aspirations.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

This was my week to cool off from completing BALANCE, the 2016 midyear reading. Even with as much astrology as I do, it’s a full-on experience to devote so much energy to each sign and rising sign, and then to go through the whole wheel in the space of two weeks.

Speaking of the Goddess, Alexandra Weishaupt, incarnating as the Fire Queen, at her wedding on Saturday, Aug. 20, 2016. Photo by Eric Francis.

I do my research over the months, get into the groove, and begin the signs. Pisces mysteriously approaches and then I’m propelled out of the project, soaked from an astrological fever. What I do is to shapeshift into each of the signs and fully inhabit it, and tell your story from the inside.

The result is a set of twelve 30-minute video sign readings that are organized in sign-pairs: Aries and Libra, Taurus and Scorpio, and so on. I have several options for what pattern you can choose to read all 12 signs.

For this reading, I explore the sign-pairs as energy systems featuring the polarity of one’s opposite sign — by the way, an idea integral to understanding astrology.

BALANCE condenses the developments you’ve been reading about for the past five months (since the spring reading covering Mars retrograde), including the end result of retrograde Mars, Uranus conjunct Eris, the Saturn-Neptune square and other events — each of which stands out as an archetypal flame of our times.

The readings are available as an all-12 package (so you can listen to your rising sign, Moon sign and opposite sign) or as individual signs. We are including last year’s vastly under-rated Astrology for Artists (the Jupiter in Virgo midyear reading) with each purchase.

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Aside — today is the anniversary of Jimi playing Woodstock. After three solid days of rain, mud, scarce food, and a miraculously peaceful event, he took the stage dressed in white at 8:30 Monday morning, Aug. 18, 1969. If this concert was history, Jimi consecrated it as such. We miss you, man.

Dear Friend and Reader:

This morning’s Full Moon in Aquarius begins a kind of astrological Olympics. Late August through the end of the summer is an adventure where a good few world records will be set.

We might ask, though, before looking into the details of this sequence of events, how it is that the movements of the planets combine with consciousness and physical experience to create an effect.

Shri Yantra, the tantric model of time, and the balancing of male and female energies. Our model of time is artificial, and a meager concept compared to older, more intricate models.

Each time I describe one of these sequences of events, it’s as if the cosmos is spewing forth another totally unique pattern in the astrology, which we then get to navigate. This is true whether we’re aware of the astrological details or not. Yet we might also ask what result the awareness yields, and how that result happens.

The traditional (and newly revived, increasingly popular) approach of astrology is to predict an outcome. My approach to astrology is to describe the environment, which then becomes whatever we want it to become, or unwittingly choose: opportunity, creative fodder or an apparent source of chaos and crisis.

Our dominant, generic model of time proposes that one day is like another; that 4 pm today is like 4 pm tomorrow. The astrology model of time reveals that every day and indeed every moment are different. A constant stream of new patterns is rolling out of, well, out of something. Not only are no two the same, they are all so wildly different as to call for an entirely new approach to each.

There is an additional factor. Everyone has a natal chart. Each new pattern that comes along is plucking, stroking or knocking into each unique natal chart differently. The transits as they meet each natal chart form a unique pattern of what you might call interference. That pattern, mixed with consciousness, becomes what we experience.

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Getting the word in: Hillary Rodham attending a student rally as an undergraduate at Wellesley College — a private women’s liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts — in the late 1960s. We originally said she was the speaker; she’s actually in the crowd somewhere. We’ll have a detailed correction in next Thursday’s edition.

“Laura had secrets and around those secrets she built the fortress that, well that in my six months with her, I was not able to penetrate and for which I consider myself an abject failure.”
— Dr. Jacoby, Twin Peaks, Season One, Episode Four

Dear Friend and Reader:

Amidst one of those hot and heavy discussions of politics that takes place on my Facebook page, one of my readers there asked why I thought Donald Trump was more likely to use nuclear weapons than Hillary Clinton. One of his hobbies is researching conspiracies on a Canadian website called Global Research. They are certain that Clinton is the second coming of Satan, being put in place to foment world war.

I paused to consider his question for a few days. The issue came up because recently, multiple news reports said that Trump, the Republican nominee for president, had repeatedly asked in a briefing with his potential military advisors why we don’t use all these nuclear weapons we have. After considering it for a while, I decided that, in my opinion anyway, Hillary Clinton understands the consequences of using nuclear bombs and would be far less likely to do so.

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