This edition of Planet Waves features your weekly horoscopes by Eric Francis. If you’re not a Core Community or All-Access member, you can read the full edition through an individual issue purchase. Get our twice-weekly mailings and more when you sign up for a Core Community Pass here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

We all have that one area of our lives where we can’t seem to bridge our idealized version of things with actual reality. You know: like maybe you persistently believe you’ll be able to stretch time to fit all the things you want to do in a day, despite your unbroken track record of never doing so; or you repeatedly overlook potential partners’ honesty about themselves, instead concocting a dream-version of the person — and then feel shocked when they stay true to their flaws.

Photo by Amanda Painter.

Maybe you always fall for the deal that seems too good to be true. Or, it continually surprises you when the comments you toss off without thinking on Facebook actually upset people who don’t understand “what you really meant.”

Those are just a few examples of the sort of thinking and situations you’ll want to beware of as we head into the weekend. What’s your unique twist on the theme? Write it down on a sticky note now and put it on your bathroom mirror so you don’t forget. Mercury and Neptune are coming to town, by way of Gemini and Pisces, and there’s a good chance all that air and water could fog up the mirror — i.e., your perception.

Mercury is currently slowing down in early Gemini, having entered the pre-retrograde shadow (or echo) phase earlier this week. If you noticed that a few telltale things such as your computer or communication went mildly wonky on Monday, that was your heads up: Mercury stations retrograde May 18 (or 19, depending on time zone).

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View of the valley floor of Yosemite National Park from Tunnel View, in California. Far left is El Capitan; near the center in the distance is Half Dome. Famous Bridalveil Fall slows to a trickle in October, indicated by the darkened stripe of rock about a quarter of the way in from the right. Photo by Amanda Painter.

Dear Friend and Reader:

This week if you dared to turn on the television, you had your choice of the Earthquake Channel or the Riot Channel. These are both tragic situations, deserving of news coverage. Yet, as usual, coverage translated to needless over-focus, coming with the sensation that the world is ending.

That point was emphasized by Wednesday night’s Baltimore Orioles vs. Chicago White Sox game; no fans were allowed into the stadium. Baltimore Sun writer Dan Connoly wrote, “There was virtual silence. Crickets, with light typing from a hushed press box mixed in.”

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Dear Friend and Reader:

The translator was laughing so hard he could not speak. He seemed to have heard the funniest thing in his life. We were all waiting for the English version of what Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the Tibetan Buddhist leader known as the 17th Karmapa, had said.

Lama Yeshe Gyamtso, the translator at right, cannot contain his laughter at a comment the Karmapa has made about the weird things people bring home from Tibet. It seems he’s seen some of those suitcases get packed. This and all photos below are courtesy of Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism; photographer credit is given where known.

The monastery up in Woodstock, New York, is the Karmapa’s North American base. He was here on his second visit to the U.S. on April 18.

The translator, Lama Yeshe Gyamtso, tried to compose himself, but without much success.

He finally seemed to find his center, then after taking about two breaths, he burst into laughter again.

Laughing like the Buddha himself, wrapped in his bright red robe, which the color of his cheeks now matched, sitting at the Karmapa’s feet in his headset with pad and pencil still in his hands.

Not your average stone-faced interpreter, the kind who can never let on that they’re actually listening to what they translate.

Dorje, for his part, was placidly watching this scene, mildly bemused. By this time the audience was getting the giggles. I am one of those people who notice moments of actual transcendence and this was one of them. You never see scenes like this in the presence of an international dignitary — well, hardly ever.

Finally the Lama Yeshe could speak. “The sad part is, it won’t be as funny when I translate it.” Still, everyone wanted to know.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton ended all the wild speculation and informed us she would be running for president. This raises an important question — is America ready for a male First Lady?

Bill Clinton could end up being the First Lady of the Land.

Could Bill Clinton handle the important responsibilities associated with being the president’s spouse? Can a man, even one who was POTUS, gracefully take on the arguably more difficult job of FLOTUS?

I consider this an extremely important role in American government and society. So much of politics is on the human level, and the First Lady is directly involved in holding that steady. Though the role carries no official power, everyone knows that she often is the influence behind the throne.

The primary role of the First Lady is to be the White House hostess. She is usually in charge of the domestic staff — the butlers, chefs and cleaners. She is president of the residential section of the White House. People often put down the importance of the role of women as the primary organizer of the household. Whatever feminist literature may say, this is an important duty and we may well ask if a man is capable of handling it.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re now looking right into the vortex of a total eclipse of the Moon in Libra. Like all lunar eclipses, this is a Full Moon. It takes place at 8:06 am EDT (12:06 UTC) on Saturday, April 4. Eclipses are always portents of change and often of progress. They have a way of shaking things loose and moving things along. This one seems to be doing a fine job of that, as we approach it.

From today’s New York Times front page. Note that rather than bombing Iran, something political forces have tried to sell the American public many times, there was a diplomatic breakthrough. Here is a blog post on the chart, which I’ll cover on Tuesday’s Planet Waves FM.

Full Moons, on their own, often have a property of breaking or releasing a deadlock. This particular Full Moon eclipse is bringing that property to the forefront. Now is the time to apply some energy into anything that has been stuck or intractable, no matter how long it’s been that way.

Like the corresponding total solar eclipse of March 20 just prior to the equinox (though for different reasons), Saturday’s eclipse seems to be another sendoff of the 2012-era — the years encompassing the seven exact contacts of the Uranus-Pluto square, from June 2012 to March 2015.

What makes Saturday’s eclipse interesting is how it nestles right into the Uranus-Pluto square. All the points in question — the Moon, the Sun, Uranus and Pluto — are located at about 15 degrees of the cardinal signs. They are all in aspect, arranged in the shape of a T.

In the plainest talk possible, think of Uranus-Pluto as the astrological engine that is driving the times in which we live. But it’s not easy to perceive that effect; it can just come across as all the usual madness, lurking in the background, usually imperceptible.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

There’s that moment early in Dr. Strangelove, the 1964 masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick, where one of the president’s top advisors is explaining to the president and all of his military leaders how a lower-level officer has managed to start a nuclear war that nobody can end.

Gen. Jack D. Ripper from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Ripper is a low-level general who personally declares nuclear war on the USSR. He’s obsessed with communist conspiracies and sexual hangups.

That top advisor, Gen. Buck Turgidson, played by none other than George C. Scott, explains that there exists this policy called Plan R, which is supposedly a ‘safeguard’ that allows someone with little rank to attack the Russians on behalf of the United States.

The alleged safeguard is that the Russians would have known we had a plan to bomb them even if some other incident killed all the top leaders of the U.S. Therefore, using twisted nuclear logic, they would be deterred from bombing us. He reminds the president that he approved it personally.

But then an obviously insane officer who knows all the right codes, a Cold Warrior bureaucrat named Gen. Jack Ripper, pushes the button by invoking Plan R — and then shoots himself. Shooting himself means he takes the ‘recall’ codes with him to eternity — the codes needed to call off the nuclear attack.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Remember that in the background of everything else I’m saying in this letter is the last of seven Uranus-Pluto squares. After next week, the aspect of our era goes into separating phase, where a whole new set of effects will begin to emerge. If you missed last week’s edition about this topic please do have a look.

Carolyn Grillot of Paris, age 20, firedancing outside Notre Dame Cathedral. Photos in this series are from my first experiments with a digital camera (a Fuji Finepix point and shoot), Paris 2005.

As a background factor, Uranus-Pluto dominates the environment, though it does so in a way that may fade to invisible. When people notice these aspects, it’s often in the form of observing a deeply rooted pattern of some kind, or perhaps some quality of existence that doesn’t seem to change.

Uranus-Pluto has been pushing everything and everyone for about seven years. When studied as part of historical patterns, each of these generational aspects seems to have about a 10-year orb of influence. We are now entering the last phase of that decade. I am reluctant to suggest how that will look and feel, though I am confident about saying it will at least be different — for those who notice.

For today I want to speak about two factors, both of them in Pisces. One is Mercury conjunct Nessus, exact Friday just before midnight EDT and therefore early in the morning Saturday in the UK and Europe. Mercury moves fast, which means pay attention.

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