Category Archives: Weekly Horoscope

Weekly Horoscope

History, Turning on a Phrase

“We don’t want freedom. We don’t want justice. We just want someone to love.”
— David Byrne / Talking Heads

Dear Friend and Reader:

The recent Libra New Moon quietly marked a threshold in world history, if you use astrology as a way of keeping track. We know that the 9th anniversary of the Sept. 11 incident was last month. Our culture is obsessed with anniversaries, but nature works on a little different schedule. Astrology points to its own moments of passage, and we happen to be at one right now. During the New Moon of Thursday, Oct. 7, the Sun and Moon were conjunct within two arc minutes — that is, 1/30th of a degree — to the ascendant of the chart for Sept. 11, 2001.

World Trade Center 7, or the Salomon Brothers building, shortly before it collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. Most people don’t know that a third tower of the Trade Center complex fell down that day. Photographer unknown.

In the nine years since that incident, yesterday’s was the closest New Moon to the chart’s ascendant, and the only one occupying that degree, and it was close. My impression is that we have a rare moment of transparency around an event that shaped our lives, changed the world and, more significantly, reaffirmed something about human nature.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the ascendant, it is also called the rising sign. In every chart there is a sign rising — that is, a section of sky, represented by a zodiac sign, rising above the Earth’s horizon in the east. In this case, Libra is the sign rising. There is also a degree rising, which is like the precise address of the chart and what it represents. Every chart with an exact time has a rising degree, including your natal chart. It’s a good thing to know. On Sept 11, precisely when Flight 11 was flown into the North Tower, that degree was 14+ Libra — remarkable because Mercury was precisely rising at that moment. Mercury in the exact degree rising gave the chart emphasis, and an ominous quality, part of which was ‘this is an event with a message’. (Let’s refer to this as the North Tower chart.)

Libra is an astrological way of saying ‘good show’. The events of Sept. 11 were compelling, even convincing, and they riled up our desire for justice, a Libra quality. But Mercury is the trickster. Behind the elegant image of Libra were a series of layers that remind us that things aren’t always what they seem, and that appearances can deceive.

I consider the North Tower chart to be a world horoscope. The event was used to reshape geopolitics. Several wars were started as a result of the attacks, which have yet to end, and the concept of the ‘post 9-11 world’ was born. So in a sense we have one of the birth charts of the 21st century: what some had thought would be the New American Century. The conservative think tank by that name argued for the new rise of a dominant American military, in a plan that called for waging a multi-front war early in the century. But in September 2000, one year before Sept. 11, it said that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Mercury is a reminder to depend on documentation as a way of keeping track of the facts. Who exactly was in the New American Century group of thinkers? Those who signed onto the New American Century manifesto included Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Dan Quayle — a Who’s Who of neoconservative politics.

The North Tower Chart

I’ve written a number of articles about the North Tower chart, most of them focusing on Mercury rising. Using classical methods of interpretation, Mercury in Libra was the planet associated with the secret enemy who perpetrated the attacks (the planet that rules the 12th house). It’s a perfect description of someone stealthy, clever, able to focus on an image and use images, and who understood how to use the media. Sept. 11 was one of the most spectacular Mercury-type events ever, broadcast on live television, orchestrated by someone with a stunning gift for creating spin.

Chart for the North Tower impact on Sept. 11, 2001. Note that Mercury is the planet in the ascendant on the left side of the chart. Click here for a larger version of the chart.

The planet representing the official government, the Moon (ruler of the 10th house), was void-of-course at the end of Gemini, indicating the government was asleep at the wheel. The other planet for the government — by default, Saturn, representing the ruling structure of the country, and also what you might call the homeland (as the ruler of the 4th house) or shadow government — was in Gemini. That’s also a representation of the twin (Gemini) structures (Saturn) involved and an image of the two faces of the government.

Now here is where the chart starts to reveal its secrets. Mercury is the planet of Gemini, and Saturn is the planet exalted in Libra: they are in reception: that is, they occupy one another’s signs. And they are in a perfect (to the degree) trine aspect, indicating cooperation.

That’s another way of saying that they can switch places. The secret enemy and the homeland government look like they’re functioning as one entity. From the first moment, we had an early warning that something was up, serving as an astrological notation of the many issues that would be raised by researchers and analysts in the decade to follow.

In particular, the relationship between Mercury and Saturn hinted at the government’s foreknowledge or involvement in whatever happened. The idea that ‘Bush knew’ was circulating widely, even in the news, by the spring of 2002. Two years later, the CIA, under public pressure, declassified something called the Presidential Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001. Just one month before the attacks, the administration was warned by the CIA that “Bin Laden [was] determined to strike in the US,” outlining a number of current terrorist threats. Notably, this was the first time ever that a PDB was released to the public.

Detail of Thursday’s Libra New Moon. Note the Sun and Moon at 14+ Libra, two arc minutes from the ascendant of the North Tower chart, and conjunct the infamous Mercury rising.

Even the official 9/11 Commission report said that the “system was blinking red” that summer.

Many writers and researchers have published on these and related issues, ranging from engineers asking how it was possible that the two towers collapsed at all, much less within 29 minutes of one another, to whether there was actually an airplane crash at the Pentagon. And with the thousands of planes intercepted by the Air Force for as little as veering off the course of the pilot’s flight plan, how was it even vaguely possible that these four hijacked flights — an unprecedented event — were not intercepted? Fifty-nine minutes elapsed between the crash at the North Tower and whatever happened at the Pentagon. One would think that an hour was enough time for the Air Force to stop an attack on the military headquarters of the free world.

The problem with these questions does not involve their validity. I’ve looked into them all, and they all have a value worth considering, raising significant questions lacking easy answers. The real problem is social: it involves what others will think of you, or the fear of what others will think, when you start asking. People tend to either get scared or accuse you of being a conspiracy nut. Some become openly hostile if you propose that anything but the official version of events is possible. A few will affirm that actual questions exist. Many polls indicate that the public is suspicious. More than half in one 2007 Zogby poll wanted Bush and Cheney to be investigated for their involvement in 9/11 and in the same poll more than 30% sought their immediate impeachment.

Even if the Mercury-Saturn relationship in the North Tower chart describes only the perception of the event, that perception has come with enormous pain and then a good dose of skepticism on the part of the public, and a lot of activity on the part of policy makers.

In retrospect, what did that look like? In The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, author Naomi Klein describes “the intersection between super-profits and megadisasters” in which “the preferred method of advancing corporate goals [is] using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” Essentially, the process breaks down to two parts: 1. Create or exploit a shock; and 2. Use the confused and chaotic aftermath to push through/assert a corporate and/or political coup with no threat of backlash from a traumatized public.

Klein proposed that, “This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch — a power grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed ‘a rolling coup’. Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit. Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex — a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad.”

The Chart for World Trade Center 7

There’s a second Sept. 11 chart that I haven’t written much about yet, timed for the spontaneous collapse of World Trade Center 7 on the afternoon of Sept. 11. Most people still have not heard that a third tower of the World Trade Center collapsed that day — a 47-story building with an impressive list of tenants. This building was not hit by any airplanes; it ‘simply collapsed’ at 5:21 pm. Notably, the 9/11 Commission did not look into how or why WTC 7 collapsed, so it came to no conclusions.

Segment of the chart for the spontaneous collapse of WTC 7 at 5:21 pm on Sept. 11, 2001. Note that the chart has Neptune (the blue trident) two degrees from the ascendant, indicating that the situation is veiled in deception and denial, and suggesting that the truth may never be known, and that if it is, it’s subject to being refuted by denial. The full chart is here.

First let’s take a look at the chart, which is for the moment the structure fell in its footprint in about six seconds. Having sustained no impact by an airplane and with several relatively small fires, we are told that a concrete and steel skyscraper fell straight down, on its own, at freefall speed.

Here’s the whole chart in a separate window; to the right is a picture of the ascendant, the most significant piece. In this chart, like the North Tower chart, there is a planet rising — but this time it’s Neptune.

Neptune rising presents a mystery. It’s also a beautiful image of how WTC 7 was a kind of non-event; it was invisible. Neptune is like a veil of fog, and that veil can indicate deception, denial or delusion (words that begin with the letter D tend to attach themselves to Neptune, including Drink, Drugs and Drama). In a public chart like this, one that potentially involves a crime, Neptune rising suggests we may never know the truth, or that the truth will be obscured or seem confusing. The sign involved is Aquarius; in fact the public (one of those Aquarius things) was so confused that most people have no idea that WTC 7 even existed, much less that it mysteriously fell down at 5:21 pm.

There are a couple of other interesting features to the chart. In the 11th house (a public place) there is a lot of activity. In particular, we have Mars in Capricorn on the South Node. In the shorthand notation of astrology we have an old story (South Node) about militarism (Mars) and the corporate/government system (Capricorn) — and we have this in the 11th, right where anyone can see it. In other words, what this aspect describes is happening in plain sight.

In the same house, Ceres is conjunct Nessus in Capricorn. This will be fed to people like poison food, with them convinced it’s some form of nourishment.

Opposite all of this, the Moon is in Cancer, on the North Node and opposite Mars: the people in their everyday lives, their home lives, taking care of themselves and their families, get caught in the mess. The Cancer Moon opposite Mars suggests the public can get emotionally swept away by a perceived enemy and security threat and thus lose track of the intellectual level — and most of us did.

What Larry Silverstein Said, and What BBC Predicted

Larry Silverstein was the developer of WTC 7 and its owner, and he held the lease on the twin towers (WTC 1 and WTC 2) as well. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was the landlord of the whole WTC complex, which included several other buildings. One year after the attacks, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a program called America Rebuilds. As part of a somber, comprehensive documentary that was fitting for the one-year anniversary, the producers interviewed Silverstein.

Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, said in a PBS interview that he told the Fire Department that, ‘”The smartest thing to do is pull it.” Screen shot from PBS.

In that interview, he told the story of what happened to WTC 7: “I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it’. And they made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse.”

In other words, he is saying that the building was intentionally demolished. You can watch this on video here. I recently purchased a copy of the DVD from PBS to verify that this segment is actually in the documentary, and it is there in proper context.

Now, what is interesting is that it takes weeks and sometimes months to prepare a building for demolition. If we are to believe the landlord’s statement to PBS, this preparation was done in less than a day — and that a demolition team was brought in through the catastrophe at Ground Zero, consulted architects and engineers familiar with the structure, then working extremely efficiently, rigged the building with dynamite and took it down. Either that or it had a preinstalled self-destruct mechanism.

The building was occupied by Salomon Brothers, as well as American Express and a couple of other banks and insurance companies. In addition, it had as its tenants the CIA, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS, the Defense Department and the New York City Office of Emergency Management. Like the other World Trade Center buildings, evacuation began immediately when the first plane hit, before 9 am. So the officials in all of those agencies, including many federal officers, had no chance to clean their desks, take copies of disk drives or do anything before the building fell down later that day.

BBC World reporter Jane Stanley announces that World Trade Center 7, also known as the Salomon Brothers building, has fallen down, even though it’s standing up right behind her. It’s the building to the viewer’s right of her head. To the left is the smoke from WTC 1 and 2. Photo: Screen shot from BBC World.

More interesting, BBC World, the international edition of BBC, broadcast that the building had collapsed at 4:54 pm EDT, 27 minutes in advance. This was also announced at the same time by BBC in the UK. In this video, you can see the reporter, Jane Stanley, saying that the structure has fallen down while it’s shown in the frame. We’re really talking ‘in plain sight, but might as well be invisible’ here. WTC 7 is easily identified by its location, and by the little notch at the top, next to the penthouse.

This bit of prescience has been explained away by claiming there was a lot of erroneous news reported on Sept. 11, 2001. Except for one thing: this turned out not to be an error. It was accurate, just a little early.

Indira Singh, a private pilot and EMT who was volunteering as a rescue worker at Ground Zero that day, said that by 1 pm the word was out on the street that the building would be demolished and people in the area, such as volunteers and emergency workers, were backing off and retreating toward safer ground.

“By noon or one o’clock they told us we had to move from that triage site up to Pace University, a little further away, because Building 7 was gonna come down or being brought down,” Singh said in a widely-reported 2005 interview on KPFA in Berkeley. She continued a bit further in, “There was another panic around four o’clock because they were bringing the building down and people seemed to know this ahead of time, so people were panicking again and running.” [Read the full interview here, and listen to it here.]

Apparently BBC was not the only network with a well-tuned crystal ball that day. About a minute before WTC 7 fell down, FOX 5 News in Washington, DC broadcast that a third building had fallen down while WTC 7 is shown in the frame. They are speculating that the smoke actually rising from the heap of WTC 1 and WTC 2 is from that third building that has supposedly already fallen. Then — while they are discussing this — WTC 7 collapses live, on the air.

That Turn of Phrase

The available facts add up to something a little weird, something that does not jive with the official story: controlled demolition was used to take down WTC 7, with all its highly sensitive contents in a rather sensitive moment. That this happened in a day is incredulous, particularly with the chaos of that particular place and time. The implication is that, if the building was indeed demolished, it was planned and set up in advance. If that’s true, the entire story of Sept. 11, 2001 — such as the surprise attack by Osama bin Laden — falls in its footprint at the speed of freefall. And this has both historical implications, as well as psychological ones.

The new WTC 7 has a smaller footprint and environmentally friendly features. It was the starting point of reconstruction of the WTC complex. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

There are some obvious questions here, such as why would Silverstein admit this? My theory is that the way he phrased his statement was a plausible alibi. He claimed the Fire Department pulled the building that day, for immediate safety. Who knows how long it takes to prepare a building for demolition? Who knows that the Fire Department does not do the work of demolition teams? It sounds true enough. Yet there has literally been a decade-long debate over what Silverstein meant by “pull it.” Or rather — what he meant by “it.” Clearly he meant pull something, but what?

When the time came to backpedal on his statement, Silverstein’s office claimed he meant pull the rescue operation — not the building. So let’s pretend that’s what he meant, and reconstruct the sequence of events using that scenario.

The following is a fictionalized, alternative version of events to test the theory.

The attacks happened just before 9 am, WTC 7 was evacuated, and WTC 1 and WTC 2 (the familiar North and South towers) both fell down by 10:30 am. WTC 7 was damaged by debris from the North Tower and there were some fires, but it was a modern steel and concrete skyscraper with numerous safety features, so it was expected to hold up. After all, it supposedly took direct hits from fuel-laden jet planes to knock down WTC 1 and 2.

However, the Fire Department commander was concerned about the fires and the stability of the building. So he called the landlord to check whether he should get his own firefighters out of the building, fearing it might collapse. This insinuates that the Fire Department needed the permission of the landlord, a civilian, on an immediate tactical decision in the face of some imminent safety issue.

Silverstein said, “pull it” [the search and rescue operation]. With that, the firefighters walked out, and everyone watched as the building mysteriously fell to the ground. [End of fictional scenario.]

You would be impressed the lengths to which some have argued — relentlessly, for years — that this is what he meant by “pull it.” Wikipedia has been a particularly intense battle ground, and administrators, for example, have reserved the right to ban users who question this point of view in edits to encyclopedia articles. Others have argued vehemently that as a developer, Silverstein could not be expected to know the terminology of the demolition industry; he merely builds the buildings. However, he does so in a city that’s the demolition capital of the world.

Referring to Silverstein’s use of the term “pull it,” one Wikipedia editor wrote to me, “Any other interpretation of this quote is a fantasy manufactured to fit a preconceived narrative.”

When there is a controversy over what a word means, I learned a while ago to look it up in the dictionary. “Pull” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as to remove a fixed object from its place, and the term “pull down” is noted as meaning to demolish a building. Ontario-based independent journalist Jeffrey Hill called up Controlled Demolition, Inc., a demolition industry leader which was called in by the federal government to clean up the mess at Ground Zero, and the company told him that the term “pull it” means to demolish a building.

Selma the Pullet, who may hold the key to the mystery of WTC 7. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Remember — Neptune is rising in the chart for the building falling down. There is a veil of confusion and deniability. Even the Wikipedia editor refers to “fantasy,” a pure Neptune keyword. And the 11th house is packed with action in this chart. Whatever is happening is going on in plain sight, such as on BBC World, even if it seems difficult to see. By the way — in 2007, BBC’s editors finally issued a statement.

“We’re not part of a conspiracy,” they reassured the public, writing on the company site. “Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.”

However, they added, “We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy).”

Oh, I’m happy it was just a cock-up. I would dread to think that BBC could be part of a conspiracy, or that they might delete their files to cover for such an odd occurrence that just happens to unravel so much of the official version of events. But if they reported that WTC 7 had already fallen down, and then it did so 27 minutes later, that just proves my theory that Brits make the best astrologers and psychics. And we should definitely put Jane Stanley to work covering the stock market.

I don’t like conspiracy theories, but in this case, I have my own. Silverstein was actually talking to his wife in that call, and she said, “Larry, what do you want to have for dinner?”

A devoted chicken lover, he said, “Pullet, pullet.”

Yours & truly,

Beyond Astonishing

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

In his New York Times opinion piece, That’s Where the Money Is, award-winning journalist Bob Herbert turned a phrase that gave me pause. “It’s beyond astonishing,” said Herbert, that John Boehner has a chance to become Speaker of the House. While many citizens haven’t the slightest idea who the House Minority Leader is, the notion that they might awaken in November to find him leading the nation’s lawmaking institution is, to me, beyond astonishing indeed. Mincing no words, Herbert went on to describe Boehner as “sleazy” and a “slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler.”

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, center, has used his business ties to become a leading fund-raiser for Republicans. Photo: David Lassman / Post-Standard.

Herbert’s candor surprised and pleased me. Frank assessment of Boehner’s leadership should not be confined to the opinion page. Mainstream media has sidestepped its obligation to denounce views that go over the top, leaving truth-telling to risk-takers like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who recently reported on a Palin meet-up that, “The dingbat revolution is nigh.” This is not just an ideological war of words. This is a moment of enormous instability attended by a perfect storm of human petulance, paranoia and neurosis. Orchestrating that movement is a party interested in nothing less than complete power, which makes them, ultimately, ruthless. Mr. Herbert hit the nail right on the head. It’s not too much to name the current leadership of the GOP an extremist movement.

Baggers — the people who earned Taibbi’s comments — have sold themselves to the world as ‘real Americans’, the purest defenders of American values and liberty. They have impressed us with their fury at big, taxing government and captured the media with their passions. Those who are sincere allow an opportunistic political wing to exploit their simplistic idealism. In a reasonable political world, where opposing philosophies wrestle each other to a standstill in round after round of electoral prowess, it would be comforting to think that this season’s minority voter has a taste for something other than snake oil. I am not comforted.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 8, 2010, #834 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

When you reach a communication impasse, that’s the time to take a new approach. It helps if one declares the impasse. That means admitting you’ve reached a place where you cannot pass through. It’s a kind of stalemate, which is an interesting word as well. The planets look like you’re at such a point, and the best strategy that I see is a change in the overall direction. This might seem like a reversal, but what is described is a reorientation that takes into account elements of the past and needs of the future that are factors in your current get-serious moment. The obstacle is not insurmountable. In fact no matter how heavy or loaded with gravitas the issue may seem, it will yield to communication if both parties can agree on a common goal and a couple of common values. Start there.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The theme of applied creativity continues this week. It’s one thing to ‘be creative’. It’s another to put the creative mind to work in a constructive way. One thing that will help is shifting your perception from seeking insight into the psychological level of a partnership to the emotional level. The concept applied means that once you have an understanding of how things are, you put that to work right away. That may take some persistence and focus, but it will pay off fairly soon. You may face the perception that you’re up against something much larger than yourself, which will fade once you start to consciously explore the situation for what it is. What seems like a limit or a boundary is really the key to exploration and adventure — and a way to balance your life.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The key to easing an emotionally challenging situation is by not being so emotional. I’m not suggesting you be cool or chilly, but rather that you take a full-spectrum approach to the question you’re facing. Let’s start with money. What role does that play? Then there is the question of how you handle the impulse by another person to be emotionally independent. Does that turn you on, does it make you insecure or do you have mixed feelings? And how do you feel about having a little more autonomy? One other matter to investigate is how your relationship to authority is influencing your feelings. You may be bringing past feelings about one of your parents into a relationship that wants equanimity and level ground. The power relationship is actually a lot more level than it seems.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You seem determined to break free of emotional patterns that have served their use. This in turn is leading to a revolution in how you experience yourself, and how you perceive yourself. Granted, it’s a subtle revolution, but there’s no doubt that your perception of yourself is thawing, and as the ice melts, what is emerging is a deeper level of emotional confidence. This may initially be the confidence to stand on your own, and to honor feelings and desires that you’re pretty sure aren’t espoused by most other people. Yet you feel what you feel, and you’re beginning to understand what matters to you. There is little point in trying to convert anyone to your cause. Be available and you will notice that the people who understand are available to you.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

It’s all about ideas. Labor counts, the time you invest counts, but the ideas you have count for a lot more. I suggest you pause if you keep having the same ideas over and over, or if the new editions of the old concept don’t do what they’re supposed to do. There is an ease factor involved, and this is true no matter how large, old or insurmountable a problem seems. Extremely challenging situations sometimes have elegantly simple solutions. I suggest, in exploring the possibilities, that you be driven by your sense of fairness, and that you remember what you’ve learned in the past. It seems that you need to take into account some prior experience or lesson and make sure you extract every bit of value that you can.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Venus retrograde is suggesting that you account for the ways in which you try to hide your feminine side. For a woman this could mean trying to conform to male values or rules, or to the desires of early caregivers who wanted a boy. For a man this could mean the ways in which so much as being aware of your feminine side can threaten people. If you find yourself asserting your authority, power or sex drive, check for the equal and opposite reaction. For example you may be trying to veil your passivity or desire to be dominated. More likely, you feel two distinct ways: a profound submissiveness and a potent sense of drive. That may be a contradiction you don’t want to talk about, but it’s as natural as the blue sky and the green sea.

The Virgo Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Virgo and Virgo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Virgo and Virgo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You seem unusually willing to admit something that you cannot usually get a grasp on. Yet for whatever reason, you’ve now got a handle on what it is. It’s almost like catching a dream in a net, or dropping a screen in front of a movie projector. What you have now that you may not have had lately is contrast. This is providing the opportunity to discern what is and is not pleasing to you, and to make some decisions based on what you’re noticing. Contrast is a useful tool, though it implies an exaggeration in perception — so be aware that things that seem off-putting are not as weird as you’re experiencing them, and things that seem appealing are not quite as potent as they appear — but overall your perception is accurate enough to make better decisions than you have in the past.

Libra birthday audio is coming soon.

What are you obsessing over? It seems like you can’t get your mind off of a mistake you’ve made several times in the past, and that you fear you’re making again. You may be wondering when you’re finally going to learn how to stand up for yourself, or how to change your mind when you find yourself doing something self-destructive or exerting too much energy for very little return. The current episode may be exaggerating your sense of isolation. Yet there is a simple enough lesson available, which is that when you assert yourself, you help yourself get what you want. Asserting yourself is another way of saying that you’re committed to what you want, as evidenced by taking action. Yes, part of you still wants to hesitate, but you cannot do both.

There are certain people who may not agree with you, though I suggest you go mellow on any authority trip and keep a flexible position. Someone you’re in contact with, or are about to be, has an idea, and they want to share it with you. I suggest you not take the role of the older and wiser one who knows more, but rather the wiser one who listens to people with ideas and those who are willing to express them to you. This person could become a good friend, and have a positive influence on your financial fortunes as well. Whether you agree with what you hear or not, I suggest you listen carefully, take it on board and consider what you hear. What’s interesting is that this person isn’t as influenced by certain biases as you are and is likely to be presenting an aware, intelligent point of view.

Take assistance as it’s offered, and as it comes to you. You’ve got a lot of responsibility and you’re handling it beautifully, but you will do better with the right assistance. This is likely to come in the form of information about how to handle a technical matter that you may not be familiar with. On anything involving an international situation, I suggest you get advice about the customs of the country you’re dealing with. What you learn in the next day or two can influence you to alter your longterm plans and expectations, and that would be a positive change. The whole point of knowledge is to take action. There are some parts of your plan that are going brilliantly and others that need revision. Remember not to delay things that are going well, and to take control of whatever you want to reevaluate.

Capricorn Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re looking for the balance between what you want and what you must do; between what you inwardly desire and what you’re driven to achieve. This is an emotional state that’s pulling you in a few directions. It may take some time to work this out, and I suggest that you not take any perceived split in your feelings too seriously. You actually have some immediate situation or opportunity to work with, and it may be particularly exciting or a fresh twist on what you can do if you want. The thing is, you may be hesitating because of this emotional split. I suggest you consider the opportunity that seems appealing, and let your deeper stuff work itself out over the next couple of months. Life is an experiment; anything new that you try will give you valuable experience and information, if it feels right at the outset.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The most interesting aspects in your solar chart — Venus and Mars in Scorpio, and lots of activity in Libra — describe your rapidly evolving ideas around sex, commitment and religion. I suggest that there’s no limit to how thorough you can be evaluating these attributes of your life, because you want to be clear on all of them: such would facilitate your happiness. You need a working concept of relationship that embraces all three and that evaporates the concept of guilt having any value at all. Guilt is merely toxic. As such it is menacing. You have much better alternatives available now, and you have the option to recover parts of yourself that you’ve lost to these useless internal power struggles. Your existence is right. Your relationships are mutual. Desire is beautiful.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Glimpse Behind the Veil

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Dear Fellow Seeker Along the Road to Xibalba:

Earlier in the week, a reader sent me this article from Monday’s New York Times about the government wanting expanded powers to wiretap the Internet, and asked what I thought was up. I had a feeling she was curious about the current Scorpio astrology covered last week. Scorpio often has a sense of the covert, and Venus retrograde looks like a search for inner secrets of some kind. I also get the feeling of Chiron conjunct Neptune — the truth about the technosphere (represented by Aquarius) coming into focus (Chiron) after a long dreamy delusion of privacy (Neptune).

One sure way to reduce the federal deficit.

After I give you the background on the story, I have a question for you, which you may respond to or take rhetorically.

“Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’ as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone,” the Times article began.

Basically, federal officials want Congress to require that all communication services, such as Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype, have prebuilt interception capability — that is, to be plug-and-play ready for surveillance on you. “The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages,” the Times reported. Under the proposed law, new services and devices would be designed to have back doors built in, and existing services would need to be retrofitted. In theory, only the government would have the keys.

But the Times relayed a story it heard from Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, about an episode in Greece. In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s. “I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Bellovin said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”

In reality, this is nothing new. Law enforcement has the ability to use the GPS in your cellphone to easily track your location, and as long as the battery is installed, they can activate the phone’s mic and listen to you. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, we learned that the Bush administration was organizing wiretaps and secret home visits in the name of national security, bypassing a special top-secret federal court — the FISA Court — designed to oversee just that function. Historically, FISA has been extremely generous granting permission to wiretap, approving 99% of the government’s requests. So if the administration wanted to go around the FISA Court, we can imagine it was up to something that was especially inappropriate. (I once had an assignment to write about the FISA Court from the well-respected journal Covert Action. After researching the thing I was so spooked that I turned the assignment over to my friend Phil. Here it is.)

And just what was the administration up to that it couldn’t collect rubber stamps on its pro-forma, all-purpose search warrants? That may have been the Porn.gov project that I’ve been proposing for a while as a solution to the national debt. The government would take all the millions of photos, videos, text messages and voice recordings that it collects, and make them available to everyone for a subscription fee. This would also fulfill the nearly universal desire everyone has to spend a day as a porn star. I would definitely sign up — for the good of the country.

Don’t Worry!

The Bush-era spy program seemed to be a revival of an older FBI program called Cointelpro that ran from the 1940s through the 1970s, spying on everyone from the Black Panthers to John Lennon to Howard Zinn. Well, it did more than spy on them; agents working on the program would destroy private relationships of movement leaders by leaving fake love letters in dresser drawers, try to get people deported, or in the case of Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States), worked to get him fired from his teaching post at Boston University. Zinn’s crime was being ‘liberal’. (Note to Universe: I am a member of the New York State Conservative Party*.)

The website Raw Story summed it up this way: “The new Cointelpro records on Zinn show the government was obsessed with the Brooklyn-born university professor who served as a fighter pilot in World War II. He turned against the Vietnam War and led rallies in the 1960s and 1970s. One of his targets was government surveillance against anti-war activists. Did he know the government was spying on him? He probably suspected it.”

In a paper published shortly before he died, Zinn encouraged activists to keep exposing these spy programs. Commenting on the FBI, he wrote, “They don’t like social movements. They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things. So the best defense against them and resistance against them is simply to keep on fighting back, to keep on exposing them.”

Now the Obama administration wants to be able to intercept your BlackBerry messages, your texts, your Facebook posts, your email and your Skype calls — clearly, they know how dangerous you are. The phone tap started recording when they heard you say, “Yes we can.”

“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the FBI, reassures us. She told the Times, “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Aah yes, good old national security, and the safety of we, the public; and working to preserve existing authority. Tell that to the FISA Court. Note to those outside the United States — if this becomes policy here, it will most likely become policy everywhere except places that have a particular obsession with and respect for their citizens’ privacy.

For those who live in the U.S., have you ever read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution? It’s short and sweet and one of the foundation stones of our Republic. It says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In other words, as a citizen of the United States of America, you have the right to your privacy. And every time we turn around, the government or some company is mining your data, willy-nilly. Phone company employees have confirmed for me that yes, certain words used in ordinary conversation start the recording devices back at headquarters.

And Now For That Question

Why don’t we care?

Do we believe these surveillance programs will help make our lives safer? I don’t think anyone does, and besides, we don’t need to spy on the entire population for that — and such is not really useful. If we did, everyone would need their own personal spy to keep up with them, and certain teenagers would need one of those black vans with five dudes in suits sitting there — just to keep up with the text messages.

Photo by Eric Francis, Blue Studio – New York.

I took a survey this morning and two of my colleagues said they thought that being spied on makes people feel more important. After all, if the government spied on Martin Luther King and John Lennon, and now they want to spy on you, that makes you special, like them. (It makes me feel less special; I’ve always felt honored that I earned having my phone tapped by writing about GE and Monsanto; now every shmoe with a smart phone is going to get the same treatment.)

I think this is a pretty good theory, by the way. We all want to feel like somebody cares about what we’re saying or thinking. We want to feel dangerous. It’s the same mentality that enables us to update our Twitter with what we’re making for dinner, or update Facebook about having gas.

To sum up, there are three trends that I can identify:

1. We’re being increasingly surrounded by recording and data transmission devices that the government can spy on, and then corporations can use that data to do marketing research and keep the world safe from terrorism. That’s why when I visit obscure websites, they feature ads from B+H Photo (where I shop) showing me pictures of, and providing links to, exactly, precisely the lenses I want to buy (to wit, the Canon 16-35 L Series, f 2.8). Do we think someone installed a cookie on my disk drive? Or are they just taking a wild guess that I love somewhat exotic, top-of-the-line wide-angle lenses??

2. We are using social networking, text messages, cameras, and video cameras to record ourselves and share all sorts of information with people we know, and with lots of people we’ve never heard of. There are people who tweet away all day and night; nothing gets left out. We put everything into emails, post it to our blogs, and store it in various locations in ‘the cloud’. Many people back their whole disk drive onto remote locations in ‘the cloud’. Lots and lots and LOTS of people share sexy photos, videos and text messages. Once we press ‘send’ on a photo, video or document for the first time, it then exists in the virtual world, it can be reproduced infinitely and basically attaches itself permanently to our karma.

3. We are obsessed with privacy. God forbid that anyone knows what we’re thinking or what we want. If some website shares your email address and you get an extra spam, your health insurance will still cover you if you get so freaked out you have a heart attack. Your physical address may be available free in 100 databases you’ve never heard of (start with various online White Pages listings), but you’re still allowed to panic when you think that someone will find their way to your house via your IP address. We would be mortified if people knew what we’re doing or what we’re thinking, or who we’re emailing or what we say to them. That’s private information! But we broadcast it like wildfire.

Yet we do nothing when we find out that we’re being spied on. I have another theory about why.

There Are No Private Thoughts

Those who have started A Course in Miracles (many have started the lessons; fewer have finished) have encountered the idea fairly early on that minds are joined. The whole basis of the Course and many other concepts of healing work with the idea that the boundary we perceive as separating minds (and bodies) is not only a leading cause of sickness, it’s not actually there. One of the most helpful ways we can facilitate healing is to see past this nonexistent veil and dissolve the ‘spell of isolation’. On a linguistic note, the word cancer derives from the Latin carcer, which means to be alone or imprisoned, such as incarcerate.

Male Gaze theory of cinema. Photo by Eric Francis – Blue Studio, New York.

Early Course lessons that cover this idea include “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing” and “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.” One of the concepts here is that how we see the world affects others; we are not perceiving privately, we are transmitting our ideas and feelings with every brainwave.The boundary that we think of the ego as presenting is a penetrable veil. It exists, but mainly in our imaginations. At the heart of the healing theory of A Course in Miracles is the idea that what we keep in the shadows makes us sick and that minds joining their light makes us well.

In the past couple of decades, as cultural beliefs and customs have changed, and as the quickening of energy has proceeded, we have all had some experience of going through or beyond the veil. It might come as a dream that reveals or hints at the future, or becoming aware of another person’s thoughts without any conventionally sensory means of transmission. Nearly everyone has had contact with a dead relative, even if they chose not to believe it later (that is the ego at work, pretending the boundary is really there). Increasingly, the notion that we can ‘keep a secret’ is being recognized as a farce.

Even people who don’t necessarily believe in ‘psychic powers’ assume that eventually others will ‘pick up’ the truth of what they’re thinking or feeling. Or they fear people will, and that experience of maintaining the boundary can consume a lot of psychological energy. It almost always comes as a relief when the ‘wall’ falls down and we can live with the truth.

One of my observations about the Internet is that it’s a model of how our minds really work (with unique identities and locations, but sharing a common psychic space), but established in a mechanical way. Looked at one way, the entire Internet is a kind of low astral plane that, for the most part, is easy to access and is still there when you go back. Looked at another way, we are pioneers in a new dimension of reality, which we are establishing with our thought forms both in data, and in our belief that the thing exists. The Net exists on two levels: as a collection of data, and a collection of what you can think of as everyday archetypes that we build up with our attention and belief in their existence.

In this environment, we get to experiment in revealing ourselves. We get to voluntarily pierce the veil of privacy and express many of our most personal thoughts and feelings. We can do so ‘anonymously’, but always with the feeling that somehow the anonymity might come back to us. The process of revealing, as you may have figured out, can be an incredible relief. We finally have a place to reveal the depths of our thoughts, and be heard by someone who can relate.

We also get to experiment with being different people — that is, with alter egos. The boundaries of name, age, gender, location, social status, marital status, career, sexual orientation and any other ego definition you can think of are temporarily suspended on the Internet. This has provided incalculable relief to many people who otherwise feel totally trapped in their ego constructions and think they have no other way out; no other way to be themselves. This again is a model for what is happening on various astral levels that we can access through dreamtime experiences, meditation, creation of art and use of certain plant allies.

And, finally, we can have our veils pierced for us. We know that people really can feel, sense and sometimes know explicitly what we’re thinking, without our having revealed it to them. Some may invade our borders, and this can be an actual violation, as we saw at Rutgers University this week. Some we may invite in; others find their way there, with us aware of it or not. We hope they feel our fantasies of them. On one level we might be mortified that anyone would know what we’re thinking the last 15 seconds before orgasm — and on another we want people to know precisely that.

On the Internet, we’re immersed in this potential all the time, as we share many of our most intimate thoughts. I think it makes us feel better to know that someone, somewhere is watching; that someone out there cares.

Yours & truly,

*Before the elections, I will reveal my plan to take over the conservative movement and wage a revolution from within.

Who Cares?

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

You’ve got to hand it to our Republican brethren. Even their infighting and vote-splitting do not daunt their confidence that they are destined to rule the world. As is written into its standard operating procedure, the Party of No gives no quarter, admits no fault, and blames the other guy for everything. Some might see that as dedicated and disciplined, but I have had a political month, working the county Democratic booth at local fairs and events. I’ve seen this attitude close up. I’ve debated with it, and I think it displays the temperament of a stereotypical Missouri mule: thick-headed, unteachable and immovable. The GOP expects victory because they’re sure they represent the actual, if unrecognized, will of the people, given by the Divine in a New Testament verse that reads, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” See there? God doesn’t care about business, so they get to do whatever they want.

Pushed in these last months to put forward a leadership plan, and threatened by the popularity of their more radical members, House Republicans issued their newest version of Contract with America this week. The original Contract was fashioned from Newt Gingrich’s alliance with the religious right and Libertarian-leaning conservatives, resulting in a referendum blitzkrieg that ripped both houses of Congress from Clinton’s hands in 1994. The original Contract with America was one of those cyclic flirtations with ‘purity’ that the right can’t seem to do without, drawing in religious conservatives akin to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and giving them a movement to rally around. In such a climate, Monica was the gift that kept on giving, dragging Clinton down into the same impeachment frenzy that the right plans for Obama the Muslim.

The GOP calls this paler 2010 playbook their Pledge to America, a promise to carry Reagan and Bush policies forward until government is completely privatized and as thin as their talking points. To sum up this ‘new’ leadership pledge in the esteemed words of Nancy Reagan, they will ‘just say no’ to anything Obama wants, along with investigating and repealing everything he’s accomplished in the past two years. In their spare time they will continue to promote corporate welfare so that taxes aren’t unfairly raised on the very rich, and attempt as best they can to shut down government. In short, there’s nothing here to see, citizen, move along. Even their own members yawned as they got in party line, save a few who found the economics objectionable. On that front, New York Times economist Paul Krugman said the Pledge was “nonsense,” adding, “Banana republic, here we come.”

Continued at this link…

Virgo Birthday Audio: The Revolution Has Arrived

Dear Virgo Sun, Moon or Rising:

I’ve just finished your 2010 birthday/ascendant audio, and it is fun — a breakthrough audio product in a year when I’ve been learning how to work in this medium.

I appreciate your patience; the letters have kept coming in steadily asking when it would be ready, and I’m happy to say that it is, and it’s excellent. In fact I didn’t realize how much was going on in so many of the most meaningful houses of your solar chart, and how they all work together. Mercury retrograde is over, the fog has cleared and I’ve focused on several other significant transits — though I do offer a new interpretation of Mercury retrograde in your sign. And I have some thoughts about what it means that Saturn has finally left.

I focus on the revolution in your identity that will arrive with Uranus in the 8th house, Aries. This will help you divest from all that you don’t want to be invested in, and establish your true identity in your own life and in your relationships. I look at the movement of Saturn, which has left your sign and is now in your 2nd solar house, Libra — and how this is about identifying your true values, and standing strongly in them.

Venus retrograde in Scorpio is a quest for what it means to be a woman, what women mean to you, or both. This transit, which takes us through late November, will help you discover skills and information that you will depend on for the next 10 years, and I explain how to make the most of it. In the audio I describe Venus retrograde as a course in personal investigative reporting. This transit is designed to help us understand the truth about who we are.

Chiron and Neptune are moving into your 7th house — Pisces — and this suggests many new experiences and reference points in your most intimate relationships. I describe this as putting on 3-D glasses and the whole world jumping into perspective.

And I cover how you identify with your work — that is, how you can become your true calling rather than “doing a job.”

This astrology reading is more than 60 minutes, plus an additional 20 minutes of tarot. It’s direct, intimate and personal, and will offer you much in the way of insights. Is it as effective as a personal reading with me, costing 20 times as much? I would say — it will come close. This will give you all of what you are looking for on some topics and get you most of the way to what you need on others, always leaving you plenty of room for your personal interpretation. In the end you decide what your astrology means to you; in this audio, I do my best to offer some useful interpretations.

Here is the link for instant access.

Thank you for your business.

Yours & truly,

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 1, 2010, #833 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Now that you reached the bottom line of a relationship, what have you learned? What is that seemingly ‘final’ piece of information about a person or a situation? I think that what you’ve demonstrated to yourself is that you can see the potential for letting go entirely, that is, the potential for having no attachments. You’ve also encountered an example of how situations have limits, including time limits. Then, having come to these recognitions, you’re in a place to choose based on the information. You may again be feeling your attachment or investment; you may be wondering whether you’re going to get the contact you need. And you may be wondering about someone else who you’ve noticed. I think that the clearest revelation you can have involves something about how relationships are not so simple, but they’re simpler when you make choices based on what you want.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re starting to see the value of your commitments. They serve many functions, including keeping your life on track. What you may be figuring out lately is how, to be valid, these arrangements have to work well for both people. We’re used to spending our lives saying “what’s in it for me?” chasing the next check, though I suggest you look at all equations from both sides. If you think you’re worth the price of your paycheck, ask yourself why that is. Consider the experience of anyone to whom you devote yourself or your energy. I suggest you set a goal of these relationships being oriented on maximum profit for all the parties involved. There is an efficiency factor here; energy conserved becomes profit made. There is a creativity factor as well: everything that exists owes its life to one creative process or another. Feed them generously.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury has finally entered new territory for the first time since being retrograde on Aug. 20, though the sense of being bogged down in something may have begun several weeks earlier. It’s been a while since you felt emotionally free, and you may be taking your first tentative steps in a while. Life would be easier if you didn’t critique yourself every 15 minutes. There are few places to turn for advice about how to worry less. I would suggest this: take steps where you feel like you’re on solid ground, rather than where you feel yourself sinking in. That goes for thoughts, it goes for people and it goes for actions you take to create a safer world for yourself. Everything you need to know, your mind and emotions are going to give you in direct feedback. And that will work great — as long as you listen to yourself.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You seem to want both certainty and a sense of adventure. Many would argue that you cannot have both. But there is such a thing as having a foundation; then there is what you do with that foundation. Some people keep pouring the concrete; others would build something innovative. This isn’t so much about a structure as it is what you do with your creative and erotic energy. Remember that most of what we cling to that offers a sense of security rarely delivers, and usually leaves us bored and wanting something else. You have the foundation you need; you have some confidence. Now, your quest is to give yourself permission to actually be the person you want to be and to have the experiences you want to have. And if something that ‘makes you safe’ is preventing you from doing that, it’s definitely time to reconsider things from a new point of view.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are at a turning point, but it’s less like making a left turn in a car, and more like the ocean tide changing directions. You seem to be taking the future more seriously. You seem to be devoted to grounding yourself in work that leads to success rather than just a paycheck or something to do. The planets suggest that you take every step consciously, and be certain that you’re not skipping any steps along the way. These involve paying attention to your environment and your relationships. Of the first, it’s clear that you’re involved in a process of many reforms and changes that are long overdue and will help get the energy moving. Of the second, remember that your life is intricately interdependent on the life of someone else. Their success is your success; yours is theirs. Therefore, put the relationship first and the success will dependably follow.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury has finally entered new territory in your birth sign, and this is your signal that it’s time to start moving your life forward in a way that felt impossible three or four weeks ago. Notice how the obstacles that seemed so enormous now look like little models you can move around on the table. Notice how the time pressures have eased enough to give you some flexibility, and how you’re not struggling with exhaustion on a daily basis. Still, you would be wise to conserve your energy and make choices one at a time. Economy and efficiency are two of the most important themes of your life. To a great extent that involves what you do with your mental energy, and I strongly suggest you do a kind of audit accounting for how much anxiety costs you in the way of time and creative potential. In fact there are days when most of your energy goes into fear. There is a better way, and you’re going to find it because you want it.

You seem to be pulled in two directions, as if you want two different things that you believe conflict. Or, you ‘want something for someone else’ that doesn’t quite align with your personal desires. In the next few days you will see that there is indeed a point of reconciliation. You may not get a look at it for very long. It may show up as one of those fleeting possibilities you notice in a slightly altered state of mind or think of right before you fall asleep. But there is in fact a point where everyone’s needs meet in a way that benefits all. Once you have that potential in mind, and you believe that it’s real, you’ll need to go through a process to have it happen. But this will be simpler if you remember that the goal of the endeavor is happiness. If you focus on that at every step of the way, you’re more likely to have it.

Libra birthday audio is coming soon.

There are two basic ways to have intimate relationships. One is to seek another person for a sense of completion, because they have something you’re missing, and hopefully vice versa. The second way is to be a complete person and meet another complete person and have a kind of partnership, journey or human enterprise. Most of the time we seek the first option. The planets are reminding you that your mission is to work with the rarely used second method — another way of saying work with your inner sense of balance. Make contact with the male and female principles you contain, no matter what your sex or sexual orientation. There may be conditions in your life that are compelling you to take a more introspective view of your relationships. Indeed there are some Scorpios or Scorpio ascendant natives that may be experiencing an unusual sense of isolation. Yet by now you know that this is serving a useful, even vital, purpose.

You’re in one of those moments when if you do what you love, the world will respond with love. Remember not to question your chosen purpose. That’s another way of saying proceed with the quiet confidence that you’re doing the right thing. You may not feel like you’re at your creative peak; you may still be taking care of what feel like the minor points. I suggest you keep taking care of those things at the same time you nourish your larger vision. The thing about larger visions is that they don’t take shape immediately, and they do a lot of their taking shape when we can’t quite see what’s going on. However, I strongly suggest you trust that this mysterious process is underway, and that you’ll get results. Even if they’re not quite the results you’re expecting, you will have plenty to work with and some pleasant surprises. For now, every detail counts toward the whole.

There are those moments when you figure out what you’re good at because you do it and discover you’re doing it well. Those moments can be points of decision without you even recognizing that. They can be moments of putting your feet on the true path of your life, and you had no idea what you were doing. Thanks to astrology you have a clue: you can be aware that you’re now at an intersection where the past, the present and the future converge. At this juncture you have the ability to shift the flow of your destiny; in a sense, you can make a choice that does something to resolve the past and activate the future in one gesture. I am not sure you’ll recognize this moment when it happens, but I can tell you that if you live consciously and pay attention to who and what is around you, and what opportunities are open, you will be that much more open and available.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

I suggest you shift modes quickly, if you were or are currently doing the push/discipline/focus thing — you’ve gone as far as you can go with that for now, and over the next few weeks you have a nice opening for flow/inspiration. The idea here is not to ease back entirely and coast along, but rather to apply your ideas as they come and develop your talents on an ongoing basis, as a kind of intuitive experiment. You can afford to be a little less goal-centered and a little more exploratory. You will find something that hooks your interest or qualifies as a plan that you can get into through a more circumspect approach. This is the part that may qualify as learning, which is suspending rationality, linear thinking and logic, and allowing your intuition to take over. I realize there are skeptics who argue that there is no such thing as intuition, right along with ghosts and UFOs. But in this situation seeing will definitely mean believing.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’ve fulfilled several key commitments or responsibilities recently, and I suggest you give yourself a break. This continues the theme of “do what makes you feel like a Pisces,” which might involve music, art, sex, poetry or ‘alternative’ states of consciousness — you have one foot in the dreamtime, so put that to good use. I’m suggesting that you do this as a way to create ‘inner space’ — that is, to open up a space in yourself that can be filled by the inspiration that is currently pouring in, and that will do so increasingly over the next couple of weeks as the Sun makes a trine to the Chiron-Neptune conjunction. For the past week of the Sun in Libra, you’ve been looking right at Saturn, which has been about keeping your focus and maintaining your relationships. Now that the Sun-Saturn conjunction of 2010 has joined that thing known as history, you’re being invited to go freestyle for a while — and that is what I would, in a word, describe as Pisces.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Something in the Night

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Dear Reader:

Venus and Mars are dancing around in a conjunction in Scorpio. Mars was retrograde in Leo earlier in the year, and now it’s moving ahead at full speed. Venus is about to be retrograde, and is moving slowly. So we have a fairly rare condition with Mars, which is further from the Sun, moving faster than Venus, which is closer to the Sun, while the two are neck and neck in a near-conjunction. That will happen when Mars overtakes Venus on Oct. 3. Venus goes retrograde five days later.

This setup puts emphasis on both Venus and Mars. These are planets we feel, and energies we live with consciously from hour to hour. Most of us are aware of the interplay between and among men and women in various configurations, particularly as we respond to our various attributes of gender and sex. Some turn us on. Some piss us off. Some are just there. But there it all is.

Scorpio tends to be competitive and it’s a sign associated with power. Putting Venus and Mars in close proximity there may have a feeling of power imbalance, or some struggle to get on top. Of course it could also be a picture of hot and intriguing contact, but that often happens in an environment of competition. We don’t have many other psychological or emotional paradigms within which to consider sex, or for that matter, sexual relationships. If you so much as mention the idea that jealousy does not need to rule over our erotic or emotional experiences, most people will look at you like bees are flying out of your mouth.

There are some interesting features to this setup. Mars is in its sign of traditional rulership; Venus is in its sign of detriment (opposite Taurus, one of the signs Venus rules). Mars is direct, and Venus is about to be retrograde. In theory, anyway, these factors all favor Mars energy. Yet Scorpio is really a feminine sign, despite being ruled by Mars, the planet of masculinity. Venus retrograde in a feminine sign represents a kind of extreme yin condition, what you might describe as the paradox of self-penetration. So looked at one way, this is a study in bringing out the yin sides of both Mars and Venus.

All in all, this sounds like an astrological experiment in gender, sex roles and sexual orientation. I would imagine that this ongoing conjunction is having its influence on many or most relationships. Scorpio is sexual, and it’s also hormonal, and emotional, and ties into reproduction and DNA. Scorpio is an energy field where power in nearly any form (biological, economic, emotional, erotic, relational) is transacted, exchanged and where it mutates into new forms. This astrology suggests strongly that relationships and the people in them are poised on the edge of some transformation that will occur as part of the conjunction, and as part of the Venus retrograde process. One question is whether we’re willing to go along with the process, take it up consciously, or whether we are more prone to resist it.

We’re also seeing the latest wave of gender drama unfold in the world. On Tuesday, the Senate, our most enlightened group of leaders here in the United States, voted 56 to 43 to keep in place the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military. Originally designed to protect the privacy of those in service, the rule actually facilitates investigations that are used to kick gay people out of the armed forces. A majority of senators wanted to repeal the measure, but they didn’t get the 60 that were necessary. So in essence the Senate voted to keep playing charades, and to allow the military to keep playing its mean game of hide and seek.

Katherine Miller resigned from West Point earlier this year in protest of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. She began attending Yale this fall.

We could partly account this to election year politics. Conservatives never want to seem friendly to gay people or their needs, and the conservative movement is fixated on sex (abstinence education, banning abortion, etc.). But it seems like the gay thing has dominated the news for years and years, and it’s at a new frenzy now. Isn’t it weird that every night there are two or three more gay or lesbian news stories about some story or another? Such as: gay marriage, gay adoption, gays in the military, gays who were recently the boss of the Republican party while it put all those anti-gay constitutional amendments onto the ballot, this Republican senator allegedly not being gay while he taps his foot in a public men’s room, what the Bible says about being gay, the gay parade or any other new permutation you can or cannot think of?

You would think there was a gay bar and gay legislative action center on every block, and gay publicists working tirelessly around the clock to bring the latest in gay news to the gay networks and cable news programs. Let’s face it. We’re obsessed. With our friend, who is gay.

In the past 40 or so years since Stonewall, the event in Greenwich Village that started the modern gay movement, it’s true that the definition of gay has expanded from gay to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ). That’s an inclusive definition. It may finally include everyone. Who isn’t questioning?

My impression, though, is that this fuss we’re experiencing/witnessing really isn’t about sexual orientation; it’s about gender, on a deeply personal level. Venus and Mars in Scorpio are making the issues that much more introspective.

Gender is something we all experience and live with. It’s partly biological, partly culturally prescribed and — as we are seeing — partly optional. People have experimented with gender for a long time, but usually it was a kind of secret, or private obsession. Men have dressed like women and women have dressed like men, probably for as long as there were differences in clothing.

Gender bending has been popular for a while — and not just for Boy George. In ‘Tootsie,’ Dustin Hoffman played Michael Dorsey, an unemployed actor, who takes on the role of “Dorothy Michaels,” a female soap opera actress and later falls in love with the show’s leading actress.

We are as a culture going through an ongoing evolution in gender roles; that’s one of the identifying factors of our time in history. This has many sources, including the many women’s rights movements of the 20th century. (Quiz question — what year did women first get to vote?) I am sure that one of them is our postmodern phase of history, where the constructions of the prior eras are basically falling apart, losing their definitions and leaving us to figure out what to do. Many men are wanting to be more emotionally present and many women are expecting them to be that way; that’s a long stretch from the mandatory silent, stoic image of a man that so many of us were told we had to live up to. Many women are moving into intellectual and leadership roles that were unthinkable even when I was a kid. It is no longer a ‘fact’ that a woman cannot design a bridge. Not that long ago, many people would have agreed. And yes that is incredible.

When it first came out in the late ’70s, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was borderline scandalous. Now it is normal fare, and I think that indicates a process of cultural change on a pretty deep level. Of note, on dollars returned for investment, it was one of the most successful films in motion picture history.

For some this is no big deal. We just go along, watching the show, and perhaps exploring our feelings. But for others who have been forced by their cultures into sex roles and beliefs about what constitutes the one-and-only form of proper sex, it can be terrifying to feel the ground shift, within them and around them. For many people their identity as a man or a woman, and as a partner in a heterosexual relationship, is a key component of their identity. If that changes, there are many people who feel they have nothing. When someone feels that male-female marriage really is the building block of society (and in a sense, they are right), they can get defensive when they read about a gay couple who wants to adopt a kid. And that defensive can go pretty far; it’s also subject to being abused by people who themselves don’t care, but who see it as an opportunity to harvest it as political power.

Then there is the chemical hormone issue. For many years, scientists have been warning us that the many chemicals that we encounter both in products and as waste disrupt our hormones. These range from actual hormones injected into meat and sprayed on plants, to products to chemicals that act like hormones (such as in plastic) to flame retardants collecting in the fish we eat.

In 1991, a group of scientists met at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, WI. They reached a consensus which included the following language: “A large number of man-made chemicals that have been released into the environment, as well as a few natural ones, have the potential to disrupt the endocrine system of animals, including humans.” They then listed several characteristics of persistent compounds that accumulate and magnify in the food chain, including pesticides, dioxins and PCBs.

Plastics which find their way into the environment through dumping and burning are likely candidates to turn up as endocrine disruptors in fish. They also leach directly into food. This scene looks like somewhere in the North Pacific Gyre, probably Hawaii. Photographer unknown.

Nearly twenty years ago, they noted, “Many wildlife populations are already affected by these compounds. The impacts include thyroid dysfunction in birds and fish; decreased fertility in birds, fish, shellfish, and mammals; decreased hatching success in birds, fish, and turtles; gross birth deformities in birds, fish, and turtles; metabolic abnormalities in birds, fish, and mammals; behavioral abnormalities in birds; demasculinization and feminization of male fish, birds, and mammals; defeminization and masculinization of female fish and birds; and compromised immune systems in birds and mammals.”

Since that time, the science has become clearer what is going on, and the stories coming in from nature have been increasingly weirder. So, we are swimming in chemicals that alter our internal gender characteristics, by messing with our hormones and our DNA. And this, I think, is influencing our perception of both gender and sex, as well as our emotional experiences of both.

So in our chemical environments we live in hormone chaos. Personally I think everyone is actually experiencing this as some degree of gender anarchy. We can feel the effects, however subtly, and when you combine them with other movements in society, the sensation can be extremely unsettling to those who are camped out in traditional gender roles and don’t want to budge.

We can also factor in one last thing — our imaginations. The Internet has created a giant field of gender variability. One website specializing in role-play games (RPGs) reports that, “Men are 3-5 times more likely than women to gender-bend” in such games. “The demographic that is most likely to gender-bend are men over the age of 25. We know that 85% of [RPG] players are male, so if you do the math, at any given moment, half of all female avatars are actually being played by men.”

How we see ourselves in our fantasies is anyone’s guess, and will often surprise us. Often it does not fit the prescribed model of what our gender is supposed to be. Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

Then there is cosplay, which is playing roles of comic book and graphic novel characters in full costume. This is apparently a wide-open space for gender exchange, called crossplay. The UK Guardian reported on this recently:

“Allison, an American cosplayer from Georgia, enjoys crossplaying (dressing as a character of the opposite gender), in part because ‘it’s really satisfying when you play your part so well that an observer doesn’t realise you’re a crossplayer until you speak’. Fans such as Allison challenge gender presentation in their fan communities, illustrating the fluidity of gender in the context of their subcultures.”

And finally there is what happens in our actual erotic imaginations. Most people are curious about sex and that curiosity can lead to various thoughts that we could file under the general heading ‘bisexual’. Those thoughts can be pretty hot, they can slip into the oddest moments, and at the same time they can threaten our ideas of what our relationships are supposed to be.

We don’t really account for the extent to which this thing known as heteronormative is like a house of cards within which our identities live. Even those of us who are a little more flexible, and a little more experimental, can basically be deeply identified with heteronormative ideas, and when these start to shake or quake or vibrate, even a little, the feeling can be unsettling. But magnify that into outright terrifying if you believe, or if the people around you believe, that you’re going straight to hell.

And this is one reason why, in our current moment of history, it’s so easy to make political hay out of the gay thing, and why the reactions are so strong. Everybody’s feeling, experiencing or at the very least noticing what you might call the global gender shift. At the same time, there is a sense of inevitability that we will have to accept the gay thing as normal even if we don’t like it. To some, even a mild experience of gender dysphoria will feel like their heterosexuality is melting like salt. That’s not what’s really happening. Something else is, but the fear doesn’t quite speak that language.

So now we have Venus and Mars about to do their gender experiment in Scorpio, and in particular, Venus, which is poised for a kind of introspection rarely seen in our world. This is going to be a journey, and it goes deeper than all the superficial expressions of sex, gender and relationship roles that I’ve described. We will be feeling some aspects of this viscerally, and others will stir up material from the deep unconscious. Scorpio is not just what we see, and it goes deeper than what we feel. You could say that on some of the deepest levels we can actually reach, it’s about how we become who we are — that mysterious process, that we often try to keep secret from ourselves.

Yours & truly,

When Reality Bites

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s been more than a decade since populist policy came easily; actually much longer than that, had any of us noticed. Even the Clinton years proved an uphill slog against the Republican culture warriors and their “Contract With America.” With the help of Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the infamous triangulation tactic that prompted Rachel Maddow to call Big Bill a “Republican president” was born. We might have raised an inquiry over Clinton’s welfare reform and NAFTA legislation, but we didn’t. Monica was the distraction of the moment, and the economy seemed sound, so we let it go. Then the bubbles began to pop, the jobs went overseas, the Supreme Court picked our next president for us, and any hint of progressivism disappeared.

While Dubya played commander-in-chief, hunting imaginary WMD — and adding well over a trillion dollars to our military debt, another 1.3 trillion for his tax cuts and 1.5 trillion for Medicare D — his Congress passed six years of laws that favored business over public interest. When the economy tanked three years ago, the least affected were the upper-class, who continue to reap the rewards of corporate welfare and laws designed to protect them. This is an example of the dreaded ‘redistribution of wealth’ eschewed by conservatives everywhere, but don’t mention that to the average class-conscious Republican, who thinks redistribution is only about giveaways to welfare recipients.

The basis of trickle-down economics is a collection of unproven, fanciful myths that play well to uncritical media. Myth #1 is that the business class deserves those big breaks in order to keep opportunities trickling down. Myth #2: top-loading the profits keeps the American Dream alive, even as the disparity between the high rollers and a growing underclass widens. Myth #3, biggest of them all, is that we need those business advantages because some of us plan on winning the lottery some day in the form of founding the next Apple Computer. This is known as “when our ship comes in.”

At a time when one in every seven Americans lives in poverty and a fourth of our families are identified as “near poor,” the notion that we must keep the rich swimming in dough lest they refuse to throw us a crumb from time to time is ludicrous. Statistics show that the trickle-down nonsense promoted by St. Ronnie the Reagan really IS the elusive ‘voodoo economics,’ named by Poppy Bush. In fact, very little trickles back down the pyramid because the rich traditionally keep their money, favored by laws that give them latitude to tuck it into some convenient tax shelter.

Continued at this link…

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Right now we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.
We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

Please click on the page and “like” us. This used to be called “join” but Facebook changed that recently. Also — there is another option, to invite your friends, and I’d appreciate if you spread the word by doing just that.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.
PPS, In this recent edition of Astrology News, I publish an interview with one of the big gaming websites about my feelings on Facebook. I thought I would share it with you — it’s the second article down, at this link.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 24, 2010, #832 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Venus and Mars in Scorpio are all about desire. But it looks like you want that desire to hunt you down by scent and give you what you need without having to say or do anything. Depending on who you are, this planetary setup might work that way, yet at the moment more pragmatic matters of relationship seem to be interfering with your hormonal drives. The two seem to exist as realities apart from one another, which is often the situation given our society’s concepts of relationship that dependably honor human needs only to the extent of providing air and water. I suggest you make peace with yourself about how a situation with a partner, or your ideas about what constitutes a proper relationship, may be entirely different than some deep elemental needs you also have. This feeling will be stronger if you’re feeling trapped, which does not make it invalid: to the contrary, this just emphasizes the point.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

It would appear that you’re trying to remember what you want from a relationship, from life or from both. It’s one thing to let others do the wanting for you; that’s the safe option, because if they are wrong, you are not; and if they are right, you benefit. So step one is to make a commitment to wanting what you want. Just slow down and want whatever that might be, not for its own sake, but for yours. Don’t forget that Pluto in Capricorn is helping you stir up/burn up about 100 lifetimes worth of religious guilt, and that may be one of the things you’re tripping over. If you happen to slip right from desire to guilt, be grateful for the efficiency of that, and notice the sequence. Be grateful that you’re enlightened enough to know that liberating yourself from guilt is vital to both enjoying the life you have and creating the life you want. You can do it — though it will take active, articulate honesty.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may feel that your wounds are still tender and that your psyche is still fragile. That’s a good reminder to tread lightly on the Earth, as you gradually make your way up the other side of the rather deep place you got yourself into the past few weeks. You are still going over old territory, but you’re doing it with a new perspective and a new purpose. That is to say, you have the potential now to benefit from your errors and to learn from your own personal past. But more to the point, you are taking important steps in your journey of transcending the past of the people who came before you. We forget that we stand on the slag pile of history left behind by our ancestors. Yet we also forget their living spirits. You might try contacting those ancestors, in their realized form, where they can guide and support you. They are watching, and they are aware.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Keep moving. Do what you need to feel good and stay visible. Part of you is being pulled back into your cave; part of you knows it’s high time to get yourself more involved with the activities of life and actually create or achieve something that is meaningful to you. You will need to address that dual impulse more or less continuously. Make sure you get enough rest. Make sure you get enough time alone. Then, whether you’re feeling certain about it or not, go out and engage the world. You don’t need to impress anyone; you need to be present, alert and sincere. This is a low-energy output mode. It’s actually easy; you can listen more than you speak, but don’t hesitate to speak when necessary. Meanwhile, Mercury has spent a month making various weird moves in your house of words and ideas. It’s now moving forward at a steady pace. Writing is your best friend right now. I promise.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may be seeking a balance of opinions or trying to please everyone, but soon you’re going to come up against a natural limit and be forced to make a decision. Think way ahead to that time and decide what elements of your plan are the most important and which elements are the ones you can forego. Do the same with others. You can actually reach a compromise here, but it’s going to be a creative one and that mainly means that you don’t want to be doing it under pressure, on the spot. Don’t announce your proposal until the end, but make sure that you know what it is, that you know what your options are and you understand what’s the most meaningful to whom. There are a good few elements that are part of the fringe, not part of the core; but certain points are the meat and bones. Protect those; don’t compromise on what you know is actually useful.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Finding oneself is so much work, it’s amazing anyone would manage to lose themselves again after they do so. However, what we call self tends to change, when we’re healthy; which is to say, not stuck. And there are times that change can feel plenty uncomfortable, vulnerable and pushed up against limits. You have pushed back against those limits lately, and stretched open your potential. I suggest you not be so fast to fill the space up. Rather, look and feel for what’s there. Consider the new dimensions of your psychic interior, and see if you can notice changes in how you relate to the exterior landscape as well. That would include your physical environs and your emotional landscape: in a subtle way, everything is different; you are different; all your relationships have shifted. I suggest you notice the changes that appeal to you and emphasize them, steering clear of old patterns and old feelings.

Shifting your emotional perspective requires those moments of discomfort, the ones that tell you that you have something to process. Move through them quickly and get into the new space, more like a backstage costume change than a session with a psychiatrist. Expect a quick series of these encounters over the next few days — take them in stride, adjusting rapidly. After about a week of this you’ll see that this series of small adjustments offers you a small clue to your mental orientation, and then after several you can deduce where you stand with yourself and with others, particularly those you’re inclined to think of as authority figures. This method of adaptation is preferable to some of the other methods that you have experimented with in recent seasons, where outer circumstances showed up all at once and compelled you to adjust instantly. This is more your style — progress in meaningful, manageable increments.

Part of our shifting psychic landscape has involved the revelation of how androgynous so many people are. Even those who don’t quite admit it are feeling the shift (hence, the vast homophobic backlash of our era). For you, from one perspective, the gender-blending quality feels natural. From another, it’s odd and disorienting. Yet you’re in a particularly rich moment of embodying your gender and sexual opposites. The more you emphasize one polarity, the more you’re likely to encounter the other. If you’re paying attention you will notice many subtleties and nuances, particularly when receiving sensation and acting on desire. At times you may encounter the seeming paradox of needing to fertilize yourself, and having to stretch across certain beliefs and seeming physical barriers. That is one of the great themes of the spiritual and creative history of our era. At first the territory can seem impossible to navigate, then after a while it can seem entirely natural, with many variants in between. Yet that sense of exploration is unlikely to abate, particularly after we’ve all spent so much time seeking inspiration and contact outside ourselves.

Pretend you’re a politician running for office and Election Day is rapidly approaching. You’re probably not running for office and you likely never would, though I suggest that this is the time to keep your focus on your actual goal and the many small steps you need to get there. Unlike in recent months, you see, those steps are likely to go well. You can work with the version of Murphy’s Law that says, “anything that can go wrong already has,” and if it hasn’t something close to it has, so you know what to do when a new variant arises. With a focus on your goal, with determination and most of all with truth in your heart, there is nothing that can stop you. The one place your chart suggests you bring out a little more energy from the reserve tanks is that seemingly elusive, arguably nonexistent thing called creativity. Don’t let it elude you and don’t forget that you have a lot of the stuff. Use it liberally and remember — if you do, it will never run out.

There’s a subtle tipping point involved in your quest for leadership and professional success. I cannot emphasize the point strongly enough that, no matter how much chaos the world is in, and regardless of how much inner tension you may feel, and how much is unresolved, you’re the person most capable of leadership in your environment. As you embrace that role you will see that it’s a fairly large environment we’re talking about, certainly more meaningful than the Thursday night scene at the local bar. I mean real success, whatever that actually says to you. Yet this calls for collecting yourself and focusing on your independence, particularly emotional. Your success is balanced on your becoming a person independent of the emotional traps of the past and the people in your environment. This will allow you to focus what may feel like an uncomfortable amount of energy on your inner development. Feel for that balancing point and lean gently into the changes.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

The Sun moving into your solar 9th house — Libra — says it’s time to start considering your longterm vision in a new way. It may be that as soon as you get any momentum here, you come up against some idea of why something cannot happen, or what is in the way. Therefore I suggest you abandon the logistical angle and stick strictly to the sketch. Draw the building you want to design from the outside in; consider its shape and size. To do this you’ll have to give your analytical mind a rest and activate the illustrative aspect. With Jupiter and Uranus conjunct in Pisces, that ought to be pretty easy, and you’ll like it. Keep making those sketches until your vision has a life of its own. At a certain point you’ll start to awaken to the inward aspects of the concept: the specifics of how to develop what you want. I am sure you follow the logic of proceeding in this order, which is to maximize encouragement and allow a sense of creative freedom.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Feed the Pisces in you, whatever that means. Fertilize your creativity. Focus on emotional movement, ideas and comfort. Jupiter and Uranus are continuing to hold a long and rare conjunction in your birth sign, which to me suggests a seeding phase. Both are retrograde, which is a clue that your mission is to become so familiar with yourself that you always feel confident being you, no matter what the circumstances that surround you. This is also a time to take in worldly learning, in whatever form you want. The art you see, the books you read and the music you hear will profoundly influence the person you are becoming, so choose well and select on the basis of what feels nourishing, inspiring and which offers you a sense of freedom. The same is true of the people you meet; don’t be so eager to take anyone into your life, but keep a keen eye for the ones who you know can truly feel you.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Of Content and Marketing: An Open Letter

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Dear Friend of Planet Waves:

When we began our Internet project in earnest back in 1998, I had a vision for a Web magazine that could cover all the subjects that everyone loves but cannot mention at the dinner table — astrology, sexuality, gender, relationships, politics, environmental issues and art. The magazine would feature my horoscope and astrology writing and present all the talent we could attract.

Planet Waves staff, on the way to work.

Even better, the concept was to be reader-funded and thus advertising-free. Over the past eight years, since beginning our subscription service, we’ve actually reached the Promised Land. Planet Waves is supported by you, our readers — through your subscriptions and product purchases.

That in turn supports many other open access services for the public, for example, our blog that updates several times a day; weekly audio; content supplied to other websites; and a graphics shop that puts out some fun, original art that you see in Planet Waves. We fund our whole operation for a year for what it costs to produce a simple 15-second television commercial. That is efficiency! It’s amazing what you can do when the community is involved; when people work for love as much as they do for money.

I remember one day around 2003 taking my then-new assistant Chelsea out to lunch and telling her: Okay, from now on we have to put energy into marketing. That was one year after beginning the subscriber service. We both have a distaste for this thing known as marketing. She looked at me skeptically. I can still remember the expression in her eyes. Don’t make me do this. I told her: We really don’t have a way to get around it, if we want to keep publishing.

Here’s why I’m writing. In order for us to keep growing, and to take care of our staff, and to take care of me, we have to do evermore of this thing called marketing. I have to distract the efforts of our whole creative team, right down to our proofreader, to do this work — and it takes away energy from the content that you want and that you love. For me personally, it feels like a breach of my integrity because as an astrology writer, my goal is to give you a clean reading, an honest approach to your psychology-astrology — never to manipulate you. Marketing materials, however honest, always verge on some form of convincing or compelling.

I have a lot of really great article ideas for you (one on the astrology of self-employment, another on how to choose a therapist, another on the astrology of adoption) and trust me: I feel like a dork every time I have to put one of them aside and supervise another promotional campaign.

So, today I have three requests of you to help liberate us from this cycle, and put some love and energy into promoting Planet Waves. If you’re not a subscriber, please sign up; give us a try. Subscriptions are inexpensive, they provide valuable information, and they are guaranteed.

1. Please tell your friends about us, via email, Facebook or face to face. Get the word spreading like fire. Please mention us on your blog, and tell local editors in your town about my horoscope. If you know editors of national magazines, please introduce us. Spread the word among your friends with the spirit that dependable, quality astrology writing is rare to find and worth money. Please be persistent. People usually need to hear a message consistently, over time, before they notice.

2. Please purchase subscriptions for the people you forward to regularly. If you want to set up a bulk order we will make that affordable for you. You can also adopt a subscriber, in case you don’t have anyone special to purchase one for. My audio readings cost about the same as cut flowers and make a lasting gift for someone you care about.

3. Help us create our promotional materials. We need ideas! Some of you are talented writers, publicists and even part of ad creative teams. You know a lot more than we do about how to do this — and how to do it well. Please get in contact and share your ideas and if you feel willing, please donate some of your time or your agency’s time.

Everyone will benefit: we will grow and that growth will come right back to you in the form of better astrology writing and other content. You will get the true satisfaction of knowing that you’re doing your valuable part to help create both community and a community resource that serves many, and will continue to grow and develop over time. We’ve come a long way — and we have a vision.

On behalf of our staff and our subscribers, thank you.

Yours & truly,

The Mighty Equinox

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Dear Fellow Traveler:

What a year it’s been. I am personally grateful to have astrology as a metric to understand history, and to see where it intersects with my own life trajectory. Some might say that I’m using astrology to force a measure of sensibility onto random events that really make no sense. But long before I had ever opened an ephemeris, I had read and loved these lines of T.S. Eliot, from the poem Burnt Norton: “We move above the moving tree / In light upon the figured leaf / And hear upon the sodden floor / Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”

The September equinox of 1994, the crew of the shuttle orbiter Endeavour recorded this image of the Sun poised above the Earth’s limb (where the curve of the earth meets the blackness of space). Photo: Astronomy Picture of the Day.

All year long we’ve been living through astrology called a grand cross, taking place in the cardinal signs. As described in prior columns, this is made up of many different events, some of which are in the past (a series of Saturn-Pluto squares; a series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions) and some of which are currently unfolding (the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction; the Chiron-Neptune conjunction). This has brought the ever-escalating feeling of tension, drama and near-madness that some people are thriving on, that others are confused by and that others are simply being worn down by.

Kudos to anyone who has the courage to stand up and try something new, to experiment with manifesting a dream, or to make a decision based on something they authentically desire.

While we could say ‘this too shall pass’, that is only part of the point. Mostly, when we go through an extended spell of high-tension astrology like this (the current astrology is rooted in events of 2008, and extends well past 2012, so it counts for ‘extended’), the alignments and what they represent leave us as changed people. It may be nice that what doesn’t kill you leaves you stronger, but only after it’s over. While you’re in the midst of the changes and the challenges, you get to make up the story as you go a long. To the extent that you don’t feel that way, you have the meta-challenge of shifting your perspective from that of passive to active participant in your own life.

We’re about to go through another peak of energy during the next week. This is a fast set of moves, mainly by the Sun and the Moon, which activate, or precipitate, long-standing patterns in the slow-moving planets that make up the psychic backdrop. I’ll go through both for you and give examples of how they might feel in both an individual and collective context.

Next week, the Libra equinox arrives on Sept. 23, simultaneously with a Full Moon in Aries. This is a combination of a solar event with a lunar event. Both involve the Aries Point, the intersection of the individual and the collective. Notice the tenor of the news. Notice the amazing extent of how the political rhetoric is going down everyone’s pants. The party identified with supposedly small, unintrusive government seems more interested in private policy than public policy.

Christine O’Donnell addresses supporters after winning the Republican nomination for Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. She is one of five candidates currently running for Senate who opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest. She believes that masturbation is adultery and considers herself a “secondary virgin.” When this kind of purity mentality is injected into political discourse, that has special meaning. AP Photo by Rob Carr.

Here is where we need to put our finger on the pulse of our own responses and reactions. Is it in some way comforting to see someone rise to a position of national attention who has recently admitted in an interview that she would stop all unmarried people from having sex, even with themselves? If you think through what this would mean, brought to the level of national policy, what do you get? And why is this coming to the surface now? What is the feeling behind it?

Now once again we have the Aries Point back in the spotlight. It’s been quite a year of this, and many of the major planets are in the process of ingressing cardinal signs, which emphasizes the phenomenon. The equinox, by definition, is an Aries Point event because the Sun opposes the first degree of Aries. The simultaneous Full Moon is occupying the first degree of Aries as well. We have the clue that something is up, something extra just out of the line of sight is brewing. This equinox-Full Moon is an impressive synchronicity: and it’s a textbook example of the kind of astrology that shakes out things that have been building, accumulating and waiting in the cosmic wings. I am sincerely happy that Dick Cheney is not in power for this one.

In the days before this double jackpot, the late Virgo Sun opposes a rare event in late Pisces — the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. We’ve heard of this one, though we met it last June when it happened in Aries. When slow planets align in conjunctions, they typically meet three times in a little cluster. Jupiter and Uranus meet every 14 or so years. But these meetings come in unusual patterns. The current cluster of three started in early Aries and then is moving back to nearby Pisces. There hasn’t been a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction there since 1334. This is happening when Jupiter is making a close pass to the Earth — great for people with telescopes or even powerful binoculars.

Jupiter-Uranus in Pisces is some of the most creative, inventive, beautiful astrology anyone could dream up. Many brilliant ideas that manifest over the next decade will have their genesis in these weeks. I would love to know what is being invented and what patents are being filed. I would love to know who is meeting for the first time — some of these encounters will result in collaborations that change the world. On one level this is a source of the madness and insanity in the political landscape: the ongoing invention of a fantasy world because the reality we’ve created is too painful. At the same time, there is an idea in there that works: the only thing that’s going to get us out of the bind that we’re in is creativity. Creativity, however, demands clarity. Looking to late Aquarius, we see that Chiron and Neptune are making a near-exact conjunction right now. That is about filtering out delusion and leaving the essence of an idea.

Passengers on the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island ferry, summer 2010. Photo by Eric.

Here is where the Sun and Moon come in. The late Virgo Sun opposes the late Pisces conjunction between Sept. 21 and Sept. 22, shining some light on the whole circus, or sea of potential, that it represents. At the same time it makes a quincunx to the Chiron-Neptune conjunction, calling for a series of refinements and adjustments as part of the creative process. Then the equinox-Aries Full Moon comes on like a storm the next day, just after the Moon passes through late Pisces and turns Jupiter-Uranus into a triple conjunction. Does something happen? Well, this Full Moon represents a peak of tension and then a sudden release. We don’t get a lot of those lately; more often it seems the tension just builds like a thunderstorm that won’t let go and rain.

Or is that who we are becoming? The times we’re in demand that we hold it together. It’s like we get to fall apart for an hour at a time, at best — then we have to get back on the job. Adults who are managing to pay the bills and parents who manage to attend to their kids have a lot of responsibility on their hands, and everything seems so dire; so crucial.

There rarely seems to be a time to let go, to experiment with moving with the flow. Our relationship to time seems to be increasingly packed into a linear format, even as we hear of new dimensions opening up. For many, their day planner is packed tighter and tighter; everything is planned and there is no room for spontaneity. This is the thing we have to watch: our relationship to time and to potential. Basically, we need to exercise choice in every single moment, and at every opportunity we have.

The planets that are stretched out in this cross in or near the cardinal signs are bringing that tension into each and every one of our natal charts, which means our mental sensation of life. There is a feeling, perhaps in the background, not so distinct or identifiable, but a feeling. There is some sense of urgency implied, and it takes many forms. One of them is a sense of uncertainty about the future.

Whatever you may believe about 2012 or the Age of Aquarius or the rapture, humanity knows that we are passing through a series of energy checkpoints that address issues like sustainability, the ability of our systems to hold up, and our relationship to the Earth and to one another. We need a revelation, but more to the point, we need to allow that revelation to change our relationship to existence.

The simultaneous Libra equinox and Aries Full Moon and the events that immediately precede them are a flash of awareness, to those who are willing to look and see.

Yours & truly,

Battle of the Dueling Narratives

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The Democrats are in a lot of trouble, depending on whom you talk to. The Republicans will sweep the midterm election, no question about it. The President is a one-term failure, an enemy of the business community. Anger with the establishment has hit a crescendo, and the Tea Baggers have seized the zeitgeist, running the board of primaries and positioning themselves to take over the Congress. Obama’s big-spending government is targeted by those who will stop the hemorrhage of money in unrestrained entitlements, turn back the clock on wasteful programs, and bring back “America’s honor” as Glenn Beck would have it. The Baggers are the wave of the future.

Really? Is all of this true? Is any of it true? Are we destined to be a nation led by those who want a repeal of the 14th amendment and absolute adherence to the Ten Commandments, who believe communal bike paths and community gardens lead to socialism and that Girl Scouts are fledgling feministas preparing themselves for abortions? Does the rise of the Tea Party signal the advent of a social order reminiscent of the John Birch Society, or is it just a typical backlash against Democratic politics? In short, is this as bad as it looks?

Backlash yes, but typical, no. We’ve discussed the astrology often enough that you know how critical is this period in history. It’s true that the Tea Baggers are leaving traditional Republicans in the dust at their primaries, which reflects growing disdain of both the establishment and incumbents, considered political insiders. The GOP, who funded the movement to start with, has had to embrace these radicals as their own, leaving their moderates behind. Having fostered the Bagger anger, Republican old-timers are scratching their heads at having lost control of the narrative. They’ve been forced to jump on board this moving train and, as Bill Clinton said recently, this new group of candidates makes George Bush look liberal.

It’s also true that Wall Street has issued an energetic “you’re dead to me” memo to Obama, despite his relatively gentle handling of their corrupt dealings. When progressives curl their lips at the weakness of Obama’s reforms, they should read between the lines of that memo. Obama has pissed off Wall Street. The joyous news that he will appoint middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren as presidential advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should make big bankers tremble as well. Installing Warren in an advisory position allows Obama to bypass a congressional stonewall of her appointment, putting her to work immediately. If that doesn’t encourage you, my progressive friend, nothing will!

Continued at this link…

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Right now we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.

We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.

PPS, In this recent edition of Astrology News, I publish an interview with one of the big gaming websites about my feelings on Facebook. I thought I would share it with you — it’s the second article down, at this link.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 17, 2010, #831 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

You may not understand what is inspiring or motivating you, but I suggest you go with it. Over the next few days, the sky heats up to a fast boil as Jupiter and Uranus form a conjunction in the angle of your chart associated with your dreams and your imagination. Then comes the annual Full Moon in your birth sign. The result feels like a lightening of a heavy relationship situation that you have vowed many times to adjust or move on from but which has been more persistent than you imagined it would be. You can create a hybrid of honoring the responsibility and commitment of relationship while opening yourself up to the potential that comes with authentic contact. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that this might not arrive in the form that you think, or with the person you think. Plenty of things work better than expectations.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Several developments next week will bring some relief from the convoluted mental and emotional experiences you’ve been through for the past month. The good part is that you got a look at where your creative energy goes: into needless obsession. Part of this was obsession with the past, or involved getting waylaid in some of your less-appealing childhood traits. You actually do have the power to be forward thinking, but I suggest you ask yourself if you really want to be; that is, if you think you’re sacrificing anything by letting go of what you believed yesterday or this morning. It won’t be your beliefs alone that make you feel better, but they will help; as the Sun moves into the health, well-being and work angle of your chart, you will shift your attitude and remember that responsibility is something that actually turns you on.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

For now, your thoughts come from your feelings; your ideas are the result of emotional impulses, and those impulses are not always correct. For that reason, you need to be careful — the translation process will happen fast, and have results that extend beyond anything you were expecting. For the next few days, I suggest you be especially careful what you say or do where alcohol is involved in any way (including merely being present in the environment). Don’t be fooled by the notion that you already thought things through carefully — many factors call not only for rethinking but also for reinvention. Even as the pace of certain events picks up radically into the early part of next week, I suggest you take this rethinking/reinvention process slowly. There will come a moment where you think you’ve ‘got it’ and then you’ll need to run it through the hopper one more time. So — steady as she goes.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Next week’s Aries Full Moon reveals something that has been hidden — for example, how much you’ve accomplished, most of which you forgot about or decided was not important. You chalked it up to experience without quite recognizing that it was actually a work in progress. Meanwhile, events seem to proceed on two fronts: one is some potentially dramatic development, revelation or recognition; the other is a subtler, more introspective breakthrough of thought that is actually more potent than anything that happens visibly. Remember this; while outer developments will no doubt be welcome and bring some recognition for all that you’ve done, the more significant matter involves the way you direct your mind, and how you process your ideas into action. Good things are happening, but the best is yet to come.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are starting to set certain things in order that have been resisting your best efforts and your lack of awareness. You’ve learned to pay attention, and to take action when you notice something needs attention. The decisions you make this week, particularly about your finances, will have effects that reach far into the future, and influence things you’re barely aware of today. So it’s vital that you make those decisions carefully, consciously and most of all, applying the full power of your intelligence. You cannot see all the potential repercussions or outcomes; you can only work with what you know, though your intuition might be telling you something. One missing factor has been a level of cooperation with those who have more resources than you do. You hold one piece to the equation, which is a concept. Someone else, or a group of others, has another piece: resources of a certain kind. Remember that the two are equal, or at least equivalent.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury, which recently turned direct, will be in your sign through early October; this will add up to more than two months of your ruling planet in your sign, including one of the most psychologically challenging retrogrades in recent memory. For the next three weeks, Mercury is going to cover the territory that it has already covered twice — first in direct motion, then in retrograde motion, and now again in direct motion. This is a layering process. That is how nearly all discovery, learning and healing proceed. They are less about moments of huge, dramatic breakthrough and more about gradually penetrating to the core. In a similar way, establishing new patterns, goals and a vision for our lives also happens in a way that resembles layering — the gradual building and development of what you might call inner technique. So take the time to build and grow carefully, intentionally, beautifully.

What do you love about yourself? You have some discoveries at hand. Qualities that in the past you may have doubted or thought of as weaknesses you can now consider to be some of your best assets or strengths. Other qualities that you may have previously considered to be your most redeeming assets may be the things you doubt the most. Yet in truth, all of these things make up who you are. The opinions you hold of yourself will change, and it’s helpful that they do; shifting your viewpoint about yourself will help you observe who you are in a holistic way. To be a whole person you need to be friends with all the different aspects of your psyche, or at least be aware of them and at peace with their existence. This is a learning process, and you’re in it now. I can tell you this: at the end of the day, and for that matter first thing in the morning, inner harmony is more important than popularity.

There is a fantastic dance of Venus and Mars going on in your birth sign right now. Okay, fantastic to some — those who love to visit with their seeming contradictions, for example, or who are curious about the inner exploration of gender. Beneath every discussion of sex, sex role, marriage preference, relationship style, gay or straight, dom or sub is the truth that we contain all of those polarities within ourselves. You don’t hear about this on the news, like you hear about the wild controversies about who in the minds of some should be allowed to get married, and who should not. But many of us know it’s true: a human being is inwardly multivalent. We’re all part man and part woman. We can all experience desire in the form of estrogen, or in the form of testosterone; and more often as is the case, a sublime mix of both.

Your fantasies say a lot about you. One thing they reveal is how emotionally driven you are. Nearly every description of Sagittarius that you read will defy this idea; Sagg is supposedly the sign of ‘don’t crowd me, give me my space’, and ‘I’m so detached, I don’t need you’. Which works fine, as long as you forget how prominent Scorpio and Pisces are in your chart — creating the deepest elements of a vast, oceanic sub-personality that is all about feeling, sensation, closeness and contact. These signs are brimming with energy right now. You have Venus and Mars in Scorpio, the angle of your chart that describes your deepest erotic drives, your dreams, your vehicle of escape. And there is a conjunction involving Jupiter and Uranus in Pisces, right on the line where your emotional security meets your desire to take the greatest risks. The planets suggest that this is the time to explore, to envision and to experiment.

This week, Pluto began to move forward again in your sign, after being retrograde since April. One implication for you is the opportunity to see what you’ve accomplished in your most intimate personal growth. For a while you get to go over territory you’ve covered before, but to experience it in a new way, with considerable experience. Then at a certain point you will enter new territory; you will open up inner subject matter that you haven’t considered in this lifetime, or anyway not for a long time. Remember that you’re setting the agenda as you go, and I suggest that agenda include honoring the pleasure-seeking aspect of who you are. That’s the part that will feed you, motivate you, and inspire you. Pleasure is what nourishes you, and allows you to have something to offer others. So when you think of growth, think of fun. I know this can be a challenge. But it’s a good one.

You live in a moment of relative freedom and flexibility. Freedom is always relative; it’s always a direct function of how we feel and what we think, not whether we can physically walk out the door. So what, exactly, is holding you back? Well, I would propose that you’re spending more time trying to understand what isn’t true than you are celebrating and taking advantage of what is true. You may also be trying to strike a compromise, but there is no such thing as ‘partial integrity’. So my question is, what would you need to consider yourself in full integrity? There seems to be a question involving a very specific point in a relationship. Not the relationship as a whole, but something precise and challenging in a specific way that you have not necessarily named, or if you have, you come in and out of awareness of the issue. My question is, how much more awareness do you need, and how do you want to get it?

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

We are now on the verge of an event that has not happened in Pisces since 1334: the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. For our world, that is unprecedented. I suggest you let this be a reminder that extremely rare things happen, and that they can happen to you. There will be an element of surprise with this development. But from the dimension of metaphysics, here is something I can offer you. Whether you feel ready for an improvement in your life will count for a lot. Readiness is not about being desperate, but being open. It’s not about feeling you deserve something but rather knowing with all your heart that it’s available. And it’s not about ‘having’ or ‘getting’ but rather about being. So I suggest you practice being the change you want in your life. This can be challenging if you’re feeling challenged, so I suggest taking any steps you can to set that feeling aside and embrace a space of being open and receptive.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Pluto, Stationing Direct

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Dear Fellow Seeker:

This week I am writing the October monthly horoscopes. I’m here today with a brief check-in, following up for a moment on Mercury stationing direct Sunday evening, and Pluto in Capricorn stationing direct today (Tuesday).

The Pluto system, seen from Hubble. This shows the four known points that orbit with Pluto, including Charon (not Chiron, that is someplace else), Nix and Hydra. The four points orbit around one common point, a gravitational center called the barycenter.

Mercury stationing direct happens instantly when you look at the mathematically calculated position of the planet. There can be a sense of immediate relief, and that would be welcome given the psychologically edgy quality of this recent transit.

Yet in reality, there are a few days on either side of Mercury stationing that require getting re-stabilized and adapting to the new environment. Some astrologers call this the “storm phase” of Mercury — when Mercury is moving less than half a degree a day. According to Raphael’s Ephemeris, which gives the daily speed of the planets, this phase stretches from Sept. 6 to Sept. 18. This is like an extra-sensitive zone where we get to integrate the revelations that came during the retrograde, and set a new agenda for the next three months.

This Mercury retrograde has a special message for those born in the 1960s, as it’s making a series of conjunctions to the Uranus-Pluto placements of millions of people. In its day, the Uranus-Pluto conjunction was radical astrology. It stirred up both the revolutionary and the evolutionary impulses in humanity and — though you might not know about it now — society took some great strides forward in that era. We understood something about community, about civil rights and about the need to participate that is rare to find today. Art, music, technology, advertising — all of it surged into the future, and we never went back.

What Sixties kids need to know is that Uranus and Pluto are again in aspect. Though not exact until June 2012, Uranus square Pluto has effects years ahead of the precise alignment, and we are deep into that phase now. So if you’re feeling a revolutionary impulse, or the desire to teach, to learn and to grow, look to the Uranus-Pluto cycle for clues as to what that’s about.

Today Pluto stations direct, and ventures forth deeper into Capricorn. For the rest of 2010 it will cover the territory where it’s been retrograde for the past five months. Then in January it will enter new territory, going out as far as 7+ degrees. That means there will be a whole new wave of Pluto conjunct the Sun transit candidates: Aries birthdays out to the end of March will feel it, and Cancer birthdays out to the end of June, Libra birthdays out to late September and Capricorn birthdays out to around Dec. 29 will experience this transit.

Section of chart for the collapse of WTC 7 on Sept. 11, 2001. This is the Capricorn angle of the chart: notice the concentration in the early degrees, where Pluto currently is.

People born between 1972 and 1974 will get an experience of Pluto square its natal position, the first major turning point after the Saturn return at age 30. Others around that age are warming up into or cooling down from that transit (or due to certain variances, may be in the middle of it, so let’s expand those dates from 1971 to 1975). Many other people will experience Pluto in the coming months due to direct transits in their charts. While the effects are deeply individual, Pluto is also a collective experience that everyone taps into; Pluto is truly the planet of the millions. And given the state of society, we surely need to hear from the millions, the sooner the better.

Those born in 1954, mid-1959 through mid-1960, 1964, late 1968 through early 1969, and 1973 currently have Pluto aspecting their lunar nodes: that is a turning point in the direction of their lives: a release of the past, a ready-or-not moment to plunge into the future, or a tipping point where the past and future are reconciled and a new direction chosen. Many others will get a new wave of Pluto transits, though this requires looking at the natal chart for points (including the ascendant and midheaven) in the early cardinal signs — where the cardinal T-square has been hovering around all year.

Pluto’s station today at 2+ Capricorn also stirs up one of the deepest, most painful controversies in U.S. history — the chart for Sept. 11, 2001. Whatever you may think of Sept. 11, and whatever your political persuasions, we know this is an event that touched us all. Pluto stations direct exactly conjunct the South Node of Sept. 11, 2001, which is to say, the deep history, connected to all of American history. It exactly opposes the 2+ Cancer Moon of one of the charts, all of which means that whatever happened on that day is directly relevant to what the American people are going through on this day. That is how transits work — they connect a cause, seemingly in the past, to a result, apparently in the present.

Yet cause and effect are never separate. That, you might say, is the law of karma, and something we need to be vigilant about right now. The United States of America has some growing up to do. Some call this 2012. Some call it the Age of Aquarius. Some call it Peak Oil and some call it embracing Gaia consciousness. They are all terms for the same thing — taking the next step in human evolution, and doing our part to shape the world in which we live.

See you tomorrow with Wednesday audio, and Friday with a new edition.

Yours & truly,

Planet Waves Gemini monthly horoscope for Aug. 1, 1999

Consciousness is the medium of reality. For all the debates over how the world physically manifested, evolved or was created, our real journey here is an endless stream of observations, decisions and emotional reactions. Rarely do we consider the genesis of awareness itself. It’s arguable that awareness is the only thing that can ever truly change, or activate change. And while the notion of “evolution” used to be about apes becoming people, we now know it is an evolutionary journey of consciousness. The mind interprets the meaning of what we experience, and adapts to the necessities with which we are faced. We are now learning the extent to which we can change our beliefs and make the “impossible” happen. We are slowly learning to use thought to direct and create our values and emotional responses. The important thing to remember is that we are the ones deciding; we are steering the vehicle of consciousness. In this moment, you stand in a place that is at once unfamiliar, unpredictable and may be truly daunting in its power. You stand on the threshold beyond thought. What you possess — as ever — is a most agile ability to respond, and to adapt; this means you really can create a new universe for yourself from the exceedingly fertile ingredients available to you right now, in this moment. You get to create the choices that will take you to the next place in life. At least on the level of ideas — where everything begins — limits are perfectly meaningless.

Mercury Retrograde: What Did You Learn?

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Dear Earthly Voyager:

My old friend Christopher McGregor, a self-taught lawyer who approaches jurisprudence from a metaphysical angle, is fond of asking people, ‘What did you learn?’

Laser-engraved, dual-honed redundant gigabit network patch board and modem-router at Brainstorm Computers and Technology in Kingston. They will engrave your laptop too! Photo by Eric Francis.

I always thought this was clever, and I consciously picked up the habit. Now when someone visits a foreign country or comes back from Burning Man or a therapy session, or has a relationship encounter they choose to tell me about, I will often ask: what did you learn?

I’ve learned something from their responses. There are people who right away jump into describing what they observed, experienced and deduced from a seemingly mundane experience. They know without thinking that they learned something, even if it’s something ‘small’. Some know that it’s possible to learn something about the world, and to learn something about yourself at the same time.

There are others who look at me and say, ‘What did I learn? What do you mean?’ — as if it’s impossible to learn something when visiting your aunt or from taking a ride on the Staten Island Ferry.

So, on the cusp of Mercury stationing direct in Virgo (that happens Sunday, Sept. 12), I’m here to ask: what did you learn during these past three weeks of Mercury retrograde? And, since Pluto returns to direct motion Sept. 14, we can expand that timeframe a little — but first let’s consider Mercury.

This has been one of the psychologically deepest, edgiest and most challenging spells of the Mercury dance in a long time. These qualities relate to Mercury being retrograde in Virgo, one of its home signs. Virgo is not an easy energy, being so mentally focused to the point of obsession, often on self-criticism. It’s given to bearing down on small details rather than the bigger scenarios of life; whether we love the details or despise them, they require attention.

Political news during this retrograde has verged on psychotic, in the clinical sense of the word. Rage about the economy is being directed into racial hatred, emulating a condition that those who know 20th century European history might be familiar with. We are living inside an economic and political tinderbox.

Speaking of, there have been an unusual series of fires this week in the United States, in or near urban neighborhoods — one in Detroit, where 85 homes were destroyed, with the cause still unknown. There was a gas explosion and fire in San Bruno, CA, last night, where so far 120 homes have been damaged or destroyed. As of late Thursday the fire was only half contained. Residents said they smelled gas coming out of sewers for weeks. And 169 homes were destroyed and 1,000 families evacuated in Boulder, CO as a fire engulfed the forest near the city, and moved in on residential areas. City residents were being asked to prepare for possible evacuation. As of last night the fire was still expected to burn for 10 more days. Wind gusts up to 64 mph were fueling the fire and making it very difficult to contain.

Speaking of fire, the little minister down in Florida who was going to burn the Koran seems to have put his plans on hold. Everyone but him seemed to get that this was a bad idea. Thursday the Department of Homeland Security descended on his church and set up a security checkpoint. He also got a call from Robert Gates, the defense secretary, explaining that this could cause serious problems for our troops were it to happen.

Fire has been a factor in the minds of some as well, and not necessarily as passion. Mercury retrograde in this sign has stirred up all kinds of doubts and, in a way typical of Chiron (another factor related to Virgo), revealed the weaknesses in the various systems of our lives. If this is true for you, the question is, what did you do about it?

Virgo is a key energy in our lifetimes because it’s so closely related to information technology. In 1990, hardly anyone had a computer in their house, and next to nobody had the Internet. Now many people carry the Internet in their pockets and have three separate connections. When we get a compact set of events involving Mercury or Virgo, that can get overwhelming; hardware and software can fail; we can sense how meaningless it all might be. Yet there are gems at the bottom of all the static.

Gigabyte logic board photographed at Brainstorm in Kingston. Photo by Eric Francis.

We’ve also had a few visits from the land of shadows. As I described last week, Mercury has been, and still is, contacting a diversity of points in Sagittarius. These are minor planets and a deep-space point called the Great Attractor, which was closely involved in Wednesday’s New Moon. One minor planet is called Ixion. It’s a Pluto-like body, with a 249-year orbit (Pluto’s is 250), though it has a particularly dark theme. My key phrase for Ixion is, “Anyone is capable of anything.”

Among the themes that came up are: what is the world like when people lose any perception of ethics? Everyone knows that locks keep an honest man honest and that there’s a sucker born every minute. So what keeps people from prying into our doors or lying about anything that can give them an advantage? Well that would be ethics. Ixion on the Great Attractor is stretching that concept a little thin. And, it’s going to be with us for a while.

The connection between Virgo and Sagittarius is asking about what material we have inherited from our family line, going back several generations. This includes the information contained in the deeper pool of our DNA. What is the influence of alcohol on our lives, and how has it shaped the emotional environment of our families?

What about those unfinished healing projects indicated by the retrograde (reference to the past) in Virgo (all matters of healing and wellness; holistic themes; mind-body connection). What’s the story with this little kid we contain, who so often tries to get our attention?

Mercury stations direct on Sunday, Sept. 12. The learning process is not over, but by now we should have the hang of things. In fact, thanks to the fact that Mercury covers the same ground three times, we get one last review of the subject matter as it moves from 5+ Virgo to 19+ Virgo, covering the territory where it was just retrograde for the third time — known as the ‘second shadow phase.’ Then in late September, Mercury will take new territory for the first time in six weeks.

The day of a Mercury station can have that feeling of the truth revealed. Odd bits of missing information can come out. Something that made no sense can suddenly make a lot of sense; what you know can assemble itself like a puzzle, though of course it’s really your mind doing the assembling. There’s a question, though: do we use that information? Do we assemble the final piece, which is bringing it into a decision process?

Pluto Stations Direct in Capricorn

Pluto in Capricorn is still a new influence. It’s the transit that is, in many ways, the pivotal energy of nearly every other event we’ve been experiencing this year and indeed going back nearly two years. Pluto was extremely active prior to that, because it spent the last few years of its trip through Sagittarius crossing over the Galactic Center. It was quite a culmination to a long transit that was dominated mainly by warfare and religious obsession.

DFI Lan Party logic board, sans CPU, at Brainstorm in Kingston, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Then came Pluto in Capricorn. Astrologers have understood this pretty well long in advance; Capricorn is about the structure of society, so the combination of the two meant a lot of changes in society’s institutions. Yet it also portends a refreshing of passion and celebration for which Capricorn is lesser known.

Pluto is about the soul’s journey. Often it’s difficult, here on the dense material plane; at other times we can easily flow with synchronicity. Yet in this phase of history, when we’re so obsessed by fear and when so many people live entirely dispassionate lives, and when so many are afraid to have new experiences, we need help: and Pluto in Capricorn is just that. It represents a new phase of evolution wherein we can crack the casing on those areas where we’re entrenched or stuck, and break out of the many ‘traditions’ that low-grade Capricorn represents in our era of history — like the one that tells us how cool it is to be totally hung up, smug or centered on personal ‘necessities’. This is not a time for purity, for orthodoxy or for leaning on the past; it’s a time to be flexible, adventurous and face the future, and that engine is coming right from Pluto in Cap.

Pluto first ingressed Capricorn on Jan. 25, 2008, staying for about five months. It returned to Capricorn to stay on Nov. 26, 2008. That was the year of the Wall Street banking collapse (the official beginning of the economic crisis, in the public’s perception) as well as the election of Barack Obama. It was the year that we began to see the hideous split in American culture between the Obsessive Regressives and the Supposed Progressives. Obama was elected during the last gasp of Pluto in Sagittarius, and we’re starting to see that have its manifestations now.

Pluto is retrograde the most of all the ‘nine planets’ — 44% of the time. This is because of its great distance to the Sun. This is the third retrograde in Capricorn; lately, it goes retrograde in early April and direct in mid-September. Because it’s retrograde so often, it’s a normal feeling for Pluto, which is a deeply introverted, introspective process most days. Then when it turns direct, it will have a moment of expression: growth and evolution are something that seem obvious, necessary, even desirable.

Of course, Pluto has been the focus of a good bit of stress and enforced changes the past year or so. We’ve recently experienced the third of three squares between Saturn and Pluto. This is the turning point we felt but didn’t necessarily see; it’s the one that actually made the difference. But it may take a little time to manifest — and Pluto direct is the time that’s likely to happen.

Among the first events of this Pluto direct is the Ceres-Pluto conjunction. This is about food. It’s about the food we eat as individuals, and the food we all eat collectively — the food supply, particularly the corporate one. The recent egg scandal, where half a billion eggs were recalled for salmonella, and then the disgusting conditions at the factories were revealed, is a hint of Ceres-Pluto — and that is a reminder to go small, to rely on local farmers as much as possible.

The Sky on the Cusp of Many Other Changes

Coils of Ethernet network cable at Brainstorm. Photo by Eric Francis.

After so many unbearably intense aspects and events through 2010, the sky (believe it or not) is currently at a bit of a lull. Jupiter and Uranus have backed off the Aries Point a little; Saturn has passed its square to Pluto. However, soon enough we will enter one of those phases when everything will seem to happen all at once. Over the next few weeks I will provide articles that detail these events.

Meantime, this segment of a chart will give you a clue. In the image at this link, take a look at those four planets with very high numbers — close to 30. To the left is the Chiron-Neptune conjunction, which is in its last months. Both planets are heading for Pisces; Chiron makes its last ingress in February, and Neptune transitions in during 2011 and 2012.

To the right is the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. We’re about to experience the second of three; this one takes place in Pisces. As I mentioned Tuesday, this is the first Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Pisces since 1334. In astrology, rare qualifies as potent. There will be one other exact alignment early next year, and then both planets will head into Aries again.

When outer planets change signs, life changes in sweeping ways. At such times, it’s vital to become a visionary of your own life. You have many precedents for this working — all the times you actually did something you previously thought was impossible. It’s wise not just to go with the flow but look where you want to be, and guide yourself there. And where would that be? I suggest you give that some thought as Mercury and Pluto change directions in the next few days. If you’ve been keeping any secrets from yourself, they’re likely to come out. Just remember, they’re coming out for a good reason.

See you next week.

Yours & truly,

PS: In this week’s podcast, I stated my plans to write about the Sept. 11 chart in this week’s edition, but every time I would touch the chart or the associated materials, I would get a heavy feeling that warned me off the issue. So, I will spare myself the umpteenth article about the incident, and provide you with a link to three back issues: Sept. 11, 1984, The Gingerbread House and Were It So. I think that the most interesting current development in the chart is that the lunar nodes (and thus, eclipses) have returned to Cancer and Capricorn, where they were when the initial event happened, only they have reversed positions. This is a little like saying that the karma of Sept. 11, whatever it was, has done a 180, which is partly why this anniversary is getting so much attention.

Meanwhile, in case you don’t know his name, I suggest you check into the work of a guy named Steven E. Jones, an engineer who has proven that the World Trade Center could not have been taken down by an airplane crash or diesel fuel. He is not a hippy conspiracy theorist; he’s a physicist who understands how buildings go up and how they come down. And there is only one way a steel skyscraper comes down: you demolish it. Nearly a decade on, we only know one thing for sure about the Sept. 11 incident: it could not have happened the way the official account says it did. It definitely happened and all those lives were lost — but it happened some other way.

The Courage Of Our Convictions

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Editor’s Note: This article covers the antics of a Florida pastor named Terry Jones, who plans to have his second annual burning of the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 incident. Thursday afternoon certain cable stations were reporting that Jones, under pressure from just about everyone, had called off his book burning. He’s been saying all week that he would await the word of his god, but I don’t think Barack Obama counts. Jude cautioned that there are conflicting reports and that Mercury is retrograde. Let’s hope the little weasel is telling the truth. Meanwhile, last I heard, DHS and other fancy cops had turned the entry driveway to his church into a security checkpoint. The things people will do for a little attention. — efc

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when Americans lost their sense of themselves. I’d be surprised if the majority still considers our country the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave,’ but I’d probably be in the minority in thinking we’re more free than courageous. Deeply polarized, we take advantage of our constitutionally-protected free speech, a liberty exploited by those who limit, hate and oppose the tolerance that democracy requires. We are free to speak our hearts in this nation, and some of our hearts are very small and dark, indeed.

In a tiny church in Florida, a minister named Terry Jones plans a book burning. He intends to gather his handful of parishioners together on Sept. 11 to burn copies of the Islamic Koran. This obscure little group, which calls itself the Dove World Outreach Center, believes that Islam is the antichrist. Last year, Jones’s book burning was attended by about 30 congregants and local press, including The Independent Florida Alligator. Now, thanks to the liberal use of YouTube and an uptick in hatespeak from the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Jones’s book-burning has become a current cause celebre.

General Petraeus, seconded by Hillary Clinton and the White House, warns that Jones’s media event presents a danger to U.S. troops. Even the Vatican disapproves, but Jones is determined. A YouTube segment showing an American tossing Korans into a bonfire will be a made-to-order recruiting video for terrorists, gasoline on the fire of global jihad. Someone from Homeland Security might have a chat with Dr. Jones in the next couple of days.

Nine years ago we surrendered freedom for ‘safety’ and declared war on an emotion: terror. Bush the Younger had systematically dismantled the programs and protections that Americans counted on in emergencies, but we didn’t notice because we weren’t expecting any emergencies. And then it happened, televised on a clear September morning. The planes came, the Towers fell. We were shocked that anyone would want to wound us, horrified that the sanctity of our shores had been breached. We looked for answers and found the easy ones, the kind of simplistic mythology we tell our children to lull them to sleep: don’t worry about a thing — America is a shining city on a hill and Daddy’s got a gun.

Continued at this link…

It’s About You: Capricorn Birthdays for 2010

Dear Capricorn or Capricorn Rising:

The Capricorn birthday audio presentation for 2010 is ready. This is a combination of astrology and tarot, suitable for Capricorn Sun, Moon or rising. I know Capricorn birthdays often get glossed over in the midst of the end-of-year/new year holidays, so I’m happy to be able to offer you this fresh look at your current astrology now.

For information about zodiac sign greeting cards, drop a note to sarah@planetwaves.net

It was an exciting report to record, since the focus of everyone’s astrology right now is Pluto in your sign, putting you at the vanguard of internal evolution as you develop your mission in the world — a world ready for your participation and, as I’ve been suggesting in recent horoscopes, your leadership.

Your Capricorn reading is a careful look at your astrology from before your last birthday through 2010. I touch on the significant astrology from the past few years and make connections to Capricorn’s role in the 2012 alignment.

The current astrology directly influences all the most important aspects of your life: your personal evolution, your career, your home base and sense of security, your family life and your relationships.

You are being called to develop your integrity, Capricorn; in fact, one of my readers once described Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn as mandatory integrity. As you’ll hear in this audio birthday report, you are up to the task of leading by example.

I’ve included a 20-minute tarot card reading, using the Voyager deck by James Wanless. You can order now and get instant access. This is high-quality stereo audio which you can listen to as many times as you like, for as long as you like — these files will be preserved in their original location. It’s priced to be affordable — $14.95 for about an hour of material (this is an extra-long edition of birthday audio).

Because my astrology writing is focused on the houses, I recommend this audio for Capricorn rising as well. This audio report makes an excellent companion to Capricorn Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, which is in written form.

Thanks for your participation, and for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

As this Mercury retrograde draws to a close, we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.

We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.


Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 10, 2010, #830 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries Confidential

In many relationships there is often that feeling of one person being ahead of the other. This might involve personal growth, apparent commitment to the relationship, desire to experience new things within or outside the partnership, and many other possibilities. The current distinctions may involve whether one partner is more into sex, more into relating, or able to understand the way that these things integrate. With Venus and Mars doing an interesting dance in your partnership angle, this theme may surface, and the way the planets are arranged, the story is going to evolve. One day someone may seem to be running ahead of you; another day they may backtrack or need to revisit something from the past. I suggest you participate in this dance as an active partner, which means knowing what you want, and listening to what others want. Remember, desire is subject to change.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Taurus Confidential

The most dynamic and creative angle of your solar chart is connected to the sign Virgo, which suggests that your passions can get bogged down in many layers of psychology. By passions, I mean your creativity, your curiosity, your sexuality and your desire to experiment with anything new. By psychology, I mean things like rationalizing, guilt, denial or critiquing your desires and ideas out of existence. You alone know how much time you waste doing these things, and by time I mean hours and years. Mercury is about to end its retrograde phase in this part of your chart, suggesting that you can work out a chunk of this material with something that equates to a single idea. You may not be familiar with the power of ideas to transform your life; to you, one may seem like another. Yet ideas are no more abstract than you are. If you are handed a solution or an approach, I suggest you try it for a while and see where you end up.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Gemini Confidential

Lately, it seems that everything comes back to safety and security. From airport screening, to every package coming with two or three safety wrappers, to Net Nannies and spam filters and a password for everything, we are a world obsessed with security. Yet rarely do we notice that security is in our minds. Whether we actually feel safe is a thought; it’s not connected to how many locks we have on our door. You inherited your concept of safety from your elders, who in turn got it from your mutual ancestors. If you’re a clear observer of yourself, you see the way the ideas of all these other (mostly neurotic) people influence whether you feel safe at night. Yet you’re entitled to your own absolutely unique concept of what constitutes peace of mind. If you’re paying attention you might notice that it has very little to do with secrecy, guns, locks or things that filter your email for you.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Cancer Confidential

Mercury’s retrograde in Virgo, your 3rd solar house — communications, ideas, writing, state of mind, your neighborhood — has likely come with a reassessment or a crisis. Let’s talk about mental health first, a topic we need to consider in how colonized our minds are by a constant barrage of ‘information’ and messages, all of which we’re supposedly responsible for. This is enough to drive anyone into madness and frustration. You’ve seen the need to not only reorganize but to also be vigilant about the workflow and the impact of data as it moves through your life. But there is something deeper, which is an idea that may be deeply meaningful to you, and something you’ve wanted to act on for a long time. I suggest you do what you need to organize your life around making that happen. Small moves will mean a lot, and one step will lead to another.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Leo Confidential

How is your financial reassessment coming? Have you figured out that your resource base comes in many different forms, not just money? We’re obsessed with cash in our current era, to the extent where there is a price connected to very nearly everything. Yet when your neighbor knocks on your door to borrow a cup of sugar, do you write it down in a book? Or have we stopped depending on our neighbors for that kind of thing? I suggest you consider what you’ve learned about how resourceful you are, and how this connects to the diversity of forms of wealth. What they all have in common is that they arise from the Earth. That makes a case for developing grounded ideas about how you come to have enough. Meanwhile, cash itself is the focus, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this Mercury retrograde, taking a look at your accounting methods and, at the least, knowing how much money you actually have.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Virgo Confidential

I am going to take an educated guess that these have been psychologically trying weeks for you. That won’t be true for all Virgos but I know that this has been a particularly challenging Mercury retrograde for some, given its presence in your sign. What may be making the difference is how much progress you’ve made, till now, addressing the past. If you’re someone who lives with a sense that the past is unresolved, you may be feeling this more than others. It’s true — family history presents us with many challenges. Ghosts of the past can arise in the form of people with new names and faces. Old relationships can haunt our current ones and patterns tend to repeat themselves. However you may handle the past, you still need to navigate through the present, and this comes down to making decisions. Once Mercury stations direct this weekend, you’ll be working with information or at least an angle you haven’t considered yet — and this will make the correct choice seem obvious.

Attention Virgos — Mercury retrograde has NOT eaten your birthday report, but I’m a little delayed. I plan to do it early next week. A thousand pardons! I still suggest checking in with the Mercury retrograde in Virgo report which is like taking a trek on Virgo through the 12 houses of the zodiac. There is an abundance of information in there offered in service of a sign that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Here is the link to connect with that product. Here is the link to connect with that product.

Libra Confidential

If you hesitate, you’re in a position where someone else might make a decision about what is important to you. The thing is, you may not be sure quite what to do, or what feels right. And you may need some time to decide, especially if the question involves a relationship. I suggest that, despite however much influence someone has had on you, that you pause for long enough to get a sense of where you’re really coming from. That may take you a couple of months. This is a deep situation, and parts of it are veiled in shadow. But here is what I can tell you at the outset. Relationships are based on shared values. Yes, they are based on chemistry and other kinds of attraction, but what makes a relationship last, and grow, is a foundation on values. So I suggest you evaluate this carefully in your inner world, and listen to those you meet and get a sense of what is the very most important to them. Make this a way of life.

Scorpio Confidential

I don’t think anyone has to encourage you to experience desire, but what I think could be meaningful to you is some encouragement to explore that desire on the level of curiosity, creativity and play. You don’t need to participate in the exceptionally uptight times in which we live. I don’t think you want to. However, it may be that ‘other people’ have an idea of commitment that interferes with your concept of what it means to simply be free — to breathe, to socialize, to explore your curiosity, to explore your feelings, to experiment. You know, all those things that commitment supposedly prevents. I suggest you not be afraid of what you want. I would also suggest that you ask directly and find out what the people or person closest to you wants. And if you’re not in a relationship situation that prevents you from being a different person every day, well — there are some amazing options available to you.

Sagittarius Confidential

The next few days offer something of a cosmic trigger for you to move forward on a career or professional matter that has taken its time, and recently been beset with delays or complications. I suggest that you go over all of your prior work; sort through your files and correspondence records, and give yourself a sense of perspective. You need to know enough of the details to make a timeline, and to have a sense of how this idea has evolved. Remember, you need this overview because you’re the one who has to manage the project. Your role is in part political — that of getting people to work together toward a common goal. For that to happen, you have to know what the goal is, and that means what it was and what it is becoming. And the missing factor you’ve been seeking for so long — it may well make itself known this weekend or early next week.

Capricorn Confidential

Be particularly mindful of any correspondence that goes across the ocean or the continent. You can also put this to work for you. If you’re trying to figure something out, call your friends on the other coast, or across the pond. Look for someone with a distant, removed or elevated perspective. In fact whatever mystery you’re now facing would look easier to solve if you personally traveled and looked at it from across the plane of reality. If you’re trying to solve a problem, look carefully about how your beliefs influence your perspective on the situation. You seem to be caught in a small idea where a big one is called for; you’re using an analytical tool where a creative solution is what you need. What you think is the issue may not be the issue at all — and as the next month or so progress, you will focus on what you’re trying to change and become, within yourself.

Aquarius Confidential

You have more freedom than you think; you’ve done the deep work of breaking free, you’ve endured the pain and the struggle, and you have experienced many enforced changes. Now comes the greatest challenge and the true reward — taking up life as a creative journey. That journey, if you allow it to, could take you far from where you are today, but you still seem to have some lingering emotional attachment or nostalgia. Just remember, that’s what’s keeping you tethered rather than some huge obstacle or impossible task. Yet if you’re not accustomed to the idea that you create your reality, the notion of doing precisely that may itself be daunting. I suggest you tempt yourself with the idea of what you truly want, especially if it seems impossible to attain.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Pisces Confidential

Once people start cooperating with you, you will recognize how vital it is that you cooperate with yourself. Or perhaps if you are true to your own cause, others will feel compelled to get behind you. Either way, this is the time to focus on your deepest, highest or best vision. It’s also time to stop assuming that it’s not going to happen and, to the contrary, assuming that it is going to happen. Indeed, what is possible, even probable, is something extremely rare, in fact, a development that may be unprecedented. And while others may play a supportive or pivotal role, I suggest you not delude yourself with any idea of not having exactly what you need right now. The more you focus on the truth that you are exactly who you need to be, and that you have exactly the resources you want the most, the more you will let go of your resistance, get into the flow and let your dreams manifest.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Virgo New Moon & the Mercury Storm

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Dear Cosmic Companion:

We are approaching the end of Mercury retrograde in Virgo, and are in the last day of the lunar cycle that turns over Wednesday morning with the Virgo New Moon. These are some of our earliest collective experiences of Virgo without the presence of Saturn there. So you might think of this as Virgo Light, after more than two years of the heavy-duty edition; but even that dense type of Virgo energy was met over and over again by an opposition from revolutionary Uranus in Pisces.

Photo of Myrna by Eric Francis. Design by Sarah, Blue Studio – New York.

One thing about Virgo in recent years is that it always seems to be setting itself up to get struck by lightning. That lightning is saying, “You don’t have to take yourself and everyone apart so they make sense and then you discover they make less sense in pieces. Leave room for direct knowledge; give yourself the freedom to adapt.”

That said, the Saturn-Uranus opposition is now something we’ve embodied, or have been in the process of doing; not quite the past, but something that we’ve internalized and accepted as part of the whole; as part of who we are. The current retrograde has emphasized the many things that feed into how we feel and what we think. And as much as we may know our history or be tapped into the ancestral realm, the question always remains, what do we do now? What is the best choice, now? What is logical, now? Or better still, what feels right, now?

Wednesday’s Virgo New Moon makes a square — a 90-degree aspect — to a deep-space point called the Great Attractor. We could sum up the square aspect as ‘something happens’ and the Great Attractor as enormous mass and energy propelling itself through the universe (naturally, in the midst of Sagittarius). The two combined add up to a revelation about existence; a thought with propulsion, with leverage, with a life of its own, but ultimately something we contain and embrace. These thought forms are within us; they are within the human experience. By definition we’re bigger and more encompassing than they are.

A minor planet called Ixion is currently working the Great Attractor. It has a 249-year orbit (similar to Pluto), so it’s going to be here for a while. If you’re wondering about the seeming vacuum of any distinction between right and wrong, or truth and deception, Ixion on the Great Attractor describes that crisis, and the New Moon reminds us that it’s time to do something about it. Virgo-styled, that something would be applying reason and rationality to our muddled perception of the world. Trust me, everyone: Obama is not a Bolshevik (as one of my neighbors hallucinated out loud yesterday).

At the same time, Mercury is close to stationing direct. It does so on Sunday, Sept. 12, so by Thursday it will be moving less than half a degree a day, retrograde. This is described by some astrologers as the ‘storm phase’ of Mercury retrograde, because it’s slowing down and approaching that moment when its relative direction switches. And that is, dependably, another moment when the truth comes out. Things that were just slightly veiled, or visible but slightly skewed, can have a way of making themselves known.

We humans sometimes have this odd glitch of thinking we don’t know what we think. Then we set about figuring it out. Here is where the ‘truth revealed’ quality of Mercury stationing direct is helpful. Not only do we have a window on revelation and a little extra mental leverage, both truth and ideas can be revealed in these moments of change. Mercury stationing — whether direct or retrograde — brings out a layer of awareness or understanding that can feel like pulling back a curtain on the obvious.

Part of the beauty of this event is that it opens the door to many more interesting points of interest. One that’s worth highlighting is the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in late Pisces, which is brewing now and is exact Sept. 18. This is the second of three Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions. The first was on the Aries Point on June 8. Take this conjunction and move it back into Pisces and it’s another critter entirely. There is a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction every 14 years or so, but there hasn’t been one in Pisces since before 1609, as far back as I can search. (Tracy just went back a little further and it turns out the last Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Pisces was in 1334. Here is a short article that covers that topic. That’s a long time ago, especially when you consider that it’s almost 2334.) So at the least, this is the first in the history of the Americas or of modern Europe and in England since King James I was boss.

I would sum up the current sequence of events as: what is the relationship between problems and creativity? Where do we invest our energy? At what point do solutions make that seemingly magical transformation into the truly creative process from which they stem? Or said another way, when do we let go of our hang-up with problems and stoke the fire of invention?

Nigh upon us is the time.

Yours & truly,

PS, This weekend I am giving the keynote presentation at the Loving More national conference. This is a small, friendly event at the Easton Mountain Retreat Center near Saratoga, NY. It’s easily accessible from Western Mass., the Albany area, Binghamton, the Hudson Valley and not too far from New York City and Boston. More information about the conference is here.

Here is a description of my talk, which is Saturday night:

Community & Compersion

One role that polyamory plays in culture is to help us rebuild our fragmented communities. Households meet other households, lovers meet one another’s lovers and group events based on human contact appear in cities around the country. What makes that possible is conscious dedication to the many relationships we all have. This in turn is facilitated by compersion, the space of allowing and embracing the pleasures and life path of the people we love. Compersion is based on the recognition that your partner is a whole person, which in turn grows from your own experience of yourself as a whole person. This sense of wholeness is extended into our community experiences and becomes a viaduct through which we embrace one another in a cooperative rather than competitive way. As we learn to experience ourselves as whole people, our communities will reflect our state of mind.