Dear Subscriber:

First, a historical note. Did you know that when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” the thing he discovered was Haiti? So the island that was shaken and the country that was shaken to rubble this week has a hallowed place in the dark history of the New World, as the place where European feet first touched the ground. There, they met the native Tainos, one of the Arawak people; and made a settlement, called La Navidad, on the north coast of present-day Haiti.

Thus began a holocaust. In 2007, US News and World Report said that from an estimated initial population of 250,000 in 1492, the Arawaks had dropped to 14,000 by 1517. How did that happen? There’s the famous entry from Columbus’ log, reporting his first encounter with them; that pretty much explains it.

“They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them…I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking…They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

So much for Pat Robertson’s theory that this week’s quake happened because the Haitians had made a pact with the devil at Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien on Aug. 14, 1791. Yes, those in the slave revolt used Santeria at the commencement of the rebellion; that is historically documented. But even in the unlikely event that has some kind of karmic influence, it doesn’t explain what had happened on Hispaniola for the prior 300 years: brutal slavery at the hands of the Spaniards and the sugar-addicted French. Bad things have been happening in Haiti since Columbus laid eyes on the place.

When we look at the astrology of Tuesday’s earthquake and notice that it was triggered by the Aries Point — that potent first degree of the horoscope that puts collective and personal events into the context of one another — we can safely propose that this is about something much bigger. Are we getting a message that this is so big, it’s a comment on the story of the entire New World?

Yes, earthquakes happen, and they can happen anywhere. For example, there is an active geological fault line running down the Hudson River. The Indian Point nuclear power plant sits atop a newly identified intersection of two active seismic zones. We in New York who don’t even experience tremors could wake up to the Earth shaking one day next week or in 5,000 years.

The Aries Point and the Earthquake

The Haiti earthquake occurred in the days before a solar eclipse overnight Thursday to Friday, right near an 11-planet alignment in Capricorn and Aquarius. Yet in the midst of that alignment was a specific astrological marker, involving something called the Aries Point. That’s the location of the Sun on the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring. Or, the location of the Sun the day the Sun’s rays square the equator as the Sun enters Aries; same thing. The Aries Point, literally the first degree of the sign Aries, is extended by astrologers to include all four cardinal signs: the early degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, all of which are sensitive to Aries Point effects.

I often characterize the Aries Point as “the personal is political,” in that the news that occurs around the time of an Aries Point event always affects a lot of people and also has a property of merging the personal and the collective realms. The world crashes into our living rooms. Everything happens at once. On the same day, relief efforts are underway from one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent history, and possibly in a very long time; congressional hearings on the banking crisis that nearly toppled the economy are proceeding. Citigroup was leveraged 68:1, debt to assets. There are no new regulations in place to prevent it from happening again. Remember I said that. I’m not the only one.

Suddenly there’s a new terrorist alert coming out of Yemen. Most people hadn’t heard of Yemen till a month ago. One near-miss incident on one flight is causing some to respond as if Sept. 11 had happened again.

A trial is underway in San Francisco to determine the constitutionality of banning same-sex marriage; talk about the personal being political. This trial is uniting one of the nation’s top conservative attorneys, Ted Olson — the U.S. government’s lawyer under George Bush — with one of the stalwart ‘liberal’ movements. Finally, a defection.

Then, in the approximate flavor of Mercury retrograde in Capricorn (on the Aries Point, with Pluto two degrees away), Google is considering pulling out of China. The company, which is part of our daily lives if anything is, cited what the Washington Post reported as “a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions.” China has imposed strict censorship requirements on Google which even fans of the company are disgusted that the search engine follows.

Oh, and our nation’s health departments are blitzing us with that ad for flu vaccinations, which you can see practically on any channel at any time: they suddenly have an overstock. I haven’t got around to doing an article on this, but hand sanitizers are pure BS. They don’t work; they make matters worse, creating a sticky, sugar-based film on the hand into which bacteria embeds and where it flourishes, allowing it to be spread further.

That Was Just the Warmup

This is a snapshot of the culmination of Mercury retrograde, two eclipses and a massive alignment within about 60 degrees of sky: a lot of pressure, a lot of Aries Point. Mars (the ruler of Aries) is retrograde, too: that lasts all winter, and you could look at it as Mars being a bit reserved and feeling cramped in his style: or Mars calling us all to look inward and search out our true sense of self. That the retrograde takes place in Leo puts Mars opposite Aquarius, the sign of conformity to groups. We are just coming out of one of the most impressive phases of mass-hypnosis that a talented, astrologically literate fantasy writer could ever make up. That would be based on a decade of Neptune in Aquarius, the drug of the masses being denial, Facebook and Fox News.

Chiron is now conjunct Neptune, a rare event that is about clearing up all that fog and seeing through the denial, delusion, deception and false idealism of Neptune in Aquarius.

But here’s what I’m here to tell you: we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I can say this with some confidence after studying Aries Point effects for about 10 years, and knowing a little about the astrology of 2010. All the fuss about 2012 is the Aries Point, but we are fully into the aspect pattern right now, as planets begin to gather in the early degrees of the cardinal signs.

Of course the Flying Saucer People (who may be right) don’t know that; the Mayan astrologers seem to have had a clue: their long count comes to its transition on Dec. 21, 2012 with the Sun in the first degree of Capricorn, that is, aspecting the Aries Point precisely. The issue is not the Sun, itself; what the Mayans were looking at was where the Sun would be located: precisely on one of the cardinal points, and where they would be aligned at this time in the precessional cycle.

Before that happens, we have the spring of 2010. And here’s a bit of what we get. The big event involves a conjunction in the first degree of Aries: the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus, two very influential planets. Jupiter leaves Aquarius and moves into Pisces on Sunday, but it does something unusual: it cuts clear across Pisces and stops in the first degree of Aries, where it stations retrograde.

Uranus, meanwhile, has been in Pisces for nearly seven years. If you’re a Pisces you’ve been on a wild ride, no doubt; but we’ve all been feeling this one as the morph of the technical world with the dream world, as a sense of bizarre instability and emotional restlessness. Uranus moves into Aries in June, right when Jupiter does: and we have the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on the Aries Point. The last time these two planets teamed up with Aries Point involvement, it was in Libra the summer of 1969. That was the summer we had the Manson murders, the Moon landing and Woodstock, among many, many other news events that get eclipsed by these big three. (For example, the Beatles broke up that year.)

What is this conjunction about? From a political angle, we see many signs of a mass movement or uprising of some kind. It could be aggressive, or even militant; it could just be highly energized. I recognize that there are occasionally protests in our time of history, but we still don’t identify with this as being a time of rebellion or uprising against the many injustices that are being perpetrated. Given all the years and years of abuses taken by the American public, and by extension, the public of many other countries that have been affected by everything from the Iraq war to the banking crisis. Most people will still tell you they don’t know what to do about these things. Jupiter-Uranus to me looks like an invention; and in part, an invention of identity.

What we don’t want is too many people becoming too over-identified with a brilliant cause that they ‘take matters into their own hands’, and I don’t mean that in the style of Betty Dodson. The influence of Aries could have certain individuals becoming extremely gung-ho about their ‘ideals’ and Uranus could have them convinced they represent a ‘group’. Jupiter can lead people to think they know more than they do. The theme of the hour is precisely the opposite: figuring out how little we know; and getting some perspective on all this group identification that has been dominating the political landscape of our era.

When Jupiter and Uranus meet on the Aries Point, they will be in alignment with Saturn and Pluto, which have already been stirring up plenty of change. Pluto in Capricorn all by itself is the astrological semaphore for the banking collapse; the near-total dysfunction of Congress; and many other aspects of corporate and government decay. Astrologers have seen this coming for years; in articles years ago I was describing a banking crisis when I had no clue what that really meant. Notably, when Chiron crossed Capricorn beginning in late 2001, we had the aftermath of the Sept. 11 event, the Enron scandal, and Worldcom going down, and Arthur Andersen; and a variety of government scandals involving the FBI and US intelligence ignoring the warning signs about the imminent attacks.

What I said at the time was that Chiron in Capricorn was a kind of readiness exercise for Pluto’s arrival; if we learned the lessons then, we would not have to go through them again. Now, it seems the entire economy has turned into one giant Enron.

An Awakening of Consciousness

Jupiter and Uranus in Aries add a LOT of energy to this equation. But they add something else, something we really need: self-awakening. The thing about Aries is that it is deeply connected to themes like self-awareness. Aries is the original sign of I Am; it turns the key to existence, to action and to desire. Uranus is a revolutionary force, forward thinking and provocative. It could have been named Prometheus just as well. The ‘fire of the gods’ is the core of self-awareness, which of course all religions seem to have an issue with. Better to leave it all to God, than to be entrusted with the responsibility of making decisions.

Then comes Jupiter. Jupiter magnifies things and is an excellent compliment to Uranus because it brings in a wisdom aspect, a cultural attribute and something worldly. And this sounds like it has the potential to be a sudden, spontaneous awakening of awareness, in particular, of self-awareness. Aries is about desire, and after Mars has spent six months lingering in Leo, most of it retrograde, desire is going to be running high this spring.

Opposite Jupiter/Uranus is Saturn in Libra, which is about taking relationships seriously. The Sixties were great and all, but one of the missing pieces was a reverence for relationship. That was a problem. What happened in the Sixties was not really a sexual revolution; it was the unleashing of long pent-up desire. There is plenty of sex going around these days, but most of it is not what you would call conscious or honest.

At the same time, in the same era, many of the people who aspire to do the work on themselves are afraid of sex or sexual contact; a good few — you must know some of these folks — are chipper and spiritual and associate sex with the ‘baser instincts’. Many people are trapped in relationship paradigms that force them to suppress who they, or is it who we, are; and it looks like that issue may finally catch fire. We sure could use the heat.

Yours & truly,

Updates daily at Planet Waves and Cosmic Confidential Diary.

Very Big PS: I am going to do my best to disappear for the next week in the service of wrapping up the Cosmic Confidential horoscopes. That may mean no regular horoscopes next week, or whatever other simplifications my inner editor can dream up. It will be very nice to wrap up four months of work on this edition: I am ready. Those who have not yet signed up for Cosmic Confidential can currently do so at the original per-sign price. See the Cosmic Confidential Diary for more details and it’s been a pleasure being your astrologer once again through eclipses and other planetary wilderness. — efc

 

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

No, I’m not writing today about liberated vaginas and the purity of a zipless fuck: it’s already been done by Erica Jong, taking an early stab at breaking through the social coding, ultimately the wall of guilt, that keeps us in our assigned roles. In sex, as in everything else, we’re only as authentic as we’ve allowed ourselves to be. Today we’ll examine the wall itself because, seems to me, we could not be tossed and twisted like pliant pizza dough whenever something scary comes along if the ingredients weren’t already within us. On the face of it, the gluten that makes us so easily stretched and molded seems to be a kind of sociopolitical herd consciousness, turned at the snap of a twig or the whim of a leader. Those of us disinclined to take such a leap get carried along by the majority, and that sums up my experience of the early years of our new century.

As always, it’s news of the day and the politics that shape it that bring all this to mind, absurd illustrations of our current psychic state. It’s taken so tragic a thing as the heartbreaking earthquake in Haiti to get the politicos off a toxic replay of national security issues, all this on the heels of the Christmas bombing event that put Janet Napolitano’s job as Homeland Security Secretary in jeopardy. Hysteria is sooooo unattractive. I confess to having very little patience with this kind of mob-mentality and group-think, and took a certain perverse delight in this quote from an article by David Rothkopf: “The Republican Party has the collective cool on these matters of Prissy helping to birth Melanie’s baby in Gone With the Wind.” While I’m coming clean, I should also mention my resolution to immediately turn the channel on any program featuring Liz Cheney. She will be added to my Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck Rule: “Do not lie down with dogs lest ye get fleas.” Or Neo-con kennel cough, whatever.

As regards the herd consciousness of the opposition party, and in some instances our own, facts don’t seem to get us very far in the national argument, intelligence doesn’t count for much, and emotion is the name of the game. As illustrated in the book What’s The Matter With Kansas?, when we’re fed on a consistent diet of make-believe, we don’t connect with our own best interests even when they’re staring us in the face. Even more, as regards this whole issue of random terror, we’re easily spooked. Sometimes I think our American “can do-ism” and confidence in our ability to manage our own lives play against us when Chicken Little starts to squawk. 300 million of us rushing out with shotguns pointed at the sky at the first sign of danger is not only counterproductive, it’s stupid. And stupidity seems the word I choose most often when I think of the dialog concerning the state of our union.

Continued at this link…

 

 Weekly Horoscope for Friday, January 15, 2010, #801 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Did I ever mention that one of the reasons I like writing horoscopes is how subversive they are? Being aware of astrology puts people at a distinct advantage. I get to propose ideas that subvert the dominant paradigm — which is exactly what your charts say you’re up to; or what you have available. These days you’re dancing to the beat of a creative drummer that nobody else knows exists. This exploration is giving you ideas about yourself, as well as approaches to political or professional situations that lately have shown no sign of abating in their weirdness. You, however, are poised to take advantage of a turn of events that others are bound to find distressing or impossible to deal with; and as a result, exceed something you were certain was a limit on your success.

The thing about your old beliefs is that you couldn’t find yourself in them. The thing about your new beliefs is that you’re right at the center of them. Let this be your guide to wider mental and geographic horizons, and to your notion of success. Despite many odds against you, the ways of the past that long predate your birth are yielding to your willpower and influence. Here’s the thing to remember: while old beliefs can exist, and while they can guide our actions in ways that are not relevant to the present moment, the past itself does not exist. Or rather, it doesn’t exist, if we notice that fact. Lately you are noticing; it’s like you’ve climbed up onto an island of the future. Take a look around: this is where the journey begins.

The thing about agreements is that when they are made consciously, they can be unmade. If they are made unconsciously, they have to be sorted out carefully before they are unmade, because nobody really understands what they implied. However, you know what you want from a particular situation and you can go a long way from stating that plain-Jane simple and clear such that a plant could understand it. The thing is, it’s likely to be something you haven’t said yet; you may not have said it in the context of this conversation, and you may not have ever articulated it clearly at all. This is a great opportunity; and don’t stop here. You are finally figuring out what is important to you, and it’s about time. Now, put that knowledge to work for you.

Friday’s solar eclipse in your opposite sign definitely represents a shift in a relationship, and I hope you’re clearly perceiving the potential. It’s possible that some change in the structure of things means that it’s time to move on, but it’s more likely that those involved will move onto a new level of awareness and a new kind of involvement. There seems to be some kind of incentive involved here; I suggest you figure out what it is, and keep it at the front of your mind when you’re making decisions. There are no more throwaway relationships in your life. I’m not saying there ever were, but now each person you become involved with needs to have a space that is their own, and be considered a lifetime endeavor.

You cannot only reorganize your work patterns now; you can go to the meta-level and consolidate your methods and systems. Indeed, that’s the theme of the hour, and there will be many benefits for doing so. It would, in fact, be wise and ethical to gear your motivations toward efficiency and profit, as functions of one another. They need to increase together, which will have an added benefit of ease. Is it really possible to make things easier, cheaper and smoother? Actually, yes. Part of how you’ll be doing this is by paying close attention to your environment: in particular, your technological environs, and to one person who is a highly effective teacher, but who you may have only caught on to the wisdom of recently.

How do you really feel about sex? Do you secretly wish you could take off your socks? Do you wish you could take a shower right afterwards, but it’s too rude? Or would you rather stay covered in your scent the whole day? Do you find the talking part as hot as the physical part? Do you like the risk of making someone guess what you want? Do you secretly swim in the direction of that which is forbidden, just because that makes it better? Yes, yes, I thought so. Your charts are super-sexy (as they would say in Germany) right now. I hope this means you are feeling equally sexed; and in terms of getting what you want, it’s far likelier if you go for exactly what you want; what, and with whom.

The ground is moving under your life right now, and and that means that energy is rising up from the Earth. Feel the power, even as you wonder what will happen, or how you will deal with the changes. Feel your stability deepening, even as your structures are challenged. Notice how the brittle spots in your emotions are cracking and settling into place; and how the strong, flexible ones are standing strong and true. Don’t be annoyed by that one lingering anxiety; don’t let it hold you back; it’s just a thought. The truth is, you are letting go of a past that you for a very long time took for granted. You took its power over you for granted as well; and that, finally is changing fast.

Your concept of a partner or loved one has to change. In polite spiritual company one would say evolve, but I mean shift entirely. You’re holding onto a lot of old ideas about this person, or trying to; they are pretty much useless as anything except souvenirs now. The past few weeks have taught you how deep into yourself you can go, without ‘losing yourself’ in there. You have seen how close to a seemingly dangerous possibility you can come without losing your nerve. All of this is helping you make a new map to your own mental process and psychic interior. Now, back to this other person: update your files; see them in their current context; and most of all, envision them on their chosen path to the future. Don’t worry: this is much likelier to bring you closer than it is to draw you apart.

Jupiter is about to change signs; it does this once a year, which is what makes you such a fashionable person. This year’s fashion is the hot tub, the Jacuzzi, the hot springs bath or when all else fails, the bathtub. If you don’t have a bathtub, make friends with someone who does, and trade them occasional peeks at your collection of Air Mail stamps. Maybe get a fish tank; check Craig’s List and you’ll find some gear at a reasonable price. Try to spend some time by the ocean. Drink water. I will remind you many times during the coming four seasons: water, water, water. One other thing: keep your frugal attitude. Don’t do less, just do it for cheaper. Save your money for some kind of significant, imminent long-term investment in yourself.

What an interesting eclipse today. I wonder what’s going on with you. You may file your iStrology report via email; juicy is welcome. As for my aStrology report: you seem to be claiming back some significant aspect of yourself or your autonomy that was previously invested in a relationship. What you’re verging on is experiencing yourself as a whole person: independently of any other person, or in the context of a relationship. This ability will provide you with many opportunities to go over ground you’ve covered, and in a sense taken, during the past three or four months, smooth out problems and accomplish your goals with much greater efficiency. The truth is, you have a job to do. Get your intentions behind that every day.

There are no compromises to integrity. You will make errors; there may be learning experiences; there are certainly unexpected or unfamiliar circumstances. But there are no compromises. Either something is true or it is not. Either someone is honest or they are not. Either you listen to your fear, or you listen to your creativity, maintaining awareness of your shadow. I am rarely one to advocate seeing the world in such black-and-white terms, but this is a temporary tool or utility that will help you get where you are going: and you seem to be feeling your potential more palpably than ever. This includes your financial possibilities; your emotional depth; your ability to focus your thoughts like a laser and cut through nearly anything. That is power, which demands responsibility. And this, in turn, is precisely that impeccability is the theme of the hour.

What a relief that Jupiter is coming home to Pisces on Sunday. It’s been a dozen years since the ruler of our sign was there. Say what you will about Zeus, the deity; Jupiter the planet bestows protection, opens potential and offers a feeling of abundance — particularly when in Pisces. Especially if you have a bit of Pisces in your chart, and you have more than a bit. On this and several other accounts, you’re both gaining a sense of clarity and easing through a spell of isolation and a weird kind of psychic pressure that has stalked you for years. You have more decompression coming, but like coming up from deep underwater, you don’t want to do it all at once. I do suggest that this weekend, you figure out a way to let your body and soul relax, take a deep breath and let your imagination do its thing.

 

Good Morning:

I have noticed the squeeze of this approaching simultaneous Mercury stationing direct and annular (not annual, rather annular) solar eclipse. I bet you have, too. Using a fairly basic set of planets, there are 11 of them concentrated in Capricorn and Aquarius, including Mercury and the eclipse; plus Jupiter, Chiron, Neptune and Pluto. This whole setup is stretched across the two Saturn-ruled signs, Capricorn and Aquarius. One addresses psychical structures and the other, psychic structures. To illustrate the point of how this feels, in case we need to look at a chart for information, Saturn is square Pluto, which feels a little like a train making a 90-degree turn.

As part of this, Venus, the Sun and the Moon are all precisely aligned for Friday’s eclipse, to within one degree. So this is an eclipse conjunct Venus in Capricorn; which is a whole book chapter because Sun-Venus alignments are pretty special and got a lot of love from Mayan astrologers. There is big one coming up in June 2012, and this is a signpost on the way.

In case that’s all not enough for you, there’s also a “near Earth asteroid” called 2010 AL30 going by, which the space-type blogs are saying might be a piece of debris. This morning one of the world’s leading astrophysicists said in an email that his best guess (the word ‘guess’ was written in all caps, which I will spare you, because we’re all feeling a little jumpy) is that AL30 is a hunk of spacecraft debris, of which there are many orbiting the Earth, and in near-Earth orbits around the Sun. “Give it a few days and I bet it’ll be pretty clear,” he said.

I would agree. Assuming the world doesn’t crack open on Friday (I read a report recently that earthquakes are indeed associated with planetary alignments, and the alignment we now have is the perfect specimen) we will all feel better Saturday. Mercury stationing direct at the time of an eclipse has the feeling of significant, specific information coming out: it could be personal, and this week is one of those distinct personal watersheds where it’s possible to make some actual, deep decisions about ourselves and our lives that stick.

In Capricorn with stuff dancing around the Aries Point, it could be another one of those huge revelations about what is happening in the banking world that nobody seems to notice because the information gets snowed under by the kid with the underpants bomb. Or, you could turn on your TV and be treated to a debate about whether Buddhism or Christianity is the better path to redemption for Tiger Woods. (Note that the notion of redeeming one’s soul does not exist in Buddhism, to my knowledge. For that, you definitely have to go straight to the Christians.) With the eclipse conjunct Venus in Capricorn, we learn something about values and what we hold dear; we learn something about how deeply our values are ‘informed’ (putting it politely) by corporate culture. Learning is, of course, subject to one’s interest level; but other factors suggest that there will be reason to pay attention.

That’s as much prediction as you’ll be getting out of me today.

Now for a little analysis. As you can see from the diagram to the left, there are lot of planets concentrated in one part of the sky. Notably, the Earth is opposite all those planets; they are in Cap and Aquarius and the Earth is in Cancer. So all that energy — big planets a thousand times the size of the Earth, and small potent ones — are pulling on us; pulling us in one direction. What direction would that be?

From time to time, there has been discussion or speculation about a chart for the world. It turns out that such a thing exists; from the Hellenistic (classical Greek) era of astrology. The chart is called the Thema Mundi, and I’m a big fan. Since discovering this chart a few years ago, it’s informed my study of the houses in particular, which are the basis of astrological interpretation. This chart has Cancer rising; 15 degrees, to be exact. Yes, the chart of the world has the maternal, feminine sign Cancer on the ascendant, rather than aggressive, headstrong Aries.

This is interesting because it puts all those planets that are going by into the two relationship-oriented houses of the Thema Mundi — the 7th (Capricorn) and the 8th (Aquarius). By relationship I mean partnership, conjugal, marriage, contractual type of relationship: direct and straight on. Note, in the chart of the world, the two houses associated with relationship are both ruled by Saturn. This confirms the joke about lesbians bringing a moving truck to the second date. We already know about everyone who gets married by Elvis in Las Vegas and the only ads I see on TV these days are for dating websites and Girls Gone Wild; I always want to marry those girls, straight away.

That joke is on me. The 8th house (marital contracts) of the Thema Mundi is Aquarius — the sign of groups.

Note that in a high federal court in San Francisco right now, a trial is underway (as of yesterday) that will in part determine the constitutionality of banning same-sex people from marriage. We will know these laws are really fair when a bisexual person can marry a man and a woman; or when five people can get married.

So this whole traveling space revival is shaking up the marriage and relationship angle of the world horoscope. Isn’t that funny? Well, I guess not if you had to call the cops on your boyfriend last night, but the rest of us can afford to have a sense of humor about it. There is a lot, and I do mean quite a lot, of stress on our concepts of relationship, and on our actual relationships, to get in step with the post-postmodern world of constant change.

It does often seem that everything about our lives changes except for our ideas about what a relationship is. We have many sources to thank for that reinforcement, but what we really have are our own ideas, our own fear of abandonment, our own obsession with control (which we call jealousy), denial of our sexual reality and that of our partners, and a lot — a lot — of religious conditioning. Which shows up as supposedly secular social conditioning, generally as marketing, all of which is under pretty severe stress to drop the whole charade and get real; which is, in turn, calling on us to take new approaches to relating that most people, for whatever reason, dare not consider: for example, relationships not based on the notion that we own one another.

The Chiron-Neptune conjunction, approaching full focus, is suggesting that we clear the fog and look at the world through some lens besides the ideals that have proven themselves to be untrue. Mars retrograde in Leo (opposite all that Aquarius) is saying we need to do the one really, truly brave thing that we are here to do in the world, which is to be an individual. When you do all the relationship calculus, no matter what one is or thinks they are in terms of lovestyle or lifestyle or preference or sexual orientation, there remains the first and final project of being a self-aware individual no matter how zonked out anyone else is on trying to make their lives as perfect as an advertisement.

And there remains the fact that the antiquated expectations that we were given by our grandparents and our parents need to be carefully assessed. We need to question every single one of the assumptions that were handed to us from the past. The group pressures coming from the direction of Aquarius, which is the sign of conformity, among other things, need to be seen for what they are — and I trust that Chiron-Neptune will offer anyone who wants to break free the clarity and resolve to do so.

Mars retrograde in Leo has been reminding me of the Abraham-Hicks material, which tells us to focus on what we want, because that is usually what we get: the key being to apply that powerful manifesting force called desire on that which is actually in our own best interest.

Yours & truly,

Dear Subscriber:

Weeks ago I described our current phase of astrology as the winter whirl. Two inner planets are retrograde (Mercury and Mars) and we’re building toward a solar eclipse — the perfect recipe for confusion and originality. Dare I say paranoia, but do we really believe it? Is it really credible? Why do we take fear so much more seriously than, say, creativity? Eclipses apply mental pressure, which can spill over to other levels. If you’re feeling good, that will spill over and if you’re in conflict that can magnify or get hooked — let it go if you can.

Eclipses combined with retrograde planets, especially Mercury, the result can be the feeling of ever-deepening chaos. Yet deep in there is a LOT of creative mojo.

If you’re experiencing frustration, the best plan of action is to set clear goals and return to your tasks day after day grateful that you’ve made at least a little progress. There are bound to be setbacks and these, too, need to be handled gently, but any setback can contain the gift of an invention. Think that way and it’s more likely to be true.

Mercury retrograde takes us out of automatic mode. Humans tend to think like old-fashioned robots: in rote habits, which is another way of saying many people don’t think at all. Mercury stopping and backing up three times a year scrambles those patterns. There’s the added benefit of a built-in pause, and with a necessity to take care of old business.

Notice how much emphasis has been placed on corporations and government since Pluto entered Capricorn. That alone is a source of change and confusion, as is the ongoing opposition between Saturn and Uranus. Mercury retrograde in Capricorn is like looking down and pausing to pick up the pieces of what has been scattered as a result of these potentially disruptive events. Mercury is calling for an alert, even creative, approach that acknowledges the past without getting caught there.

Mars retrograde has a different flavor. We live in an aggressive culture. We wage war, we love competitive sports and we are trained to experience our creative journey as a rat race called a career. Mars retrograde is saying: slow down. Consider the factors that you normally might miss, like whether something is really worth doing; like whether you really want what you think you want.

Mars in Leo is famous for its ego-trip quality. It’s a lot of fire in one place, and when you turn that fire retrograde, the message is tune in and go in. Question your motives. Take off some of the pressure and listen to yourself. As you move through the next few days, Mercury stations direct on Friday, Jan. 15, the same day as a solar eclipse, which is a turning point. I’ll have more news on Tuesday.

Meantime, walk and drive carefully on that ice.

Yours & truly,

Updates daily at Planet Waves and Cosmic Confidential Diary.

 

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Now that I’m back in the Pea Patch, welcomed by snow drifts and glacial temps, my days of basking in the sun, reading the books that seemed to magically arrive in my hands, are over for a while. I finished the last book, borrowed from a friend, the final afternoon of my visit, and looked out over the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood to note the changes a month had made. Here in the Patch, autumn seemed to come in an eye-blink and faded away as quickly: perhaps ten days of color blooming on the trees, then a brisk wind and it was all crunching under my feet. In California, the deciduous trees took their time, and it was luscious to watch them slowly turn and drop their leaves until they stood as naked heralds of winter.

My last read was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. It was better written, perhaps even more interesting than his later offering, The Da Vinci Code, but like James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, the message was in the concept, and consequently Code became more valuable as a marker in collective consciousness than as a literary offering. Angels and Demons is a rousing conspiracy tale about religion versus secularism, the religion being Catholic and Papal and the secular being science and technology. Personally, I’ve never had a problem merging the two into a symbiotic whole, just as I’ve never seen politics as more than leavening in the social order; not so, of course, for those who can’t seem to define themselves except through railing against something and in so doing, solidifying it to the density of concrete. Brown’s earlier book made a potent argument that humankind, and especially the religious, cannot seem to comprehend that there is no fear in love. None.

The opposite of love is not hate — it’s fear. A Course in Miracles tells us that there are only these two core emotions, and while they appear to be in mortal combat, love must eventually win. Given that, it’s no surprise that our planet seems steeped in the darkest of energies and there appears to be no end to its strength and power. We are in purge mode, not only by weather pattern and climate change, but within the very fabric of our thought system. What is darkest is coming forward with a vengeance but, as I’ve mentioned before, it is no longer so dense, impossible and terrifying a stone that cannot be rolled away. Now the darkness is shot full of Light, but perhaps only those who can put aside fear to open themselves to love can see how fragile the darkness has become. The rest of us are as busy as ants at a picnic trying to patch the holes with concrete.

Continued at this link…

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, January 8, 2010, #800 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

There is much you want to say and do, but something tells me you’re experiencing more obstacles than opportunities. The frustrating part about this is that you have plenty of ideas, and there is energy moving; all the signals are telling you to make your mark. In about a week, an eclipse of the Sun will release some of this pressure. Until then, it’s vital that you not push, not seek or make firm commitments, and in particular that you not try to fix anything that isn’t broken. Most of what you’re experiencing involves circumstances rather than systemic issues, though if you study those circumstances you will be able to identify one or two wider problems that you would be wise to work on, though only after the eclipse and the concurrent station direct of Mercury — no matter how tempting it may be to meddle now.

You seem unsure what to believe, or where your beliefs are guiding you. The thing about beliefs is that we assume they’re true because they exist, rather than noticing they exist and questioning whether they are true. There are rewards for embarking on what seems like a brave expedition into your own ideas; your false beliefs do little other than get in the way of your more meaningful and authentic ones and you have yet to discover a thing or two about what is really true for you, as in for you personally. The real discovery will be an understanding of what ideas you carry around that have nothing at all to do with you, and were placed into your mind by others. Why exactly was that? Well, that’s the real pearl for which you’re diving.

Here is the key to forming a consensus. First, identify the common values you share with someone. Make sure you get those common values to a clear understanding. For contrast, create a separate list of values that you don’t agree on. Then, focusing on the values you have in common, agree on what would be the right course of action. For example, if you are in accord with a partner that you want to spend less money, then it’s easier to determine where you will make the savings, based on that fundamental point of agreement. If you haven’t come to this deeper agreement, it’s more likely that you will struggle in the conversation of where to make the savings. Simply put, consensus proceeds from identifying common values to taking logical actions based on those values.

Your relationship life may seem pretty complex at the moment. From the look of your charts, you feel like you have no idea where anyone stands, and you may have the feeling that there are a good few things you have yet to learn about someone close to you. There’s not a conspiracy, though — there are however ideas, decisions and commitments in progress, most of which are too formative to get a clear sense of. You can afford to be patient, because as you suspect much that is unclear or unresolved now will become a lot simpler over the next week or two. If you can keep your expectations to a minimum, you will have more space in your open mind to work with openings, opportunities and benefits that come your way before long.

Focus on taking care of ideas and projects that were left behind during the past year. This common wisdom of Mercury retrograde holds true more than ever now; there seems to be plenty left behind from the whirlwind and tumult of 2009 that could use your attention today. And there were some very good propositions that got left behind as other forms of progress took over. I suggest you work through any backlog of projects and clear both your desk and your mind. Even if you don’t think that there’s anything you have to do, if you dig around you will find at least one potential issue you’re very glad you didn’t miss. This is the week — you’re actually not under that much pressure. Things will be much more hectic next week.

If you have kids, even grown kids, this is obviously a more complicated time than you were counting on. The lesson is that growing up is not a straightforward process, and neither is helping people grow up. What’s interesting is that there are clear parallels between your life and the lives of the young people you know or coexist with today. One of the best gifts we can offer our kids is being aware of what our own childhood was about; and doing our part not to repeat the parts that were not so pleasant. You’re at one of those points where the layers of time are transparent; usually they are entirely opaque, and we live as if trapped in a tunnel, isolated from the wisdom of what we’ve learned or experienced in the past.

The more you untangle your feelings, the more feelings you have to untangle. I would caution that there are certain emotional conditions that you cannot resolve through mental maneuvers. Others will lend themselves well to a concrete understanding, though you may not be able to tell which in advance. I suggest you go gently, and remember: you are not your feelings. If you’re having feelings that are bigger than you, you’re in the middle of a distortion. If that is the case the first thing to do is remember that your feelings are part of you — not the other way around. You are bigger than whatever you may be going through; you are bigger than your family situation; and for that matter, you’re bigger than any goal or creative idea that you have.

You seem to be caught in that balance between work and profession. Your aspirations and intentions are one thing; what you have to do every day is another. Sometimes they seem to have no relationship; all the work in the world doesn’t get you where you need to be. At the moment, you seem to be sacrificing certain higher goals for the sake of immediate short-term needs, though without seeing the connection. At the moment they are woven together; there seems to be a puzzle and something of a psychological situation that you are being called on to confront, and this seems to be little glory or promise of success. But it contains an idea: the seed of a breakthrough. Start with making a science of routine.

Plenty is weighing on your spirit these days, and no matter how much you do right now they don’t seem to come out right. I suggest you not try so hard; ease off on the effort. Introduce a new word to your language: efforting. That’s when you’re working harder than feels right, or feels healthy, to get something done. I think you need a bath; you need water, and you need to shift your environment in a way that’s soothing to your emotions. This may be a short-term palliative, though we are in one of those live day-to-day moments. If you can do that for a couple of weeks, you will find that you’ve eased yourself into a better place: much better than you’ve been in for a while, and your troubles will seem a lot smaller, if they even exist at all.

You may be one of the few people you know for whom things are going well — the big ones, anyway. One of your strengths is that you know how to sort out the small stuff, and keep your eyes on the real stuff. Remember that if you find yourself getting frustrated or confused. And by the way if you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything, or have no real opportunities to do so, look more carefully. Remember that your goals don’t merely consist of a list of hoped-for achievements; they involve putting principles to work in everything that you do. I have emphasized the point of leadership many times in recent months: and ethical leadership is the kind we need the most right now, particularly if you are even vaguely influential in a business environment.

You seem to urgently need the truth about you to be known. It looks like you’re on the brink of a catharsis. It’s grown painful holding so much in; and worse than that, unnecessary. You may fear the consequences of what would happen were the truth about you known. But think of it this way: There was a time when you were more inclined to deny your personal reality even to yourself. Now you’re far more honest within the confines of your own mind. Do you feel better? Does your existence feel easier and safer? I would imagine so, and there will be a similar effect when you open up to others. One gesture of truth deserves another. What you are taking now is a formative step on the way to yet another commitment to integrity.

Do you have the right to benefit from your own existence? Well, if you don’t, then who does? Nature exists on the basis of symbiosis. A beehive produces plenty of honey for both the bees to live on and for the beekeeper to sell. You’re at the end of a long phase of your life when the keynote has been sacrifice, or rather, the belief in sacrifice. I am not suggesting that we don’t have to give up what is not serving us, or that in the process of repairing the world, we’re not going to have to make some exchanges. What I’m suggesting is that you seem to have adopted an unnecessary kind of sacrifice as a prerequisite to success; and this is simply not necessary. You produce more than you consume. You create more than enough benefit to go around. Keep reminding yourself of these things.

Hello Subscriber:

It’s Tuesday, and there’s not a monthly horoscope this week; but I will see you Friday with a weekly edition. I trust you’re moving through the double retrograde and eclipse pattern gently.

Important note to Cosmic Confidential subscribers: anticipated publication date is between Jan. 17 and 20. Till then, watch the Confidential Diary for highlights from from prior annual editions, previews from the current one and other fun stuff. Monday I posted an article contrasting my style of writing annual reports with “custom reports” from a database. This one is a lot of fun and it helps explain why good horoscope columns work when they do.

Here is more about the current pattern of events.

Here is your January monthly / short annual. Here is January Inner Space.

We have some interesting stuff going on the main page of Planet Waves as well.

Today I’m writing weekly horoscope 800 (!) and then it’s back to Pisces Confidential. See you Friday. Please note, if you have subscriptions to other services, you will see other versions of this letter posted to other lists.

Dear Colleague or Contributor:

It’s New Year’s Eve and we have an eclipse of the Moon in Cancer — the sign ruled by the Moon. Eclipses represent dependable transitions; this is fitting astrology for the end of a year, and even a decade. Yet by our calendar, this is not technically the end of the decade; that’s a year from now. When we get wind of the astrology of 2010, we’ll see that the coming year is the peak of something that has been building since before Dick and Junior went to Washington and committed treason. However, it’s been 10 years today since Y2K; 10 years since another foiled terrorist attack — the guy who was going to bomb Los Angeles airport (LAX) who was busted by a worker on the Washington State Ferries. Vigilance is indeed the price of liberty.

Eclipses come back to any pair of signs every nine years, and the signs where eclipses happen have a way of coloring the world. One of the themes of eclipses across Cancer and Capricorn is emotional dependency and its counterpart, the need to submit to authority. Back when people other than advertising writers thought about psychology, a few of us understood that giving away our power was an emotionally-driven process, fueled by fear and the refusal to take authority for our own lives. Erich Fromm called it the Escape from Freedom.

Here’s a theory for you: humans rarely seem to grow out of the tendencies we develop in our early childhood relationships with authority figures — such as our almighty parents; ministers who claim to personally wield the power of God; and teachers who can inflict torture and humiliation on us. Once instilled, these patterns dominate our emotional landscape; and take up residence in our relationships, our homes, our jobs, our creative experiences — everywhere. Under such emotional conditions, the only acceptable way of life is to be stupid, fat and bored: nobody is threatened. We would in fact express ourselves, if not for the fear of threatening others; which is a ruse for refusing to grow up.

If the Western world is stuck on one issue, this is the one. We love to be told what to do; we love to have our decisions made for us; we love to be told what is right and wrong and who is honest and who is not and whether it’s okay that some golfer had a lot of girlfriends. We need to be told what is perfectly safe and how long we’re going to live and to be angry about lead in Barbie dolls and that toxic dorms are safe; and as a result, this whole concept of becoming an adult is a little like reaching Valhalla. Where the heck is that? I think it’s in Connecticut.

We Americans in particular tend to spend our lives acting like little children, and it’s time we grow up and claim some accountability for our actions, our choices and our destiny — personal and collective. Part of that is admitting that we do indeed make choices, which is to say that we don’t need our internalized parents, teachers and ministers to run our lives. We can do a lot to take care of ourselves; all the ‘health care’ in the world will not substitute for throwing out your microwave oven. We don’t need content filters to tell us what is ‘safe’ to read.

At the same time, I think that our particular society needs to take more responsibility for our children: our refusal to admit to having temporary authority over them, when they need it most, is the same thing as letting our own lives run wild. We can twist our knickers all we like about the ‘sanctity of marriage’, but that has nothing at all to do with cultivating devotion to honest relationships. Which will help us and help our kids and help build our society.
Humans tend to be creatures guided by our emotions rather than by reason or intellect; and as such we are easily led around and told what to believe, based on what we think will make us feel better or ‘be safer’. An eclipse of the Moon in Cancer, particularly opposite many significant planets — Venus, the Sun, Pluto and Mercury to name four — is about setting ourselves free from those emotional patterns, crossing the great divide to all those Capricorn planets, and taking on the mantle of authority over our own lives.

Somebody has to; it may as well be you.

Come check out the Cosmic Confidential Diary.

 

Weekly Horoscope for Thursday, December 31, 2009, #799 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

You seem to be seeking security rather than actual emotional grounding. What’s running out is your ability to identify with your role as partner — that is, the notion that your identity depends on a relationship or a particular relationship style (such as marriage). Your concept seems to be running up against the reality of the situation; and that reality itself is in the process of change; and as a result you’re clinging to an idea. You could save yourself a lot of time, effort and energy by understanding the situation as it is; noticing where the people involved are coming from, beginning with you; and making the necessary changes based on a notion not of what you would like to be true, but rather what is actually true.

God is love, not a bunch of rules. Goddess is the Earth and her creatures, not a collection of rituals. You’re moving past these things, toward what you might call your true faith. This comes with a vision of the person you want to be; the two are related because you find yourself through having faith in yourself: an active process, not a passive one. Yet mixed into the conversation are various preconditions that I suggest you account for and decide whether you’re really interested in them. Another way to look at this is as tension between the past and the present. No matter what you do, you seem unable to build your foundations on what has been, which is a truly encouraging sign. It would take a lot for a Taurus to admit the past no longer has relevance — and a lot is precisely what you have right now.

While you’re in a phase of time perfect for renegotiating old agreements, it would be wise of you to focus on what you want. I say this because while it appears you thought you knew, your objectives and values are changing. If you don’t update your mental files and the conversation fairly soon, you will end up getting what you wanted in the past rather than what you want now. Two other bits of advice: one is don’t undersell yourself, based on your expectations of what someone thinks — you don’t really know what they are thinking, in part because it’s changing from day to day. There are indeed plenty of resources to go around. Second, please don’t sign anything until after Jan. 15, and preferably until after the 20th.

This week’s lunar eclipse in your sign is the perfect emotional release point: you seem to be carrying as much tension as a water balloon on a string. You’ll feel better when you let yourself burst, and equalize yourself with the environment around you. First you’ll make peace with the fact that everything is in flux; then with a bit of awareness, you will figure out how good that is for you. Over the next few weeks there will be a series of exchanges and contact points from which you will profit significantly, if your emotional state is in balance. Here is one clue that might help: much that you think holds you back is doing nothing of the kind. Commitments, sentimental entanglements and various forms of dependency are dissolving like fog into sunlight.

You seem to be blowing off a lot of fear all at once. Good thing, too, because you figured out long ago that fear does nothing other than consume energy and block your ability to think clearly. One thing you want to devote yourself to during Mercury retrograde is being mindful of your health. Keep your hands clean. Pay attention to what you eat, and where you eat; stick to the diet that works for you rather than making any radical changes. Keep your work in balance as well: if you’re straining or stressing, there is very likely an easier way to do things, and most of that will involve your mental approach. Numerous things that seem pressing can wait; certain things you’re not noticing need attention now. Some issues that seem troubling are not issues at all, so it would be wise to not attempt to fix them.

Many people say that Mercury retrograde is the most creative time for them, because their minds can think off the main streets and find their way to the back alleys. This may be true of you now; the artist in you wants to flourish, which means pushing and stretching your inner boundaries. There’s something about sex here — in fact, something really interesting about sex. The things you let yourself think in the last 10 seconds before orgasm want a full hour of fresh air right now. Set yourself free in that space. Break out of your squeamish tendencies and let yourself dive deep into the crevices of your existence. You can do this alone, or not — you might want to try both. Any encounter with another person may have a fleeting quality, and will be all the better on account of that.

Check in whether a close partner is experiencing some frustration with you. Not that it matters, of course; but then, it just might. To you, that is. You seem to be hiding behind a shell lately, even as that shell cracks apart and reveals a new layer of your being. I know the emotional material coming up is deep and defies expression. I know you have no obligation to tell anyone how you really feel; but since the current theme of your charts is self-interest, you might want to do this in support of your own cause. It’s true that you are adopting one method of growth while others around you have an entirely different approach. But if you want these relationships to have any integrity or last through the new year, eventually those approaches will need to be reconciled; and the sooner the better.

If you don’t know whether you’re coming or going, you might want to decide — or consciously give yourself a few weeks to decide. There are certain professional matters on which you have some time to spare; however, certain deeply personal matters require more immediate focus and attention. It looks like you’re prioritizing one issue while a close partner or love interest is prioritizing another. I suggest you focus on what is important to that person first, then decide whether it’s important to you. At least then you will have that out of the way and be able to focus on your own situation without anything ‘external’ hanging over your head. The clearer you stay with others, the more they will be available when you actually need their emotional support or the clarity of their mind — and you will.

An old story is giving way to a new one. It’s about time; you’ve been caught in a drama for many months that has eaten up way too much of your mental bandwidth. Granted, you learned a lot, and you had an opportunity to help someone. Mostly, you were lured by the prospect of spiritual growth: and that, too, paid off. But now it’s time to move from theory to experience, and from an idea to something tangible that you can live in and with. One theme of 2010 will be creating a better environment for yourself, one that supports your emotional wellbeing and delicate creative process rather than consuming your energy with constant demands, distractions and shrill voices. The loudest thing in your life should be music. If you were a college student, I would say it’s time to move off campus.

You may feel like you and a partner or close associate are not seeing eye to eye, or thinking mind to mind. The distance is not as significant as it seems; you’re both going through adjustments, and though you may seem to be growing apart, that is a temporary illusion. You’re generally a patient person, though at the moment you’re experiencing something that more resembles restless passion. Do your best not to push, pull or tug; rather, breathe and focus and pay attention to what you’re thinking. Explore some of your own paradoxes before you dive into the apparent contradictions of the relationship. You have a lot to make up your mind about and someone you care about has a lot to consider in the way of feelings. Move gently toward the meeting point.

You’re probably feeling more complicated than ever. That’s okay — count it as honesty. You really are this complex, though typically you can veil this fact behind a friendly exterior that you try to convince yourself is a valid image of who you are. Now you’re getting to experience the mystery of your own existence. Perhaps you’ve noticed that for as forward-thinking and progressive as you strive to be, you have old-fashioned values at heart, and you’re made uncomfortable by ‘too many’ questions, ‘too much’ change or even the idea of significant progress. I would ask you: what exactly does the past offer that is so precious? A big swath of your attachment is about fear rather than nostalgia. If you call it what it is, it’s less likely to have power over you as you do your best to take positive steps.

I know you live with the feeling that while time is rushing by like a river, you seem to be standing on the shore. Or are you clinging to the shore, refusing to let go into the swift current? How fast time is actually going may involve your willingness to take a chance on something; that something may have an emotional, sexual or creative theme, rather than, say, financial speculation. This is a personal risk and you will know you’re there because it’s long been a point of hesitation for you. Your desire to make a move comes and goes in a dependable cycle; but now you’re at a jumping-off point: a place where embracing the risk feels more appealing than anxiety. And that is the theme of many days to come.

Dear Friend and Reader:

In 12 years of writing annual horoscopes — as of this year, one edition for every sign of the zodiac — I’ve never looked at the charts and thought: Man, I’m glad I’ve been at this for a while. Not until now, that is.

Given the care with which my words are read, I do my best to get it right. I do this knowing there’s not really a right to be got. Astrology is interpretive. When I suggest what is happening in your life or what theme might offer some insight or comfort, I’m using intuition to guide me through a wide range of choices shown in the charts. So I need an internal ideal to aim for; and for me that is following the planets in the direction of a compassionate unfolding of our personal stories. I look for the best possibilities in the aspects, and at the same time I view them as calculus equations to be resolved creatively. The planets never present a problem without offering a solution. The art of astrology is about working your way from one to the other, then putting that into words.

When the sky is really amazingly exciting, I’ve learned to take a mellow approach to describing it. It would be easy to get caught in all the promise and forget the obstacles that so often crop up on the way to getting there. Those are generally interior: false beliefs we hold about ourselves; our relationship commitments, which are not designed to help us open our potential as much as to offer a kind of delicate stability; our emotional entanglements, which eat energy but which don’t feed us; our fears and that lurking sense of not quite belonging. I try to get underneath these and see them as the temporary situations that they are; not as actual problems. If I’ve addressed the points of resistance or the stumbling blocks, maybe I’ve helped open the way to your potential. I offer some ideas; you do the work (and often send some great ideas back).

Now, part of me knows I’ve got a lot of nerve believing we can live the lives we want, when everything is getting so weird. But living a good life is economical. For anyone aware, it amounts to food, creative love and an authentic way to connect with the world around us. That world, however, is currently a mess, and we know it’s going to get a lot messier if we don’t do our part. So why exactly focus on reaching for the best life has to offer? Well, what else are we supposed to do? I believe we’re a lot more useful to our community and the process of humanity’s growth when we’re in creative mode rather than hung-up, depressive, creatively malnourished robotic mode. Obviously. Well, maybe not so obviously. I will explain; or perhaps seduce you with a few ideas.

For the past few years, the astrology has been gradually ramping up. We left behind the challenges that defined the Cheney-Bush years: aspects that came along with the stolen election and Sept. 11 and the big hurricanes of 2005. With those aspects came plenty of crisis and growth, but even more deferral of the real material we need to be addressing. That is twofold: one, our inner struggle for healing and awareness; and two, taking part in a creative solution. Most of the cost we’ve paid is pretending we can put off taking care of inner problems that delay our lives, and pretending that we don’t make a difference.

Through 2009, the astrology shifted into what I am describing as the 2012 configuration, and we are now in a brief, relatively calm moment before the energy ramps up exponentially. True, the planets between the December solstice and mid-January are like a teacup ride. But that’s very small stuff compared to what is coming. I don’t have time for the details here, but at the end of this article I’ll tell you where to find them.

Twenty-twelve configuration means that some of the most energetically packed planets are aligning with Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn: the cardinal points, or summarized in astrology as the Aries Point. The focus is on the first degree of Aries: a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in the first degree of Aries. This meets up with Pluto, newly in Capricorn; and Saturn, newly in Libra. That happens on June 8, with plenty of excitement along the way there.

The last time we experienced anything vaguely resembling this was the summer of 1969: Woodstock, the Moon landing, the Manson murders and much else changing not just the world, but our cosmology. We know the cultural ethos back then was more about getting involved; getting together; thinking in terms of potential and not just survival. The energy of 2010 is the first experience that makes the Sixties astrology look like a walk in the park. Our survival is indeed at stake, but we need a creative approach. We need to face our own challenges and those of humanity with the idea that we can, if we try, create a much better world than the one we now know of.

When the energy rises like this, many people feel it as something passionate. Yet for those who are struggling with obstacles, it can be extremely frustrating. We can find ourselves at a moment of awesome potential with nothing but chores to take care of. I suggest we remember that we’re in a moment of quickening. There are no shortcuts to growth, but there are moments of rapid acceleration, and we’re about to stroll into one of them. The horoscopes you have below are the short version of Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves. The full edition (available at CosmicConfidential.com) offers you a truly excellent, extended astrology reading at a very economical cost. Astrology is efficient. And borrowing from Tim Leary, the current map says: tune in, turn on and get involved. Surely some revelation is at hand.

Yours & truly,

 

Yes, you are still searching for yourself, and still trying to find your voice. This takes a while, and it’s always worth the effort. But I would ask you: how much of your struggle ‘finding yourself’ involves figuring out what you want? And how much involves being honest with yourself about what you want? In another universe, one where personal volition (and its twin, personal responsibility) were actually honored, this might not be the primary question. Yet in a world where we have the right to desire, but so little self-awareness and nearly no sense that our choices matter, that is another question.

You’re becoming bolder about your quest for inner awareness, if only out of dire necessity, though more likely you’ve felt what a rush it is to wake up to your own beauty. Yet at times I am sure you wonder where you’re going to find the energy and motivation to work through the kinds of limitations you feel confronted by every day. Recently, you’ve been willing to look right into the face of your internal challenges, and not be as daunted as in the past. You see your challenges as an obstacle to something, which means something you want; and as a result you’re noting that it in fact exists. You could far more easily be direct with yourself, and suspend the guilt trip that stands between you and your right to exist.

You’re in a focusing phase right now. You are literally learning to see, to feel and to sense the future. Much of this involves an evaluation of your environment, and the ways in which you’re influenced by the people around you. You’re also deeply impacted by numerous messages that come from advertising, so-called news and from imitation culture. Choose your influences carefully. Be careful who you look to for a reflection. Even as you find your freedom, you have the not-so-small matter of authority creeping into your life everywhere. One of the most significant themes of your immediate and long-term astrology involves redefining your relationship to that which has power over you: and beware, most of these factors are hidden. Find the courage to challenge any authority when your moment of absolute awakening arrives: and that moment is approaching rapidly.

Read your full 2010 extended Aries astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

What keeps your mental horizon so narrow, when all you want to do is open your perception and experience your life for what it can truly be? You seem to live within two entirely different perceptual frameworks, which alternate and at times conflict with one another. You might say you have two different value systems that are trying to function at the same time, independently of one another.

I would propose that this split runs in two-month cycles. You seem to alternate in your goals and intentions a little more often than once per season, which constantly knocks you out of focus and seems to put you at cross-purposes with yourself. Yet you can use these fluctuations like a rock climber uses gravity for leverage.

If you opened the doors to self-perception, you would see the world as a place that constantly changes, and you would embrace yourself as someone adapting to this as an ongoing adventure. You don’t need stability; you need immediate flexibility, particularly in your beliefs. You know you’re not someone who embraces change warmly or easily; and this alone is a source of resistance. One frequent result of this tension is the constant, subtle fear that ‘everything is going to be different’, which could be alleviated by embracing the truth that if you seek growth, you must be friends with movement, progress and the unfamiliar.

Resistance has an energy source. The emotional tenor of what you’re working through is fear. This in turn is disguised as guilt, obligation and the choking feeling that ‘someone is running my life’. If that someone is one of your parents (whether near or far, dead or alive), first check in with your mother. Describe her karma to yourself: her life story, expressed as what she never did that she wanted to do (and why). Note how religion shaped her mind, and consider how those values, whether dressed in religious language or not, are the ones you might need to address the most directly. Guilt is a religiously generated emotion, meaning that it would not exist without the underlying fear of what some remote, impersonal ‘god’ might think of you. Certain people in your life have their own ideas; you have yours. You will be a lot happier when you recognize the difference.

Read your full 2010 extended Taurus astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

How is your intuition? I mean: do you listen? Do you even know when it’s doing the talking? Do the hints you get tend to work with or against the things you know intellectually? Or do you override what your subtle sense tells you? Most likely, you alternate among the possibilities, never quite sure what internal voice to accept as valid. This, you call confusion. Yet because your intuition so often proved itself correct in hindsight, you probably fight with yourself about this issue on a fairly regular basis.

You have powerful analytical skills, though analysis does not proceed by itself; it’s guided by beliefs. Often enough, your intuition contradicts your established beliefs, or your notion of what you want to be true. That’s the issue.

More often lately, what other people want from you contradicts your sense of what is right for you, though it’s been surprisingly challenging for you to stand up to those influences. They seem to carry so much gravity. So there are really two matters on the docket: one is your relationship to yourself, as described by the intuition versus intellect issue; and the other is how you’re influenced by people who seem to have extraordinary power in your life; most recently, financial and sexual power. Both money and sex experienced as power have one thing in common: fear.

We could boil this discussion down to one theme: how do you handle fear? I suggest you start by calling it what it is. Drop the concepts anxiety, agitation, judgment, embarrassment and uncertainty. They are all forms of one thing, which is rarely grounded in reality. See if you can spot the habit of self-attack, and notice how much it costs you in the way of life force and peace of mind. Study when you go into automatic mode. You justify this as being ‘on the go’ or a way to ‘get it all done’, but the cost taken from this is the self-awareness necessary to keep you in a loving and relatively clear state of mind. The decision to go into auto-mode, while it has mental effects, is actually an emotional response. And now for the payoff question: from whom did you learn that habit? Once you know that, you will learn a lot more besides.

Read your full 2010 extended Gemini astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

You have so much to offer, and the deep need to share it. If you could make peace with this fact of your existence, your life would be so much simpler. And if astrology is any indication, you will have some extraordinary opportunities to share and make your mark as the next few seasons unfold. These are likely to be disguised as unprecedented success and an expanded role in the world.

Yet often you have your doubts of that role. Simply put, you have long been nursing an injury to your confidence. And when you look at it and question that sense of injury, it can seem ridiculous. Here is an analogy: On Earth, people and industry are constantly digging their energy out of the ground as coal and oil, which we burn, to our detriment. The Sun is giving off energy constantly, but the notion of gathering that energy still seems like an exotic concept. Now, if you were the Sun, would you take this personally?

As a person, especially one as sensitive as you are, you do take it personally. You not only wonder why people are not more receptive of your generosity; you devote yourself to life, then make value judgments about yourself based on their lack of response. Here’s where what I will call the fictional piece enters the equation. You make up a story about your personal worth based on what you think that others think. This is, in turn, colored by your perceptions. Consider this equation as you continue your long-overdue overhaul of your outdated ideas about relationships.

Focus on trust, above all else. There is a vast issue in the world about people not trusting being nourished; not trusting those who offer nourishment; and a good bit of resentment to go along with this global emotional mess. You may think you need love and be loved. What I propose you need are bonds based on mutual understanding, grounded expectations and a foundation of goodwill. If you falter in your trust of yourself, you will open the door to those who you don’t trust. You can be sure this has happened when you encounter resentment. Therefore, if you want to enjoy your success — or even notice it — you must be vigilant, and hold yourself in high esteem.

Read your full 2010 extended Cancer astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

Nobody would accuse you of being an introvert, but sometimes the most outgoing people are the most inwardly focused. You know this about yourself, and it’s challenging because you feel like it’s your destiny to have attention focused on you. The circumstances of your life call you out into the world of leadership. Yet your sensitive heart and soul call you ever inward.

Your transits this year provide support for that deep inner search, one that could best be described as an exploration of your spiritual beliefs. By spiritual, I mean that which defies the world’s expectations, laws and rules; that dimension of you that identifies with ethics: considered by most something impossible to attain.

I just described this as ‘spiritual’, but for you it’s one of the worldliest things you think about: the necessity for personal responsibility. This is one reason why traditional religion holds so little appeal to you. Nearly all religions project what they think of as God outwardly, and in a way that is parental and removes one’s own direct involvement. Religion is most often used as a way to dump responsibility for our personal choices. Your natural tendency is to be in direct relationship with God or Goddess within. That divine entity, expressing itself in human form, is what embraces every facet of human nature. That is your first mission of the coming seasons of your life: to directly experience and understand the light and dark aspects of who you are, and to act only when you’ve checked in with both ‘sides’ of yourself.

As you move through this territory, you may experience the sometimes-tense relationship between you and your potential. You know you’re capable of so much, and while it would not be fair to say you think you fall short, you know that you’re capable of far more. There’s an adventure for you here, more than there is a learning task. The way to do better work is to go deeper into the quest. You seem determined to develop habits that make you more efficient, though I would suggest that work methods that allow spontaneous growth and your passion for a challenge are the ones to experiment with. As usual, much in the world depends on your contribution, and for that grounding and sense of purpose, you can be thankful.

Read your full 2010 extended Leo astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

The ancient story of Virgo is about giving birth to yourself every day, and this is the focus of your spiritual journey right now. You nourish the inner seeds of your creative process, which is a self-creative process; and these seeds emerge into the world as things with a life of their own. When you take responsibility for this process, you create things that nourish you. When you step back and don’t take responsibility, the results can be damaging. You know that self-expression is a double-edged sword; but rather than being afraid of this, a more useful approach would be to grow in your self-mastery.

To say you’re actively working to liberate yourself would be the understatement of your lifetime. Thanks to Pluto in Capricorn, you can now free energy from all the stuck places in your creative and sexual core. You’re learning how to take chances; and finally updating the stale tradition of being terrified of yourself (or feeling guilty for existing) that was inflicted on you as a child. You’re learning to both grow up and contact the passionate kid you were at the same time. As you do so, you will need to confront and process some of the toxic emotions that come along with having had your creativity stuffed down when you were younger. Working through those murky shadows is precisely what will drive your creative process forward.

Many adults feel that ‘personal expression’ is at best childish and egotistical, and at worst a distraction from what really matters. This is a cover-up for how anyone taking an authentic creative risk threatens their ego. Regardless, you’ve discovered that if you don’t indulge in actual expression of your ideas and feelings, you feel trapped; and if you open up, you experience life as a happier, more grounded person. Nothing will do more to set you free from the past, and from your own sense of past limitations. You will be more inclined to notice the incredible gifts that are being offered to you. Those gifts — if you receive them — are opportunities to respond, to mature, and most meaningfully, to you, to serve. For you who know that you have no choice but to serve others, you will do this the most effectively when you are at your most passionate.

Read your full 2010 extended Virgo astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

I’m flying to Paris to write your annual horoscope this year. Paris, that museum city; with its formal elegance and its occasional bursts of the completely outrageous. It’s a place where everything is tastefully done; where the store windows are worth the whole trip. There is something serious about these strongly Libra-influenced people. While they can be annoying at times, their creativity will almost always manifest as dedication to both aesthetics and quality.

There is a difference between these two things, of course — and that difference is part of what you’re now discovering. It’s no longer so easy for you to hide behind your shell; you’ve become acutely aware of when you’re doing so. You can retreat; you can hide away; but you keep finding yourself there. The profound change to your psychic structure (that is, your personality shell) is that the facades that used to work so well no longer make you feel safe; they no longer convince anyone of anything, particularly yourself. As a result, you may feel especially vulnerable; and that’s just part of the story. Your whole inner emotional structure is being rearranged. Compartments of suppressed feeling are cracking open. Memories you had no concept of are coming back to you. Your relationship to your history is changing as a result. Assumptions about the meaning of past events that long went unquestioned are suddenly yielding to vital new information.

All of this is leading in one direction — profound self-renewal. If you think this process is going too fast, I suggest you take a bold step and allow it to go a little faster. Get out of your own way. Other factors in your astrology suggest that by June, your world will be rocked by extraordinarily exciting events (including relationships, opportunities for travel or involvement with some kind of international culture) that will challenge you to be as alive as you can be. When these experiences come your way, you will want to respond to them in the most direct way; to miss nothing, and to embrace the journey with your full being. This will call for vulnerability and the willingness to embrace change passionately — qualities that will initiate from the inside out, and which before long you will be meeting face to face.

Read your full 2010 extended Libra astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

Somewhere deep in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien is the idea that in our tenuous lives here on Earth, we should be glad that even the least of our desires comes to fruition. Most of us want more than that; we are a society composed largely of people that want everything, and for whom nothing is ever enough. I say this because of the extremely delicate state of your professional ambitions, and in honor of the thin line you are walking. In some ways, it seems that you’re barely entitled to an ‘ambition’, and even like the desire for more could jeopardize the little that you have.

The planets suggest you take your quest for success inward for a while, seeking an understanding of your true motives. You can no longer act on desire without a strong concept of why that desire matters; which is another way of saying you need to discover what you want. This involves not merely diving into your emotional world (you’ve done plenty of that lately) and seeking clarity (you have succeeded in many ways) but also projecting yourself into the world and determining who you must be in relationship to everything that surrounds you. You’re being called to connect who you are on the deepest level with the world you see around you.

Clearly, this is not going to happen in the usual blaze ahead, take it off-road method of our society, or by doing what you were told to do. Neither method was as productive as they promised. Imagine, instead, that time has stopped; and that what a second ago was the present moment has instantaneously become the past. You’re able to move around and explore in this frozen world. You’re seemingly alone, in a dimension that you can only see but with which you cannot interact. Now, at least, you’re relieved of the mirage of an exchange. Move slowly through this world. Look carefully, remembering that what you see is colored by your vision. Feel deeply into your senses for any sign of heat or movement. Look carefully for what actually responds to your awareness: for what speaks to you directly and wants to exchange energy with you. What responds to your presence in this crystallized world is what’s truly part of you.

Read your full 2010 extended Scorpio astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

Of all the challenges you’ve faced during the past decade, seeking emotional stability ranks highest on the list. For you, this is the promised land of personal sovereignty. You’re something of a high roller.

You like that feeling of roller-skating on a slick floor as you make an airplane reservation on your BlackBerry.

And that, to my thinking, has concealed not only a deep desire to be stable, but also your lurking fear that it may not be possible. Yet much has changed in the past 12 months. You seem to have been through something that has granted you an actual measure of peace of mind; that is the main ingredient of a balanced existence.

Along the way, you have given up certain trappings and seeming necessities that were not working for you. One of them is your relationship to your family; it took you a while to be honest about the deception lurking there, or at least about why that environment was so difficult for you. It’s come down to you deciding that you were not going to believe the lies that other people believed. It’s easier not to believe lies you’re told. Yet to cast off what a whole culture (in this case, your family of origin) accepts as the stock and trade of wholesome truth is the work of a revolutionary. And the result can, indeed, be destabilizing. This, by the way, is why those who adhere to what is obviously not true tend to do so: they at lest have ground beneath their feet, even if it’s not solid.

You have given up this chaos in exchange for something far more useful: the ability to sustain awareness no matter how little you have to stand on. Not content to live on quicksand, you have learned how to dive deep into your feelings. Refusing an easy answer, you have taken years to explore your personal truth and where it connects to some much greater truth. And you are still changing as fast as ever. Yet now, having cultivated yourself this way, you are confronted by the issue of how exactly to express yourself in a productive way. And I would ask: what are you afraid of the most? That is the invitation.

Read your full 2010 extended Sagittarius astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

Your mission is to be who you are independently of the momentum or intentions of your family of origin. I recognize that among modern writers and certainly among astrologers, I am suspicious of the ‘hidden’ (but blatantly obvious) negative influences of family on individuals; such is not currently in vogue.

On the surface, the taboo involves how people who are themselves parents are less likely to openly question the neglect and abuse at the hands of their own parents, recognizing how difficult it is to raise children. We need to go deeper than denial, if we have any plans of healing the world or healing our lives. I’m suggesting that it’s time for you to wage a revolt against your early socialization, regardless of anyone’s opinion.

Family affects us several ways, all of which deserve a careful, extended review. First, family grants us life, though that often assumes that we owe our life back to it. Then family imprints us with its values, in its own chaotic, narcissistic image. Last, the Trojan horse of guilt is installed so that we go into paralysis anytime we try to digress a single millimeter from the agenda. Fear kicks in, because we are terrified of being without the structure that allegedly supports us, though we’ve done no actual study of whether this is true. More often the ‘support’ manifests as a battle waged when we try to make up our own minds about anything at all; or an internal conflict ensues, as if we’re being challenged by some absolute authority.

The combined action of Saturn and Pluto says that you are the only actual authority in your life. This is a matter of both growth and of opportunity, which at this point depend on one another. You’re being called upon to stand up to the challenges of your own evolution; indeed, to define your whole existence as one who evolves. You’re evolving past the ‘every man for himself’ attitude that’s been pounded into humanity for so long. You are replacing it with a more elegant vision of tribal awareness, where cooperation is honored and where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In such a world, freedom is not a privilege, but a precious responsibility. And in a word, this is leadership.

Read your full 2010 extended Capricorn astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

You depend on your intelligence; there are few more valid astrological truisms than descriptions of that unique Aquarian gift of reason, rationality and the kind of cleverness that lends itself impeccably to engineering. Yet your astrology is now calling you in a different psychic direction. You have by now felt the strong pull toward organizing your life around hearth and home. You have observed your intuition go from something that you doubted to something that you depend upon like a trusted friend.

This journey is related to something else you’re going through, which is evaluating, questioning and rejecting so many of the things you believed in the past. What you are seeing is that often, you perceived they were true because you believed in them. You’ve learned to take nothing for granted. Now a new clarity is taking over your life, based on a deep devotion to accurate perception that you’re embracing eagerly. For years along the way to this moment, it has seemed as if something was being taken away from you — as if your ideals were losing validity, which was a personal loss. Yet having discarded so much as false, you now have room for what is true and authentic. Having seen yourself for who you are, you can afford to allow others to witness your life. You have no need for ‘idealization’.

One theme you’ve become concerned with is justice, which is a worthy mission on Earth. There seems to be so little of it in the world, and you know you have something to offer here. I suggest you start on the controversial subject of love, where supposedly all is fair and for many, is akin to war. This is the first place to seek justice; love bestows incredible power, particularly over those whose lives have been defined by isolation. You’re the one in the position of holding a standard of fairness, which begins with authenticity. You are the one who sets the conditions on unconditional love, and the truth is, you can afford to be generous. This will connect you with a deep part of yourself that doesn’t always get a voice: a passionate maternal quality, which nourishes existence from the inside out.

Read your full 2010 extended Aquarius astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

For years, you’ve worked to set yourself free from something: perhaps from the lies that you believed; from your sense of being trapped or isolated; from a world that does not appreciate how subtle and beautiful life is. Though that setting-free process is not over, you’ve made progress — far more than you recognize. I suggest you sum up what you’ve learned in the simplest possible terms. For example, it is easier to come up with an innovative solution to a problem than it is to go back and ‘fix’ the past. Remember that one; it will be useful.

Another thing I trust you’ve observed is that it pays to be direct. People have a hard time fathoming what you’re thinking, even though it seems clear to you. You can afford to be even more transparent, including with yourself. In fact, you can afford and will thrive on radical honesty: about who you are, what you value and your vision for your life. Everyone will benefit; many of the things you understand easily are difficult for others to grasp, or to even admit the existence of; yet much depends on your ability to make yourself understood.

Transparency involves letting go of any attachment to your image. It’s necessary to match your outer appearance with the actual person you are, especially with your friends and to partners. This seemingly daring move will liberate your energy, and help you feel safer on the planet — and this, you know, is a real challenge for you. You’re finally getting a handle on your fears. In this time when everything in your life is poised to become larger, more successful and more visible, processing fear at the point of origin is far easier than facing it in magnified form.

Here is something you can count on as you take your next bold steps: In your relationships, trust is more important than love; and both are more important than sex. Trust is the most challenging aspect of any human equation, and a tragically scarce commodity in the world. You’re personally working to break the tradition of broken trust. You’re on the hunt for many other dysfunctional traditions, yet what matters more are the innovations you create for yourself and offer to those around you. One of them involves self-worth. On this theme, you’re on the verge of your greatest breakthrough, akin to any of the brilliant inventions that have changed the world: only this is your world.

Read your full 2010 extended Pisces astrology report in Cosmic Confidential

Dear Friend and Reader:

Happy holiday. We don’t have a Friday issue this week, though Judith Gayle has written a
holiday letter. I leave you in her capable hands. See you Tuesday.

Yours & truly,

 

PS, there has been plenty happening on the Planet Waves daily diary — lots of stuff about tomorrow’s Mercury retrograde, for instance.

Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re now in that special moment: two planets stationing retrograde, two eclipses are on the way and Jupiter is making conjunctions. The first-ever Capricorn solstice conjunct Pluto is about to happen, in a square to Saturn. The Sun is now conjunct the Galactic Core. Everything really is happening at once. Many astrologers have observed that the gods have a demented sense of humor. Welcome to it.

In the past few issues I’ve covered the personal implications of these aspects [if you need a refresher, here is one article and here is another]. Today let’s check in with the world we live on, in and with. As promised, the political is personal this week: for example, the UN climate conference in Copenhagen. It’s come down to the crunch just as Mercury is stationing in Capricorn, which suggests that there’s not going to be a final agreement at this conference. There are so many interests competing on this issue, and so many different countries and continents involved, that given the state of human nature, one could surmise that no agreement is really possible.

Clearly we are witnessing one of the first real opportunities for these factions, tribes, regions, environmentalists, fundamentalist industrialists, scientists, pseudocrats, ideologues and random freaks to come together and overcome their belief in their separate interests. They may not be getting too far, but heck, at least a bunch of them showed up for the meeting. We may yet look upon these as the good old days, when everyone got along.

It all seems incredibly messy to us. Maybe that’s because it is. We have a fine example of one of those “impossible situations” described by A Course in Miracles. What we’re seeing is certainly an interesting experiment in what can happen on a planet when there’s some dim recognition that survival of many species, including our own, is threatened. This would have made a fabulous scifi action story fifty years ago; today it’s all over the newspapers.

Imagine how this looks on a karmic level, in the long history of humanity on our world. Place it in the context of what we are doing here in the first place; make up your own story what that’s about. Imagine if you could see onto the dimension where many individuals with different levels of growth and widely varying beliefs in separate interests are attempting to hash out a resolution. Imagine the people who know that they’re on the wrong side of the issue, but are too sold out to change their official view. Imagine those who are are there to present a controversial viewpoint, struggling to get any attention at all, knowing they are performing an evolutionary function.

And then there’s us, here at the foot of Olympus, either listening to what’s happening, or not. How many people really care? How many of us really know we have an actual interest in the outcome of this unprecedented global meeting?

Astrologically, there are two pictures: the local one — the imminent station retrograde of Mars and Mercury (which could scuttle the conversation, in the short run); and the big-sky dynamic of the cardinal cross T-square: the 2012 formation that is now taking shape. This involves Saturn and Pluto in early Libra and Capricorn (making a square), and the coming conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus on the Aries Point. You could not ask for better astrology to tell us that something affecting the whole world is on the docket. It’s going to be there for a while. The current t-square melts in to the full-on square between Uranus and Pluto, which is exact for the first time in 2012 and lasts through 2015 — making an incredible seven exact squares. But note: even though it doesn’t officially start for two years, we are in this dynamic now.

Let’s first consider a late-breaking report on the deal that’s being debated: how much do world leaders agree to allow the average temperature on the planet to rise? Will it be 2 degrees centigrade, or 3? The UK Guardian reported yesterday that the emissions cuts offered so far at the Copenhagen climate change summit would still lead to global temperatures rising by an average of 3C, according to a confidential UN analysis obtained by The Guardian [please see chart analysis of the document below].

“With the talks entering the final 24 hours on a knife-edge, the emergence of the document seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last day of negotiations will be extremely challenging,” The Guardian reported.

“A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government — as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, more flooding and droughts.”

So this difference between a rise of 2 degrees and 3 degrees seems to be the point of the whole conversation. I guess 4 degrees would be worse and some prudent people are calling for 1.5 so we have a safety margin. I learned a new word tonight, gigatons. That is a measure of carbon release into the atmosphere. Unfortunately a gigaton is too big to fit in my pocket, like a gigabyte picture card.

Some people are coming forward with less-than-savory ‘solutions’ to the problem. In the Beyond Nuclear Bulletin of Dec. 16, the editors reported on the attempt by U.S. senators Kerry, Lieberman, Graham to insert nuclear power expansion into the Copenhagen climate negotiations. Development of American commercial nuclear power plants has been all but on hold since the Three Mile Island partial reactor core meltdown of 1979. The Chernobyl meltdown of 1986 gave another reason to stop nuclear power, but clearly this didn’t stop or even slow France, which currently gets 80% of its commercial electricity from nuclear fission plants.

According to the statement issued by the senators, “Additional nuclear power is an essential component of our strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We strongly support incentives for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, but successful legislation must also recognize the important role for clean nuclear power in our low-emissions future.”

Clean nuclear power? That’s like “clean dioxin.” You can only make it less toxic with words. They may as well say wholesome, fresh nuclear power or perfectly safe meltdown.

In a comment, the editors of Beyond Nuclear Bulletin replied: “Atomic power cannot solve the climate crisis. First, it costs too much and takes too long to deploy. In addition, in over 50 years, it has failed to solve its ‘insurmountable risks’: nuclear weapons proliferation, the danger of catastrophic radioactivity releases due to accident or attack, the unsolved problem of what to do with forever deadly radioactive wastes, as well as the ‘routine’ toxic and radioactive releases at each stage of the uranium fuel chain.”

Even my father, who has done time as a nuclear industry public relations consultant, admits that they have no clue what to do with the radioactive waste. How exactly do you mark a container or dump full of something that will kill people in 5,000 years? Can you read Sumerian tablets? Even in our current era we build housing developments on top of toxic waste dumps knowing perfectly well what they are.

Meanwhile, the recent hacking of emails on climate change breathed new life into the position of climate change skeptics. The emails, taken from a climate change laboratory in East Anglia, England, were hacked from a server somewhere in Turkey on Nov. 17. On first read, they seemed to indicate that certain scientists were only pretending that global temperatures were increasing.

As a hobby publicist myself, I love the timing of this — just one month before the Copenhagen conference, just enough time for the issue to be the perfect red herring. Even Sarah Palin is at her pulpit (somewhere) reminding us how those ecology nuts are full of it, we knew it all along, blah blah blah.

According to Sign of the Times (SOTT.net), even Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said, “Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action. But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.”

He added, “These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look. They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called skeptics. They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.”

However, the Associated Press reported this week that it studied 1,073 of the stolen emails and concluded, “emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.”

AP said that five of its reporters each read about one million words of e-mail text and in a Dec. 12 article said, “In the past three weeks since the emails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen emails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a ‘culture of corruption’ that the emails appeared to show.

“That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible,” but not of fabricating data.

One of the most intriguing properties that I’ve seen over and over again with Mercury stationing (either direction, retrograde or direct) is that lies do not stand up well to the aspect. The station seems to present that other way of looking at things, the shift in perspective or the direct revelation of the truth, that makes it abundantly clear what is actually true. [As an aside, 22 million Bush-era White House emails previously believed to have been lost or deleted were dug out of White House servers last week.]

I wonder what people who are climate change skeptics really think they stand for. Are they suggesting that we continue the industrial-scale consumption of the Earth, with all its many other problems — such as toxic pollutants and the ravaging of natural habitats? Are they in denial, trying to hide from their own responsibility for a problem they are helping create?

One of the skeptic theories is that there are natural fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature, some of them similar to what we are seeing today. But as I explained to one reader in an e-mail tonight, just because it was a natural phenomenon in the past does not present the logical conclusion that it’s natural today. We have something that they didn’t have back then: massive industry and the burning of carbon fuel. And obviously we have a lot more at stake: a much greater population, much of it concentrated on the coasts.

Anyway — I thought you might want this Copenhagen update. I know you have a lot going on, and planets are on the move.

For those who are curious, in the next two short articles, I’ll take a look at the charts for the Climategate e-mail hacking incident and the secret report obtained by The Guardian.

See you Tuesday with the January monthly horoscope.

Yours & truly,

PS, the Yes Men weigh in on climate change, again.

PPS, Holiday schedule note — we are taking next Friday off (Christmas Day) and will do a short issue only on New Year’s Day.

 

And just what does the chart for breaking into an obscure, high-security university computer and stealing the private emails of climate scientists look like? Here you have it. The location of the hacking was somewhere in Turkey; so I used the capital city. The server where they were taken from is in Norwich, England. I am counting the crime scene as the location of the perpetrator and not the victims. That was my first intuition and then I ran it past my colleague and longtime astrology mentor David Arner, who agreed that’s a good way to think about it. It is possible that the IP address in Turkey was used as a sock puppet (a false identity) for hackers working elsewhere; after all they are hackers. But it’s the best information we have. The time is stated in Eastern Standard Time, per the data source, which is attributed to this discussion.

The chart is Pisces rising, so you can be sure that Jupiter and Neptune will describe key themes. This turns out to be true.

The Moon, the Sun and Mercury — immediate significators for the incident — are in the 9th house, and the Moon and Mercury are in a close conjunction in Sagittarius (ruled by Jupiter). This speaks to the international nature of the incident, its academic setting and the fact that a global issue is involved (all of these are 9th house themes). The Scorpio Sun in the 9th adds a feeling of espionage, and the ease of the theft.

The Moon is separating from its conjunction to Mercury, so that’s the “thing that just happened.” Moon and Mercury are in aspect to the Saturn-Pluto square, the bigger thing that’s really happening — the world is changing. The Moon’s very next aspect is to the Black Moon Lilith, a strange hypothetical point associated with the Moon’s orbit. It’s dark and mysterious and while not inherently evil, it can stand in for less-than-wholesome motives; and for anything that is elusive or difficult to pin down. This is worth its own article. The Black Moon is one of the strangest behaving points I know of.

Notice that the big conjunction in Aquarius (technology) is like that hidden e-mail database that got hacked into. It’s located in the 12th house, which is a good representation of the data cloud, trade secrets and scientific secrets.

The Moon in this chart tells the story. Straightaway, the Moon makes a conjunction to Pholus, which is like the release of the emails. Pholus is about things or events that can’t be contained; that get let out of the bottle like a genie and then don’t go back in. It’s also about a small cause and a big effect.

The Sagittarius Moon goes on to make a series of aspects to the Aquarius grouping, as the whole story blows into an international sensation. In that larger-than-life 12th house way, in full Sagittarian flavor, the whole conversation basically ran wild. The Moon then made a square to Uranus — a disruption of some kind, namely to the Copenhagen proceedings — and then makes its last aspect to a major point or planet to Neptune: the lie is undone.

 

Would you notice if your house was one degree centigrade warmer or cooler? Actually, you probably would. It makes an even bigger deal on the planet because each degree increase in average global temperature means that so many more miles of coastline are flooded by melting ice and therefore rising sea levels.

The Guardian newspaper has revealed the existence of a confidential document which says that world leaders currently meeting in Copenhagen are only using 3C increase as a target — not 2C.

“The analysis seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last 24 hours of negotiations will be extremely challenging,” the newspaper said.

“A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government — as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, more flooding and droughts.”

And what would this chart look like?

The first thing that stands out is that Mars is in the 12th house — the house of the “hidden enemy.” Someone is hiding something; that’s what the article is about. Mars rules the 8th house, of secrets and of money. Mars is about heat. They seem to be hiding heat. And it seems to be for the sake of…money. It appears they are hiding a good bit besides.

Again the Moon turns up in Sagittarius; we’re close to the one month anniversary of the emails being hacked. The Moon is conjunct Venus less than a day before the exact New Moon. The Moon and other significant points are in the 4th house — the house of home; ecology is the study of the Earth. One thing about the Earth is it’s getting hot, and there’s certainly a lot of fire in there with all that Sagittarius. Moon to Venus gives another clue that something about money is going on. Once again the Moon is going to sweep past a series of aspects to the Aquarius alignment.

We don’t know the end of this story; the document was just leaked. But we shall see what we shall see.

 

By Scott Kalechstein | ScottSongs.com

I had written so much about inner peace, balance, and harmony in cosmic terms, when all it really came down to was fallout from Mom and Dad on this earth. What a joke. You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light, until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you’ve got to go and who is the real turkey!
— Shirley MacLaine, Dance While You Can

Are you going home for the holidays? To those people who love you, but who seldom express it in the way you would want? To those people who sometimes (or often!) have no clue how to honor your boundaries, or validate your feelings? To those people who can push your buttons before you even push the doorbell?

Coming to a place of real peace in our hearts with Mom and Dad, whether they are still alive in the flesh or just in our psyches and memories, is often both the most difficult and the most important soul work one can do in a lifetime. We can meditate all we want, feng shui our home and work environments, visualize our goals, get healers to clear our chakras, and eat organic, live foods, chewing slowly forty times each bite.

Yet if we have unprocessed indigestion from the hurt, anger and shame we felt when we were chewed out by our parents, it’s going to get in the way of enjoying lasting love and happiness in our relationships as adults. Engaging in spiritual pursuits without psychological and emotional healing work is like placing icing on a cake of mud. No matter how delicious the icing, the cake won’t taste good.

Sometime in my late twenties, a suspicion began sneaking up on me that the difficulties recurring in my relationships with women might have something to do with my connection to the woman I’ve always had the most difficulty with. (Take a guess!) My mother is one of the most passionately headstrong and expressive women I have ever met. She really voices her opinions and lets her feelings fly. Throughout childhood and on into young adulthood, I often felt swallowed up and overpowered by her emotional energy. It felt to me as if there was no room in our relationship for my own feelings, and even for my emerging (or submerging!) identity. My coping mechanism was to play the game of see-saw. When she raised her voice, I lowered mine. When she emoted, I suppressed. When she expressed caring, I danced at a distance.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

We are entering a Mercury retrograde, just as the Christmas rush has us spinning like dervishes. How Divine! What better time to stumble just a bit, to stop for breath and reconsider our options? I won’t dwell on the downside of such retro, with people hearing what they want to hear rather than what’s being said, with seemingly important bits of information vanishing down the rabbit hole just when we need them. My advice? Keep a notebook handy and scribble down anything that seems important. You will have cookie crumbs to follow when all else fails, and certainly technology is the first to wobble when Mercury blows us a big, fat raspberry. Keeping track of the crumbs is, at all times, one of my essentials.

The hidden blessing in retrogrades is contrast. In direct motion, we go bumbling along, pursuing our goals, handling our necessities and lost in our habits and patterns. As any given planet seems to halt and change directions, we should take the hint to do the same. The contrast between our regular forward motion and a slower, more inward-looking pace shakes us, wakes us, and takes us somewhere else in consciousness. Or it can. That is always up to us. We are each the author of our life story, our every thought and action. Which brings me to authors in general, and books that follow the trail of crumbs, illuminate with perspective, and consequently, bring us balance and understanding.

I don’t read for pleasure often enough, a condition I’m determined to rectify this coming year. I invariably give myself permission to do so only when I travel, which means that once a year, when I visit with family, I spend free moments reading. I like to sit in the sun when I return to California, because, as you may have noticed, the sun does not shine similarly everywhere you go. Its qualities shift from place to place and frankly, there’s no place like home. As a Mutable, I find it difficult to do only one thing at a time, so when I sit, I read. In the two weeks I’ve been here, I’ve polished off a dazzling array of reading material while soaking up the rays — five books in all, including Stephen King’s latest offering of over 1100 pages.

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Aries (March 20-April 19)
I’ve often thought that all matters spiritual would be easier to understand if we remove the word ‘spiritual’ from the language. Everything we think of in this ‘category’ needs to be thought of as normal rather than as something distinct and special; then we will get it. That would include having a broad mental horizon, honoring ethics, being honest, treating people as equals and the world as one place, and living in the spirit of love. As I’ve grown older, I’ve rethought my position on this; the qualities covered under my concept of spiritual need to be identified and honored as such. They need a place and as you know, that place is everywhere; it’s not church. Your charts this week suggest a return to the heart and soul of your faith. In that case we might well ask why you are concerned about anything else.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You have many admirable gifts and attributes; the one you consistently forget to reach for is leadership. Even going back 15 years and up to the present day, you’ve been called on to take a stand for what is right, and to help organize the efforts of others. Part of why this is so frustrating to you is that while you can accept people in their imperfections, it’s another thing to be responsible for their conduct, or to depend on the undependable. True enough. The solution is a new concept of leadership, based on mutually supportive relationships. You can think of these relationships as involving sacred contracts, where everyone involved gets the purpose of the gig, and responsibility and the burden of dealing with human flaws are fairly distributed. You are creating or renewing some of those sacred contracts these very days.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
It’s often difficult for you to stand up to your relationships because you see so much that’s outside you as larger and more influential than yourself. If we remember that the Galactic Core is in your opposite sign (which signifies relationships), it’s possible to adjust the scale and remember that nothing in our world is quite that monumental. You now have a point of emotional access to a situation or circumstance that once seemed daunting. That’s all it takes — a little common ground; the feeling of being recognized; the emotional sensation of trust, whereas before there was just an idea. If as the weeks and months progress you lose your sense of scale, remember this feeling. Connect with the reality that people are people. We’re all in this together, no matter what anyone thinks or tries to convince us.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Are you grateful for your health? The planet is in crisis about this right now, and it’s not just about how to pay for doctors. Between the faltering global immune system, poor nutrition and the constant overdose of stress, I suggest you practice a yoga path of appreciating even the most modest experiences of wellbeing: such as making your own food and walking under your own power. Yet it’s also time to reconsider what exactly we mean when we say healthy. There is something in there about staying connected to your source; to your inner core, which is always alive and always thriving even if we don’t quite express it in the world, or feel it in our emotions. This source can be tapped into when we need it. It takes practice, but you happen to be in an excellent position to learn (or relearn) the basics.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Your potential is opening up in unexpected ways. You’re never one to fear how amazing you can be, though you have a way of getting stuck on one level. Then you forget you’re there. You’re suddenly rising to a new occasion or accepting a mission that stretches your talent. This has been developing for a while, but now the sense of a calling is undeniable. You seem to have made a decision about how you see the world, or perhaps learned something from an important relationship. This has helped you redefine yourself; perhaps an analogy would help. Imagine someone who didn’t feel that beautiful caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, in a certain light or from an angle that provided a new perspective; and that momentary glance changed her self-image forever. But this is not about how you look; it’s about who you are.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Remember your relationship to the world. Not to the ‘little world’ of activity around you, but the very world. The whole story, the drama of our time in history, and the planet Herself: the planet that’s your home. Why you have such a deep sense of the Earth and her reality is not just about Virgo being an earthy sign. It’s about the placement of Sagittarius in your 4th solar house: your roots, your safety and your grounding. In one system of astrology, Sagittarius is the sign associated with the Earth. This week’s New Moon is an invitation to celebrate your home; which as you know is part of a much greater whole. I suggest you take some time this weekend and celebrate the fact of your belonging, your involvement and your sense of authentic contact — rare among humans — with the planet you belong to.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
Have you figured out that you think by divination? Most people hardly think at all, or try to use an outdated version of logic more resembling MS-DOS than an iPhone. Your mind is a crystal ball. You don’t exactly think; you allow a moment of no-mind and ‘unknowing’ — then you recognize what’s really going on. You’ve just had a big glimpse into the crystal. So much information came through that you might have forgotten the whole experience. However, it would seem that international travel plans are involved, and that you suddenly have a sense of your long-term trajectory. And there was the latest pleasant shock into some new creative or erotic territory, someplace you’ve been expecting to go for years, but are now suddenly willing to take the chance and explore with your senses and your soul.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Do you have the feeling that you just avoided some grave danger that you only found out about after it was over? Check in with the year 1999 and see if that time in your life, or in the life of the world, has any messages for you. You seem to be going back over the territory of a relationship that happened then, which may be leading you to question some current situations in your life. True, there is common ground between the two situations — but most of that involves your memory. You’re actually standing in a hologram of where someone close to you was some 10 years ago. You’re able to feel a little of what they felt, which is delivering some surprising information. Stick with this process — it has a lot to teach you; and along the way you can be grateful for how far you’ve come since then.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Feminine does not mean passive. True, most girls and women are raised to be more fearful and retreating than are most boys and men; but feminine is an alert, potent state of mind. Particularly in your relationships, the key to opening up to your receptivity is allowing yourself to flow from experience to experience. Notice who notices you. Respond if you like the vibes. Observe who is drawn in your direction and notice the first thing they say to you. Yet the real gifts will come from listening carefully to your intuition. Solutions to problems that have puzzled you for years may enter your mind, but unless you notice and actually write down what you hear, the benefits of that information will likely pass you by. This year has been all about learning to focus your mind. Now is the time to put that skill to work.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You seem driven toward a goal without knowing what the goal is. Well, it’s about you, not a place, a thing or an accomplishment. I don’t think there’s been a time in your life when you’ve been under so much pressure to become someone you are inside. The early to mid-1990s contain a clue, but that was likely such a chaotic time in your life you don’t like to think about it so much. Yet you learned a lot, the most significant thing being that you can rise to the occasion of highly demanding situations. Growth in this particular case involves dismantling some aspect of your personality: or releasing some habit of existence that has gradually become a false reason for living. It would be nice if less were going on at the same time. Yet part of what you’re learning is how to distribute your energy effectively, and to make personal evolution part of your life experience every single day.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
For a long time it felt like you were not ready to act. Suddenly you feel overdue for action. Don’t worry about that interval between the two observations about yourself. There wasn’t actually a moment when you ‘became ready’, though you’re currently in the moment when you’re noticing. That’s the time to cast the chart or draw the runes. Recognition is the connection point. You still have the ability to drift, delay or pause; your next reminder won’t feel like the original message. You will have to summon more of your internal will rather than moving with the flow. At the moment, you have the option to let go into the circumstances and events that are shaping you and allow yourself to take a new form, precisely at the beginning of a cycle in your life. You have reasons to make a move; you have reasons to hesitate, though remember — you can delay change but not defy it.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You’re starting to fill in the blanks on just how accessible some extraordinary success really is. Success is elusive to you because generally it demands being competitive. While you’re capable of this, it doesn’t feel good; no goal is worth feeling less than human. However, a truly human version of recognition and reward are available right now. This is partly because you’re so visible at this time of year. You’re finding it easy to be authentic lately, and someone who can provide a vital connection is actually noticing what you’re up to. Proceed every day as slowly as you can, whatever you may be doing. Emphasize what is beautiful about your work, without neglecting how much you’ve achieved. And if you’re doubting that, I suggest you make a list of how far you’ve come in how little time. This will help you remember your confidence as a conscious act of will.

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