Dear Friend and Reader:

This is an off-week for a monthly horoscope; the next one will be next Tuesday. So I’m here this week with some practical astrology, focusing on the events of the current week.

Our top story is that Mercury is getting ready to be retrograde in Capricorn just in time for the holidays. It’s not there yet, but the vibrations are coming back to us from the near future; I call this the echo phase. Mercury retrograde happens three times a year, as Mercury tucks between the Sun and the Earth. That a big magnet passing by can make electronic things act strangely does not explain how mail can be delayed. Our minds are electronic devices, but we’re sentient so that’s not an excuse for being a flake. Still, at some point or another everyone gets a good game out of Mercury; I’ve always thought it wise to offer a prayer to the Winged God and at least remind him that we know he exists.

The retrograde effect is starting to become obvious: for example those 22 million ‘lost’ Bush-era emails appearing on the White House servers. That feeling of an invisible crack in reality out of which things manifest, or into which appointments, ideas, emails and commitments seem to disappear. It’s hardly convenient that Mercury is slowing to a station right at the time of the year when just about everyone is trying to rush like a lunatic and slack off simultaneously. I’ve noticed an increase in the quality of sarcasm (especially when in professional hands, very Mercury in Cap). And I’ve drawn a connection between ‘passive’ aggression and Mercury retrograde: not doing something that creates an effect that creates a blowback for which someone else takes the blame.

I suggest you take this as an opportunity to put up with nothing. Not with games, with lies, with marshy statements of commitment and most of all, not with excuses. Hold yourself to a higher standard of integrity. Remind yourself of the concept regularly. In fact there are some things that actually do have to happen during Mercury retrograde. We wouldn’t put up with paramedics thinking they can act a little weird just because a planet is going by. Therefore, be professional. Leave yourself plenty of time to get places. Don’t rush going out the door. Make sure you have the phone number of the person you’re meeting — and that it’s right. If someone wrote down their number wrong, you could get blamed.

It’s worth paying attention to the technology side of things. The single most important thing you can do during Mercury retrograde is protect your data. That mostly means keeping an extra copy or two of your most important files or databases (such as the one in your portable device or phone), backing up websites, and making sure you pay attention if something is acting strange. One of the most consistent events I’ve noticed is that of losing or misplacing things. I wonder whether this increases during a retrograde or whether it just feels different somehow.

One thing we learn, though, is to sharpen our problem solving skills. And I would say that if you’re looking for an ‘antidote’ to this fabled and storied astrology, a clever eye for seeing solutions is as good as any. That may be the root of the matter, intellectually. I wonder, if you checked patents, which were filed during Mercury retrograde?

One of the simplest, most effective things you can do here on Digital Island is save your work. If you’re happily typing along, stop and save the file. Then save it again. If you use MS Word, set the thing to save the file automatically every two or three minutes. You’ll find that in “preferences.” If you’re blogging, remember that “save draft” button.

Then we have relationships. The holidays present all kinds of pressures and complications. It’s vital to state what you mean and mean what you say; sarcasm is extremely risky. Be open to negotiation. Make sure you listen — especially to what children say, but in truth to anyone you love, who counts on you, or who you depend on. I see a lot of revenge acted out in families. It’s really time for that to stop.

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet-light image of the planet Venus, taken on January 24 1995, when Venus was at a distance of 70.6 million miles (113.6 million kilometers) from Earth.

In other news, the Sagittarius New Moon is Wednesday, conjunct Venus and the Galactic Center; and square Uranus. Wait, that’s really happening. How incredible. This New Moon is going to be full — of surprises, that is. It’s also harmonizing beautifully with the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune alignment; it has a transcendent quality, and the sense of a higher calling associated with the Galactic Core. The Core and Venus are sources of feminine energy; what is known in Eastern thought as yin.

Goddess power is sending her volts through this aspect dance of the New Moon; which is a yin event in itself. Yin is not passive energy; it’s more like the ocean. Venus brings the earthly passions, pathos and emotional intelligence. The Core — Galactic Centercamp — offers a message that’s subtle, deep and subject to being ‘forgotten’. The Core’s property of fleeting insight feels like a reminder to remember what we usually omit, and to listen for the homing signal.

The thing about the Core is this. We really have no clue what’s there, what it feels like, what it looks like and what it really means to be that close to a black hole where the stars are that concentrated; though if we’re looking for life, i have a hunch that’s the direction to travel.

For realtime updates, please stay tuned to the familiar Planet Waves daily blog and the Cosmic Confidential diary. This new site features updates on the way to finishing the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, as well as daily highlights from our 11 past annual editions. If you have time for more than five minutes of astrology, these are fun places to visit.

Catch you Friday.

Yours & truly,

Dear Friend and Reader:

Over the past few days, we experienced the conclusion of the Jupiter-Chiron conjunction in Aquarius. This has been working out all year; this week’s was the third of three contacts since May, then July. I believe this is one of those aspects that future astrologers are going to look back on, associate directly with the historical developments of our era and wonder: what on Earth was it like to live through that?

Speaking of threes, there are three planets involved at the core of the Aquarius astrology, and a fourth one close by which I will explore next week. The three are Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune. What we experienced over the past few days was the Jupiter-Chiron conjunction; next will be the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, exact for the first time on the winter solstice (though it came quite close in May).

Jupiter is the fast mover of the lot. It’s been in Aquarius for less than a year, while Chiron has been around for five years and Neptune for 10. Jupiter is therefore visiting and going over and in a sense gathering the experience of these two outer planets (Chiron and Neptune) via Aquarius for so long. I have in the past referred to their eventual conjunction as an Awakening of the first kind; and the meeting is dancing close. To my thinking, this is a review process of many changes that we as individuals have been through, and that our society has been through. Much of this involves the themes of: where do you fit into the larger world that surrounds you? What is the cost of conforming to expectations that you don’t understand? What must we give up in order to be an individual?

Photo by Eric Francis.

Because this setup involves Aquarius, part of the conversation involves the mental realm and what is known as the technosphere: the cloud of technology that surrounds us, the energy and information that move there. In recent years it’s taken on the name, ‘the cloud’, a term used to describe part of Earth’s environment. In a book called Time and the Technosphere, the author suggests that the biosphere, this green-blue living sphere where everyone grows and blossom and squirms around and eats and reproduces, is gradually being encircled in the technosphere.

That is, all the wires and broadcasts and devices and engineered seeds and all of us awash in microwave radiowave 3G 4G bluetooth blueray wifi myfi jai alai, that whole buzzing sphere that it is, is merging with the living realm. We are merging into one another. How do we personally relate to the experience of being immersed in this? I am curious about people’s personal journeys through the technosphere; our own personal intermingling. You can post your thoughts and experiences here.

Do you see yourself as passive in the process, or do you strive to be an active contributor to the collective in some way? On this, more depends than you may imagine, because whether you see yourself as separate or apart, as having an influence or not, suggests the posture of your mind as you move through life.

The last factor involves our relationship to mass deception, as individuals and together. Neptune has been in Aquarius for a decade; we have been lied to quite a lot during the past 10 years, I believe far more than usual. Or perhaps the demand for deception, as a form of prepackaged denial, has grown more enthusiastic. This issue comes into high-resolution focus as Chiron (the focal point) makes its first exact conjunction to Neptune early next year.

Yours & truly,

Note to Readers: Today is the last day to purchase Cosmic Confidential at the flat rate. After today, the signs will only be available separately; and after Jan. 1, the key life transits section will be available separately. Also, the Confidential Diary has been created and is being updated daily. All readers are welcome. Thank you for making this year’s annual such a success. -efc

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The arrival of Santa Claus at the parade’s finale marks the start of the Christmas season. Photo: Wikipedia.

December is not shaping up this year as the customary flow of social excess, frivolous spending and holiday glee. We’re still buying at a steady gallop, but most of us appear to be downsizing our expectations to meet our dwindling budgets. All the trappings are in place: carols piped in to soothe shoppers and make them jolly, early Christmas parades come and gone, Santa installed at the mall, tent cities of tree vendors popped up like mushrooms on the lawn.

I don’t see as many shoppers as usual, the parking lots are not jammed and there’s a kind of ‘wait and see’ attitude going on, but some traditions die hard. Here in California, where I’m visiting on my yearly pilgrimage home, the Christmas Light Wars have already begun, the newest blow-ups added to the collection of lawn decorations and the requisite jumble of lights running, chasing and winking their way across rooftops. My son-in-law has outdone himself this year, annoying his competitive next-door neighbor so much that the man — apparently afraid of heights — forced his young teen up onto the second story roof with lights in hand.

Sitting in the sunshine reading, I had to smile as I listened to him micro-manage the placement of each string: “No, not there, to the left, the LEFT!” Not to be outdone by my SIL’s talent (and dexterity) he purchased a set of three electronic trees that pump out a light show to music, and now we’re being treated to Christmas warbling eight or more hours a day. The Grinch would be tearing his hair out in tufts.

Continued at this link…

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, December 11, 2009, #796 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

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Aries (March 20-April 19)
Take care not to act out your parents’ dramas in your relationships. Their bonds were more likely based on a sense of ownership rather than friendship or partnership. You have an opportunity this week to discover how meaningful and productive a step in relational philosophy this can be for you. One of the key reasons that our personal lives are so complicated involves this issue. To even begin to take the step of recognizing one another as free people, we need to know ourselves well, and address our own weaknesses. We need to understand our emotional triggers. We need to embrace clarity in our dealings with others. These requirements leave out most of the population, despite the profound benefits of relationships created of awareness and trust rather than entanglements made of fear and expectation.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You may experience some wild extremes in your sex drive for the next few days, which would be fine — except for how judgmental we’re taught to be. Despite what you keep hearing, you’ve got nothing to hide. That you may have mixed feelings about being so passionate is not evidence of who you are inherently. It’s about an agenda that takes the most spiritual experience in the world and turns it into something we’re allegedly supposed to feel bad about. I invite you to try an experiment of reversing this equation, beginning with affirming your existence, your desires, your body and your intentions as evidence of only goodness and beauty. Grant yourself the space to be completely honest with yourself. Remember: once you experience a new depth of inner freedom, you won’t want to go back.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Remove the ‘fate’ factor from a crucial personal or business situation. You seem willing to let the pieces fall where they may, when vigilance would serve you better. Be attentive to every word spoken and action taken. I’m not suggesting that others have a negative agenda for you; rather, it seems that certain people close to you are in a lot stronger position than you are. They’re likely to be seeking encounters with those who are determined to help themselves, rather than those who are drifting or caught in their sense of victimhood. Notice your motivation as it comes in strong some days and seems to have gone missing on others. Communicate clearly, and listen till you understand. Take conscious and tangible steps toward improving your financial and personal partnerships. Look for common ground and you will find it.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Whatever door has swung open the past couple of months is still open, and you have access to more energy and resources than you ever imagined possible. You’re also blessed with a passport to exploration of both ideas and experiences. Most of what you felt judged for in the past will no longer stick to you — so you don’t have to live as if it will. Once you’re clear with yourself, others will feel a need to be clear with you. Embrace your own right to exist as a free person, and a space will open granting you the privilege of acting on that freedom. Meanwhile, I suggest you get out of the habit of trying to predict what others think. If you admit that you really don’t know, that will save you the burden of aspiring not to care.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Has anybody but me noted the conflict between our society’s obsession with hot romance and its other obsession with marriage? The whole situation seems doomed to turn our relationships into the kind of 18-hole scandals we love so much. Many who feel they want marriage respond by turning up the valve on sex and dating — which is unlikely to work. There are political and business agendas involved that have nothing to do with us. My question for you is: what is your agenda now? What do you need, socially, erotically and spiritually? More to the point, what do you want? If you’re clear with yourself about what you need and want, you’ll be likelier to find it, and less likely to feel bad if you don’t live up to an image of yourself.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Everyone has their own idea of fun. You believe in serious fun. That puts you in the queue for occasional serious debauchery; you need both. Yet the thing you would benefit from them having in common is that no matter what you do to amuse yourself, observe yourself doing it. Notice your obsessions, and be generous admitting them to yourself. This will feel good in a way that you’ll appreciate, daring you to align language with intention in a way that offers intellectual pleasure and the emotional pleasure of relief: the fully-absorbed idea that life is easier when you don’t hide. Over the next month or two you are likely to do pearl diving within your own psyche, discovering what else may be down there, and what else you want to reveal.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You may have more to offer than your current friends can stand. It’s not their fault; you seem to be bursting with energy and they seem to be holding back a little. You can psychoanalyze why, but it would probably be a waste of time; you have more important things to think about than why friends or partners don’t want to move their energy. For you, your motivations are worth considering, though. One thing that’s clear is that you’re needing to take deeper emotional risks than you have in recent years. And you have come to the limit of one particular self-concept, and seem determined to let that fall away and be replaced by your actual sense of existence. You know, not a persona, but an actual person. The difference can be pleasantly shocking, though it usually requires some reorientation, both emotional and social.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Don’t push yourself to anything like a peak expression of strength or power — I suggest you reserve your energy. Now is the time to work from the interior outward. Think of this moment as the fulcrum, where small changes on a deeply personal level can result in much wider, deeper changes months or years down the seeming line of time. Actually, the observations you make about yourself, and the commitments you make to yourself, have effects immediately. Everyone in your environment is influenced. The small hang-ups you identify and release liberate energy on a much deeper level than anyone is aware. The agreements you make with yourself change your inner orientation and therefore influence every subsequent agreement you make with another person.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
‘Tis the season to be pushed, pulled and stretched in every possible direction, plus a few you haven’t heard of. Except for: you seem to be calm as a willow. Perhaps you’ve finally learned to let others do all the worrying, or you’ve figured out that faith works better than fear at getting you where you need to be. Here’s the thing to be cautious of: the sense that your emotions are running out of control. There’s something to be said for grounding any state of consciousness that verges on manic into a hot bath or a walk in the woods. You’re releasing so much energy right now that you may have the impulse to let it all go at once. I suggest holding your charge, like a battery. Then learn to let go in gentle bursts of energy that you can come back from, without losing yourself, relaxing into the after-effects.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Each day you awaken deeper into a process of inner growth that finally has a life of its own; a life you can recognize and relate to. There are times when the journey seems to be directly part of your existence, and times when you seem strangely removed from it; which is of course a trick of the mind: you are your life. If there’s a theme behind these developments, it is creating a concept of responsibility that is yours alone, having nothing to do with your parents’ or prior authority figures’ notions of right, wrong or necessary. You’re developing a concept of responsibility that has little to do with what you have signed on for through much of your life. What you are learning is new, and integral to a way of seeing that the world itself is gradually accepting, first as meaningful, then as valid.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Recent days have arrived with a shift in your self-perception, and likely, of your view of the world. It’s as if energy that was building for many months has finally tipped in one direction, which feels curiously like forward. Yet there is a review process involved. Many weeks leading up to the current moment have found you exploring your personal history from one point of view; you reached a culmination, and now it’s time to describe your process going back even further — about 10 years — and consider it from that perspective. This one may be a little more challenging to grasp or express in words or formed concepts. But here is a clue: something within your character has been in the process of dissolving, like soft stone left out in the elements year after year. That is what’s being revealed to you.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
Make careful moves this week; treat every decision like it matters, because it does. If you’re involved in a career or project that requires visibility or at least depends on your reputation, be mindful that others in key positions of influence can see you vividly now, and some are poised to reach out. This is not the time to be passive. Action starts with awareness, then choosing based on what you notice. You may feel like you’ve been navigating without being able to see the real landscape you’re in. Aspects over the next five or six days will give you a much clearer picture of where you are and how you’re getting to your next destination. Meanwhile, I suggest you take a moment and look at what you’ve accomplished in recent years. Some of what you think amounts to the least really amounts to the very most.

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Adapted from Cosmic Confidential by Eric Francis.

From mid-December through mid-January are some of the most whirlwind months of astrology in recent memory, and that is saying a lot. The nice part is that we who honor astrology can actually use it as a tool to make our lives a little easier.

We are approaching simultaneous Mercury and Mars retrogrades, a lunar eclipse, a solar eclipse, two Jupiter conjunctions and finally a sign change of Jupiter. Uranus is now on a clear course for Aries, turning over one of the most significant cycles in all of astrology.

Moving through the next six weeks will require skill, awareness and the maturity to slow down and make conscious choices. In those moment when you find yourself acting like a robot, pull the plug and resume being human. You’re always just one thought away.

In all of this astrology, there is a huge cosmic and psychological push to make, rather than delay, progress. Only you know what you’re avoiding. Only you know what you really want. As I have said many times, the planetary momentum only builds from here, though presently we are at a decision point; an entry ramp into the momentum.

This article is designed as a planning tool. All of these events fall in different solar houses for the 12 signs, and shake out a different way based on your real natal chart. The Sun sign astrology is one of the key themes of Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition, and I cover it thoroughly in there as a theme for the entire year and into 2011.

I can say this for everyone, regardless of your astrological tribe: Mercury retrograde in Capricorn is about getting our business affairs in order. This is accelerated and emphasized by a solar eclipse in that sign, on the North Node. There is something here about taking all things Capricorn not as something ‘out there’ but rather as something interior, for which we are personally responsible.

Mars retrograde in Leo is about defining ourselves as individuals, in the aspect of breaking our habit of pride-based conformity. Mars in Leo will take us deep into ourselves, and if we are willing to accept the mission, we can stand apart from the crowd, with integrity. It’s an invitation to live in such a way that offers us some freedom from what we think people think about us, and worse, the pride that makes us care at all.

Mars retrograde in Leo is associated with a Chiron-like planet called Hylonome, which says: be careful about self-inflicted injuries. Watch your psychological patterns and beware of what you do to yourself.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Big Astrology Background: The Cardinal T-Square

All of the current astrology is set before the background of the cardinal sign T-square: Saturn in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn, which will soon be joined by Jupiter and Uranus in Aries (which in June make a conjunction right on the Aries Point). Major forces are both combining and colliding. Navigating all of this consciously requires our full attention, and the heart-level willingness to participate consciously in the process of change. That process is never limited to one person alone. Much of the message is about awakening to yourself, and then collaborating with others.

We are seeing big picture astrology that closely resembles the Sixties, which was made of a Saturn-Uranus-Pluto dynamic: upheavals, long-delayed changes, and a rapid acceleration of both old-system breakdown and new-system creation. When Uranus and Pluto get together, there is a surge of progress in every field, and we need to keep the focus on things that are directly humanitarian. These kinds of events build for decades. We are usually involved in their momentum long before we’re aware of this fact, and before astrologers say anything. This is because the time orbs involved are generally way underestimated.

For example, what we are calling 2012, which in Western astrology consists mainly of the Uranus-Pluto square, is exact for the first of seven times in June of that year, and stretches through 2016. Yet we are well under its influence now, and there were clear signs going back to the summer of 2008. This is society going through contractions of change so deep that they represent a total change in our reality framework, also known as a paradigm.

We are seeing a metaphor of this with the dismantling of the financial system, and the whole thing seeming to be creeping toward the brink of disaster. Yet we don’t know what will replace it; most of us have not yet tapped the inventive and inventive energy of this transit. We’re not exactly tapped into the revolutionary spirit — not yet, anyway.

Part of how you can do that is to shed the skin of fear, that is, of your identity rooted in fear, and begin to allow the creative heat at the core of your being to express itself as a sense of movement, exploration and freedom. It’s time to ask real questions about what you want and need to be doing with your life. It’s time to listen to what your inner guidance has been telling you for years.

Photo by Eric Francis.

The Subtle and the Sublime: Jupiter, Chiron, Neptune

Closer to the foreground is the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune alignment in Aquarius. This has been shaping our reality for the past year or so, and now it is coming to its full peak.

Chiron was also a big factor in the Sixties: in my view, it was the cosmic, spiritual piece; the part that spoke up for love and grounded the mystical and psychedelic consciousness of the era. Chiron in Aquarius is equally significant today — but playing a different role. Today, Chiron is a catalyst for social consciousness, provoking us to embrace our individuality in a way that allows us to connect with others as individuals. Yet making contact with both planets associated with Pisces — Jupiter and Neptune — Chiron is once again grounding a message of peace and reminding us of the power of social movements. In Aquarius, you can be sure that the Internet is one of the most crucial reality fields we can be working with. This to me is about no longer being a victim of technology, but embracing the technosphere as a living reality wherein we can learn, grow and feed ourselves with the Living Information. Most important, it is a place where we can connect with one another.

Jupiter and Chiron make their one and only exact alignment on Monday, and then Jupiter goes on to make its conjunction to Neptune on the solstice. This is a subtle series of events that is more obvious as an internal shift than as an external one. I would describe it as a rapid acceleration or focusing of spiritual growth; of awareness of and contact with the unseen world, and with subtle energies; and a gift of both healing and evolution that feels like an alignment with sanity. This focus on Aquarius tells us that people who can work, grow and love together are finding one another. And we’re being reminded that it is time to reach out.

Remember that Chiron has the property of being tangible and responsive to documentation. It is not an ‘etheric’ energy, but a highly pragmatic one. Chiron is a tool, like your Maglite or Leatherman.

There is an apparent paradox in these developments. The world is going through some wild gyrations, many people are in pain, and yet certain individuals have never felt clearer or safer, though recognizing the fragile edge we live on. For those caught in the old framework of a fear-based reality and identity, these Chiron aspects may not even register in their awareness, or they may turn up as crisis. For others, everything simply seems hopeless or out of control. For those going through an evolutionary progression, there may be some sense of mystery about those who grasp onto a dense level of awareness; who try to hold onto the past, or to live past patterns in a much lighter-density present moment.

Open up to the Living Information that is coming through you, and your options and sense of potential will open up. Jupiter conjunct Chiron is about applying a sense of alchemy to your perceptions, which you could say is equivalent to informing yourself with a deeper, inner truth than anything you can see in the world. Imagine the focusing power of Chiron grounding the wisdom potential of Jupiter. Or imagine the light of Chiron illuminating the beauty and potential of Jupiter with a whole new kind of radiance. This is about actual experience — not a theory or a concept.

The conjunction of Chiron and Jupiter is in full effect right now, as you read. Yes, the world and many people who live here are struggling. There seem to be many challenging inevitabilities on the horizon, but these change with the shifting perspective of how we look at them; and that perspective starts within us: specifically with how we see ourselves. I recognize that the world ‘exists objectively’ and is not merely an internal phenomenon. I am talking about something different here, which is what we do with our precious minds when we accept that we have the choice for how we see and conceive of ourselves and our experiences.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Here is a listing of key events between now and early summer.

Tuesday, Dec. 8: Jupiter conjunct Chiron (at 21+ Aquarius)

Wednesday, Dec. 16: Sagittarius New Moon (at 24+ Sagittarius)

Sunday, Dec. 20: Mars stations retrograde (at 19+ Leo)

Monday, Dec. 21: Sun ingresses into Capricorn (solstice)
Jupiter conjunct Neptune (at 24+ Aquarius)

Sunday, Dec. 26: Mercury stations retrograde (at 21+ Capricorn)

Thursday, Dec. 31: Partial Lunar Eclipse and Cancer Full Moon (at 10+ Cancer)

Wednesday, Jan. 13: Saturn stations retrograde (at 4+ Libra)

Friday, Jan. 15: Mercury stations direct (at 5+ Capricorn)
Solar Eclipse and New Moon (at 25+ Capricorn)

Monday, Jan. 18: Jupiter ingresses Pisces, and does not retrograde till it reaches Aries in June

Wednesday, Jan. 20: Sun ingresses Aquarius

Wednesday, March 10: Mars stations Direct

Thursday, May 27: Uranus enters Aries

Sunday, June 6: Jupiter enters Aries

Thursday, June 10: Jupiter conjunct Uranus on the Aries Point

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, December 4, 2009, #795 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Dear Friend and Reader:

Astrology often seems to happen all at once, and if you’ve been wondering why this was such a strange, exciting or nerve-wracking week, we are in a pretty significant cluster.

Overnight Tuesday to Wednesday was the Full Moon in most time zones within our readership, and this event has had a significant ripple effect. The same day, Uranus stationed direct after a long retrograde.

Due to a conjunction between the Sun and a Chiron-like planet called Pholus, certain factors in your life (and indeed, in the world) may seem to be quickly running out of control. You may not be able to “get control” but you can do your best to see the situation for what it is, and create a vision for what you want, or what you need.

We are taught to worry about trivial things, and to run from the important ones. Part of what we now need to do is prioritize. We’re also taught to over-emphasize the value of fear, and to think that love is scary. If you find love scary, you might benefit from placing the emphasis in your life on trust, and letting that fill in for what you used to think of as love. Trust is partly intuitive, and it’s partly based on a track record with someone that is built over time.

In challenging moments, it’s important to remember who you trust, and go to them. But it’s more important to trust yourself; to remember who you are, and why you are on the planet, and focus on that. If you don’t think you know, trust that you’ve merely forgotten and need to remember rather than learn something new. This remembering is another way of saying have faith in yourself. This is a skill, and one that is learned over time. But the first step is often the most challenging, and the most rewarding.

Most of the pain we experience in life, we inflict on ourselves. Many current aspects suggest that we need to be careful about this. We can help ourselves by being more introspective; by spending more time with our thoughts and feelings, rather than merely reacting to them.

Something else to keep in mind when we’re in challenging times is to be conscious of how we describe our problems. Notice that there are two ways to do this. One is to state the issue in a way that it seems impossible to solve. The other is to state the problem in a way that it is possible to solve. In this, you have a choice.

Yours & truly,

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Aries (March 20-April 19)
Should you take that risk and go the distance? Or is discretion the better part of valor? These days, the latter expression rings true. You are being reminded to do things for their own sake, rather than for appearances or for the sense of glory. You are being reminded that the deepest risks are the ones you take with your ideas about who you are, rather than what you want to impress others with. For a Westerner, this kind of adjustment can be a shock. I dread to think how many people think someone is a ‘better person’ because they have a more expensive car. Yet these illusions are falling apart fast, and you want to be ahead of the curve. Make sure you stick to reality, in your relationship to yourself, and your relationship to everyone else.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Your emotional orientation to another person is shifting. It has been for a while, with the combined satisfaction of getting closer and some added tribulations about being vulnerable. There can be a delicate walk involved. What you may not be seeing yet is the extent to which the past plays a role in the situation. During childhood, you had a powerful need to be the center of attention, and you were often rewarded this way. As an adult, it’s difficult to find people who need us in a way parallel to the way our parents focused on us; and difficult to find anyone who loves us with the intensity with which we loved and needed them. This is the point: it’s time to liberate your current relationships of parental drama, and relate in realtime, adult to adult.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Mercury is about to change signs into Capricorn, and this says it’s time to go over your banking-related issues. Take some time this weekend and look at your credit card statements. Check your current interest rates. Make sure that everything that is on your statement belongs there. Make decisions about joint finances that focus on what is actually important, and on decisions that make things simpler. The key is mental focus, and dealing with the corporate authorities in your life on terms they understand. If you are in a situation where something seems unfair, or where you feel victimized, take steps to get out of that position. One of those steps involves knowing your rights. If you are doing this in concert with a partner, make sure you both agree on the strategy before proceeding — but time is of the essence.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Remember: the past is over. Your past is over, and the generations of people who came through the planet before you have done their bit. Yet in a curious and often disturbing way, we tend to drag around their history. And at the same time, we live our own lives like it was the past and not the present. We spend so much time obsessing over the past, you would think that our lives are speeding in that direction, and more often than not, that is what happens. To this end, you can make a project of determining what used to be important to you, what is important to you now, and what you’re growing towards. If this is working, you will be asking yourself why you previously considered certain things so important. Some still are; some are not.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Most people are so busy this time of year there is no time to live from the center of their being. If you are caught on the treadmill and don’t feel you have time to really be yourself and explore your favorite things in life, you’re missing out on what for you is one of the richest phases of astrology for many months. We tend to think we lack time; much of what we really lack is awareness and availability. Paying attention is so cheap, it actually doesn’t cost anything, which will appeal to your thrifty nature. But these days it has a high return value, and you’re likely to get results fast. Problems are better solved by ideas than by labor. Erotic exploration is more natural when we’re spontaneous and responsive. Creativity is like a cat. If we feed her, she keeps coming back.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Your psyche is calling on you to be honest with yourself about something, and it probably would fall under the general heading ‘sex’. You may be feeling this as guilt, or as pressure to say something to someone; in either case you will feel a lot better if you articulate your feelings, needs and desires to yourself. What you need is a state of mind that allows total self-admission, which you could rephrase as letting yourself in. Then rather than judging your desires, you need to create experiences. This may take some planning, and some negotiation with what the best way to approach the question is — but the idea is to work with your desire while you’re being real with yourself. This has come up quite a few times before, and what you need is to go underneath the surface chatter and into a place where you can untangle — and enjoy — your deeper sense of self.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You have had your insecure moments the past year, many of them surrounding your home life. Yet you may not have been able to focus on what is bothering you, or why it matters so much. I would propose that you’re attempting to process a fear that belongs to one of your parents, or perhaps your grandparents. I’m surprised this issue is not talked about more, you know, on Oprah or on Dr. Phil. We treat everything like it was our original, brand-new problem that showed up last week, but then there is a general taboo on honestly addressing what our parents and grandparents did to us. The history in this situation involves declaring that ‘you can’t trust anyone’. Most of us are told that, but it actually looks like someone in your family believed it, and this is making your life unnecessarily complicated now.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
The progress you make on articulating your professional goals during the next six months can establish a foundation that lasts you a decade. For this to work, you need to do something unusual for a human, which is to determine with absolute authenticity what role in the world works for you and what does not. You will learn a lot from a review of the past 10 years, including a thorough revision and assessment of your work history. Each line on your CV or resume needs to be assessed for what you learned in that position, what you liked and disliked, and whether you thought you were actually effective. The other part of the process involves embarking on an experiment: trying something absolutely new for at least a couple of months, with no expectation of success.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Often we hold back on being real because once you start, where does it end? Well, it may not; it could become a way of life. Another concern: in choosing authenticity, there can be that uncomfortable recognition that one was not so real in the past. Now something is seducing you to bring your deepest self to the forefront of your existence. That something might range from it feels good to you’re curious to see what might happen. Something will indeed happen; your choices will influence your environment, touch the people around you and most of all, affect your perception of yourself. You may discover something profoundly important to you that you had not noticed in the past. Yet it’s only fair of me to remind you that once you move forward, there is no turning back.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You may suddenly be in a tight spot. Or you’re being reminded of what’s been true for quite a while, and of your commitment to change that has bubbled to the surface of your mind again and again. You might say that awareness is very nearly everything. How you orient your mind will determine how you think of the different situations in your life. If you look at the situation one way, it looks like one thing, and you have a notion of how to resolve it. Look from another angle and you have a different concept of the issue and a different concept of how to resolve it. Yet how can they have so little in common? Clue: the two perspectives have more in common than you think, but you have to look just the right way.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Personal change is often a miracle. It’s the everyday kind of miracle that we look back on and realize it’s happened, but didn’t notice at the time. By the grace of astrology, I can tell you that you are in just such a moment. Indeed, an extended moment, but which reaches a peak over the next four weeks. As part of this, you may need to suspend or at least significantly reduce the emphasis on some of your ‘normal’ interactions with others: elements of partnership, sexual exchanges, even seemingly ordinary things like going to the gym. Play with your autonomy, in every sense of that concept. This is a word that means naming yourself. This is not just about the word you answer to when called; it is about defining your existence consciously, following a trend you have been working with for a while.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
Keep your eyes and your soul on the invisible. I know the energy has been popping in every direction, but you have rather incredible focusing power right now due to the conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune — that conjunction is now back to full strength, and this lasts all month. For you this conjunction represents a natural evolution of learning, growth and developments which have been difficult to see in action, but which will become quite obvious once Jupiter soon arrives in your birth sign for the first time in 12 years. Until then, certain things will be less obvious, but don’t let that stop you from paying close attention. The world may yet again seem to be spinning off its axis, but at the moment your charts contain nothing but potential: that would be you.

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Editor’s Note: This is a shorter holiday edition. It’s been an exciting week on the Planet Waves daily blog and there are some recent posts I would like to highlight.

Last night I added one about the couple that crashed the state dinner at the White House. We are the first website to carry an article about that astrology. Yesterday, I posted an entry thanking the Planet Waves staff for their incredible work. We are featuring video interviews with Sarah Palin supporters. Len Wallick wrote a Thanksgiving asteroid roundup. I wrote an editorial calling for media literacy. One of our readers wrote in about why she loves Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, which got 47 responses. And on Sunday, I covered the chart of the JFK assassination, which got 37 responses. The blog has been hot lately, and is fully supported by your subscriptions to Planet Waves — not by advertising. Thank you.

Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, is still available to subscribers at the flat rate of $39.95 for all 12 signs. This will get you all 12 extended-length interpretations for 2010, that is, one for each of the signs; as well as articles on your key life transits for next year, and more. This is not quite as good as getting a natal reading from me, but it’s an excellent way to get practical, personal information about your astrology for 2010. Here is the signup link and here is some more information.

Catch you on Tuesday with the Inner Space monthly horoscope for December 2001. In case you missed the December monthly horoscope earlier in the week, here is a link.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Turkey Day is behind us, although there are probably leftovers in your fridge. That’s the best perk of the holiday, to my mind, except for the gathering of family, but I suppose that depends on whether you like your family or not. One of my favorite sleeper movies is Home For The Holidays, which takes a warm poke at generational issues and family dysfunction at Thanksgiving homecoming, and makes me laugh every time. Millions of us take to the road every year for just such an occasion. As with most annual holidays, we have expectations of everyone getting along as cozily as clams piled atop one another. The table will be perfect, the children spotless and polite, the family members civil and well-meaning, the meal scrumptious, and the hostess calmly welcoming while as ruthlessly in charge of every detail as the chef in a 5-star restaurant.

President Obama and his family pardoned a turkey named Courage to live the rest of its life in Disneyland. Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters at Christian Science Monitor.

Not. There never was a Mrs. Cleaver, hovering over the table in pearls and heels while never breaking a sweat, although my own mother came damn close. Her constant comeuppance was my Uncle Frank, appearing at every requisite gathering, one too many cocktails under his belt and an argument brewing in his brain. After he’d polished off several courses and the topic of politics, he’d move on to religion. As a practicing atheist, he made my Baptist mother twitch and amused my Aunt Ethel, a great old dame who started drinking before she left home and who laughed maniacally when the conversation got hot at the table. She’s been gone a dozen years, but I can still hear that laugh. I also remember Mom’s tight lips and furrowed brow; no doubt her ulcer was killing her, teaching me at an early age that the guest list at a dinner party was every bit as critical as the menu and place settings. With family, of course, we don’t get a choice.

As my favorite childhood holiday, and occasional birthday, Thanksgiving was a day when the house smelled like heaven, yummy surprises just kept coming and there were no obligations to attend to: no buying, no gifting, no thanking, yadda. Just sharing and being glad. By the time I reached adulthood, I understood that the buying and gifting came from the pocket of the host/ess and the thanking came with gratitude that the table was cleared, the food put up and the dishes finally done. The agenda after that included reclining in front of the television in the kind of stupor a python swallowing a water buffalo endures, watching football teams scramble the brains of their opponents, and getting to bed early enough to hit the deck for pre-Christmas sales the next day. All very American, don’t you think? And far from the essential meaning of that first Thanksgiving, hundreds of years ago. We need to own this uniquely American holiday as well as what we’ve made of it, and recognize ourselves in both our family dynamics and our attitude about gratitude.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, November 27, 2009, #794 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Dear Friend and Reader:

Mercury is a prominent factor in the sky and in our lives this week. I’ve suggested many times that in our world of communication devices and grannies who twitter and mommies who blog and 13-year-olds who text all their friends about their new boyfriend, Mercury is an incredibly important planet. By that, I mean it’s a concept we need to understand, honor and work with, because we are basically married to this fleeting energy.

Over the next few days, Mercury in Sagittarius makes aspects to Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune — which has the potential to clear the way for many positive developments.

Here is a message from Mercury: When times are tough people tend to want an easy solution, rather than a complex one that requires actual thought or effort. One thing about thought is that it’s sometimes hard work; it’s not as simple as a perfectly smooth iPhone app that works flawlessly because it’s been tested 100 times.

Not everyone thinks so much, or likes to. Actual thinking is an expression of freedom. Freedom is scary to many. There is the implication that one may be wrong; indeed, in any thought process you see that you’re continuously wrong, and then need to make a correction.

We toss the word freedom around, but in truth freedom is of the mind — and that is a dangerous edge. Freedom requires not just that you get in your car and drive anywhere you want, but that you be willing to walk along that cliff, not sure if or when you’re going to fall.

Yours & truly,

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Aries (March 20-April 19)
Initiative is one of the keys that unlocks success, and progress, and for most people, happiness. Often it is the single most vital factor. You could say that this concept is the opposite of passivity, the game of ‘see what happens’. Both Mars and Aries contain the potential for a mind to break out of passive mode. Once we succeed at that, we get the experience of, well, of experience itself: which can include success, failure, resistance, pleasure, fear and many forms of encountering The Other. There are times lately when The Other feels like The Many, like you are somehow up against the collective mind, no matter how private of a person you may be. These encounters will go on for many months, and are designed to bring your inner being out of the alcove in which it sometimes hides.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You may be recoiling at how sexual people see you as being, though I’m here to tell you that you can be enjoying it thoroughly. However, the real news is that there is a rich place between what we think of as attraction and what we think of as repulsion, which is the zone of exploring the unfamiliar. Most of what we like, we know from the past. Most of what repels us, we’re afraid of or avoiding. Part of what you are exploring is how you think others see you. The presence of Venus and Ceres in your opposite sign Scorpio is a reminder to keep pulling apart the curtains and looking past your mother’s perception of you; of who she thought you were, are or should be — a place you often find yourself trapped. What is on the other side? In sum, you are.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Be careful of a tendency these days to generalize or exaggerate. It would be just as easy and advance your cause more effectively if you are precise in your speech and thought. As you focus your mind and your use of language, you will be more discerning what you take in; you will become more concerned about the differences between facts, ideas and beliefs. These are subtleties that are beginning to dissolve into the current environment of ‘say it enough and it must be true’, or ‘if I believe it then it must be true’. If you have not quite awoken to the beauty of ideas, this is a potentially rich moment. As you do this, remember: the specifics matter. One example does not prove the case — your own, or anyone else’s.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You may feel like the sole survivor among your peers as the person not willing to sell out your values. Yet there are moments when it’s challenging to put those deeply held principles to work — which is the whole point. It’s not always easy; in fact, it’s usually quite challenging. I would propose one idea. Particularly where your work and reputation are concerned, you must be willing to embrace some inner chaos, and trust that this is the thing that will help you the most. In other words, to have possession of what you know, it’s necessary to encounter many other possibilities, some of which challenge you and some of which challenge who you think you are. Encountering the unknown within yourself is nearly identical to the willingness to change.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Life is not a war and it’s not a struggle for survival — or at least it does not have to be. Of course, just because you know this doesn’t mean there aren’t many others with a bunker mentality. Here is what: don’t get caught in it. You’re a lot better off reasoning with yourself than you are trying to reason with others who don’t see the point to engaging their creativity. However, if you listen and feel your way carefully through the world, you’re likely to meet one person with a gleaming, open mind. It may be a child and/or may be someone considerably younger than you. From that conversation, you could learn quite a lot, but mainly you will have an example of someone who is simply open to truth, whatever that truth turns out to be.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You’re at one of those moments where you really can decide not to let fear run your life. The challenge is figuring out that this is what’s happening, or starting to happen, before the process takes over. It’s difficult to pull back, in those situations; but I would like to ask a question, or maybe it’s a suggestion, which is to notice the allure that fear has for you. Notice the aspects of life to which you are drawn and by which you are frightened (or made nervous) at the same time. You may think that you’re magnetized by the attractive quality and repelled by the fearsome quality, but have you considered whether this equation works better the other way around? Now for the bold step: allowing the fully conscious experience of pleasure in the fear.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
One day when I lived in Brussels, I locked myself out of my apartment with the keys left on the inside of the lock. I had an extra key, but the one dangling from the knob on the inside prevented it from working. Then, I leaned on the door to get a sense of how strong it was. I didn’t push or bash it — I simply leaned on it, and with a cracking sound, the door swung open and took out the doorframe with it. I was stunned at how I had believed for so long in what turned out to be a total illusion of security. Every time I had checked whether that door was locked turned out to be meaningless, but then, nothing had gone wrong. So it is right now with the things you think make you safe. So it is with your belief that the key you are holding works.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
At this moment you may be identifying with inner qualities that are different than what you normally feel and experience as yourself. This can be disorienting, even to the point where you may be wondering whether you are indeed someone different than you thought. I would propose that any of these experiences of identifying with something you think of as representing your ‘self’ are a kind of shadow play. Who, for example, is the self beneath the concepts or identities that is having the experience of inner perspectives? How you respond to this says a lot about you. Human consciousness has a disturbing tendency to define itself by what it feels different than. Projected outward, it can turn to war, and projected inward, it often appears as the terror of change. But these are merely options. There are many others.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Have you considered that what you are responding to in this mind-bending way is a sense of your potential? We are given this idea that we’re supposed to get all excited when confronted with an exciting possibility for ourselves. Yet we all know how often we run from what is new, exciting or positive. And it remains one of the great mysteries of human nature why this is so. I have my ideas, but let’s first apply some cold, clear logic: if we don’t consciously explore our potential, what exactly do we do with our lives? If you choose the seemingly less challenging path, who does this benefit? And if you awaken fully to who you are and allow yourself to choose the more challenging path, who (besides yourself) does this threaten?

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You’re not the type to trust your intuition, or rather let’s say that it’s not an everyday occasion. I suggest you make it a habit. Your uncanny sense of the past is an intuitive gift. This gift can be turned toward your perception of the present and of the future. More significantly, you can turn your perception to what is really going on with you, in these times when everyone, particularly yourself, is living under the full stress of enforced change. Think of how much it would help if you had access to an information source that guided you toward making decisions at these crucial moments. There are two aspects to this. One is recognizing that fear is just one of the voices in your mind. The voice of spirit is a still, soft voice. The other is simply trusting yourself. And it is simple.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You are doing a good job of working with those who support you, and what you may be figuring out is that communication is key to the process. Keep the dialog open with everyone, even those you dislike or don’t necessarily trust. Treat the people around you with as close to equal priority as you can, and remember that anyone can present you with an opening that opens the way not just for you but for everyone with whom your life is integrated. This is the concept to work with — integration, or put in another form, integrity. Every viewpoint that you hear or observe can contribute significantly to your own. This will compel you to keep a wide-open mind and enter a process of give-and-take with your own opinions. Over the next few weeks, you will see many times that an open mind is your very best friend.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
The correct path is often the most difficult. I know there’s a New Agey theory that when you do the right thing, everything happens like magic and with ease. Yet if you look at the world and notice who has persisted at living their truth, and achieving something significant or at least meaningful while facing the world’s many destructive tendencies, you’re likely to see it’s those who are willing to embrace adversity first and ease second. You’re closer to the ease phase than you may recognize. There are long worked-for elements of success close at hand, yet you need to recognize and be responsive to opportunity when you see it, and more to the point, be open to it. Despite the holidays or whatever else may be going on, this is the time to focus on your goals and to pay close attention to everything you do.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Where were we?

Which page of history, exactly? Except for emailing grandma from the computer in your pocket and cars that talk to us (but still run on gas), we could be alive in any century or decade you like.

School for brides, Berlin circa 1930s, was part of the Lebensborn program. The young women in this program had to prove that they were pure Aryan, and were then trained for breeding purposes. They did not have to be married to be used for reproduction. The program, created by Himmler, was a disaster. Photo: Picture History.

One minute it feels like ancient Greece, then it’s Rome, then suddenly we’re back in the Crusades. Blink and it’s the Renaissance (in the style of Machiavelli), then it’s Revolutionary days (in the style of fundamentalist Teabaggers). Turn around and it feels eerily like Germany in the 1930s. Blink your eyes and it’s the McCarthy era (you can get blacklisted for thinking people should be able to go to the doctor), or Vietnam, minus the protests. Then suddenly all at once, we’re in Atlantis.

Maybe Pluto in Capricorn (the sign of history) is burning a hole through the layers of time and we are seeing history flash by before our eyes. Or was there something in the punch? Or is there some kind of conspiracy to keep everything good and stupid while humanity faces one of its most critical moments? Aren’t we embarrassed to imagine what people in the future will think of us after we’re all dead?

Anyway, I have been promising an impressive frenzy of politics = personal as Saturn and Pluto make their square aspect in these very days, aligned with the Aries Point. But let’s see if we can go from prediction to understanding to the hints of a solution.

Let’s start with one-sentence delineations of the two planets involved. Saturn is the authority principle, which provides structure, limitations, boundaries and a framework of reality. Pluto is the evolutionary principle, which includes hormonal reality, deep passion, the crisis of personal growth and the journey to soul consciousness. So we have one concept which is largely externalized as government, parents, rules and laws, meeting up with another concept that is usually so deep in the shadows of the psyche that we tend to deny it. When Saturn and Pluto engage one another, the adventure erupts.

Here is how Rick Tarnas, who studied the cycle going back about 2,000 years, put it in his book Cosmos and Psyche: “The successive quadrature alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle coincided with especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects. An atmosphere of gravity tension tended to accompany these three-to-four-year periods, as did a widespread sense of epochal closure: ‘the end of an era’, ‘the end of innocence’, the destruction of an earlier mode of life that in retrospect may seem to have been marked by widespread indulgence, decadence, naivete, denial and inflation.”

Christians profess the need for abstinence, but the religion is based on a virgin birth. The concept of the virgin whore or the virgin mother are both related to Vesta, the Roman goddess of fire and the hearth.

The current Saturn-Pluto square (exact for the first time this past Sunday, though we’ve been under its spell for a while) is part of this cycle, which works in phases just like the Sun and Moon: new, quarter, full, quarter, new. That’s what Rick means by quadrature. The whole cycle takes about 35 years. If you live to 70, you live through it twice. You see a lot of destructive change. Any two planets relative to one another work in a cycle like this. Saturn-Pluto is a big one. It involves lots of reactionary fear. That fear, in the style of Pluto, is often hormonal in nature.

The conjunction of this cycle happened in 1982-83 (which was the setup for our current national political landscape early in the Reagan administration — in particular, the merging of the Fundamentalist Christian and Republican movements into something that for a while we were calling Neocon). When Reagan took office, one of the first things he did was install abstinence-only sex indoctrination, in effect banning proper sex education from the schools. This was the era of say no to everything and the origin of “stay a virgin till heterosexual marriage” as a federally funded national policy. In the last weeks of the Reagan administration, a set of federal regulations were adopted which attempted to curtail the previously broad allowances on sexual speech.

The first square in this cycle was in 1993 (when Bill was president but Newt was king) and we started to figure out what had happened. We were beginning to tox out on the cocktail of religion and politics, similar to the one gripping Afghanistan and Iran. As the cycle peaked just before the 2001-2002 opposition, we had the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Keyword: sex. [Worth mentioning here that the Saturn-Neptune cycle, another potent one, was at a square phase at the time of the impeachment, which opened the way for the kind of deception we were flooded with at that time.]

Then came the opposition of Saturn and Pluto — the full peak of the energy. That one was interesting, do you remember? Cheney/Bush take office with wide platform planks of the anti-abortion variety. The summer that Sept. 11 happened, the big issue was stem cell research, which involves fetuses. Sept. 11 meant perpetual war; which meant an extra $12 billion a month going to the war machine. There was Enron, Worldcom and a vast, well-documented forgotten scandal about how Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance.

We are now at the waning square or last-quarter 90-degree phase of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. It’s the next big turning point, working out to be the big final exam covering everything we’ve been through during the first decade of the 21st century and indeed going back to the beginning of Reagan/Bush. Because it’s a waning square (akin to the last quarter Moon) and not an opposition (akin to the Full Moon), the aspect lacks the destructive power that we saw displayed back in the summer and autumn of 2001. Or at least so far. Fort Hood was horrendous. It was not Sept. 11 — though the two are related.

Newspaper headlines from around the world declare the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Image courtesy of (AP/Wide World Photos).

Let’s consider what has come up. Fort Hood we have covered. But now the FBI files on Maj. Hasan are coming out, as did an Army memo which says that basically the guy is a flake who didn’t really do his clinical work and who brought up religious issues with his patients. Famous quote of the week: “He demonstrates a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism.” There were other problems; and just like in 2001, the people who might have, failed to connect the dots.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, last week Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11 — was dropped into the sizzling pan of television as the Honorary Terrorist who will stand trial. He has gone from his extended waterboarding vacation (reportedly 148 times) in Cuba (Guantanamo, that is) to being New York City’s biggest star. The current debate is over whether he really should be tried in open court, before a jury, as was decided this week by Eric Holder, the attorney general. One bunch is wondering whether this is showing the world we’re soft on terrorism, and another is wondering whether he can ever get a fair trial in Manhattan. Constitutional law Prof. Obama this week played Queen of Cups and declared him fit for execution before the trial.

I am thinking, the guy was brought to the brink of death so many times through simulated drowning, he must be a kind of yogi by now. Holder calls him a coward; that’s a lot of nerve. I can’t imagine he’s afraid of anything at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he can levitate.

Meanwhile, the decades-old health care debate has come to full crunch; apparently this is the weekend that the circus comes to the Senate. I would humbly call your attention to how the subtext is getting more airplay than the text: a bunch of gun-toting yahoos are claiming that the government providing people with a doctor, which it currently does through Medicare, is unconstitutional and a form of tyranny. Nobody is asking if we should be listening to people who have health insurance tell everyone else they should not have medical privileges. (This may indeed be a 14th amendment case — that apple pie bit about equal protection under the law.) In high school, my AP European History teacher began the class by stating: “History is the struggle between the haves and the have-nots.”

Last week, I mentioned the abortion rights issue and its relation to the health care bill. The Stupak Amendment, which in effect banned abortion for anyone on any kind of federal subsidy (such as a welfare program), is not a joke. It’s part of a much wider strategy designed not only to gradually corral the freedom of choice without an outright reversal of Roe v. Wade, but to politicize the most private issue there is, sex. Meanwhile, what happens: war after war after war.

Sarah as Miss Wasilla. See her swimsuit competition video at this link.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin. One might criticize the obsession over her book this week as a kind of mental problem in the media; I would agree, but I think it’s a mental problem that reveals a much bigger issue, perhaps the core issue.

I was asking myself last night: What is at the roots of all this political controversy we are seeing these days? If you strip off all the categories of liberal and Republican and extremist, what are the values beneath them? What is this whole game we are seeing really about? What if we were all naked, all the time?

Let’s see. First there is plain old avoidance. The world and most of its societies have some extreme problems on our hands, problems that threaten our survival. Our big systems and often our personal lives feel like they are about to implode. We retreat into either ignorance, drama or the dog and pony show of politics. Avoidance is the first cousin of denial. We have a lot to deny.

Then there is a very old tribal struggle that (as it has for a while) happens to be between those who identify as Christian, Muslim and Jewish. People are put in categories based on what side they choose and whether or not they believe that what someone else thinks is a threat really is a threat. To see the racism beneath the whole terrorism thing takes some self-reflection. The only reason that bombing Iraq is not considered terrorism is that one side was in uniform.

The naming of an enemy is crucial to the process of ego-identification. If you have an enemy, you exist. If you hate Muslims, you’re supposedly a true American, and if you don’t, you’re a traitor. If you feel guilty about war and hatred, blame God.

Next, as mentioned, is the battle between the haves and the have-nots. This can be summarized as self-interest in a kind of brutal debate with common interest, and also another form of old-fashioned enemy making. The problem in the United States is that the poor and even your average suburban types think they are rich, and then fight one another. A postal worker with eight kids can pick up a gun because he doesn’t want someone else to have heath insurance — and instead of referring him for counseling, we put him on TV. (This is true.)

“Larry, you’re being inappropriate.” Carrie Prejean gets ready to “walk off” of the Larry King set. Actually, she just unplugged her microphone and earpiece. Screen shot from CNN.com.

Last, there is the issue of how we feel about the female body: whose is it, anyway? Why is it the female body that represents a common battleground where we agree to wage ideological (and often physical) war?

Note that the two women getting the most airplay in these Saturn-Pluto weeks are former beauty queens: Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean. That does not mean they’re inherently unintelligent; they can speak for themselves and clarify that point. Neither would be getting the attention they are getting unless they had won the genetic lottery and their particular form of beauty is what is the most coveted and valued today. Britney Spears has more Twitter followers than Barack Obama.

These women are presented to us as some mixture of sex bait and birthing pod. But they are morally pure. Carrie Prejean is a particularly hilarious example of the sexually pure sex symbol who attempts to enforce her purported morals on others. (This is Vesta turned against herself; there was an interesting Vesta aspect this week as she changed signs into Virgo, by the way — Vesta conjunct Transpluto in the last degree of Leo.) Remember, Prejean became famous first as a sex symbol; then for her inflammatory comments about gay marriage, which got her Miss California title stripped. Apparently this is not all that got peeled off. Soon enough, she became famous for her sex tapes, which, by the way, featured her alone and I’m curious to see.)

Now she is famous for how sanctimonious she is, and is being floated as a potential congressional candidate. I wonder if she has sex, or just makes those videos. Meanwhile, she draws 100% of her power from matching an image of sexual desirability which is amplified a few orders of magnitude by her supposed unavailability. Then we say: but she’s so intelligent. What awesome values she has.

Sarah Palin is playing the same game. She presents herself as the picture of moral purity, and everyone knows she’s a Milf. This affects men and women because men are supposed to want her and women are supposed to want to be like her. The cover-up is that she’s some kind of political genius who happens to be hot; who rose from mayor to governor to vice presidential contender to culture queen 2012 hopeful. In fact she can’t even get along with her own campaign staff, and could not finish her term. I know why: it would get in the way of her book tour.

The Palin phenomenon is beyond cynical — because the whole conservative movement has built its fortunes, such as they are, on squashing sex from every conceivable direction, creating a culture so sex-starved that it’s on the brink of insanity. There is no form of sex except for married, monogamous heterosexuality that is not subject to public moral attack, prosecution or paroxysms of guilt; or death as the wages of sin. Then she emerges as the savior of those starving and thirsting and longing for mother, supposedly maternal but cold as a gun, if you ask me. She is unavailable and at the same time she flaunts her desirability. We have a few emotional blocks from seeing her purely as a sex symbol, one of which is that she’s presented as the savior of our purity and our values: the American Dream.

Wilhelm Reich got it.

This phenomenon was described by Wilhelm Reich, said to be Freud’s brightest student but really quite a bit more. He proposed this in the 1930s as the basic recipe for promoting fascism. The formula is, push purity and therefore create a sexual frenzy so intense that it transforms into a mystical longing, which is then answered by a charismatic leader. Any alternative to this is derided (or prosecuted) as disgusting, reprehensible debauchery. Yet here is the catch: if you tally up all these moral issues, notice how many are focused on the female body rather than the male body.

Which leads me to mammograms. I don’t think there’s a woman as close to a computer as you are now who has not heard about the recommendation that women in their 40s not be given regular mammogram screening. This battle is a distraction from the two real issues at the core, neither of which I have heard mentioned, and which again turn the female body into a war zone. So while I’m standing here with a microphone, here’s my take.

One, do the mammograms themselves cause breast cancer, with their annual dose of radiation?

Second, what are the more pervasive causes of breast cancer? Study after study demonstrates that breast cancer is caused or fuelled by environmental toxins such as dioxins, PCBs, pesticides and numerous other chemicals, all of which mimic estrogen and other hormones. These chemicals will show up in everything you eat except maybe an organic carrot. Their manufacturers wear suits and assure us they are safe.

But I ask you: why is General Electric, one of the biggest hormone polluters, also one of the biggest manufacturers of medical imaging equipment? And what does this have in common with Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean?

Yours & truly,

Judith Gayle is taking a week off. She will return next week. Dogtown Writer Eric Francis is resting up, so there are no news briefs.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, November 20, 2009, #793 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Dear Friend and Reader:

Through the end of the week, the Sun is making its way across the last degrees of Scorpio and will enter Sagittarius at 11:22:34 pm EST on Saturday, Nov. 21. When the Sun is at the end of a sign and not making any new aspects to major planets before entering the new sign, that is called Sun void of course. We are familiar with the Moon being void of course, which has the same basic definition. They have different feelings; among them is habit: the Moon void happens twice a week while the Sun void takes place 12 times a year. Usually it lasts a day or two; at several days, this is a long one.

The Sun void comes with the feeling of unusual things happening. It’s like an opening into the unlikely, which can be friendly if you get to take advantage of what seems like an odd chance; or it can be less than friendly if you’re not paying attention and something untoward happens to you. This is the time to make luck work for you rather than to push your luck; to see the moments that invite you to ease in. With Scorpio, this can be an opportunity to balance out the emotional or erotic economy.

As the Sun is making its transition into Sagittarius, there is a conjunction of Venus and Ceres (in a pattern where it’s annual for a few years, then skips a few years). I have been suggesting that Venus + Ceres + Scorpio is about understanding our mother’s sexual baggage. True, we don’t like to think of our mother as sexual, but to the extent you want to be sexually free, this is something I strongly suggest. Mother has secrets. We don’t know them. She had to maintain her image; she may not have wanted to share her pain; she may be too self-conscious or modest to let on what is really bothering her. The problem with this is that this becomes miasmic: multigenerational material that causes the next generation pain it does not understand.

Seek and you shall find; find and you shall facilitate your emotional healing process.

Yours & truly,

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Aries (March 20-April 19)
Don’t let yesterday’s arguments affect you today. You can safely cancel the negative effects from all of last week, as long as you accept what you learned from those interactions, particularly the stressful ones. Life has been stressful, as if everything in your world meets everything else in your world on an odd angle that does not quite fit. As you try to assemble the parts, you might ask yourself what they are part of; and that something would be you. At first it’s difficult to think this way, that is, to embrace the idea that the one thing everything in your life has in common is you. It would help to give yourself one example of an inner conflict that turned into an interpersonal one. Do that two or three times and you’ll figure out how to keep things a lot more placid.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Your mother’s emotional pain shows up powerfully as a factor in your relationships this week, particularly her tendency to exaggerate. You seem to have internalized this habit in some form, and don’t know what to do with it. You basically have two choices: get caught in the drama, or move right in the direction of its antithesis: conscious emotional and sexual nourishment. Turning this backwards, both the pain and the exaggeration are cover stories for a reluctance to be emotionally generous. You may think you feel better when you’re not giving of yourself. Yet I suggest you be honest about this and notice how you feel when you give sincerely from your deepest well. Get the hang of this and you’ll discover this is the well from which you can nourish yourself.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
The issue is spiritual, but what the heck does that mean? Let’s start with deeper. Let’s continue with considering what is not obvious, which will require you to do some original thinking. Let’s move on to a question of ethics, which goes beyond a rationale for why something ‘must be’ necessary. You may have the feeling that something larger is at stake; you may be experiencing a sense of deep responsibility. If that is coming through clearly, it will be a little daunting. Welcome this feeling. Pay particular attention if someone well known or famous is involved; you need to understand his or her motives, and decide consciously if you’re in alignment with them. This will not be difficult to figure out; more likely, you will be reminding yourself what you already know.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Not everything can be negotiated, but most things can be. Or perhaps it would be better to say: for you, not everything is negotiable, and not everything has to be. It would be wise to make sure you know what points you’re willing to compromise on and what points you’re not even willing to consider bargaining. That said, you might want to make a list of all the non-negotiables and ask yourself why exactly you feel that way. I suggest you focus your greater efforts on determining where the common ground between you and someone close to you exists. There is plenty; it’s a matter of seeing your shared space from the right perspective. This will start with ideas, and move onto resources and experiences.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
With the Sun drifting through the last few degrees of Scorpio at the moment, I suggest you wait till it’s solidly in Sagittarius on Saturday night before making any major decisions, commitments or moves. That said, the drifting energy is just what you need, given how much the past few weeks have been about pushing yourself toward a limit that seems to have no definite value or location. The seemingly boundless energy you’re experiencing is in part coming from other people, and partly coming from your own determination to do it all. Allowing yourself to disengage would be helpful. This means giving yourself a day or two away from their influence. It won’t take much more than that; the main benefit will be gaining perspective you don’t know you’re lacking.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Your mind needs a break; you need to be around water. Start with the bathtub and some sea salt. Skip the perfume: the salts will give your body the chance to discharge nervous energy. Three times within a few days ought to get you back to a baseline mental position, and provide some time to meditate on how you can simplify your life — particularly the enormous strain you seem to be under at work. If you’re riding on the high side of this astrology, your mind may be functioning like a precision machine, and you may be afraid to stop. You do need to stop long enough to cover the basics, and I do mean food, water and rest. You can push it all you want but at the end of the day, your body is the boss.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
Keep a grip. That may mean letting go of your tight hold on reality, though in more ways than one it would seem that your astrology is telling you to do the opposite of what you think you need. Anyway, your thoughts are coming at a ferocious pace, though here’s a clue for how you can tell if you’re being productive: your curiosity quotient. In other words, if you’re getting a litany of ideas and conclusions and things to worry yourself with, or if you’re trying to prove you’re right about something, pause and ask questions. Your desire to know something that you don’t already know will be your best friend, and if you haven’t noticed, at the moment there sure is plenty that you don’t know.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You may be experiencing emotions that you don’t understand. I suggest that you not make more of them than you need to; in other words, they may feel more important or meaningful than they are. This is a question of balance between intensity and meaning, something that has been a theme of your entire life. Yes, there is meaning to be found in all these feelings, but it’s not a direct consequence of their full-on sensation. It’s vital that you not attempt to nourish yourself on pain, and moreover, that you identify anyone in your life who tries to live this way so that you can help identify when and how you picked up the habit. The answers here will not be strictly based on rationality, but that will be your first foothold in what appears to be a complex situation.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You may suddenly feel like you can see the world from the perspective of someone close to you, and this may be a little shocking. Not a lot, but enough to remind you that you need to spend more time shifting your perspective and reminding yourself that your viewpoint, wide as it is, has certain limitations that you can only get around with conscious methods that you embrace routinely. One thing you may notice is how exactly someone feels about you — which may surprise you, in that you weren’t thinking they held you in such high esteem. You decide that you have undue influence, but part of how you can address that is to be conscious of it and include their opinions in your decision-making process more often than you ordinarily would.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
During the past week you’ve experienced a rare aspect involving both your sign and your ruling planet, Saturn in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn. This accounts for the feeling of time running out, and the corresponding feeling that everything is more urgent than you have time for. However, the pressure is coming off, and you have made it through the most complex, delicate phase of this astrology — at least for now. Yes, you need to keep an eye on things, and make sure you’re devoting the very best of your political skills to your business and professional affairs. But I suggest you remind yourself that in times like we are living in, success could well be defined as exactly what you’re experiencing.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Go lightly on what seems to be a big professional success; don’t brag about it, and don’t put too much on its back. Remember that the purpose of work and therefore of achievement is to help everyone have a little more of what we all need. That would include you, though the theme of exchange and of trading is all over your charts right now. One of the deepest anchor points for humanity’s darkness involves our belief in separate interests. Look at the news; look at what the people close to you gossip about; notice what you worry about: it all has its roots in the notion that we have divided interests. Consider how many people would go out of business if that turned out not to be true.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
One day at a time is not just a nice concept; it’s all a person can do. You’re still under extraordinary pressure that you haven’t given a name to, and which sometimes disappears into the background because it’s so pervasive. You’re starting to see you have options, and that each of those days is a step toward clarity. The next thing that happens is that you start to see that your experience of life makes sense. The clarity may be as subtle as the pressure is now, but like a good book, the story will gradually weave together and build momentum toward a logical point of resolution. You don’t need to push this, or push anything; for the moment, less is more — and what comes your way this weekend is likely to be precisely what you need.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Sometimes I wonder if humanity is not a puppet, subject only to the influences coming from outside. I say this because as we approach the first exact square of Saturn and Pluto, events of recent days are so characteristic of this aspect that it leads me to wonder how, exactly, these things are scripted.

Photo by Eric Francis.

The Saturn-Pluto cycle, which had its last peak in the summer of 2001, is described in Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas as a cycle of crisis and contraction — a time when reactionary movements thrive on fear and narrowness. Fuelled by our anxiety about change and our obsession with clinging to the supposedly little we have, those with an agenda we refuse to look at eat human energy like the cannibal scavengers they are; bless their tortured souls.

We also tend to let the same energy consume us from inside. This of course produces change, but not necessarily of the kind we say we want — progress toward a more pleasant and egalitarian world.

Sunday is the first of three exact squares in this cluster, and this autumn has come with the feeling of a squeeze or the attempt to push things to a head. The confluence of events included the massacre at Fort Hood last week, where a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist opened fire on his peers, killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 others.

The massacre is being used to foster a bunch of new anger and hatred directed toward Muslims, and more justification for why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan at all: there is a jihad movement and it’s out to get us. This, as President Obama considers proposals for exactly what to do with Afghanistan — such as whether and how to increase troop levels. Here is something to consider: he won’t be able to pull the troops out without a wide public consensus that we don’t belong there at all; and that these wars are doing nothing but damaging the world and our own society.

Why is anybody at all surprised that Maj. Hasan took out a couple of guns and shot all those people when he is part of the same military that has killed at least 93,000 Iraqis? This, based on the lie that Saddam Hussein did 9/11 or had the power to blow up the world? Or the lie that we’re in Afghanistan fighting the terrorists who attacked New York, rather than fighting people who simply want us out of their country? And why is it turning out that this event was preventable, much like the Sept. 11 incident that preceded it? The FBI had reportedly intercepted communications between Hassan an Islamic cleric that should at least have given them half a clue that (by their own rules) he needed to be called in for an interview.

Two days after Fort Hood, the House of Representatives passed its version of the health care bill, which included a public option — but which also included a provision banning abortion.

Mourners at the memorial service at Fort Hood, Texas, as seen on CNN Live. Photo by Eric Francis.

This was introduced by Rep. Bartholomew Stupak of Michigan, so it’s called the Stupak Amendment. Bart is a member of the C-Street Coalition, a group of congressional representatives, both Democratic and Republican, who frequent a certain house on C-Street where they get their marching orders from Dominionists, the radical Christian movement with a platform calling for the takeover of government by religion. I had to look this up in Wikipedia for a basic definition:

“Dominion theology is a grouping of theological systems with the common belief that society should be governed exclusively by the law of God as codified in the Bible, to the exclusion of secular law, a view also known as theonomy. The most prominent modern formulation of Dominion Theology is Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R. J. Rushdoony in the 1970s. Reconstructionists themselves use the word Dominionism to refer to their belief that civil government should be controlled by Christians alone and conducted according to Biblical law.”

How very Saturn square Pluto. The whole “pro life” thing might make some sense were it coupled with comprehensive sex education so that unwanted pregnancy might be avoided; and with substantial funding to protect poor young mothers after they give birth; and with a real system to care for fetuses once they’re born as children, if the natural parents can’t take care of them. When you subtract those two factors from the equation but leave in opposition to abortion, the agenda is easier to see for what it is. And when you look at the supposedly holy agenda in the context of the death penalty, the underlying political truth becomes even more obvious. This agenda is not about helping people or protecting anyone; it’s about power and control. And that power and control is being organized and funded by religion, or what passes for the stuff.

Note, at this stage in history it’s actually necessary that, when communicating with the public, I explain that one of the most basic concepts on which the United States of America was founded is the separation of church and state. This is central to the idea that reason and the pursuit of knowledge are what must govern our affairs, and that every person has the right to practice his or her own religion without interference from others.

Not surprisingly, this movement is being used to sustain a philosophy of fear and greed rather than love and generosity, as preached by the long-forgotten founder of the Christian movement, Jesus of Nazareth. I am not a bible scholar but I do know that Jesus healed the sick and fed the poor. We’re real chumps if we think that Christians want to throw the sick and the poor out in the street; by their works you shall know them.

It’s also a baby after it’s born. Right to Life propaganda in rural upstate New York. Photo by Eric Francis.

Part of the problem with the Stupak Amendment is the ban; whatever you personally think of abortion, it happens to be a constitutionally protected right of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy. (The rich always have the right of abortion, because they can go somewhere it’s legal and get one. The Roe v Wade case is really about protecting those who are less economically fortunate. So the Stupak amendment discriminates on the basis of income level as well as gender.)

But the Stupak Amendment took an additional step and prohibits anyone on federal aid of any kind from purchasing an insurance policy which covers abortion; which is like saying that if you’re on federal assistance, you lose your right to free speech. Note, this provision has only been passed by the House of Representatives. We don’t know what the Senate version will contain. As for the Stupak Amendment, it’s the thought that counts.

The rest of the problem is that very few people responded or even noticed. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the world’s first out lesbian news anchor, explained the issue to her viewers in clear terms. She was the only commentator that I saw who did not gloss it over; there were probably a few others, but most treated this proposed law pretending it was just something normal that actually has a place in American society; and like it made perfect sense to link it to health care. [By Thursday night, Jon Stewart was onto the issue and got the story right, including stating clearly that a woman’s right to choose is as basic as spleen surgery or any other procedure.]

We live in a time when it’s difficult to see that there’s a higher principle than our own personal beliefs. And we have a lot of people marching around telling us they get their information directly from God, but we rarely subject this to psychological analysis.

I could take you through layer after layer of understanding why this kind of thinking exists: an obsession with controlling women, for example, or the terror that certain individuals feel about having never looked at their shadow material. In truth, that is none of our business. It helps to remember that the purpose of politics is to concentrate wealth and power, usually at the expense of the ethics and principles that it professes to espouse. Most people have no idea how the game is really played, or how personally the consequences can come home. Both the purity campaign and the violence amount to little more than a floorshow that distracts us from the real agenda.

Photo by Eric Francis.

The problem with these Saturn-Pluto aspects is that they are used to capitalize on the baser instincts, fears and ignorance of humanity and basically turn us against our own interests.

A Saturn-Pluto aspect like we are experiencing does not mandate that we retract from progress and turn into our own enemies, but it makes it seem appealing. The more scared someone is, the more fear feels like a refuge; that is, until that false sense of “safety” runs out. It’s easy to shove this stuff down our throats, like sugar, salt and grease, packaged as a delicious hamburger and contaminated with e-coli. We think we love it; we can’t get enough; the price went down to 99 cents. Hurry on in.

There are three other aspects on the radar that we need to be tracking. Next up is movement in the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune configuration in Aquarius. This setup, which reaches another peak in December, is about waking up from the delusions we use to help us survive and those that are pounded into us by advertising — such as Pepsi leading directly to sex and a Chase credit card leading to a wealthy, generous husband. It’s about seeing through the bullshit we call spirituality and translating our personal growth into awareness and action on the level of civic involvement. Yet we live in a time when the concept of a common good is considered socialism. In fact it is the purpose of society itself. Scarcely one of us could survive in the woods for a week.

How do we think we look as perceived through the eyes of others? How does our notion of their image of us affect who we think we are? That’s the theme of the upcoming Mars retrograde in Leo. The astrological equation is Mars (ruler of Aries) in Leo (individuality) opposite Aquarius (the sign of groups). Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

I recognize that part of the problem is that the moment we pull our heads out of the sand, the world looks like it’s in pretty dismal shape. Yet the fear and sense of futility are precisely the emotions we need to confront. Those are bits of our personal shadow material that adds up to an environment where reactionary politics and stealing from those who have the least seem to make perfect sense.

Next up after that is Mars retrograde in Leo. Mars is retrograde every two years, and this one is about understanding our relationship to everything that is larger than us. Mars and Leo both have strong individualistic energy; put that opposite Aquarius and the many planets currently working through that sign and we have a series of encounters with the larger movements of our culture, which shape and condition us as individuals.

The retrograde says we look inside for the truth of how and why we respond the ways that we do; then maybe we will recognize that we’re all in this together. What exactly are we looking inside for? Hmmm, how about what’s the root of all this paralysis we take for granted?

Last on the radar is the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in the first degree of Aries. While this happens in the spring, in truth it’s happening now. Like any aspect, this one can go several ways, but either way it represents a kind of populist explosion. Maybe it’s going to be about peace and love and maybe it’s going to be the biggest Klan rally in history. Maybe we will wake up to the fact that whether we admit it or not, we are part of something larger than ourselves and that something is part of us.

Whatever we may see on the news, whatever may be going on with the stock market or in the streets, for each of us it’s going to come down to a personal choice.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s been on my mind to share some thoughts about death for months now. The biggest elephant in our consciousness, hunched in the corner and just out of sight, is mortality; it drives our every waking moment and some of our sleeping ones as well. Death is woven into the very fabric of 3D incarnation, where time and mortality are bunkmates. The early Fall window is tailor-made for such a conversation about an ancient fear that is built into our genetic memory, influenced by the Scorpio signature that is cozy with this reality. You may be turning your nose up, about now. This is a conversation most Americans avoid like the plague.

Revolutionary War era graves at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

I suppose there are other cultures as uptight and repressed about this inevitability as we are, but they don’t talk about it, either, so I’m not entirely sure who they are. Our avoidance of the topic diminishes us. I applaud the Mexican tradition of el Dia de los Muertos, for instance: their Day of the Dead, when loved ones passed are celebrated with picnics at their gravesite, altars in the homes of those who miss them, and a joyful remembrance of their lives and pleasures. Now that’s a party. And while I avoid the somber religiosity of funerals, the Irish in me appreciates a good wake. But what else can you expect from a woman who, as a child, talked to dead people and found comfort and perspective while roaming acres of cemetery grounds close to home?

I’m not sure when we stopped lucid conversation about death in this country, but it was in my time. When I was a teen launching into adult activities, I was advised to keep mum about the Big Three — politics, religion and sex — as social conversation, lest conflict erupt. I ignored that, of course, since I saw all three topics much differently than my contemporaries and wanted to explore them. Notice that death was not on the list. Our American traditions once allowed for laying the Loved One out in the parlor for viewing and visiting, for a grieving process that made death’s realities sharper but the inevitable parting more palatable. Perhaps it was the Second World War that changed all that. That’s when we learned to make killing an art form, war a big business and death just a byproduct of pursuing national interests. I suspect that was also the time in our history when AmeriCo burst into being, the whole of the globe suddenly open to us and “For Profit” our new national model.

The First World War sent home more than our share of fallen in makeshift boxes, winnowing away the young men of that generation. Those early years of the 20th century saw the what was called the Spanish Flu pandemic as well, which took my great-grandmother and forever changed the course of my family’s history. Many men died of the flu on the way home from the war. In those years, bodies were literally stacked up like cord-wood awaiting a final resting place, and we could still talk about death, find our relationship to it. Then came technology and policy and a shift of the nation’s economy into militarism, and we slowly stopped talking about the inevitable result of international conflict and adventurism.

The comings and goings of 24-hour cable news celebs and their constant ratings wars and personality clashes don’t generally pass muster for a Planet Waves story.

CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. Photo by Sylvain Gaboury/AP.

But then you run across information like this from The New York Times: “Mr. Dobbs quit CNN once before, in 1999. […] He became the chief executive of Space.com, an astronomy news source, but returned to the network two years later.”

That would be Lou Dobbs, Mr. Independent himself, CNN’s [now former] quirky, outspoken, so xenophobic it’s kind of funny news anchor, who quit the network this week. He had recently clashed with management over some of his remarks — such as giving credence to those who questioned President Obama’s citizenship, for example. [Actually, it was John McCain who was born in Panama, outside the Canal Zone in the city of Colon, and who is not, in fact, a natural born citizen.]

But Space.com? I mean, there might be foreigners out there. Really, really weird ones who want our jobs and who don’t have to worry about any kind of fence keeping them out.

“Well, space has been a lifelong interest,” he said in 2000 during an online interview and chat with the site. “From building rockets at the age of 10 or 11 — building rockets from scratch and trying to make them work, which we did succeed in doing on rare occasions — and a lifelong interest in astronomy and the space program itself.”

There’s some pretty interesting bits in that interview. Such as Dobbs and his wife “volunteered for the civilians in space program back in 1983,” and his prediction that a manned mission to Mars was realistic within five to 10 years if advances in propulsion were made, though he offered a more sober estimate of 20 to 30 years. Then there’s his thoughtful response to a questioner who asked about the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos:

On the right side of the wheel, we see Dobbs’ extremely rare triple conjunction of Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron; the last time it happened and one of the few times in recorded history that it’s ever happened.

“The possibility of life in the universe, at least statistically, one would have to believe is great. In terms of intelligent life, also is significant. The possibility is fascinating and it’s reasonable for us to conduct a search that would extend as far into the universe as possible,” Dobbs replied. “I do think it is a little unrealistic for us to expect alien life, should it exist, to span the cosmos, identify us, and then for us to expect a communication. I think it’s far more realistic that we attempt in the search to meet halfway — extending our own reach as far as possible — the heavens.”

But not Mexico.

I just had to check his astrology. He actually is a crusader for social justice, born during an extremely rare conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune in Libra (along with his natal Sun) — it happened once in the 20th century and if memory serves, there’s not another one prior for hundreds of years. We are currently in a similar conjunction now, in Aquarius.

The social crusade part comes specifically from the Jupiter-Chiron contact; his spiritual piece comes from Chiron-Neptune. Yes, he can be delusional on a fairly grand scale (Sun-Neptune) and exaggerate (Sun-Jupiter) but he makes a good show out of it and is willing to take his lumps. He’s one of those people that no matter how off-base he seems, you know he’s sincere — not running an outside agenda. Frankly, he has about as much of a chance at making it at Fox News as Amy Goodman.

Guaranteed, he will be back doing something interesting. Dobbs also has an eminently practical Taurus Moon, which lends itself well to a crusading dreamer.

Dobbs made his name on cable TV covering business news, and in his 2000 interview supported the idea of expanding private space industry as well as continued government funding of a space program. Now that he’s departed CNN and his next venture has yet to be announced (the Fox network has denied reports he’s in talks with them about joining their financial news lineup), it will be interesting to see if his passion for space might surface once again. Hopefully he will get to meet our “alien” counterparts — I am sure that would get him a reprise on CNN.

This just in — The Onion today is reporting that Dobbs was deported back to Mexico after living illegally in the United States for 48 years.

The first human ancestor to experience a dream was probably also the first to try and interpret what the nighttime vision meant, asking themselves, “What’s my brain trying to tell me?” Well, okay, maybe they didn’t know about their brain. But dreams are one of the great ongoing sources of mystery and inspiration for humanity.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just your brain doing yoga. Photo by Eric Francis.

Now a Harvard researcher is positing that the brain’s not trying to tell you anything by dreaming — it’s trying to get itself ready for work.

According to an article at Physorg.com, a recent study by psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson determined that the purpose of dreams is “physiological rather than psychological. During REM (rapid eye movement) sleep the brain is activated and ‘warming its circuits’ and is anticipating the sights, sounds and emotions of the waking state.”

So the fact you found yourself walking into the office naked, or running through your high school trying to get to a classroom you can never find before the bell rings, could just be the brain’s equivalent of starting the car on a cold morning and letting it sit for a while. Except, of course, for those times when dreams blow you away with their meaning.

The article said Hobson equated this brain workout to jogging: “The body does not remember every step of a jog, but it knows it has exercised, and in the same way we do not remember many of our dreams, but our minds have been tuned for conscious awareness.”

Dreams happen during REM sleep, which can be measured by instruments that read brainwaves. The content and purpose of dreams, however, have been the subject of intense speculation and study over the centuries. Even though he’s found a physiological explanation for why we dream, though, Hobson does not discount a possible psychological purpose, as well.

“Dr. Hobson finds support in lucid dreaming for his argument for dreams as a kind of physiological brain exercise,” Physorg.com reported. “A study co-authored by Hobson and published in the September issue of the journal Sleep reported that elements of both REM and waking were apparent in lucid dreaming, especially in the frontal areas that are quiet during normal dreams. According to Hobson, this suggests there are two systems, which can be running at the same time.”

A reminder that hurricane season extends well into the fall, Hurricane Ida savaged parts of Central America at the start of the week. Angola Press reported on Tuesday that 130 people died in El Salvador as a result of the storm, which hit the country on Monday and caused widespread flooding and mudslides. More than 130,000 people had evacuated their homes in an attempt to flee the hardest-hit areas. Ida also left a swath of wreckage in its wake as it passed across Nicaragua late last week.

A boy walks past an array of makeshift houses damaged by Typhoon Mirinae in Taytay, Rizal province, east of Manila, Philippines. Photo: EPA/DENNIS M. SABANGAN.

Ida subsequently was downgraded to a tropical storm and hit the Gulf Coast late in the week,

WikiNews reported this week that parts of Scotland also endured heavy flooding following intense downpours. Worst hit were Aberdeenshire, Arbroath, Tayside, and Grampian, with “Arbroath is being described as virtually cut off, with major routes including the main railway line to Aberdeen disrupted.”

Two weeks of heavy rains also caused widespread flooding in Kenya, causing a mudslide that killed one girl and prompting authorities to order hundreds of residents in other areas to evacuate their homes in case more mudslides occurred, World-Countries.net reports.

According to Radio New Zealand International, the island nation of Tonga recorded a 5.9-magnitude earthquake on Nov. 2 — just five weeks after a huge 8.0-magnitude quake sent a tsunami crashing into the Tongan island of Niuatoputapu. The Nov. 2 quake was centered more than 350 kilometers north of the island of Vava’u. No damage or injuries were reported.

And the month started off with Typhoon Mirinae slamming into the Philippines, killing more than a dozen people. Photos of the aftermath can be found at Monsters & Critics.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, November 13, 2009, #792 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Dear Friend and Reader:

This weekend, Saturn and Pluto align in the first of three exact square aspects (from Libra to Capricorn). We’re seeing this crash through the news — for example, last week’s Fort Hood massacre and its aftermath. This is the first major point of awakening in the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there’s the long overdue battle over health care in the United States. There are equally profound changes developing for each of us individually. They may be arriving in the form of challenges; reassessments; or the kind of system breakdown-rebuild that is characteristic of Saturn-Pluto aspects.

While this is happening, beware of an aspect developing in the background (and which has been cooking all year), which is the conjunction of Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius. If you want to know what this is about, make a list of the ways that our society lives on denial. Do you really want to know where your hamburger comes from? Are you sure you want to know what’s in your flu vaccine? Are you really happy with how your friends or partner treat you? Everything developing in the planets right now favors awakening from denial and seeing your life for what it is. After careful assessment, you may even decide it was better than you thought. And you will undoubtedly see where there is room for improvement.

Closer on the horizon is the Scorpio New Moon, which is exact Monday at 7:14 pm. We’ve heard many times how the veil between the worlds is thinnest when the Sun is in Scorpio; this is the peak of that energy, when the veils that separate us from the truth will fall away, at least for a moment.

Yours & truly,

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Many people are getting the message that it’s time to break out of the monogamous shell. Clearly this is not for everyone, but it’s a viable option for more people than attend polyamory conferences. The big excuse — that there’s no way one’s partner would go for it — may be obviated by the profound changes that any partner or potential partner in your life is currently going through. You’re changing and so are they. We all know that the certified relationship model does not work for most people; one way we can tell is the high rate of misery and failure in our relationships. We try to resolve this by cycling through new people; but really the issue is more about the nearly-impossible-to-follow rules we try to play by. Be brave and lead the way.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
It’s time to do that Taurus thing again and get out of your head. One of the odd miracles of your sign is that yours is simultaneously the most physical of the 12 and also the one most likely to get trapped upstairs. You have options at the moment, and your mind will come in handy as far as determining what is healthy and what is not; what you actually want and what you don’t. Notice when you’re getting mixed up in a process of rationalizing. If you’re having conversations with people who are not there, call them and work it out in real life. This will give you permission to explore the exceptionally interesting opportunities in your environment. Stick to who or what you actually want and you will be perfectly safe.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Mercury (planet Gemini) changes signs again, from Scorpio to Sagittarius. Look for a mirror effect: people will say what you’re thinking, and you will say what you think they’re thinking; even if you’re right, it will more likely be about what’s on your mind. Have fun with this; it’s a form of harmony, but with enough tension in the equation to keep things interesting. For you, it’s playful astrology mixed in with lots of simmering, passionate, verging on dangerous astrology. Playful plus dangerous equals kinky, which is another way of saying being experimental with desires you don’t usually talk about. Start by talking about what you want or need, and seeing if, by chance, this is not mirrored perfectly in someone supposedly outside yourself.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
I’ve been in a long email correspondence with one of the world’s leading radical feminists; or at least she was when feminism was something that had a voice in society. What I’ve discovered is that she wandered off into the desert of denying pleasure; and worse, of denying that sexual reality is an influence in every other aspect of reality. At the moment you are poised for a sexual awakening that feels like thunder and lightning on a hot summer night — the kind of night when you want to leave the windows open despite the pouring rain. Or, more likely, run naked in a field, even if that means taking the risk of getting hit by lightning. That’s the spirit.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
The Scorpio New Moon takes place in one of the most sensitive areas of your chart, and you may find yourself on an emotional ride. You can make this easier if you notice when you’re feeling someone else’s feelings and when you’re experiencing your own. Who is that someone else? Your mother comes to mind. She seems to have a lot to say lately, on that internal level where parents always end up. Who else? The younger person you were, years ago, back when you didn’t realize you were in fact young. Her message to you goes something like this: remember that everyone feels old, because we’ve never been older than we are today. This logic also says you were just as old then as you are now. It’s a matter of perception. Young is what young does.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You’re discovering that the structures, rules and policies you maintain are in the way of actually existing. When it comes time to renovate, it’s necessary to determine which walls are load-bearing and which are simply dividing space. This is a metaphor for certain structures in your life. A few actually hold up the framework of your existence, others merely compartmentalize. One of the compartments involves money, and how you think about it. Part of why you struggle in this area of life is that as a child you were denied the space to dream. As an adult this developed into an obsession with practicality, which as you know isn’t always so practical. This particular wall is not actually holding up the house. It’s just getting in the way.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You have reached a moment where you cannot deny your emotional reality, and part of that reality is saying that the present must be different than the past. This holds logically: the past is over, but if that is so, why does it have so much influence? The reason is that instead of burning our karma, we pile it up like cordwood. That, or the whole forest catches fire. This is a karmic moment for you, where you come to a revelation such as, “I am a different person than my family expected me to be,” or some form of “I’ve outgrown my life and it’s time for something new.” But as I’ve said before, you don’t need to make this change all at once; whatever you do, or whatever you attempt, the change will come in distinct phases; this is phase one: awakening.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
All of the interesting astrology this weekend involves your sign and your planets, Mars and Pluto. Some of it is so enormous it’s spinning the world on its finger. Some of it is so personal that you feel like you’re in a burning building, or more accurately, like there’s a fire burning in your belly. Like most civilized people, you wonder if civilization would not come crashing down if you acted on your deepest needs and urges. The question is, how intellectual do you want to make this conversation? You can do your usual thing of analyzing till the passion ceases to exist (or at least until it’s safely contained); or you can take a ride on the Scorpio New Moon and be exactly the person that you are.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
If you’ve been keeping any secrets from yourself, they are about to burst into your awareness with a passion. If you’ve been feeling lost, murky or depressed, you’re about to wake up, and wake up rather suddenly. If you’ve been feeling bored, get ready to feel extremely curious. You will benefit from encouraging yourself to be extra passionate or expressive, to the point of what may even feel like lewd; that’s the hot zone. This is the moment when you discover how ridiculous it is to maintain an image. You’ve been feeling held down because you’re holding so much inside, and that includes what you cannot admit in polite company. So get yourself into some inappropriate company as soon as possible, and check your judgments at the door.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Most people would say it’s inappropriate to view anyone as a potential sexual liaison, but I would say it’s more in touch with your authentic nature. Said another way, you’re someone for whom the line between friend and lover is more of a gray area, and now is the time to explore this potential. Your world will not unravel in a storm of anarchy and chaos. You will not go on a crime spree or become a prostitute. If you draw criticism, it’s all about envy. The truth is, the world is awash in pheromone communication, the level of awareness where we’re all sizing one another up all the time. Take a moment and explore how good it feels to be honest about this.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
This is a beautiful time for a crisis of faith. While you’re in there, consider what, exactly, you feel moved to have faith in. We usually associate faith with God. Yet we do so with no tangible concept of what God is, which gives us a foggy concept of what faith is about. Your current situation is more personal, or needs to be. You’re not being called upon to have faith in something outside yourself, but it’s not strictly about you, either. What you are looking for is an intersection where your purpose connects to a larger purpose; where faith in yourself is akin to faith in a creative force that is at once contained within you and greater than you.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
In your personal mythology of relationship there is the partner you want, and the partner you want to be. Both are undergoing a revolution. It’s possible that someone currently active in your life is going along with this wave of progress, and it’s possible you’re figuring out that you need to move on. Either way, there remains the fact that your notion of what a relationship is and what it is for are evolving rapidly. This is so fundamental to your identity and sense of belonging on the planet that I suggest you honor it with every cell in your being. The trajectory of your life does not follow any fairy tale you were read as a child, or the disaster that your parents’ life may have been.

BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You seem to have an emotional investment in a career issue that you would be wise to consider through a more objective lens. It would make even more sense to focus on the creative aspects of what you are doing rather than having an attachment to success. If you strive for cooperation and a measure of originality, success will come.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Be aware what is bothering you and what is bothering someone else. We are rarely upset for the reasons that we think; you would not be playing therapist if you guide every situation deeper, and then dive for the pearls of wisdom that they contain. The pain that your mother endured — past or present — will be a profound teacher for you this month.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You have had enough contention this year. You have reached a point where you understand diplomacy and mental balance are more important than being right, and far better than a fight for its own sake. Remember that cooperation is a skill, and that contrary to the rumor, to compromise does not mean that you are wrong. It’s the art of finding a solution that works for everyone.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Relationship experiences so far this year have felt like a conspiracy to take you to new emotional and spiritual depths at least once per week. The Sun in Scorpio will help you feel like you’re in the right place: if you’re going to dive head-first, it’s best to use the deep end. The beauty of it is, the water is warm, and we both know you love to swim.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You now have the strength to meet the world on its own terms, but make sure you don’t treat everything like a fight, or worse, a beauty pageant. The stars say that humility rather than pride will give you the edge that you need: be it a creative or competitive one. You can relax. People already notice you. They are drawn to you and trust you as a leader.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
The emphasis of your life is about to switch to financial self-sufficiency. In your chart, there is a seeming paradox in that you can’t get there without cooperation. Greed itself denies the central concept of money, which is about an exchange. And that is the goal. The key is to create that exchange with those with whom you feel an affinity and shared values.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
It’s now time to make your move. The veil of mystery and isolation is about to lift from your soul. That’s another way of saying that you’re poised on a major discovery about who you are, and this will correspond with the opportunity to play an important option that, until now, has felt impossible or out of reach. Be aware that whatever you do, careful timing is still of the essence.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You have a lot of ideas about relationships that you don’t even know about. Many of the ones you’ve played out over and over again are based on a rift in your soul between your possessive nature and your drive to be free at all costs. The introspective phase you are embarking on will help you work out the seeming contradiction between these two values.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You thrive on cooperation. Now you can make this into a science, as you work your way into a unique position of influence and success. The emphasis is on unique: there is no model for what you are doing, hence, every agreement must be worked out on an individual basis with friends and colleagues. This is a custom job, not a thing out of a box. It will take longer to establish, and work better.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
When success and achievement summon you, that is not the time to decide whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. Take a moment now and consider that it’s right: for you, and for the world. Clear up your doubts; you don’t want to take them with you on this particular journey. To have confidence, you merely need to resolve the thoughts that erode it.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You typically scorn and shun politics. Suddenly it seems obvious that this particular skill has a useful role. Remember that the goal is fairness and justice. These things don’t happen by accident; they happen by design. More often than not, they develop when someone such as yourself has the foresight to take the long view of time, and the guts to imagine what is indeed possible.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
If it’s felt like you could never quite come to a solid agreement, the time has come: though it may require you to make some overdue and, I would add, eminently beneficial structural changes in your life. These changes may be designed to help you facilitate a relationship, build a business partnership or even create a new business. Every day remind yourself that it’s great to be an adult.