Dear Friend and Reader:

Overnight Saturday to Sunday is the Aries Full Moon. That’s the Moon in Aries opposite the Sun in Libra. Aries is the sign of “I am” and Libra is the sign of “we are.” This lunation is about the meeting point of individuals and the relationships we encounter. The tune of this Moon as I’m calling it is: how can we be ourselves in relationships, a whole person relating to another whole person, instead of being half of a couple?

The many faces of marriage.

As Saturn works its way toward Libra (making its first ingress in just four weeks), relationships will be a defining theme of the next couple of years, so this is just a warm-up.

Saturn in Libra brings in the Aries Point (Saturn will soon oppose the first degree of the zodiac, as discussed in last Friday’s edition), so the conversation occurs at the astrological nexus of our private lives and public discourse. Aries is all about self, self-awareness and on the dark side, selfishness, but then by some cosmic miracle it backs into a very wide dimension where we’re al connected.

With planets gathering directly on the Aries Point (Jupiter conjunct Uranus, next spring) or in aspect to it (Saturn square Pluto beginning in November), the subject will be big news and it will come with many twists, innovations and surprising developments.

Even in the most basic terms, Saturn in Libra will help us clear the decks and identify our most fundamental values; emphasize the importance of human contact; and give us a way to think about the concepts by which we structure our personal lives. Saturn in Libra may serve to highlight our phobia about talking openly about actual relational themes; Saturn almost always takes us into fearful territory for the purpose of getting over ourselves.

Yet when you combine it with an opposition from Jupiter (expansion, culture, ideas, benefit) and Uranus (innovation, invention, revolution) on the Aries Point (the personal is political) we have an image of events driven by many people waking up and discovering who they are. And this will always express itself in relationships, which will stretch and crack open and grow in order to handle the surge of individualistic energy.

A dance for gay youth sponsored by Openarms Youth Project in Tulsa, OK. Photo by Brent Humphreys for The New York Times.

Warming up the topic, this past Sunday, The New York Times Magazine did its annual article on sex: Coming Out in Middle School. The writer visited the lives of young people who were exploring some version of queer, and also talked to their heterosexual allies in school organizations known as Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs).

From this article, you find out that many places, it’s easier for kids to be out of the closet than it was 10 years ago. Middle school is notoriously brutal on sexuality. There’s so much fear and judgment mixed with this phase of hormone overdrive that most people never get over it. Once those junior high school social patterns set in, they usually keep their grip till well past retirement age. In all, the article was optimistic, while pointing out that even in cool places like San Francisco, some students still fear judgment, while in supposedly backwater places like Oklahoma there can be surprisingly enlightened values.

It’s great to see this kind of progress. I attended one of the most progressive, experimental high schools in the country — John Dewey High School in Brooklyn — and by the time I graduated in 1981 there was not one out gay male. There were some presumed lesbians but they weren’t differentiated from feminists. There was absolutely no discussion of homosexuality when every other social or political issue was open season.

What the article did not note is that the conversation of sex within school walls or the school system is set in the context of abstinence-only sex education, which incidentally got $50 million more in federal funding this week. Begun in 1981, abstinence “education” informs students that their only choice is to abstain from sex until monogamous, heterosexual marriage. In other words, not only have schools refused to offer sex education to students, many have provided an ongoing tirade of disinformation, often disturbing in its specific attacks on gay, bi, lesbian and questioning students and for its intolerance of masturbation.

This attempt at repression through abstinence indoctrination seems to have created a generation of young people for whom experimenting with and exploring both sexual identity and gender identity is more or less normal.

Victoria Woodhull, namesake of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, was the first woman to run for president, and was a proponent of what she called free love.

I was curious for some theories how this kind of progress bubbled up from a culture that’s been told over and over that the only good sex is no sex. So I called up Carol Queen, a sex educator and board member of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, to get her theory. As a student in 1975, she founded GAYouth, one of the first youth organizations in the country in her school in Eugene, Oregon.

“While abstinence-only is the law of the land for youth, all those young people for the most part have access to the Internet,” she said Thursday. “That’s the real game changer here. People who are getting in touch with their sexuality and feel the need for some support go online first and get it, and understand that they may have some opportunities to come out, to organize, to find like-minded others in their own communities, and that’s what I think is really driving this phenomenon in the wacky and repressive and sinister world of abstinence education.

“Here’s why I say sinister. I say sinister because it’s a project of the political right to refuse information to young people who need it. To me that is not okay. I don’t need to give information in an overwhelming way to young people who don’t feel like they need it. But refusing information to people who need it is a problem. And it’s made young people band together to get that information, to reach out and get that information.”

She said that kids tend to make stuff up, to tackle the question of what to do with their sexual desires, which “the kind of repression that is being attempted with this policy” encourages.

“What’s shocking is that communities both more liberal and more conservative across the nation have been forced to, and in many cases, have chosen to buy into this, because they don’t want to take the responsibility for giving real information to youth. So that leaves youth hanging on their own. I say this as someone who saw the effects of this as a young person activist myself in the 1970s. I saw this problem in my own life and the lives of my friends and was activist around it.”

The Times piece described the emergence of Gay-Straight Alliances in many high schools.

“The whole phenomenon of the Gay-Straight Alliance is a really important one,” Queen said. “The notion of this is that youth across the sexual orientation spectrum are going to find these issues relevant. It’s a nascent political support organization, in a way. But it’s also a social support network of students who don’t feel as though queer is horrible. Plenty of straight students want support for more progressive sexual notions and are probably attracted to organizations for that reason.”

Stevie Jay at a recent performance. He is challenging the definitions between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. Click for video.

Stevie Jay is a stage performer whose one-man shows take on issues of sex and sex culture. He met Chelsea one day down in Florida, and she sent him my way.

In his performances, he uses wit, charm and common sense to seduce his audiences outside their comfort zone. He’s advocating getting rid of, or going beyond, the concepts of gay, queer, straight and their cousins, feeling that their use is basically finished. He just performed five nights in Providence, RI.

“When I was in Providence, I met men who were members of various social groups for gay men, e.g. yoga classes for gay men, rowing clubs for gay men, etc.,” Jay wrote to me last night. “It’s been said a thousand times, but apparently it can’t be said enough: it’s not as if ‘straight men’ get together and form clubs and organizations based on their sexual orientation, like ‘Yoga Classes for Straight Men’, or ‘Straight Men’s Rowing Club’. Unless the activity is sex, is there really a reason to group yourself with other people based on sex? It’s not like sucking cock or eating pussy is an indicator of one’s personal integrity or represents one’s deepest values. It’s just sex. It’s like food. We all need to eat. I like to eat pizza and you like to eat hamburgers. End of subject. Are you telling me that we’ve got to have a freaking symposium? Pizza eaters vs. hamburger eaters — we need to practice tolerance. I don’t get it!”

Reading this, I called him up and made sure he understood that before there was the modern, trendy version of identity politics, there were gay men organizing in Greenwich Village because their hangouts were being raided by the cops; one could get arrested just for walking in the door. Just like there aren’t yoga classes for straight men, there also aren’t bands of gay cops raiding bars frequented by heterosexuals, clobbering everyone for sport.

He gets it; he was in his young 20s living in Miami when Anita Bryant commenced the modern anti-queer movement by advocating the repeal of a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She teamed up with Jerry Falwell on this project, and anti-gay hatred reached a new peak. He remembers people screaming anti-gay comments at him from car windows. His feeling is that now, identify politics merely divides people, rather than fostering any kind of unity.

“I feel like this is a major blind spot — especially among folks who tend to be progressive and liberal in their thinking,” he said in his email. “So much gnashing of teeth about equal rights, calling for the dismantling of heteronormalcy while simultaneously using the word ‘queer’ to describe people who are same-sex oriented (sexually). The word ‘queer’ means ‘odd’, ‘weird’, ‘abnormal’, — and there are untold numbers of self-proclaimed ‘queer people’ who passionately campaign for the mainstream world to accept them and stop regarding queer people as abnormal. Great — you’ve got a neon sign above your head that says weirdo and you’re angry because people regard you as a weirdo, and you demand to be treated as normal and not weird. It’s a lot to ask.”

Start of polyamory contingent at San Francisco Pride 2004. Photo by Pretzelpaws, courtesy of Wikpedia. If you ask me, this kind of political display is ridiculous and accomplishes nothing except familiarize people with what they must think is a new kind of plastic.

He continued, “Men love men and women love women, and that’s a reality of being human. And to take that simple reality and turn it into a ‘thing’ via giving it a label adds all kinds of weight and significance and existential/social/interpersonal conflict that are nothing more than mental constructs and have nothing to do with the reality of simply loving someone or simply being attracted to someone.”

His implication is that the queer movement isolates us from intimacy rather than offers us to it — which is the purpose of most social games. Usually, closeness to others is the last thing people want, despite their claims. More often, motives like tribalism, being part of an in-group, being seen as better than others or the need to be a victim take precedence over actual bonding or the sharing of contact. Games and pastimes are put to work to take up our bandwidth and guarantee arm’s-length relationships with one another.

I have been having a similar conversation within the polyamory community, in which I’ve been active as a writer and presenter since 1997. Polyamory means the capacity or practice of having committed relationships with more than one person, but with everyone consenting to the experience. I’ve been encouraging the leaders of the poly movement that I know to stop using the label, and to cast their message in terms of something of benefit to all people who are in relationships or want to be. For years, I’ve presented at poly conferences thinking, the people who say they’re monogamous are the ones who would benefit the most from this information. And it’s a much larger audience.

The great thing about the label “polyamorous” is that people who feel that way, on hearing the word for the first time, can discover that there are other people like them. I’ve heard over and over again the same story: “I learned that word and I discovered that I’m okay.”

And baby makes… four: (from left) Laurel Avery, Roland Combes and Juliette Siegfried with their baby, Maya. They were recently featured in an article on polyamory in the Independent. Polyamory has got a good bit of press this year, including a special about how trendy it is shown on MTV last month.

The problem is that it becomes both a label and a club. Unless you live in a city large enough to have specifically poly events, such as pot-luck dinners (a common kind of poly get-together), announcing you’re polyamorous pretty much guarantees you’re not going to get a date. You say poly and the person listening to you hears cheater.

Since few people bother considering the ethical issues of relationships, it’s outrageous to think that someone who admits to being nonmonogamous would be the person to open up the topic — however, it’s true; the discussion of ethics and sensitivity is easily half of the polyamorous discussion.

My message to the poly club, and the monogamous club, which I recently offered in a French television interview:

There are relationships and there are communities. All relationships are one on one, no matter what the style. If you have three boyfriends, you must relate to each of them individually. The basis of any relationship is trust and communication. These subjects will come up, by name or not, in any relationship, no matter what the style.

Relationships all exist in the context of community. Communities either support relationships or stress them; relationships either support community, or isolate us from it.

Many monogamous relationships isolate people. One cannot often be monogamous and also be available for new relationship experiences, whether sexual or not. Often what we say, feel and do comes under the tyranny of jealousy, of which we rarely question the validity or cause, or note the damage that it does. Many monogamous relationships compel people to lie about their reality, since the illusion of exclusivity has to be maintained. But we don’t generally have the communication skills or self-esteem to have a real conversation, even if we want to. And most relationships are governed by the fear of being abandoned rather than the pleasure of loving.

The underlying issue is honesty: about what we want, feel, need, and have done. Only the truth is erotic; love is real to the extent that we allow ourselves to be real. Relationships are either inherently honest or dishonest. Everyone loves more than one person, but the question is, can we admit it, or does that fact have to isolate us from the people we care about? And why do we have to hide? Are we using the relationship experience to cover up our insecurities, or is it a journey toward resolving them?

I turn around, and it’s fear. I turn around again, and it’s love.

Yours & truly,

The Aries Full Moon of Oct. 4, 2009 takes place overnight from Saturday to Sunday in the United States and early morning Sunday in the UK and Europe. Incidentally, that is St. Francis Day (when you can bring your llama, cat or dog to church some places). Here is the chart, with a few details. Note the opposition of the Moon and Sun across Aries and Libra; that’s what makes it the Full Moon.The Moon and Sun are always in opposite signs and houses for the exact Full Moon. It is an opposition or the peak of a cycle.

Chart for the Full Moon, cast for Kingston, NY. The ascendant will be Leo through much of the northeastern United States and move toward Cancer in the western states. The Full Moon is overnight Saturday to Sunday in most United States time zones, occurring at 2:10 am in NY, and 11:10 pm in Los Angeles.

In this chart, the Sun appears in the 3rd house and the Moon appears in the 9th house. Remember, the houses will change depending on where you are in the world; to see the chart for your area, you need to cast it using your own coordinates. However, the positions of the planets don’t change; only the positions of the angles (such as the ascendant) and the houses.

You can see the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune on the 7th house (middle of chart, right hand side), an appropriate placement for the themes of today’s article, which focuses on queer youth movements and polyamory going beyond their old definitions and social identities. Whatever the style relationship we chose or need to choose, they all have one thing in common.

We also see a lot of Virgo activity in this chart, on the lower left: another triple conjunction of Venus, plus newly-direct Mercury (still slow and powerful) and Saturn. These three planets oppose Uranus in Pisces (top, toward the right, in blue) which is conjunct the asteroid Juno. This meeting of Uranus and Juno could be summed up as “reinventing marriage.”

Mars (symbol from men’s bathroom) is close to the south node of the Moon, which is about the need or the effort to old emotional rage and violence, and indeed negative emotional habits of any kind. If I were reading this chart cast locally for a specific question, the 12th house would suggest that the habits were both hidden and rooted in fear.

Mars is closely trine Uranus in Pisces, which suggests an opening for what I’ll call ‘spiritual’ energy — higher vibration energy from a nonphysical or not conventionally physical source. Mars has squared Eris (a glyph that looks a lot like Mars), which was exact midweek. Therefore, this is a separating square, suggesting that the subject matter is in the past — which fits the theme of Mars on the south node: we see something here about resolving old anger towards women.

While we’re on the subject of gender, Venus is in Virgo: both thoughtful and self-critical. There is the capacity for logic if you can let go of that thing about striving for perfection by means of picking every last zit.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

While many in the Northern Hemisphere welcomed the equinox and the arrival of autumn, recent weeks have arrived with an unusual cluster of natural events around the world. These events coincide with unusual Aries Point activity, astrology that has a way of rippling into the lives of many people.

People made their way through a rubble-strewn street in Padang. Photo: Dita Alangkara/Associated Press.

Wednesday night, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the sixth largest island in the world. According to published reports, by Thursday night it was known that more than 1,2000 people had been killed in the city of Padang and nearby areas, which were just 30 miles from the epicenter. Sumatra was the scene of the infamous 2004 earthquake, which had an epicenter 155 miles off the coast of Banda Aceh, on the northern end of the island. An estimated 130,000 people were killed in the 2004 magnitude 9.2 quake and subsequent tsunamis.

One day before the Sumatra quake, another earthquake in the South Pacific sent tsunami waves crashing into the Samoas. Thursday that the tally of the dead had risen to at least 160 and property damage was widespread, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa at 6:48 a.m. local time (1:48 p.m. EDT; 17:48 GMT) Tuesday. The islands soon were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) high that reached up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland.

The Samoas lie about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, ust east of the international date line. Some of the islands are an unincorporated American territory.

Meanwhile, the second tropical cyclone in less than a week is bearing down on the Philippines. Typhoon Parma threatens the island nation in the western Pacific Ocean with catastrophic flooding, mudslides and destructive winds tonight into Saturday. While part of the large typhoon will stay offshore, the northeastern part of Luzon province is expected to be hard hit.

Just days ago, Tropical Storm Ketsana brought massive flooding to Manila, the Philippine capital, following close to 20 inches of rain in some areas.

September was also a month of heavy rains in the Southeastern United States, especially in Georgia. Devastating flooding resulted, and images of the impact of rising waters can be seen at the website of the Citizen-Times of Asheville, NC.

Meanwhile, in Australia there were both floods and fires in the past weeks, as well as the gigantic dust storm that swept in from the Outback to cover Sydney, coloring the skies (and everything else) in red and orange.

As for the adage that “everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it,” British astrophysicist Piers Corbyn predicts extreme weather events around the globe using “predictable aspects of particle and magnetic effects from the Sun.” Check out his September 2009 forecast on YouTube.

One wonders what wonders Guy Laliberté will come up with while floating around the International Space Station for the next week.

Guy Laliberté playing at the $25,000 World Poker Tour – No Limit Hold’em Championship. Photo by FlipChip / LasVegasVegas.com.

If you don’t know his name, it’s quite possible you know his work: he founded and owns Cirque du Soleil, the innovative Canadian circus troupe that started humbly as a group of street performers and now has permanent installations around the globe. Laliberté, now a billionaire who according to published reports paid $35 million for this trip into space, is the mastermind behind the Cirque, which has virtually nothing in common with P.T. Barnum’s three-ring affairs: for example, animals (with the possible rare exception of dogs) are not used.

In fact, perhaps the best word to describe Cirque du Soleil’s unique shows is “otherworldly,” which makes Laliberté’s orbital escapade quite apropos. His performers sail above the ground on gossamer wings of billowing fabric, or exhibit bizarre behavior that could easily be described as “alien.” Anyone who has watched one of Cirque’s themed performances would likely be little surprised the boss has ridden a rocket into space. His employees almost certainly wouldn’t be.

Laliberté, born in 1959, has a Virgo Sun clustered with the Moon, Venus and Pluto. He is a technician. However, his conjunction of Mercury and Uranus in Leo make him an innovator and showman.

But what does it mean to have this man, this literal clown, this juggling, stilt walking, fire breathing, unapologetically unreformed street performer on the International Space Station?

For the future of manned space flight, it might be a very good thing. After all, the Golden Age of space exploration was characterized by a sense of wonder. The man who now floats in orbit over our heads has both the creative genius and the outreach (Cirque’s permanent shows in Las Vegas draw 9,000 people every night) that scientific agencies like NASA lack. Imagine if he translates his time on the International Space Station into a new show that hundreds of thousands of people would see in just a few years, then Cirque du Soleil, the Circus of the Sun, could literally put stars back in the public’s eyes again.

And as for the people who aspire to one day reach for those same stars, they have a new mantra: “Hey, if going to space is so easy even a clown can do it, why can’t I?”

Brain = Computer. It’s a pretty simple equation, one kids have been learning for decades now, and it does offer up a pretty clear idea of the basic function of that marvelous, squishy mass of stuff inside our skulls.

Well, the website PhysOrg.com is reporting that one new study hints that Brain = Wireless Hub might be more accurate.

Pre/post central sulcus. Image: PhsyOrg.

Here’s the gist: At any given time, your brain is the destination of an incredible number of signals. Some of those signals offer conflicting information, or suggest courses of action that are mutually exclusive — the article at PhysOrg suggests grabbing a hot platter, where one signal is telling you to drop it before your fingers burn, while the other is telling you not to drop it because your dinner will wind up all over the floor.

The article quotes Ezequiel Morsella, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and the study’s lead author, who says this means the brain is less like a single computer and more like “a set of computers that control different tasks, consciousness is the WiFi network that allows different parts of the brain to talk to each other and decide which action ‘wins’ and is carried out.”

Furthermore, PhsyOrg reported, “The study finds that we are only aware of competing actions that involve skeletal muscles that voluntarily move parts of the body, the bicep for example, rather than the muscles in the digestive tract or the iris of the eye.”

There is actually a Fun Home Brain Experiment you can perform along these lines. It’s called a Stroop Task, and it works like this: Print the words GREEN and YELLOW, one over the other, on a piece of paper (or go to this web site). However, use yellow letters for the word GREEN, and green letters for the word YELLOW. Show it to a friend (because it’s always more fun to experiment on your friends) and ask them to name the color of the top word. There’s a very good chance that instead of saying “yellow,” which is the color of the ink, they’ll say “green,” because they’re conditioned to read the word.

The study was released in this week’s edition of the journal Emotion.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 2, 2009, #786 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
This weekend’s Full Moon is raising questions in a partnership, but just what questions are they? One thing stands out: can you be yourself in a particular relationship? Or is the whole thing a political exercise, wherein you must follow a kind of intellectual choreography? Second, can you extract yourself from these old emotional patterns that you know you need to be free from? Bear in mind that this is a matter of how you’re going to do it, not whether you will do so. Beware of a potential overlap in the issues, which is how your own life story has led you to the situation you’re currently in. Life is not about playing a role in a drama; it’s about having an authentic experience. If you use that as a reference point, the specifics will be more obvious.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You may feel like a partner or colleague is way ahead of you in terms of their ability to express creative energy, and that they make everything look easier than it will ever be for you. If you keep that opinion, you’ll miss the obvious truth that you’re sitting on a well of untapped creative energy. You’ll benefit profoundly from sizing up your relationship to your inspiration, and noticing what you do with it when it arrives. That relationship feels stressed, as if the ideas you entertain are more of a fancy notion than something you can reduce to a practical plan of action. What you may not be remembering is that everyone who already knows how to do something learned how from someone, and then turned that knowledge into experience. This takes consistency and dedication, and more than anything, willingness to learn.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Suddenly you understand something that seemed impossible to sort out just a few days ago. That something would be your own feelings, which were mired in conflicting internal viewpoints and moreover, a sense of self-reproach. If there is anything you’re not forgiving yourself for, now would be the time. You seem to be working through this issue in layers. The last phase involves coming face to face with the part of you that both judges you and is stuck in the past. Whatever you hold in your mind is an idea, and all ideas are subject to change. What you may not have figured out yet is that you are an idea, though throughout your life many people have tried to have a hand in shaping you. It’s time to value your own opinion about yourself above all others.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
We hear the word “proactive” a lot, and today is a good day to talk about what it means. Simply: setting up the present so that you increase the likelihood of the future that you want. Opportunities are opening up with this weekend’s Full Moon, and your job is to remove from your path any obstacle that you can perceive. Look straight at the future you want to create. Be bold and tell yourself what it is, going further than describing it in general terms. What comes your way will surprise you and is outside the scope of my vision, but it’s clear that doors you didn’t even know existed will be opening; contacts you make now can lead you far and wide. Maintain your optimism, do your small part, and recognize a gift when you see it.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
In an odd and unexpected way, your fears will provide you with vital information. This is rarely so; fear tends to be the thing that steers us wrong nearly every time. The key now is to engage yourself in a dialog, though this may feel awkward or unproductive. It will be worth the effort. Primarily, the fear will orient on a concern that you cannot change something rooted in the distant past. Your motivation to do so is an indescribable internal pressure compelling you to make some immediate change, based on a belief that seems to have suddenly reversed. If you can recognize the pressure or anxiety specifically for what it is — that is to say, actual fear rather than one of its candy-coated feelings — you will be able to enter into a direct dialog with yourself. Remember, the real information is veiled. See the veils for what they are, and remove them one at a time.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Though much remains unresolved, one especially difficult point of confusion suddenly worked itself out this week. The added challenge is that you may be looking at what feels like too many options, and relationships you don’t understand. Meanwhile, the most exciting and positive opportunity seems like the most daunting, and the one that will jolt you out of your old tendencies. I suggest you look at every decision you make for the next few months as a point of no return, and consider every chance a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Things have not been moving too quickly for you; they have been moving far too slowly. The main thing that’s been hanging you up is your own idea of who you are. That is about to change fast, and I suggest you go with the flow.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
What if everything in your life, all the improvements you want to make and every issue you’ve identified, hung in the balance on the food that you eat? Any nutritionist would tell you this is true every day of your life, but your astrology says it’s something to consider now. Whether you’re considering how to advance your professional goals or your emotional state (which are related), or how to make your relationship a better place, think food. More to the point, think differently than the food your parents taught you to eat. They didn’t know everything, and a lot has changed since you were a kid. You’re older and you can’t live on your old diet of ramen and ghetto pasta. You need actual flavor and nourishment.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Family or community matters seem to be occupying more bandwidth than they deserve. Yet over the next few weeks as matters begin to work themselves out, you’ll likely agree that it was worth the time and effort. What you’ve accomplished over the past four or five months will help you ensure that you proceed into some truly exciting, challenging times with a clear head. While you may feel responsible for your family and tend to take on responsibility for groups of all kinds, you (thankfully) have a limited leadership role. At the least, you have learned to share responsibility and learned how to tell others they need to look after their own affairs, and look after one another. The key will be heading into the future with no guilt that you’ve promised yourself to take on less of their stuff.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
The primary skill you must bring to your professional activities involves public relations. You have invested your labor, your ideas and your time. Now you need to present yourself to those who have the power to make a difference. For anyone oriented on doing quality work, the process of presenting that work comes with its own challenges. Despite its blustery reputation, Sagittarius faces many of the same challenges the rest of us do when it comes to advancing their own cause. But you do love a challenge, and currently it involves having faith in the quality and value of what you are achieving. The public relations phase is, for you, the harvest phase. I propose, though, that you’ll have a pleasant surprise when you get into the groove: a lot of new ideas coming from the people you talk to.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Be on the lookout for a revelation that will greatly advance your long-term goals. You might discover something that was hidden, or come up with an entirely new idea. Indeed, if there was ever a weekend to draw up the 10-year plan for your life, this is the one. Remember, plans are a sketch that gets you thinking; a space to explore the possibilities; a space to stretch into territory not exclusively defined by what was possible in the past. That is the best value of plans: something to aim for, but not to be trapped within. Once you have a sketch (one page in length will suffice) you can ask yourself if it works for you, and adjust accordingly. But these will not be ordinary plans; rather, something more like channeling your future self.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You need to live with the tension for just a few more weeks. Mercury has stationed direct and the Full Moon is about to pass; many people will feel better as these events take hold. In terms of direct results, Aquarius is on a bit of a time delay; as we anticipate Jupiter and other planets stationing direct in your birth sign. Before that happens, I suggest you conduct all your conversations with the utmost care and awareness. People who say casual things to you will reveal profound insights into your life. They will spark off inner processes that get you asking the right questions, and provide a mirror for your most difficult-to-see issues. Note all these things carefully. When your life goes into overdrive in a few weeks, you will be very pleased to have this information.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
The Full Moon in Aries this weekend will light up the horizons of your financial potential. Yet any such awareness really comes from a deeper level, which is learning (in the words of my office manager Chelsea’s Pisces husband TJ) how to feel good about yourself. This is the name of the game, fellow fish. When you feel good about yourself, your life goes well. When you don’t, things tend to slide backwards. When you feel beautiful, you get dates. When you don’t, you’re left wondering why not. For you especially, the heart of your cosmic mission needs to start with your emotional environment: the feeling-tone of your existence. Eat well, live well, and invest in yourself. Hold the world to a high standard for how to treat you, and be willing to meet it yourself. The rest will follow.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Earlier this week, we experienced the first Libra equinox with Pluto in Capricorn: Sun square Pluto in the cardinal signs. This is the most recent of many firsts associated with this still-new Pluto transit. In a few weeks Saturn will enter Libra and we’ll experience another major event: Saturn in Libra square Pluto, one of the true stand-out sluggers in the vast aspect repertoire of astrology. If you want to understand the astrology, check out the news: a global climate summit in New York, the G20 erupting into massive protest and certifiably creepy police response, wildfires and floods and the weather going mad — what’s a girl to do?

Not Burning Man. The worst dust storm in decades swept across Eastern Australia on Wednesday, blanketing Sydney and snarling transport as freak conditions also brought earthquakes, giant hailstones and even a tornado. Photo: The Standard.

All of this is associated with the Aries Point — the potent first degree of the zodiac — because the planets involved are poised in the first degrees of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn). That puts them right near the Sun (i.e., conjunct, square or opposite) any time there is a change of seasons; for quite a while, these seasonal turning points will seem bigger than usual, and as they are today, come with concentrations of wide-reaching news that actually matters to us as individuals or feels like it should. For a while, every season will feel like another year; and with each passing season the news becomes more personal.

Even as President Obama was addressing the United Nations climate change summit, the cover of CNN included news of a drowning mother caught in a Georgia flood; wildfires that raged in California and a state of emergency was declared; Sydney, Australia, was swarmed with a dust storm that made it look like a Martian landscape; and Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical correspondent, caught H1N1.

At the UN, Obama also raised an issue we haven’t heard about in a decade: nuclear nonproliferation. He warned that, having evaded disaster in the Cold War, we now face the threat of regional nuclear arms races (India versus Pakistan; Israel versus Iran) and “loose nukes,” of which there are many as a result of the decomposition of the USSR. [Text, video of Obama’s presentation at this link]

“No longer do we have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together,” he said, which gave me an instant aha as I saw him say the words: exploiting differences and conflicts is a way to avoid the important work that we as humanity have to do. This is the game of stopping the conversation about health care reform by accusing someone of being a socialist; on one level, all of our red herring arguments amount to the admission of being too lazy to do anything, or too invested in another values system but not willing to admit it outwardly.

Unsuspecting New Yorker reads the cover of the fake New York Post outside Grand Central Station, which announces: We’re screwed. Photo by Eric Francis / Planet Waves.

When I got back from the city Monday night, I stopped in at a local bar to deliver some copies of the fake New York Post that went out that day, created by the Yes Men. This is the edition designed to focus the conversation of climate change on real issues. The bartender said she wished she could do something about climate change, but she had to work three jobs. I asked her why she had to do that, and she said, to pay her mortgage and also that she liked to go shopping and take expensive vacations. Let’s see: carbon footprint 101.

Often, getting involved is not a luxury. It just kinda happens to a person. As David Byrne said, the world crashes into your living room. Or you feel a calling; an assignment or calling chooses you and all the excuses (lack of time, lack of motivation, etc.) vanish.

As powerful planets gather around the Aries Point, we’ll experience things that cramp our particular let’s call it “middle class” style, disrupt the usual patterns of our lives or call us into action: maybe all three at once. There are also social movements coming, more sophisticated cooperatives (fuel, food, medical), new kinds of housing arrangements that will consist of small, focused communities more efficient than the current choices, and if we can say nothing else, options will be opening up. In work, technology, rrelationships, child rearing and family structure. Dust off your old copies of the Whole Earth Review — we will need them.

Said astrologically, we will be and in fact currently are witnessing and experiencing many consequences of powerful planets coming into focus with the Aries Point. The star of the show will be the revolutionary planet Uranus entering Aries next spring, making a T-square with Saturn and Pluto. By early next summer, the aspects involve a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in the first degree of Aries, which always — always — brings an exciting year of progress. Let’s tag this the cardinal sign T-square, so that it has a name. A T-square involves planets at three points of a cross; the sign supposedly missing is Cancer, but there is in fact something there, an odd point called Kronos (another conversation, truly, but it involves authority and taking authority). Uranus and Pluto will remain in a square through around 2016, making seven exact contacts and representing a sequence of events that, simply put, rock the world.

Yes Men Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum pose in their “Yes Men faces” for a photo-op outside the UN. They orchestrated the creation and distribution of 100,000 copies of a counterfeit “New York Post” warning about the effects of climate change, as scores of heads of state and environmental ministers arrived in town. Photo by Eric Francis / Planet Waves.

And we are getting a taste of those vibes right now. (Of potential interest, I’ve so far neglected to mention that Uranus in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo are both square the Galactic Center in Sagittarius. I did a lot with Pluto conjunct the GC in ’05 thru ’07 but noticed the current aspects to the Galactic Core about a thousand times after I saw them with my eyes.)

Add it all up and you’ve got a before-and-after scenario where it’s one kind of world now and it will be another kind of world when these aspects start to pass us by. I’ve said before that this is astrology that makes the Sixties look like a walk in the park. Why, exactly? When the same three planets lined up around 1966-67, causing all kinds of uproars, they were in the mellow, slow-acting mutable signs Virgo and Pisces. When they align continuously along the run-up to 2012 and beyond, they will be in fast-acting, high-impact cardinal signs, closely aligned with the Aries Point.

This setup seems to be located a few seasons into the future, but in truth we are experiencing the dynamic now and have been for well over a year. Human consciousness takes a while to figure out what’s already been going on for a while.

The effect of anything aspecting the first degree of the zodiac is to turn big things personal; world events are arriving with the reality of having direct impact on our lives.

Most New Yoprkers just seemed puzzled when they read the cover of a New York Post which mysteriously had a conversion experience and was taking up environmental issues rather than celebrity gossip. Photo by Eric Francis.

To wit, a major climate change summit at the United Nations, in preparation for the main event in Denmark that will occur around the time of the first Saturn-Pluto square. Anyone who thinks this is just another meeting of world leaders has not read enough science fiction. This is occurring concurrently with a meeting of the G20 in Pittsburgh, where the leaders of the world’s major economic powers will be grappling with many of the same issues. The G20 protests exploded into protests the like of which we have not seen since Seattle in 1999, including some very dark conduct by law enforcement.

Human consciousness has another problem: we tend to separate cause and effect. We believe in effects without a cause and we think that all this stuff we’re doing is never going to have a result or consequence of any kind; and most of us are pretty certain we’re ineffective.

Yet in our moment, we have the ability to influence the future in a way that has never happened in recorded history; or as the case may be, to abdicate our potential to make the future better for our children and for many generations to come. That is, as long as we’re not too busy paying for vacations.

My pre-equinox day spent on the move with the Yes Men (Monday from 4 am, starting at the Empire State Building, well into the afternoon) was incredible fun, good for journalism and introduced me to the climate change issue in a new way. The question some people may be asking is, is this kind of thing useful? Or is it just fun and games? Well, estimating that two or three people read each of those precious copies of the fake Post, I would say that now an extra quarter million people — some of them in actual positions of power — now have new information. Many, many people on the ground have new information. Lots of folks got involved and spent the day making a difference, and having fun (the two work well together).

Outside Grand Central Station, Ana White, a former fashion model, declares herself an oil painter in a one woman-protest. This is not indicated in her sandwich sign; she would explain the “I’m an artist” part if you talked to her. Photo by Eric Francis / Planet Waves.

When we think that something is ineffective, or if we don’t want to get involved (or are scared to get involved), it’s likely that the issues are internal; that is to say, personal emotional or psychological hooks. The growth piece is, for example, learning how not to tell yourself that you’re ineffective, but rather, committing to learning how to be effective (and cheerleading your own accomplishments). It’s about creating relationships that support your values, rather than undermine them. If you find yourself telling yourself “you can’t fight City Hall” there is something here about your worldview and your relationship to your parents; and exploring that is the growth piece — the personal empowerment piece — of participating in your community.

Of course, once you do get involved, you’ll get a tour of the human personality and its tendency to make its own affairs as political as possible. It’s wise to avoid organizations and causes that politicize themselves, internally, but then we always have the challenge of learning how to work with one another in a productive way. There is the challenge of learning how to be an individual in any kind of collective environment.

One thing I love about the Yes Men is that they come from a tradition of theater and art. They’re the jesters, telling the truth. Their leadership and the respect they receive are based on their talent, commitment and the strength of their human bond. Their whole scene was groovy in the way that they focus on having fun and never missing a good laugh; and they’re spontaneous in addition to being extremely organized. People they invited to distribute the fake New York Post had no idea what they were getting involved with until turning out to the Empire State Building at 4 am Monday — that is trust. They drew the sweetest, most easygoing bunch of New Yorkers you can imagine.

Their classy approach included black, screen-printed New York Post satchels for utility and the perfect prop. The Yes Men were able to do what few other protesters are able to accomplish: get a coherent message into the hands of the people in power (at least some of them) and also out to the public, then have the whole thing picked up by the media in a way that repeated the correct message: we have to pay attention to climate change, and do what we can about it.

Mom-daughter team at the Empire State Building, 4:30 am Monday, ready to give out copies of the climate-change edition of “the New York Post.” Photo by Eric Francis / Planet Waves.

Activism (I prefer to think of it more descriptively as participation) involves social networks and also self-directed individuals who collaborate. Here, we’re into Aquarius territory. There has been plenty of planetary activity in this sign peaking this year (and continuing into next year), concentrated on Chiron’s and Neptune’s long journeys through it. Chiron’s presence, in particular, is challenging us to wake up and function as an individual with and within a collective.

While there are conflicting viewpoints on whether we’re in the Age of Aquarius yet, there’s one property of the times we’re experiencing that distinctly has that quality: we get into patterns that it’s very difficult to get out of. As the Aquarian Age persists, this will become more palpable; and the sooner we get out of our negative patterns, the better.

They seem to be about routine, obligation and responsibility, but in truth they are mental patterns: ideas, concepts and habits of thought that can leave us with the feeling that we can never change — until something comes along and forces us to adapt. I really and truly wonder: how many people who got laid off recently wanted to get a new job and kept telling themselves that?

The change we are going through, and about to go through, may not be convenient, but regardless, it’s upon us, calling on us to get involved rather than to get a job.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

We live in funny times. No, I’m being serious (wocka wocka!) If we weren’t so absorbed with the need to make sense out of all the garble and nonsense, draw some conclusion about this surrealistic void-space in our transition from one era to another, we might be able to relax and find a few laughs. Lord knows we need some; the shifts and stressors of this period have the ability to create us as brittle, vulnerable and humorless. That is, of course, a choice and we’re seeing a number of citizens make it. Bummer, as we used to say; and not part of any productive solution to our challenges.

Laughter Tablet. Photo: My Pinoy Humor Blog.

I’m not so sure we are capable of making sense out of everything in this moment, anyhow; some of it is absurd to the point of brain-freeze, and not nearly as tasty. It takes an increasingly light touch to get through the day and a suspension of the myriad judgments we used to make when we thought we knew what we were about. I’m not suggesting that we let go of that thread of rationality that binds us all in common purpose; I’m proposing that those of us who have already taken the lay-line of this new landscape stop agonizing over the map and have a bit of confidence that we’re on the right track. Shift is sweeping us all along, the astrology is opening doors to vaster consciousness and the collective spiritual intention has put all of humankind on a remarkable journey; those of us who will come out on the other side of the tunnel with a smile on our face are those who cultivate one now. Indeed, our choice of optimism, hope and humor is our protection and safety net.

Do you need something to tickle your funny bone? I’ve heard it said, and rightly, that laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense. As the world is lush with nonsense at the moment — what can be said of a political climate that has prompted many news articles to come with this disclaimer: this is NOT an Onion article — it shouldn’t be difficult to spot an opportunity to lighten up. For whimsy, how about Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) showing up on Jay Leno’s new nightly spot to show off his Abstinence Ring? For cutesy, take a peek at this collection of Green commercials. For farce, consider the oh-so-serious lecture given by an aide to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn at the recent Values Voter Summit, that proclaimed Playboy magazine a recruitment aid for homosexuality. For satire, the faux-ad done by Will Ferrell and others — Hollywood speaks out to help insurance companies — has been picked up by MoveOn and spread around the nation. This last proves the wisdom of Francoise Sagan’s notion that, “One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.”

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

There was a time when an event like the G20 economic summit would stir the interest of a comparatively small group of die-hards: Policy wonks, finance majors, journalists working the international relations beat, and maybe a handful of protestors from fringe groups leery of a single world government.

Students marched past a coffee shop in Pittsburgh on Wednesday ahead of the G20 economic summit meeting. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP.

Well, the G20 summit is being held in Pittsburgh right now, and things are a little more … lively. With protestors of all stripes converging on this Pennsylvania steel town, the city and federal government expected to spend $19 million on security during the conference, which started Thursday and ends today.

Expect similar scenes at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, from Dec. 7-18 of this year. Many groups are expected to arrive and protest the deliberations there — even some that support reduction in carbon emissions but think government and energy companies are hindering progress.

What’s changed, that these once-esoteric events have become hotspots for mass protests? Our awareness, that’s what. With information becoming more and more easily available all over the world, thanks especially to the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, more people are aware of what is being dealt with at these conferences. And that means more minds are pondering the significance of every detail of those negotiations, and their consequences.

Some might decry this trend of protest-ization of virtually every international issue or conference. Do the images we see on television and in newspapers — often depicting opposing groups of protestors struggling over barriers, waving signs and screaming insults at each other — cloud the bigger message of these meetings: That these governments, however imperfect, are at least coming to the table to discuss the pressing issues of the day?

Truly, it’s hard to say. But one thing can certainly be taken away from this trend: More people, in more places, are aware of how even the most technical elements of international relations can impact the lives of individuals. And that awareness has also resulted in movements like microfinance, increased education of women, protecting rain forests and overstressed fish populations, and many more. People around the world have grasped the big picture, in other words, and in the long run that’s most likely going to wind up good for the planet and its inhabitants.

That would be Saturn, the majestic sixth planet of our Solar System, whose rings have fascinated stargazers for centuries. Thanks to NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, in orbit around the gas giant for five years now, it is possible to appreciate those colossal rings in a whole new light.

Of the countless equinoxes Saturn has seen since the birth of the solar system, this one, captured here in a mosaic of light and dark, is the first witnessed up close by an emissary from Earth … none other than our faithful robotic explorer, Cassini. Image credit: NASA.

The magnificent photos that NASA recently released provide the best view yet of Saturn’s rings, which is perhaps best viewed in this slideshow. But it wasn’t just spectacular photography that was reaped from this mission — scientists also picked up new information about the rings, themselves.

That’s because in August, Saturn reached its equinox, which happens twice during its 29.7-year orbit, just as it does during an Earth year. With the rings lit directly edge-on, the images taken by Cassini revealed that they are not as uniformly flat as previously expected; instead, they appear corrugated, like a tin roof.

Furthermore, scientists noted that there are some “bumps” along certain rings that cast long shadows over their neighbors when illuminated by the equatorial sun. If “bumps” is the right word for something that would have to be as tall as the Rocky Mountains, by NASA’s estimates.

“The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings,” Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release on the JPL.gov website. “To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving.”

Added Carolyn Porco, a Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado: “We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we’ve come across walls more than 2 miles [3 kilometers] high. Isn’t that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction.”

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 25, 2009, #785 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You appear to be in some kind of struggle between work and relationships, manifesting any one of several ways; for example, as something within working relationships, or between your ‘work life’ and your ‘relationship life’. Actually, it looks like what you’re grappling with is insecurity. In other words, with doubt, with questioning yourself, and with the feeling that your apparent limitations will never allow you to accomplish anything truly significant. This is more likely to be an issue if you actually want to do something meaningful, so you can at least credit yourself with that. I suggest, in everything you do and feel, that you ask yourself: is this supporting my purpose, or fighting it? That will open two doors: contact with your sense of mission; and assessing everything on a simple metric — if you remember.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
If your mind releases a flood of ideas and passionate desires, notice whether you resist or go with the flow. There is a difference, and I suggest you get good at discerning it. What you normally offer yourself is a litany of excuses for not taking action, based on presumed consequences, ungrounded expectations and, in a word, fear. One of the things you fear is making a decision from which you cannot turn back. This is always true, in any event. Making any decision is a risk, and risk is the most important thing to become friendly with right now. Life goes like this: you take a chance and see how it works out. Then take another, and see how it works out. Then you do it again. Being mired in conflict is a temptation but not a viable option.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You seem to be stuck on an emotional point. You may also not know that’s what’s going on; it’s difficult to identify the true nature of a hangup when you’re in the midst of it. If you’re obsessing over finding ‘the right strategy’, that is a sign that you’re snagged. But how do I know the issue is emotional? Well, that’s what your solar chart suggests. Here’s what else: you are secretly trying to negotiate with one or both of your parents; to do what you think would impress or please them. This has been going on for a while, but not so blatantly as at this particular moment. Issues lingering from childhood usually go away when we want them to, so here is a question: what purpose is it serving? Clue: it’s a huge distraction.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You have a right to not express yourself. You don’t owe the world any explanations, and you don’t need to explain anything about yourself that you don’t fully understand. You might want to explore the position of giving no excuses, reasons or rationales to everyone. Let every statement be some form of, “This is what I am doing.” If someone asks you why, reply with some form of, “This is what I am doing,” or don’t reply at all. I also suggest you try doing a few things that you want to do, which specifically defy the will of others. Try pushing against the world in a way that lacks your usual diplomacy, but which specifically fulfills one of your goals.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Several factors suggest strongly that you take a gander at discerning whether you are making certain choices based on what is important to you, or what is important to others. I say this because it’s a significant step in the kind of sorting out of priorities that you’re up to lately. It’s fine to work to impress others, as long as you know you’re doing it, as long as it supports the relationship, and as long as you’re conscious and willing. Problems arise when others run your life by what amount to unspoken expectations, which may have no validity at all. Pay particular attention to the issue of ‘how you are supposed to get things done’, meaning, pay careful attention to your methods. How you do things, literally the steps you take, represent an important value that is yours and yours alone. Collaborating is one thing; being ruled by a silent dictator is another.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Why are you so obsessed with analyzing your motives? I suggest you make a short list of all your possible intentions and work from there. That is to say, resolve the issue in a tangible way, in logical, black-and-white terms. You are entirely too suspicious of yourself, which leads to internal misunderstandings. This in turn leads you to blame yourself and others for issues that don’t exist, while missing many opportunities to connect with people on clear, simple terms. For that to work, you need to simplify the terms of your relationship with yourself. If you are in conflict, there is likely to be something you are denying. It will come out in vivid colors when Mercury changes direction next week, but you don’t have to wait till then.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
The Sun is now in your birth sign, but this may not be granting the renewal, relief and sense of awakening that it usually does. It’s difficult to overlook the feeling that something huge is lurking behind the scenes of your existence, something over which you have no control. There’s a bit of an exaggeration going on for you; what you’re feeling is impending change. Remember though, this isn’t the kind of change you can plan. It’s the kind you must embrace when the time comes; and it won’t arrive all at once. The adjustments that will significantly improve your existence will arrive in a series of decisions. This information can relieve you of the need to plan, though I suggest you experiment with ideas for what you want.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Chiron pioneer Melanie Reinhart once described this era of history as being about “breaking the taboo on God.” I suggest you break the taboo by describing God in detail. Make a list of the attributes, powers, motives and agenda of God as you perceive or experience he/she/it. Second, look closely at what you were told about God, by parents, religious instructors, teachers, television and other external sources. Make an accounting of what they believed, and note how it’s influenced what you believe. This is all by way of making your many thoughts and ideas conscious rather than having them lurking in the background. If you were raised in a ‘non-religious’ or ‘atheist’ household, that merely means that the concepts are buried that much deeper. Get them out in the light, where you can see them.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Continue to exercise the utmost care and patience where your career goals or projects are concerned. At the moment, you may have a number of reasons to think that things are going badly or are delayed beyond any hope of a meaningful outcome within a timeframe where it matters. Proceed gently and focus your mind on solving old, seemingly small problems rather than blazing ahead. Issues that now seem intractable will unravel themselves over the next two weeks. A few significant obstacles that you perceived as impossible to surmount will reveal that they are smaller and less daunting than they seemed over the next two months. When they move, the main thing you will notice is how much you have accomplished over the past couple of years; those achievements are the foundation that you will build on.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You are, at the moment, getting a look at what will be possible in the future. What is possible in the future is usually possible now, but several things can intervene: one might be a sense of readiness. Another might be the availability of resources or other people. Yet these things are more often ideas than actual obstacles; you already have your strategy in place, and you would be wise to assign anything you’re considering in the distant future as something you can do more immediately. With the Sun now crossing the most public angle of your solar chart, you need to see yourself as a leader, as an innovator and as a person of action; simply put, that is what you are.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Your world is getting bigger. Finally and at long last, you have a sense of what is possible, as a feeling more than as a list. This feeling is crucial because it’s the experience of granting yourself permission to dance with your own potential. Aquarius is the sign of the zodiac that is about mental patterns. Many astrological factors have been conspiring to get you off the tracks and out of the mental maze that you’ve been calling a personality. In truth, your unconscious has sent you just about every kind of signal and given you the opportunity to experience just about every kind of test that’s available. Yet there are few experiences so powerful as stepping outside the door and recognizing that you can do anything you want.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You are the lucky sign that gets to have Libra as your 8th solar house. The 8th house is one of the most challenging; most people associate it with jealousy, power struggle and with crisis. But taken Libra style, the powerful relational attributes of the 8th house come out: for example, the desire and willingness to have authentic exchanges with people; to share, though in a beautiful and creative way; and the capacity to experience your changes in a way that is elegant and compassionate. The Sun’s course through this sign for the next month is a kind of live-action preview, which will offer you many rich possibilities. The gears fully engage when Saturn ingresses Libra in late October.

Actor Patrick Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer on Sept. 14 at age 57, seemed to defy one of the stereotypes that society and, especially, Hollywood have cultivated: Tough guys can’t be sensitive.

Patrick Wayne Swayze (August 18, 1952 – September 14, 2009) Photo: PR/WENN.com

That alleged contradiction was his hallmark in Dirty Dancing, and in Ghost, and even in Road House, where he both knocked heads and waxed philosophical.

“Get in touch with your feminine side” has been a mantra of self-discovery for decades. “Easier said than done,” declared our macho-centric culture. Swayze, however, seems to have captured that essence; he was a man’s man who drew guys to the box office because of his toughness, and a ladies’ man who captured women’s hearts through his tenderness. That combination made him a huge box office draw despite lukewarm critical reception — which he didn’t seem to care much about, anyway. Not a surprising attitude, perhaps, for a man who was a long-time practitioner of Buddhism.

Swayze was a super-Leo with Virgo rising; super meaning that he had the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Pluto in Leo, along with the South Node. Born two days before a solar eclipse, he was born with star quality and seemed to live with the hand of fate on his shoulder. The combination of Leo Sun and Virgo ascendant (and Venus) is a combination that seems to offer a larger-than-life quality, also seen in the horoscope of Madonna.

He had the asteroid Terpsicore, the Greek muse of dance, mixed in with all those Leo planets. This was most closely conjunct the Black Moon Lilith, an elusive, verging on nonexistent point that gives the impression he could dance with the nonphysical realm and embrace the very darkest qualities in women gracefully. This gift shows up elsewhere in his chart, such as a powerfully placed Eris.

His rising degree — 24+ Virgo — puts his natal angles precisely in line with the Saturn-Uranus opposition that was exact the week he died. Saturn was in his rising degree or ascendant, and Uranus in his setting degree, or descendant.

He died less than a year before his second Saturn return. Most astrologers looking at that would likely feel that he had left something undone, or was somehow evading a crucial point of maturity on the physical plane; yet his life does not resemble the many greats who died just before their first Saturn return, from Kurt Cobain to Jimi Hendrix.

Click on image to enlarge.

Much has been made of his origins — the son of a rodeo rider and a choreographer –- and his fairytale romance: He met his wife, a dance student of his mother, when she was a teen and they were married until the day he died. But like any person, there was more to Swayze than met the eye.

This can be said of anyone; humans are for the most part inscrutable creatures, but when your Sun is in the 12th house, there is something about you that’s mysterious and not fully invested in the material plane. If you are fortunate and you do your part to both take creative risks and ground your talent in discipline, it’s possible to garner considerable success. He had Saturn conjunct Vesta in Libra in his 1st house, which suggests that he was willing to set aside his own idea of personal gain in lieu of doing what was right, as he understood it.

The surname “Swayze” is not one you run across every day. According to Ancestry.com (which cited the Dictionary of American Family Surnames from Oxford University Press), Swayze is a variant of the English name Swasey. That name is likely a form of Swijse, which is Dutch and a variant of the Dutch name Wijs.

Which in turn means “wise” — and wisdom is also not something you run across in a person every day, though he seemed to possess it in a Yoda-like fashion.

Perhaps most famous for his role in Dirty Dancing, what’s overlooked by all but his most ardent fans is that Swayze also sang one of the songs on the movie’s soundtrack, the ballad “She’s Like The Wind,” which also featured vocalist Wendy Fraser. This is a considerable achievement for an actor.

It wasn’t his only venture into recording, either. He also sang the song “Raising Heaven (In Hell Tonight)” on the Road House soundtrack. That’s not nearly as likely to turn up on your local classic rock station, though.

For an actor who had been on the scene more than 20 years but who didn’t turn out a box office smash every year or two, Swayze had remarkable staying power in the culture, indicated, among other factors, by his birth at the time of an eclipse. In human terms, perhaps it’s because he spoke to an archetype that resonates with us as human beings: A savoir. Strong in mind and body and spirit; able to protect us physically and emotionally. It’s something men and women both can identify with. And it’s a fine legacy to leave.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

When was the last time you had a hangover? Had a balls-out, overindulgent, cutting-loose evening … with, I don’t know, a bottle of warm Sake, for instance, or a nice aged Scotch … that saw you falling into bed with a case of the spins and waking with a pounding head, blessedly-vague memories of outrageous excess and a mouth that tastes like the bottom of a bird cage? OK, well, if you haven’t done anything that humbling lately, surely you remember the last time — or one spectacular instance; and if you haven’t ever been there, then go do it now. I’m not proposing that you become a chronic drunk or strip off your clothes as you sing Karaoke at the local beer joint, which in my case is a little shack called the Mule Lip and is infamous for its bar fights and public humiliations. I’m suggesting that blasting ourselves out of the straightjackets of all that’s acceptable and safe, all that we expect of ourselves, gives us valuable information about our humanness. And experience is everything.

The oldest hangover remedy is to simply keep drinking. Photo by David Bowman / TIME.

Of course, we have to pay attention to what we learn; most people who do something like that tend to put it behind them as quickly as possible, stuff those images and feelings down into their memory basement as a glitch in their norm. Sadly, some others make such behavior their ‘new true,’ and slowly diminish themselves with substance, more at ease with their uninhibited subconscious behaviors than the tightly patterned conscious ones. Here in the Patch, I’m cozy with a bunch of Alcoholics Anonymous members because they ping on two of my prerequisites for awareness; they’re patient with other people’s foibles and they try to tell themselves the truth. Because of their sobriety process, they’re ‘teachable’ — open to self-exploration. Since I appreciate all paths, I see theirs as a somewhat violent but expedient way forward; although they might not agree, given the nature of their regrets. But we get to a productive Now by making sure that Then is mined for all the wisdom it offers, and they’re miners for sure. Life is messy; and if it isn’t, we’re missing out on some worthwhile short-cuts eschewed by those who work toward a mistake-free life (and good luck with that, by the way!)

This was the week that saw the President give his long-awaited speech on healthcare reform to the combined Congress. Televised in prime time, we all got to see the reaction of the Big Three — Obama, Biden and Pelosi — to a shout-out from Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who yelled “You lie,” to the assertion that illegal aliens would be exempt from receiving healthcare services under the new proposals. Our respected Congressional pomp and circumstance fell prey to tea-bagging town-hall’ism and caused everyone, nation-wide, to gasp aloud. Just one of those little Uranian surprises that we can expect more of in the coming days.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

This week’s news takes us from Patrick Swayze, a man who embodied virtues that embrace both the masculine and the feminine, to a controversy over an athlete who didn’t fit an international organization’s gender expectations. We somehow don’t think it strange that most athletic competition is strictly segregated by sex; men and women generally don’t compete against one another, unless of course the game depends on mental prowess above all else. Yet gender isn’t what it used to be.

A brief recap: 18-year-old South African Caster Semenya, the women’s world record holder in the 800 meter run, won the 2009 World Championships in Berlin this August. However, she subsequently became the focus of high-profile, and humiliating, questions about whether she was, physically, a woman.

Recently, the results of physical examinations of Semenya were leaked from within the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the agency that ordered the testing. Apparently Semenya has no ovaries or womb, but does have internal testes. The offensive term “hermaphrodite” was immediately tossed around by a gleeful tabloid press. Yet the test results have raised more questions than they answered, many of them on social and philosophical issues.

Semenya’s postmodern gender is reflected in her natal chart as the Sun mixed in with the extremely rare triple conjunction of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that rocked the world in the late 80s and early 90s. That conjunction seemed to melt away structure, coming with the disappearance of the USSR and the transformation of China into a new breed of capitalist communism.

Venus is in Aquarius, a masculine sign. Mars is in Taurus, a feminine sign (though the two are not quite in a square aspect). The Moon is in Libra, conjunct Nessus — there is a long story there, one that we need Semenya’s personal history for. But her story is very much reflective of the gender anarchy of our own times.

Writing about the testing, the medical exams and the circus atmosphere that has surrounded the runner’s dilemma, Columnist Dave Zirin at The Nation finds the whole scenario to be disgusting.

“Besides being a cruel and idiotic practice, sex testing doesn’t account for the idea that gender is at least in part socially constructed and far more fluid than the iron categories of male and female. An 18-year-old woman is being torn apart in the press for doing nothing but winning a race. If it is the goal of the media and the IAAF to destroy the life of a young, talented female athlete by outing her as potentially intersex, then they are not simply pitiless; they are socially repugnant.”

Zirin is not the only one raising questions about the morality of this process and the way in which Semenya was being treated by IAAF authorities. The bloggers at The Science of Sport in South Africa also see rampant unfairness and illogic surrounding the situation.

For starters, sports science and marketing consultant Ross Tucker wonders how the IAAF could have let this situation develop in the first place.

“The fact of the matter is that these allegations are not new. They have followed Semenya for a few years. Therefore, there was ample time to verify sex (again, a difficult process) and clear the way for her to compete… Because it was not, we are sadly seeing that Semenya will be the loser in what might well become an ugly story.”

But even more crucial, Tucker writes, is the complete lack of understanding regarding the difference between gender and sex.

“‘[P]rivate parts’ do not alone constitute male or female. This is a rudimentary distinction, but does not acknowledge a range of developmental conditions that can cause male characteristics to develop without there needing to be male reproductive organs…The fact that ASA [Athletics South Africa] believe that ‘asking her to show us her private parts’ will do the job suggests that they have little idea of the issues.”

Zirin sums up the chauvinism of the situation: “Exceptional male athletes are treated like kings, not sideshow freaks. But for women to join them on the royal dais, you must appear as if you can step seamlessly from the court or track and into the pages of soft-core porn. Freaks need not apply.”

Unless you’re a climber or a geologist, rocks may not rank high on most people’s list of “things I’m looking for in a place to live.” But when you’re talking planets to live on, rocks are everything.

An artist rendition of the first rocky extrasolar planet called Corot-7b. Photo: AP Photo/ESO.

Earth is a rocky planet. Mars, Venus and Mercury, likewise. And if mankind is ever going to set foot on a planet circling another star, there will need to be something to set foot on. Well, rocks — specifically a rocky planet — are the best bet.

That’s why Wednesday’s announcement of the discovery earlier this year of Corot-7b is such a big deal. It’s the first rocky extrasolar planet discovered by astronomers, and orbits the star Corot, which is 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn).

Corot-7b is a hot rock, too. In fact, an article by AP writer Seth Borenstein notes the planet is so close to its star that the surface temperature is some 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also fast, to the tune of 466,000 mph, orbiting its sun in 20 hours. That makes Mercury, our solar system’s speedster with an 88-day orbit, a tortoise by comparison.

But setting aside the hostile environment, Borenstein reports that this planet is “a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe,” according to Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution, who wasn’t involved in the discovery.

An extrasolar planet is any planet that is discovered orbiting a start other than our Sun. The first such planet discovered, according to The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, came in 1989. Its name is hardly poetic — HD114762b — but maybe you can call it “b” for short since the rest of that alphanumeric code is the identity of the star it circles. That’s astronomy for you, eh? Fortunately, its constellation has a lyrical name and an interesting association: Coma Berenices, or Berenice’s Hair.

According to Wikipedia, “Coma Berenices is one of the few constellations to owe its name to an historical figure, in this case Queen Berenice II of Egypt, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes (fl. 246 BC–221 BC), the king under whom Alexandria became an important cultural center.” The article also attributes the “promotion” of Coma Berenices to a constellation to Tycho Brahe, an astronomer of the 16th and 17th centuries who also had a really fun idea about our solar system that, like so many other early theories, were undone by modern science.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 18, 2009, #784 – BY PRIYA KALE

For more astrology, horoscopes and information on Private Consultations please visit www.priyakale.com/blog. You can email Priya at priya@priyakale.com with feedback and comments.

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You reach a turning point within a partnership now allowing you to readjust a crucial balance. No matter what or who you feel has power over you, this is about equal partnerships and fair agreements. You have found your sense of purpose and you know what you are trying to build will require dedication and commitment. A partner for their part is committed to healing this partnership with their devoted daily presence. You are getting a chance to clear the air, so be willing to ask for the help you need, renegotiating agreements based on mutual needs. Avoid critical tendencies and be open to good advice when you hear it. Brilliant ideas often come while doing the most menial tasks, so pay attention while doing the dishes, in the shower or even out in the marketplace…

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Yours is an earthy kind of love that blooms, because of your endless devotion, but on a deeper level there is a need for healing that you must admit to yourself first. You can have this if you can make the conscious effort to seek perspective, balance and co-operation on a daily basis, rather than project any sense of powerlessness or get into power struggles. Yours is an earthy, sensual kind of passion that settles for nothing less than the most luxurious expression of your energy — be it love or sex or creativity. As you evolve to a higher understanding of your own core power, you could reach tangible and emotional peaks of success and ecstasy. Just allow yourself to be open to receiving a divine truth and a deeper understanding of what wants to heal you with its grace. When in doubt, listen to your heart. It hears the things the ears do not.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You are revisiting a part of your past which holds the key to your future. Be open to a radical solution that unravels a deep mystery you’ve been intent on resolving. Something may feel like a bit of a risk, but you don’t have to make any new commitments yet. You are just turning a corner towards a deeper understanding of your inner being. Whatever it is you are deathly afraid of, it can lose its grip once you realize this is about an inner surrender rather than anything external. You are securing your home base now. Even if it takes a bit longer to sort out the details of a close personal situation, you can get the ball rolling by conquering your own fears first. And then as Eric Francis said to me once, “You can’t pull the parachute string, unless you jump first.”

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You reach a profound turning point within a close personal situation asking you to open your mind and evolve to a greater sense of perspective. If what you seek is inner peace you will have to confront and resolve your own possessive tendencies. Be honest with yourself now about what you want out of love and what you need to feel more at ease. This will mean adopting a daily, conscious process of being true to your heart and a greater wisdom. You can tend to be fairly self-critical — now you can resolve a dilemma simply by being open to greater inspiration. As the quote goes: “We are never given a wish without being given the power to make it come true. We may have to work for it however.”

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You reach a turning point asking you to be brutally honest with yourself. More than what you “want” this is a question of what you “think” you are worth. If you listen to what someone is saying to you; this is not criticism but can heal you of the voices that keep you trapped inside your head saying you’ll never be “good enough.” You are indeed more critical of yourself than anyone else. No matter what you feel has power over you, recognize the value of what you have to give. You can renegotiate arrangements now to bring greater understanding and balance. There is no success that is out of reach if you are willing to work towards it with your selfless devoted affection. The results of this will be emotional and tangible success that opens your heart to the very real magic that surrounds you every day.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You’ve recently felt a surge of passion burst through your defensive walls. This has forced you to go deeper to find your core integrity and consciously move forward as you begin a new phase of your journey. You are reaching a deeper understanding within yourself now, about who you are. This may come in the face of a deeply personal situation which is as risky as it is tempting. But resolve any sense of powerlessness you feel and don’t waste time doubting or projecting fear. You are a beautiful being capable of untold passion, a deep sense of fairness, with tangible, creative and sexual prowess. But mostly this is about you finding faith in yourself in the face of unpredictability, knowing above all you have what it takes — a heart of gold.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
After a recent surge of activity, a part of you is going underground to discover deep treasures in your soul that fill you with nostalgia. Allow yourself the time for this evolutionary journey and take comfort in that which heals you. But as the Sun moves into your sign and squares Pluto this week, you have to face your deathly fears of the past and come out of the shadows into the light. This need not be a struggle, you can turn a corner from a darker past, by consciously deciding to not become a prisoner of your fears. Find a balance now that allows you to build your life on your own rules. It may take a little while longer before you can make sense of all the details or pieces of the puzzle you think are missing. But if you keep yourself open to inspiration there could be a radical solution to an issue it’s been hard to wrap your head around.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You are evolving to a higher consciousness now. But the thing with awareness is you can never go back to not knowing. You can resolve your subconscious fear of relationships, when you are willing to admit them to yourself. You are seeing more clearly your own duality and this may be painful to admit. If you avoid projecting your doubts onto the world, there is a greater truth emerging. You can reach a new depth of understanding within an important relationship, if you are willing to listen. Remember the heart hears and sees what the ears and eyes do not. It may sound unbelievable but you can if you want experience a more earthy kind of love and tangible abundance, that awakens, heals and liberates you all at once.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You are turning a corner towards greater financial freedom this week. After the recent battles with your sense of security this may sound unbelievable. But don’t be afraid to re-negotiate an existing arrangement, it can only benefit you in the long run if you stay rooted in what you know you are worth. You have a deep respect for tradition and authority, which at times holds you back from reaching your highest ideals. But there is no struggle here, you can find a balance if you recognize your own power within a situation. You are due to receive recognition over the coming weeks for your lasting devotion. Accept and receive this with grace and humility. The hardest part is behind you, now comes a time for reaping the rewards.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You reach a turning point in your career, putting you in the spotlight again. It may be scary given your recent doubts, but I suggest you leave yourself open to imagination. A dream you’ve had is slowly starting to piece itself together, giving you a vantage point of the solid abundance available to you. Do what you can to conquer your fears and need for control. If you can keep an open mind and sense of perspective you can reach a deeper understanding of a perplexing dilemma. Be honest and willing to listen, a piece of information you hear can liberate you from your anxiety about the future. It may take a little longer to sort out the details. But if you keep a sense of the highest hopes in your heart, you can manifest them with love and dedication.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
A recent confrontation has forced you to move past a point of no return. You can taste freedom now, but at the same time this means resolving any fears you have about success. When it comes to intimate and financial agreements something is igniting a deeper desire of possibility. It may be scary to think you can reach for something so emotionally and tangibly rewarding. Be honest with yourself and others about your deeper needs for healing. You can reach new agreements within your relationships, that stabilize you, if you are willing to truly listen to what someone is trying to say. You are building relationships now that have soul lessons for you and can stand the test of time. Remember, you get what you give.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You are at the start of a new cycle within your relationships and there may be a powerful association you share with someone that is asking you to go deeper. This could be a sexual or financial relationship, but it has the ability to open up your world in emotional as well as tangible, material ways. Consciously avoid projecting power struggles and recognize the value of surrender, not to anyone or anything but your own needs for companionship and co-operation. Overcome your fears of being locked into something you cannot escape from. As long as you are willing to keep an open dialogue with partners, you can rework arrangements so you feel there is a sense of fairness and balance. You are reaching another level of understanding within a partnership, which can liberate as much as it heals.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I spent most of last week at Burning Man, a kind of festival in the Nevada desert held each Labor Day. The event takes its name from the burning of a giant neon and wooden effigy of a man, which is burned on Saturday night as 40,000 people gather around and watch. In my daily series (now running about four times a day) I’m looking at Burning Man in words and pictures, explaining the basics of this odd, survivalist example of capitalism turned inside-out.

The Man at Burning Man, about half an hour before being burned, on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009. The arms-up position indicates that the fire is about to begin. Photo by Eric Francis.

The photo at the right is The Man, which has become something of a cultural icon now more than 20 years in circulation. Burning Man traces its history back to 1986, when the founder, Larry Harvey, burned an effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The event was moved to the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada several years later and is now the annual meeting place of a far-reaching, extremely energetic subculture.

Planet Waves first covered this phenomenon in 1999, as part of a series about the grand cross and total solar eclipse titled after the festival; the festival itself is covered in part four of the series, which you can read here.

Astrology is about symbolism, and in this article I’d like to look at a few of the messages of the fire ceremony that’s at the center of this elaborate creative project called Burning Man. I think for most people who participate, the theme is so intuitive, they don’t really think about it much. You get the message in the creative fire that surrounds the symbol; it comes across as real world. Given the freedom and the safe space to do so, women strip to the waist and walk around in public. Many guys wear skirts and tutus. Everything is connected to a concept, an idea, a game of twisting logic around into something sensible in a different way.

In effect, Burning Man grants many people permission to be who they are, and in the absence of concrete knowledge, to test out some ideas of who they might be and not have to worry too much about the legacy of who they were yesterday.

This legacy is our problem. It’s not that we use the past as a reference point for who we are, or where we are going, which would be fine. It’s that we determine our lives almost exclusively by what has happened in the past; by who we knew in the past; by what we held as true in the past; by our family of origin and what they did to us; by the career that we developed, generally with no special intention to have done so. And this is really the least of it.

Severe dust storms nearly prevented the burning ritual this year. Burning Man is held on the playa left behind by an ancient lakebed. The dust is finely ground and strongly alkaline. Photo by Eric Francis.

What we struggle with the most, if you ask me, is the unspoken requirement to be who we were, feel how we felt and love who we loved yesterday. We allegedly must, by some strange set of unwritten rules, get up in the morning and do what we did the day before. If you look closely there is actually very little to intervene in this train of experience. This is why key life transits such as the Saturn return, Uranus opposition and Chiron return, are so often experienced as train wrecks. We make next to no room to ritualize the idea of change that would allow us an opportunity to in fact actually change.

Much of this process is encrypted in our social patterns: that is, our relationships with friends and family. We tend to stay the same fearing their judgments, therefore trying to live up to their supposed expectations. Some of our most fundamental values, such as whether we think marriage has any validity for us personally, are bound up in these social ties. Deep beneath our fear of being ourselves, which really is a phobia on a cosmic scale, is the fear of being cast out of the tribe if we violate its social order.

This by the way is what I would call Chiron in Aquarius stuff: The tribal wound as it manifests as the fear of individuality. Here we have a convenient illustration because this year and next, Aquarius is such a focal point of the astrology. (The once-in-a-lifetime triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune is still working out in that sign, the peak of a five-year transit of Chiron in Aquarius.)

Fire dancers perform before the Man is burned at Burning Man 2009 in Black Rock City, Nevada. Photo by Eric Francis.

From all of this, we get the idea that people don’t change; we merely get locked into patterns. The times we expect to change are generally the moments of the train wreck. Maybe you’ll be different after a divorce or a death in the family, but even then there is only so far the rules of society allow us to go.

Enter Burning Man, where we ritualize and embrace the process of growth. We show up, facing the extreme conditions of the high desert, forced into both radical autonomy and the need to embrace community, both consciously, as a matter of survival.

The thing about the Man is, he’s this elaborate artistic creation, different every year, and then we do something very odd by our society’s standards: we burn him. This is the Death card (Trump XIII) on a grand scale: the point of no return; the actual moment of transformation. We release the form and some new element of energy has the room to express itself. By the time this ritual comes, most participants have been pushed to the limits of their physical and emotional reality. Burning Man is “fun” but it’s fun only to the extent we give up some of our worldly trappings, our sense of time, our daily routines, our names and so on. Like most valid rituals, this is one that takes preparation.

Part of that preparation is what we bring to offer the community. Unlike most enterprises in a capitalist system, Burning Man is about what you give rather than what you get. The whole purpose of capitalism is to maximize profit at the expense of the worker and the consumer. The idea of Burning Man is to give resources to the community, at your own expense. This is a missing experience for most of us, who don’t think we have so much to give; and if we do, the idea of actual generosity is often repulsive or seems inappropriate.

The Burning Man ignites in a ritual of transformation. Photo by Eric Francis.

The gift culture ranges from the most elaborate perks from Corporate America (somebody with a lot of cash on their hands paid for the Opulent Temple) to the most modest offerings of self. The camp that I was staying in, Poly Paradise, offered a daily Human Carcass Wash where up to 600 people came to be washed down from their coating of playa dust.

Part of the preparation involves developing a new relationship to physicality. I’ll give a few examples. It’s really easy to dehydrate in 110-degree heat. Therefore it’s necessary to constantly think about water, which reminds us that we’re made of water. There are ways to measure hydration; you can figure out how much you drink; or count how many times you pee. My personal method is, if my nose is dry, I’m dehydrated.

There’s nowhere to buy food; therefore every meal is a conscious act. You cannot simply “grab a sandwich.” If you run out of food or water, you’re at the mercy of your neighbors, who are usually generous; everyone is in the same condition.

There are no flush toilets. Port-a-Potties are glorified outhouses, and if we make a mess out of them, they are messy for the rest of us. We literally have to deal with one another’s shit (something that most of us know not about, in the industrialized world). One result is the most impeccably clean public bathrooms you’ve ever seen at an outdoor event. The potties are plastered with public service announcements created by various camps and factions reminding what and what not to drop down the hole — and the admonition that someone will, in fact, have to dig out your Pepsi bottle if you toss it down there.

By my second day on the playa, I was planning my self-care activities one at a time. Find dental floss. Use dental floss. Find toothbrush. Brush teeth. I shaved once; it was a memorable project, involving the spontaneous discovery that I had left my shaving gear in the glove compartment; then boiling half a gallon of precious water. Every step was a conscious act. The result felt like no shave I’ve ever experienced.

Crowd of 40,000 watches as The Man burns, at Burning Man 2009. Photo by Eric Francis.

Then there are relationships. Those tend to be rearranged in this environment. It’s true that I was in a camp that had relationship-oriented discussion groups every morning (called Poly High Tea) and where we hosted talks on the history and sociology of monogamy. However, all around people seemed to be tossed around in a kind of relational anarchy — sometimes pleasant, sometimes not — as a result of being confronted by so much intense beauty and so many people bringing out some aspect of their creative fire. In reality, one makes one’s boundaries, rules and agreements; then what happens, happens.

Synchronicity is the name of the game at Burning Man: this thing we call manifestation is in full force. The stories are too many to count, and it’s fun to see it in action. I really had to surrender to the notion that if I think of something, it could happen in a matter of minutes; and even if I wasn’t consciously thinking of it, but I secretly wanted it, it could happen when I was least expecting it. Some of these stories are more appropriate for Book of Blue. Synchronicity messes with your idea of how physical reality intersects with consciousness. It’s true that we were in an alternate plane of reality that was a lot closer to the astral/causal levels. If you play this game well, it’s possible to let go of a lot of negativity.

Then, after a week of this, the whole community gathers for The Burn. This year, all day Saturday was in what I’ll call a category-2 dust storm, caused by persistent winds blowing across an ancient lakebed. The storms do get worse: absolute whiteout. But this one was pretty bad, and it seemed to last forever, all day and into the night, threatening the ritual itself. I got myself there early, to have a seat in the front row, all the better to photograph for you. And I sat there as the dusty wind pounded my body and my cameras and my lenses, catching dust in my mouth and eyes despite my mask and goggles.

They can’t safely light a fire that big with 40,000 people around it in such a stiff wind, but unlike last year (when there was a similar problem) the higher-ups made the decision to start the pre-burn festivities: a LOT of fire dancers and musicians and acrobats came out and performed in a vast circle to the audience/participants. These performers were dedicated, doing their thing at full strength despite being slammed by the elements. Most of them had prepared for a year for this event.

Finally, the wind stopped and the arms of the Burning Man were hoisted into burn position: high above his head. Then came the fireworks and the pyrotechnics, and then he burst into flames, taking all of us with him.

Yours & truly,

in Reno, Nevada

More photos and articles about Burning Man are at PlanetWaves.net. Thanks to Jeff Patterson for getting me to Burning Man this year.

Photo by Eric Francis.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

In all things there is a necessary tension — between being asleep and awake, for instance, there’s a physical response that either gets you moving or eases you down into a dream state. When you lay your head on your pillow tonight, chart the tension as it releases itself from your frame; this is one of those I-didn’t-notice-it-until-it-was-gone deals. When you wake up tomorrow morning, notice how every nerve in your body gathers itself for the day, sending signals to your muscles to propel you out of bed and fill you with its animating force. Tension is the game here in 3D. There’s also tension between people, which I believe is primarily sexual; not overtly, in most cases, but a subtle thread of chemical recognition and social expectation. It defines attraction and, ultimately, human relationship. When we focus on something, tension brings all its power to bear on one point, moving a project forward to completion. Tension is an enormous creative power, if we recognize and appreciate it.

Connection to Inner Selves. Photo: Kitaido.

This is normal tension I’m describing, not stress; but then, nothing’s been exactly normal for quite a while. Few of us have relaxed on the most basic levels for years, and consequently most of us are stressed up the wazoo. In very broad terms, I think of that tension that moves us along as chi, as Divine animation, as God/dess — and the debilitating stress that we allow it to become as the Flip Side; we are either in cooperation with ourselves in producing our own good or in a constant state of self-sabotage and defeatism. I don’t suppose I need to remind you that excess stress is a killer; our bodies aren’t designed to deal with it in large quantities. It taxes our heart and erodes our immune system; it debilitates our nervous system and makes us snappish and jittery. It leaches out into our attitudes and behaviors in ugly ways.

So here’s the thing about the kind of stress most of us are dealing with today — it’s all in our head. I mean, think about it; and if you do, all the variables for tension/stress come up on your touch-screen for you to select from. Without our mind mulling the options and projecting their possible result out into the future, our bodies would be at rest, quietly awaiting instruction. The simple truth is unless we’re being charged by a rhino in some African veldt or the Sheriff is coming up the drive to serve foreclosure notice … well, yes; there’s that, for some of us … actual stress is all about dwelling in an unhappy past while projecting a frightening future. Our most recent past, unfortunately, has created an underlying habit of anxiety that feeds our fears; and that’s in our head, as well. We are assuredly not required to repeat any dismal patterns or perpetuate learning cycles, but that always demands our awareness, self-discipline and cooperation with Higher Self. The past announces the future — but only if we let it.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

Seems we acted like the mainstream media here a couple of weeks ago, accidentally anointing Jeane Dixon as the astrological advisor to First Lady Nancy Reagan during her husband’s tenure in the Oval Office. That advisor, of course, was Joan Quigley.

“I was never good at earthquakers. What I do best is politics”. Photo: PEOPLE Archives (May 23, 1988).

While we’d like to blame Wikipedia or the Hottentots or pretty much anyone for the error, it was ours alone, and so we offer a heartfelt apology to Planet Waves readers. The fellow who creates our news briefs, the Dogtown Writer (in a fun coincidence, yours truly also happens to be named Eric Francis, but is no relation to the earlier Eric Francis of Planet Waves), is a non-astrologer and well, that’s what can happen.

But if there’s a bright side to this coin, it’s the opportunity to examine the remarkable relationship between Quigley and the Reagans – particularly the public hoopla that followed the revelation.

David Roell, a veteran astrologer who operates the Astrology Center of America in Maryland (and a longtime advisor to Planet Waves), was in a unique position to assess the New York media’s reaction to the Quigley story: He was the guy answering the phone when they called.

“I was working for Henry Weingarten’s New York Astrology Center,” Roell recalled. “At the time, I knew all the astrologers in New York and ran charts for them all, but I didn’t know the celebrity astrologers. Quigley was a celebrity astrologer, so she was unknown to me.”

The problem, once the story broke, was that the journalists covering the story had no idea who to call.

“When this hit, all the news media in New York City responded, but not one of them had the name of a single astrologer in their Rolodexes,” said Roell. “If you’re a news organization and Patagonia blows up, you have an expert on Patagonia. What happened for astrology is no one [in the media] thought astrology was important enough to have in the Rolodex.”

So those reporters consulted their phone books, and one name stood out: The New York Astrology Center – where Roell happened to be working the phones.

“I handled the phone calls for the first week. People phoned and phoned and phoned,” he said. “After about a week, Henry Weingarten, who owned the place, figured out there was a flap going on.” Up until then, Roell said, Weingarten hadn’t been the least bit interested in taking calls.  “After a week, he said ‘you should be giving me all these phone calls!’ And I gave him these phone calls, and two days later they stopped.”

Roell has a theory for the media’s quick loss of interest: His boss wasn’t a good quote.

“I was having fun, I was playing with them, giving them the lay of the land,” he said. “Henry was pompous. He was a Leo with Sag rising.”

Still, Roell got what he called his “thirty seconds of fame in New York City” with interviews on Italian television and CNN. But he says the news media didn’t learn any lesson then, and “they still don’t have astrologers in their Rolodexes.”

As for the Reagans, Roell credits them for recognizing the importance of astrology.

“Reagan had been using astrologers since the 1950s, straight through his governorship [of California],” he said. “One of his inaugurals in Sacramento was held at the stroke of midnight at the recommendation of an astrologer.

“Reagan was a reasonably smart guy who got what he wanted by following reasonably smart astrologers.”

Finally, Roell also got a chuckle out of our Dixon/Quigley gaffe: “That’s like saying John Glenn was the first man to walk on the moon.”

Touché!

A 10-member committee formed by President Obama to assess NASA’s plans for its human spaceflight program in the coming years has delivered its verdict. In short: Scale back, or spend more.

Space Shuttle Discovery as seen from the International Space Station ISS in late August. After the shuttle program’s scheduled end in 2010, the United States will again be left without a launch vehicle to go into outer space, this time making the ISS inaccessible via our own spacecraft. Photo: NASA.

The Augustine Commission (so named because it’s led by retired aerospace exec Norman Augustine) delivered an executive summary of its report on Tuesday of this week, and it wasn’t kind to the widely publicized ambitions of sending men back to the Moon and on to Mars in the near future. There are more realistic options for the amount of money NASA plans to spend, the commission declared.

The commission’s full report will be delivered later this month.

Washington Post science writer and blogger Joel Achenbach summed it up this way in the paper’s Wednesday edition:

“Don’t try to put astronauts on Mars yet — too hard, too costly. Go to the Moon — maybe. Or build rockets that could zip around the inner solar system, visiting asteroids, maybe a Martian Moon. Keep the international space station going until 2020 rather than crash it into the Pacific in 2016. Help underwrite commercial spaceflight the same way the United States gave the airline business a boost in the 1920s with airmail.

“And spend more money on space.”

The commission wasn’t against the idea of human space flight, reports Achenbach, but did say that program “appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” At the same time, it “clearly endorsed the goal of a robust human spaceflight program and all but pleaded on behalf of” NASA.

However, NASA’s $18 billion annual budget isn’t sufficient to meet the goal of “a space exploration program that will be a source of pride for the nation,” the commission reported, estimating it would take another $3 billion a year to accomplish that, the Post article said.

An article on Wired.com notes that among other assessments, the commission judged the gap between the retirement of the Space Shuttle next year and the implementation of the Constellation Program to return NASA astronauts to space in 2017 was too long — but they couldn’t identify any “credible approach” that could shorten that gap to less than six years.

The commission studied a number of options for moving ahead with manned space flight, the Wired article noted, and the one that received the greatest support by commissioners was what they called the “Flexible Path.” That would put people in space, but landing on the Moon or Mars wouldn’t be goals; instead, astronauts would travel to and explore smaller bodies, such as the asteroids or Phobos and Deimos, the Moons of Mars.

Wired quoted the report as saying: “We would learn how to live and work in space, to visit small bodies, and to work with robotic probes on the planetary surface. It would provide the public and other stakeholders with a series of interesting ‘firsts’ to keep them engaged and supportive. Most important, because the path is flexible, it would allow many different options as exploration progresses, including a return to the Moon’s surface, or a continuation to the surface of Mars.”

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 11, 2009, #783 – BY PRIYA KALE

For more astrology, horoscopes and information on Private Consultations please visit www.priyakale.com/blog. Please email priya@priyakale.com with comments and feedback on the horoscopes.

Aries (March 20-April 19)
This week you move past a barrier and a milestone in this quest of manifesting your dreams and soul’s purpose. On a deeper level you know this is a confrontation of some of your most lucid fantasies and fears. The way past your fears is not through idle romantic fantasies but solid agreements. You are no stranger to determination and I suggest you embody the strength you feel you somehow lack. As you renegotiate your sexual, creative, personal and professional relationships over the coming weeks, create balanced communication with clear understanding of roles. If there is to be healing, there first needs to be an honest appraisal of the passion, dedication and level of commitment within a situation. Do you dare acknowledge your heart’s desire? What would you do to meet it?

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Your level of breakthrough this week depends on your ability to see beyond the illusion to something divinely inspiring. A situation close to your heart seems to be ready to move forward to its next stage of manifestation. But ultimately this means devoting your heart to something that inspires your faith. You are aware of wounds you’ve carried too long that have no place in your future, if you want more of the peaceful existence you say you do. This is about you feeling safe enough to be yourself, express yourself and indeed love yourself. You may wonder if you have what it takes or if you deserve something this divine. But this is no fantasy, just an awakening of your core, embodying and revealing your natural transcendence.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You are retracing core aspects of your being, asking you to come down to earth for a moment. You may have thought you’d seen the last of a difficult situation and it may seem you are heading right for it again. When it comes to negotiations your imagination is key, this is not about spinning romantic fantasies. You are moving toward a future where you can work on building the kind of relationships that stabilize you with greater emotional and financial security. What’s the use of playing in the rain, if you are constantly looking over your shoulder to check if your house is still standing, or that the sky is going to fall on your head? Get your foundations right so you can experience more of the carefree passion you long to express.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You’re close to reaching an understanding or commitment with a partner over the next few days, setting the stage for healthier communication in the future. But first there may be a few realizations to come to within yourself. This will mean first being honest about where your models of communication come from. Look especially at your relationship with your father or an authority figure that in the past has had you feeling like you have little or no say within a situation, causing you to react or respond in a certain way. How you feel about yourself ultimately defines the wealth and love you attract into your life. Dig deep to find your integrity while opening your mind to the wider possibilities for the future. Embody your truth and speak it fearlessly.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You are reaching a breakthrough point in a deeply intimate, personal or financial situation that has been pushing you to find your core integrity and self-worth. Above all else now, be honest but don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not about being ‘good enough;’ it’s following through on what you say. You may fear the forces of chaos, but all that exists came out of this very nothingness. The people in your life are there to mirror the depths of your heart. Some of this may be painful, some may be just golden, but none of this defines you. A situation is asking for you to dive deep. Relationships are like swimming –- no amount of reading will teach you what you can experience only by diving in. You will not drown, rather you can become the anchor in the eye of a storm. If you surrender, it’s likely to be a more wet, wild and magical experience than anything you “fear.”

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You’ve been battling a delicate situation for what may have seemed like an eternity. The recent Full Moon in your opposite sign, Pisces, may have brought you an inkling of what’s to come, but truthfully you’ve known for a while. This week things reach a breakthrough point. Try not to be too self-critical at this point. Rather, become the force of change by embodying it. As long as you are grounded in what truly matters and who you are, you can make choices accordingly. Deep in your soul, there is a fire throbbing with divine love, asking you to pour your heart into that which heals you. It may be scary to open up and risk being rejected. You can have your heart’s desire, if you dare acknowledge it to yourself first. There is nothing to fear here but fear itself.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
This week brings you a solid glimpse deep in the heart of desire. What is it that you desire now? What is it in your world that needs healing? Your heart has had its share of lessons to learn. Look at what you are creating in your world and ask yourself if this is a projection of the truth. Create out of love, boldness, fearlessness and passion. It is always easier to escape into an illusion for fear of rejection, but hurt pride never solved anything. Be honest with yourself now as you ask these difficult questions. You cannot see it but you are on your road to true freedom, the kind that comes as a solid knowing in your psyche. You will have to get past your own subconscious fear of change to recognize that this is what you have wanted all along. Allow yourself to soar on the wings of imagination as you realign, redefine and embody your soul’s purpose.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
There may have been a deeper truth that has come flying out recently. Whether or not you feel ‘ready,’ you have no choice now but to resolve your darker suspicions, that keep you from experiencing reality. You reach a point of breakthrough within a situation that has demanded more than you may have felt you had to give. But this has opened your eyes to just how valued your gift to the world is. You may have doubts about the future of a partnership, but I suggest you dive deep into your soul to discover the undeniable truth. There may be painful realizations to confront and wounds to heal. But these have to do with the past, rather than the present and boundless future you can feel exploding in your heart and being.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
It may feel like you are being asked to surrender all known securities in favor of something or someone that may have been a tough client to please. You don’t need to get into anyone’s good graces as much as embody your own strength and integrity. You’ve been digging deep to find your self-worth and confronting darker fears about success. Now comes a transformation point in an important partnership. There are a few creative ideas floating that you could capitalize on, allowing both parties more freedom. You will not lose anything, nor are you banging your head against a wall. You’ve always played by the rules and soon you will reap the rewards of your faith. This is about you reclaiming respect and your rightful seat of authority in this world. No matter what you fear, you sit in the lap of a greater divine force endless in its depth.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
On the surface, to the world you may seem self-assured, but there’s a deeper question you’ve been digging for an answer to. Who are you? What are the things you like about yourself and what do you feel is ready for a change? You’ve been gaining perspective and now comes a moment of truth. You’ve been working hard to expand your mind to the greater possibilities available. To get what you desire, you have to admit it to yourself first. If you have doubts regarding a financial and intimate partnership ask yourself why? Focus your deepest values even if there is some painful truth to confront there. This is not about your selfish gain, nor is it about praise, fame or life’s transient pleasures. But about something that fills you with hope, pride and joy, worthy of your devotion. Dare to speak your truth –- the world is listening.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You’ve been battling with a difficult situation for what may have seemed like an eternity. You had to dive layer beneath layer within yourself to discover depth you didn’t know you had. Now comes a final confrontation within a situation, which can free you to pursue without worry the desires in your soul. It will require inspiration on your part and the ability to see through to the heart of a matter. You’ve always been the one pushing through boundaries to get people to open up to a greater truth. This is not about shock value, but rather your deepest soul values. What you have to give is infinite in its depth and wisdom, a partnership is solidifying now. If you can focus on what you are trying to build rather than what you fear you may lack you can ease the pressure here. This is about you having faith in yourself and what you choose to dedicate yourself to.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
It may have been a battle to gain your sense of self and freedom within a situation. But this has led you on an unexpected journey of discovering depth within you, you didn’t know you had. You have the opportunity now to create and imprint your life with the soulful vision you have long been dreaming. This will take dedication and bucket loads of inspiration, but when have you shied away from the impossible? Consider this an opportunity to work your magic. Allow a situation to open up its arms to you and breathe life into that which you create daily with love and passion. Pour yourself into creating a life lived fearlessly with love, passion and bright colors for the future. You are starting a new phase, asking you to let go of the past and walk boldly into the future. Trust your integrity and dedication will carry you through the stormiest seas.

Dear Friend and Client,

If you follow the blog, you know that Eric has emerged from Burning Man, and is posting some great photos that document his time in Black Rock City. He’s in Reno getting reoriented at the moment, so I’m writing a short update in his place.

As you may know from our recent blog posts and emails, Mercury stationed retrograde yesterday. If you haven’t already, now is the time to order Eric’s latest report. It’s the perfect tool to help you navigate through the current Mercury retrograde at an affordable subscriber rate of just $8.95.

To order, click here. Then, if you’re a subscriber you’ll get to give one to a friend, on us. Once you order, send me an email and I will make sure your gift recipient gets the report promptly.

With Love and Sunshine from Florida,

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You have many expressions of ‘self’; you’re one of the most multifaceted people around, and you may at times believe this is a debility. It is nothing of the kind. In the world we live in, we need to change modes quickly, and to rely on both sides of our brains at all times. You’re developing some rare gifts that will help you do this. You also have some talented friends who would be very likely to help you express your full potential. Hit them up.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Taurus is the sign of the body, yet those born under your sign are famous for having the most active, obsessed minds in the zodiac. You’ve been trying to get an idea or goal into your reality; that is, into the physical routines of your life. We often mistake inner journeys for outer ones; we mistake a destination in the world for a feeling in our heart, or a pattern that we need to establish. Focus on your body and its basic needs, and your mind will follow.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
While there is a mathematical aspect to working out emotions, this only goes so far. You can reason your way to the exit doorway of your insecurities, but to walk out the door requires a step that might feel more like a leap of faith. Yes, having reasons to make a decision can make that decision seem plausible; then you simply need to decide. You are close to that point now. Don’t be held back because something you expected to be difficult turns out to be easy.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
One thing we can say about this phase of your existence is that relationships have finally come into focus. The potential, the problems, the benefits, and above all else your deep need to connect deeply with people are now central points of your life: in a tangible way rather than an abstract way. I would draw one distinction for you, at the beginning of this prolonged period of your life. Being drawn to someone on an emotional basis, or on the soul level, are two different things.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You are someone who likes to be wise with your pennies, but you need a more complete financial strategy than that. Involved with having a coherent relationship to money is a clear relationship to your father; that is, with the person and with the concept of authority, and of your power in the world. Sort out the difference between doing something ‘for him’ and doing something for yourself. Get to that core idea and money will make perfect sense.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Your quest at this time of your life is to embody maturity, consistency and a mental rather than emotional approach to existence. The difference is not obvious to most people; for your part, having a nervous disposition is what often gives you license to be inconsistent. This is one of the most opportune moments to get to the roots of that particular issue and take a major step in the direction of being a solid, dependable person.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You may feel under enormous pressure right now; take life one step at a time, and one day at a time. At the core of some enormous mystery is a clear and simple strategy that will get you to the next place. That you cannot perceive it does not mean that it does not exist; to the contrary, not knowing is an invitation to make a discovery. I promise that what you would seek to discover about yourself is waiting patiently for you.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Under the best circumstances your sign is one of the most involved with processing emotions. If you’re not careful, you can do it for everyone around you. Rarely in your life has this been so conscious, or have you needed more support. I would caution against feeling too self-reliant; like you can ‘handle it all yourself’. No person is an island, even a mighty Scorpio. I suggest you state your needs and seek the spiritual nourishment you need.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You’ve learned so much this year, and you’re still processing it. Were I in your shoes, I would be itching to express all that I’ve been learning; and I might feel like the knowledge were too incomplete. Remember that to get anywhere in this life it’s necessary to experiment with the bits that you do feel confident about; to explore the parts of yourself that need a voice, even if you don’t feel quite ready.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You’re crossing a bridge from the past to the future, and the longer you walk on that bridge, the longer it becomes. Your life right now is a meaningful invitation to be where you are and notice the incredible potential of this moment. The planets suggest strongly that you explore actual potentials that are available right now, rather than ideas or plans you have for the future.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You are charged up like a battery — and the challenge is to expend your energy slowly and steadily rather than all at once. Ideally, you want to distribute the physical and mental effort and put most of your emphasis on creating ideas, rather than making them happen. There will be days when nothing seems to go right, but you can safely get up the next morning and start over.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
A relationship or partnership seems more complex than it is. Gently lead your mind out of the heavy quality and constant referencing of the past, and remember why you were motivated to make contact in the first place. By the time the Sun reaches Libra on Sept. 22, you will understand that this is a real exchange of mutual appreciation and support.

Dear Friend and Reader,

For those of you who may not know, Eric is at Burning Man this week. I spoke with him briefly last night; he has a rented satellite phone that actually works pretty well. He has made the trek across the country and settled into Poly Paradise. Eric has no internet access, so he has been unable to submit the usual brilliant astro-journalism piece for today’s newsletter.

Instead, we will lead with a piece from our favorite person in the Pea Patch, Judith Gayle.

There is still time to order the Mercury Retrograde Report before Mercury stations retrograde next week. Here is how we’re handling discount pricing for subscribers: you’ll get the pre-order price of $8.95 (the price for everyone else has gone up to $14.95). Then, if you’re a subscriber you’ll get to give one to a friend, on us. Once you order, send me an email and I will make sure your gift recipient gets the report promptly. To order, click here.

Wishing you a peaceful and relaxing weekend.

With Love and Sunshine from Florida,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Welcome to September. It seems to have come quickly this year; perhaps that’s because time is moving faster than a freight train or maybe because the summer was so cool and rainy here in the Pea Patch it didn’t hit all the normal markers that anticipation sets in place. Typically, August is a difficult political month, summer breaks create a Petrie dish in which mixed messages and speculation can grow in fungal splendor; the hot August winds traditionally blow a lot of chaff to litter the Hill. This year, no matter the local weather, Washington DC, and ultimately the nation, experienced a shitstorm of hot air with cold, deliberate calculation driving it. Yes, if this is that juncture where the conversation turns back to something that encourages rationality and civil discourse, September is welcome indeed.

Glenn Beck tells viewers that he is a clown who needs “Walls And Gates”. Photo: YouTube Video.

August was the month when desperately needed healthcare reform became a Liberal Socialist plot, its proponents warned off by guns and hysteria in town hall meetings across the country. Citizens everywhere exercised their right to keep their minds vacuum-sealed, and even the most tediously irrational such as Glenn Beck, who lost a bevy of corporate sponsors for his inflammatory commentary, is forced to rely on the old Republican counterintuitive meme of being persecuted for telling unwelcome truths. Promise of violence poked its ugly head up like a mole in the great American lawn, encouraged by the rhetoric of the Party of No that did its level best to scare the hell out of seniors; this Ann Telnaes cartoon, based on an actual event, sums it up nicely, and frankly, if these elders — the Pluto in Cancer crowd — don’t get a clue, I’m going to have to rethink that Greatest Generation thing.

In this remarkable age of Internet access, even overwhelmed as we are by factoids and tidbits and opposing philosophies both rational and un, we have been given all the information we need to form our own thoughts; but not the education in critical thinking to do so. We’re still too driven by the steady, gossipy beat of “what’s new” in pop culture, the persistent barrage of advertisement, the holographic fiction of television and the insecurities prompted by harsh realities, to tame the various voices in our heads. The change of consciousness that is required of us does not come easily to those who resist its necessity; yet, as with pouring fresh water into a glass, the dregs that await us at the bottom must float up to be eliminated, and will do so whether we wish them to or not. That’s where we find ourselves now; pummeled by events we’d rather not get cozy with or admit into our consciousness — which is highly nonproductive because that’s where they were born.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

For centuries, mankind has been watching the skies, noting the movements of the heavenly bodies, and sorting out how it all works.

Then a planet like Wasp-18b comes along and throws a spanner into the works.

An artist’s impression shows a “hot Jupiter” close to its parent star. Astronomers say a planet known as WASP-18b is so close to its sun that it should soon fall to its doom. Copyright: C. Carreau/ESA.

As related in an article from Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, this particular planet has a number of standout qualities: It’s a “hot Jupiter,” a gas giant that’s exceptionally close to its star; it has an incredibly short orbit, taking less than one Earth day to complete; and, by all accounts, it should’ve fallen into that star and burned up a long, long time ago.

That, at least, is the conclusion of astrophysicist Coel Hellier of Keene University in Staffordshire, England, who discovered Wasp-18b.

“This planet should spiral inwards on such a short time scale that the likelihood of seeing it is very low,” Hellier told the newspaper.

Which raises a lot of questions in the astrophysics community. For example, it could be that the star around which Wasp-18b is orbiting (which is called, coincidentally, Wasp-18) has about 1,000 times less energy than scientists believe. Or it could be that the planet has only been in that orbit a short time and that Hellier happened to catch it there as it gradually spirals into the star. But each of those propositions raises other questions.

Meanwhile, those looking for answers can start closer to home. One of the two moons orbiting Mars, Phobos, is in a similar situation: it’s far closer to the planet than it should be (5,600 miles) and still maintains its orbit.

Normally, columnist Dan Barry at The New York Times travels around the country and writes fascinating, insightful stories about regular people.

Dan Barry. Photo by Fred R. Conrad.

But this week, Barry turns his pen upon himself to discuss one of the least-discussed and least-understood — outside of cancer survivor circles, that is — side-effects of chemotherapy.

It’s called “chemo brain.”

There’s an old saw that Barry quotes in his column about how “cancer tends to focus the mind.” Well, chemotherapy tends to unfocus it. Those powerful, hateful chemicals that are surging through the body, meant to track down and vanquish killer cancer cells, also have the tendency to fog the mind. Once dismissed as side-effects of patient age or fatigue, the American Cancer Society reports that studies show some of those chemicals do have an effect on the brain.

In his very personal remembrance of two rounds of chemotherapy, Barry talks about the brain fog many patients experience after chemo, and maybe never go away. But for his part, Barry found he thought clearer during chemo, was able to prioritize, to focus sharply on things that mattered — to let go, as he described, and quit worrying about who got the last of the Vienna Fingers.

Perhaps the most important lesson he learned from his two bouts with cancer had little to do with the disease itself, Barry ultimately realizes. It was this clarity, this sense of perspective, that he took away from the extra lucidity chemotherapy afforded him.

That’s something the doctors couldn’t have predicted, and a reminder that even with the most advanced and carefully studied medical techniques, there remain some mysteries to be discovered.

Let’s say you’re thinking about investing in land. And taking the really, really long view.

Could I interest you in some lovely backcountry acreage with canyon-like features? Or some prairie-flat plains dotted with craters? Or maybe some chloride salt beds?

The Man Who Sold the Moon. Cover of Shasta edition collection. Photo: Wikipedia.

Could I interest you, to put it directly, in Mars?

Okay, nobody’s buying off-world real estate yet (outside of science fiction or some pretty clever entrepreneurs), but NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has announced the release of thousands of high-definition photographs of the Red Planet’s surface.

It’s some pretty spectacular viewing, too, courtesy of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. According to JPL’s website, “Each full image from HiRISE covers a strip of Martian ground 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) wide, about two to four times that long, showing details as small as 1 meter, or yard, across.”

We’re still years away from a manned Mars mission, of course, and decades (if that) away from the average earthling getting a chance to set foot on our neighboring planet. But with these gorgeous photos available, there’s just a little temptation to pick out a spot for some far-future vacation, just in case.

For our part, the Meridiani Planum Southern Boundary looks like a lovely place to park a yurt and spend a few weeks hiking and sightseeing.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 4, 2009, #782 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
There seems to be an issue making you persistently angry. You try to get ahead of it, or move it out of your way, but it sticks. The frustrating part is that it’s difficult to actually make full contact with the feeling; it’s like the two of you are shadowing one another but can’t quite catch up. The danger is taking the resulting frustration out on someone you love. You can work with this issue in the context of a relationship, but make sure that you’re clear about how it’s your issue, and you’re seeking help. One clue I can offer you is that this does indeed involve the intersection of your relationship history with your family history. The two are always related, but the intersections are often difficult to see. If it’s working, the conversation will lead you in the direction of the past.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Pride is of the essence. How do you really feel about the stuff? Are you conscious of the spectrum of emotions involved, or is it a kind of gloss that reflects the light instead of absorbing it? It seems like you will first grasp intuitively what you cannot quite grasp mentally. I suggest you look directly at the evidence of how you feel (mainly by accounting for your choices), and how others feel as a result (which you will be able to discern from their choices relating to you). Then two puzzles follow: how to put what you’re experiencing into words; and whether you can get the idea or feeling across to anyone. There may come a time fairly soon when you will care deeply about both. It would help if you bear in mind that the essence of communication is trust.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
The creative process is not arts and crafts. Rather, it’s about everything from doubt to confronting your sense of emptiness to exploring the feelings and memories that we are basically all conditioned to ignore. In sum, you go deeper, and that depth often requires the use of a working medium that could be clay and it could be a camera and it could be your notebook. Let it become a sacred space, but not so sacred that you fear that what you create there will be known to others and influence their healing process. You’re not alone in going through what you’re experiencing. The feelings running through your body are part of a collective current shared by millions of other people, each in their unique way, and each equally meaningful.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Sometimes you go so far into your feelings that you have to retreat from yourself. Sometimes you forget that you have a spiritual connection so deep that there actually is no bottom. You will remember this week. Let the Full Moon remind you every time you look at it. The current peak of energy comes once each year in the sign Pisces, one of the places you draw your highest vision from like a well. Consider this moment in your life to be a vision quest. You’re feeling unusually bold. You know you have the choice to trust your circumstances if you want to. Therefore, let a vision come to you. You may not understand what you see; you may not think it’s attainable or realistic. Getting from one space to the other can be summed up in a single word: growth.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You tend to be the one with the practical side, and you invite others around you to bring in the creative side. In the process, they gradually become like you, and you become like them. At the moment, I suggest you not let your brass-tacks nature dampen the spirit of someone you love who is absolutely soaring on an idea, a feeling or a desire. You see the limitations and you will, soon enough, have the role of helping sculpt the idea into something useful. Yet in doing so, your job is also to protect and preserve its essence. Therefore, I suggest you absorb as much of that essence as you can. Let its light shine on you and remember that it’s a reflection of your own imagination; an invitation to not only think about what is possible, but to feel what is possible.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Before we (as a society) get underneath the epidemic of anxiety, you will get underneath your own personal affliction. Here is a clue. The more you are strategizing, the more fear you’re feeling. Strategies are not the solution, they are the symptom. The solution would feel something like trust, or love, or empathy, or allowing yourself to let go into the flow of your life. Deep in your fear there is something about your dad and seeking his approval. As adults we are often loathe to admit that we have such needs, but you’re in an unusual moment of potential honesty and clarity. I say potential because what you are feeling right now could approach a level of beauty that pushes you into denial or retreat — though you have other options.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You’re searching for a new sense of identity, and of your professional role. At times they conflict; at times they are in harmony; at times the two seem to make no contact at all. Lately, they may be doing all three at once. This, in turn, might be having you wonder if you’re ever going to get the pieces to fit. I can assure you of one thing, which is that a lot of the mystery and pressure and confusion will resolve itself when Saturn enters your birth sign next month. There are things in astrology that always make a difference, and Saturn making an important move is one of them. Meanwhile, I suggest you keep mining the distant past for information, particularly if you’re ever feeling isolated or like the ground is too unstable to stand on.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Cooking a meal is all about timing. Well, it’s about blending flavors, and timing. If you can’t do both, the task will seem impossible. Both take practice; blending flavors is related to having healthy sexual instincts (this, according to the Kama Sutra). As for timing, you learn there are things you can start a little early, like rice; there are things that take very little time and have to be served right away, like pasta or certain vegetables. Likewise, certain processes in your life can wait; others you need to attend to immediately; there are some elements ready right now. Make an inventory and sort out what needs to be treated as what. Size things up carefully and work with all the known information. Admit that there are times when you’ll need to take a guess. Remember the words of Eddie Weigert, one of the talented chefs who trained me: “When you think it’s done, it’s done.”

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You seem to be edging back to the dark side of your nature. Sagittarius is odd this way; the dark side is almost always a deeply internal phenomenon. It’s a little like the Galactic Core, which is in your birth sign: hundreds of billions of stars, held together by an enormous mass of dark matter. Speaking in more practical terms, you seem to be revisiting an injury, affliction or source of pain from your childhood. It looks like you want to get close enough to see, but not to touch — that may be just the right approach. Stay on the edges of these feelings, rather than diving into them. Watch certain scenarios from your distant past play like a movie, and observe what you’re feeling with a bit of detachment. That’s usually easy for you; it may be more challenging now.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Don’t allow things to get personal when they need to be professional. At the same time, when things are personal, keep them that way. The boundaries are blurring all over the place and may be threatening you with a setback of some kind. While there is some confusion in the short run, your star is rising: Saturn is getting ready to cross the ever-important midheaven angle of your solar chart, which happens late next month. You can consider everything that happens between now and then to be preparation, rehearsal, dry runs and experimental. Part of that experiment involves how you relate to people as your influence in the world increases.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You know what is important to you; why then do you allow yourself to get caught up in the resistance of others who don’t share your values? You seem to be faced with a choice right now: to break away, or compromise. In fact, you may need to do both, but the order in which you do them will affect the outcome of the situation. I suggest you take the matter as an internal phenomenon exclusively. You are trying to reconcile two aspects of your nature. You’re also trying to align two different sets of values that you possess about relationships. In fact, you are seeking a third factor, mental state or outcome. This is something entirely new. Intellectually you may not grasp it yet, but intuitively it’s starting to make perfect sense. Let that build your faith.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
This week’s Full Moon in your birth sign will light up all the most meaningful questions of your life. I suggest you let the questions stand; let them be what they are. Notice how your perceptions are different when you admit that they exist and when you pretend they don’t exist. Beneath them is a level of certainty that can only come from faith. Faith is not as abstract as religion makes it seem. Actually, it’s about having confidence in yourself. In the second instance, it’s about having confidence in others, which may be somewhat lacking at the moment. Therefore, tend your own garden, and remember how far you’ve come in a relatively short time. It is true that plenty remains unresolved in your life, but take heart, because that means the book is still open.

Dear Friend and Client:

Ted Kennedy’s departure from the planet marks the end of a dynasty in American politics. It’s interesting that we consider it so: John served as president a little more than 1,000 days, more than four decades ago. Robert was mainly known as attorney general. Teddy was a senator — being hailed, probably accurately, as the most effective in the history of the Republic. A dynasty is something with persistence over time; mainly that was him.

President Kennedy and his brothers, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. White House, outside Oval Office. August 28, 1963. Photo by Cecil Stoughton, White House.

Neither JFK nor RFK came close to living out their true potential. Imagine what a different country this could be, if they had. The Rolling Stones once asked, who killed the Kennedys? The reply: after all, it was you and me. The implication is that we are all so distracted with greed and warfare that we cannot focus on what really matters; by our actions and our choices, there is only so much we will allow the cause of humanity to advance.

It was Ted Kennedy who we allowed to live, perhaps out of sympathy and perhaps because he lacked the sizzle to make him seem like a worthwhile target. Ted, in return, offered himself in service and gave his clan its reputation for service rather than for human sacrifice. We got to see him mature into his potential, something we missed with his three older brothers. He rarely had the spotlight. He was more a politician of the old school, that of making deals behind the scenes rather than mass public appeal. Yet in that distinctly Piscean way, he worked his way into our cells and established himself as part of the landscape.

One fact about the Senate is that there are not term limits. The limit on presidential terms — not included by the framers of the Constitution but added after FDR — limits what a president can get done; by the time you learn the job, you have to leave office. You can stay in the Senate for as many terms as the public can stand you, and Teddy had a lifetime appointment.

It’s obvious from his chart that he had no business being president, but many said that he had no business being a senator. (The same kinds of things were said about Jack at several levels of his political career.) Ted was 30 years old and he got elected on the basis of his family name. Then like someone who falls in love with their partner in an arranged marriage, he felt and answered a calling.

Before 1960 this was a different country. There were few protections for anybody but the rich. Short of the New Deal just about every civil rights law, labor law, health care law or anything that actually helped people was enacted during his time in office, and had his name and his influence on it.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy joked with his brother Robert, background, on Capitol Hill in 1965. Photo by George Tames.

Those who study history know that it was Joe Jr., the oldest son whom Joseph Kennedy originally felt was destined for the White House, the one who was being groomed for the job. But he was killed in his airplane while on a mission over the England toward the end of World War II. Then came the Sixties, which in many ways were defined by the loss of the Kennedy brothers.

Ted was the sole survivor. He went on to become the antithesis of his father, a high-ranking Nazi sympathizer (as the United States ambassador to Great Britain), who had made his fortune from bootlegging. (Most people remember the bootlegging but don’t recall the fact that since his embassy was a leak back to Berlin, he was in essence a spy against his own country.)

How you go from there to some of the great leaders of the 20th and 21st century is a bit of a mystery, but it happened. One of the legacies that his older brother John left for American politics was the influence of the presidency over the other two supposedly co-equal branches of government. JFK cleverly used the force of his blazing Gemini personality and the early power of television to nearly eclipse the influence of Congress and the Supreme Court, at least in terms of visibility and being newsworthy on a day-to-day basis. The problem with this kind of spotlight is that if you’re “too progressive,” it can get you killed. Many lesser men abused the spotlight that JFK created. Most of them looked wan by comparison and still got their agendas past Congress and the American people.

Congress is not that glamorous. It’s often downright boring. There is that old joke, if pro is the opposite of con, what’s the opposite of progress? But Ted Kennedy was all about progress. He was an organizing, driving, unifying force in an unwieldy, viciously divided and sold-out legislative body. He was the guy who made things happen, and even the certified right wingnuts considered him their brother.

Who was he and how did he do this? I’ll give you a few snapshots from his natal chart in this article. The data is confirmed by Astrodatabank.

Defender of a Dream

Ted Kennedy was a Pisces, born Feb. 22, 1932. His friends remember him as charming, blunt, self-effacing and hilarious. He drank a bit, he got in some trouble, he got out of it, and he finally found a good woman to help him stabilize his personal life. Mostly he was dedicated and talented. He identified with people and they with him.

Click on image to enlarge.

He was, after all, a Fish. He’s starting to remind me of another Pisces of his generation whose life touched an extraordinary number of people of many political persuasions and social strata; another one who carried a piece of American culture, and its pain, on his human back: Johnny Cash.

“For America, he was a defender of a dream,” Michelle and Barack Obama said in an email that just came in. “For his family, he was a guardian.”

Let’s look for those themes in his chart. I will cover five features in this article, for saliency. To sum up: he was Pisces Sun with Capricorn rising and a Virgo Moon. His 10th house of high office is empty, though Scorpio is on the cusp of that house. Most of his planets are concentrated in personal, not public, houses.

Virgo Moon conjunct Neptune (closer than one degree of precision; in the 8th house; or using whole sign houses, in the 9th house). To me this is the aspect that gives away the chart. It’s the image of a dream (Moon-Neptune) and the dream has a tangible, practical side: it’s in Virgo. This aspect represents the low-key, inexplicable charm. There is a perfect morph of the factual and the intuitive; the mundane and the perfectly invisible. Moon-Neptune also describes his alcohol problems and, if you count it as part of the 8th house, the horrendous legacy he lived with: that of so much death constantly around him. Yet again and again he personally escaped death: the plane crash, the car crash, and being the target of a prospective assassin who wanted to get his name in a history book. Looked at one way, that powerful Neptune gave him an aura of invisibility and afforded him excellent instincts so that he could protect himself. It speaks of a very, very strange relationship with his mother. I have never read a biography of him, but to me it looks like severe isolation from her caused by alcohol or psychosis.

Sun in Pisces, conjunct Mercury and Mars in Aquarius. Pisces and Aquarius go well together. In a way similar to the configuration I described above, Aquarius gives structure to the intuition of Pisces and Pisces takes the logical edge of of Mr. Spock. Mercury-Mars makes a fast thinker, anywhere, but especially in Aquarius. He was extremely intelligent; he could analyze and solve a problem before most people could register its existence. Strong Aquarian types simply must apply their intelligence as a basic fact of their self-esteem, and this aspect is in his 2nd house, covering that very theme. He knew his intelligence was one of his most powerful assets, and he did not hesitate to use it. The Moon-Neptune configuration and the Sun-Mercury-Mars configuration are opposite one another, and this represents a deep inner divide, that for years may have seemed irreconcilable. Had he not been compelled to take up a position of leadership, that inner gulf might have swallowed him whole. You could say that he made a conscious choice to rise to the occasion of his life. I think that we all have the potential to meet our astrology this way, or not.

Ted Kennedy. Painting by Andrea Ventura.

The Aries Stellium. A stellium is a close gathering of planets that does not include the Sun or Moon. Ted had Eris, the Black Moon, Venus, Uranus and Nessus in Aries. No matter how much conflict he might have been in, he had a sense of who he was. Venus in Aries — these people do love themselves, and it can be extremely annoying; but it’s much easier to get enveloped by their charm. Eventually they figure out that it doesn’t work being self-centered in quite the way that they are predisposed to be; they can turn that Venus in Aries into a gift for the rest of us and still keep it themselves. The difference is between love and vanity, which on certain levels of the personality seem to be related. The conjunction of Venus to Uranus in Aries reaffirms his incredible power of ideas, and Uranus, which emphasizes groups, takes them to a collective level. He learned how to move easily between the concepts of I Am and We Are. His best ideas seem to have come when he was struggling; this is more the chart of an artist than it’s the chart of a politician, but he turned politics into an art.

Chiron square Jupiter. These people are famous crusaders. Chiron provokes the social justice aspect of Jupiter. He shares this aspect with Johnny Cash, Joseph Conrad, Peter Fonda, James Fulbright, John W. Gardner, Robert Anton Wilson and Malcolm X. This comes from his sense of family wounding and some painful stuff about clashing with its values (Chiron in Taurus in the 4th house); and it deals with the family legacy, including the nature of the wealth that he inherited (Jupiter in Leo in the 8th house). In a real sense, he took his personal pain and his inheritance and put them together to create something helpful to many people. We know from his devotion he was not faking caring about people; his chart confirms this fact.

The Cancer-Capricorn Axis. Let’s take this as a whole; it’s complex and could be worth a book chapter of its own. Cancer-Capricorn is extremely helpful in politics. One must combine the sense of home with the sense of authority; one must master parental energy from the left and right hemisphers, or at least take advantage of it; and powerfully activated Cancer connects a person to the public like few things can. He has Capricorn rising. Ceres and Pholus are in the ascendant, suggesting that he traces his spiritual lineage through the maternal side. He also bore the pain of his grandmothers, in particular. Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, is in the last degree of that sign. It is anaretic; it is a matter of do or die. I believe that late degree Saturn, in any sign, can be the symbol of a very old soul, one who has come here not so much to experience and to learn, but to get the work done. The Cancer side of this equation involves Pluto in the 7th house; this gives a picture of the amount of death that he faced, and that stalked him; and it reveals his particular way of connecting to ‘the millions’. Juno on the 7th cusp is like being married to the public or to the world itself.

Of course there is plenty else we could say about this chart; there is no way it can stand up to the man himself, genuinely one of our country’s great leaders. It’s not about being perfect. It is about caring.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Money doesn’t buy happiness, they say; but lately our love of keeping it and fear of losing it is sure buying a lot of unhappiness. When there doesn’t appear to be enough, we become whiny and disoriented, or snappy and impatient; when we’re having trouble making our own finances work, we get annoyed at those who show no sign that there’s a fiscal crisis sweeping the nation. We live in a state of fear and depression that masks our private, isolated terror about tomorrow. The middle class that everyone talks about is not as middle as we think it is, anyway; the lower middle class is where most of us live and that’s taking the most direct hits. Lately, we’re paddling our little canoes as fast as we can and not making much headway. As we speak, the average citizen is getting a sense of just how difficult, how worrisome and how dangerously vulnerable their lives can become in a shaky economy. If you mention your challenges to acquaintances, they will surely be able to testify to their own troubles; do it, if you’re brave enough — it’s a great equalizer. Grieve together if need be, and encourage one another; share a hug. We’ll get through this.

Father of Modern Physics, Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa. In 1933, they emigrated permanently to the United States. Photo: Wikipedia.

Let’s make lemonade, shall we? It’s way past time we came into awareness of the way we earn, the way we spend and the thousand and one ways we’re bled as citizens of this prosperous nation. If we put aside our national pride, and resolve not to spit the pea soup of cold war propaganda we were raised on, the Socialist supposition that we’re a manipulated nation of slaves to the capitalistic model is not entirely without truth; up until lately, that lifestyle was comfortable enough to keep us lulled, our nose to the grindstone. When the comfort disappears, it’s time to rethink; that’s usually the point when harsh realities intrude.

We’re at a national turning point; some of us sense it deep within, aware that we can’t continue as we have, i.e., Einstein’s proposition that repeating old patterns and expecting a different outcome is insanity. Others of us are determined to beat the Old Paradigm horse to death, trying to breathe life into its dissolving carcass. As we’ve come to expect, any good news we hear of economic recovery seems to be showing up only on accountant’s books; the trickle-down effect to American households is mostly moot. This has created a kind of internal catharsis in the national persona: we’re battling our deepest fears while engaging our highest hopes; we’re emptying our psyches of moldy-oldies, awakening from the lethargy of decades and looking for a new way forward. In this purge of outworn consciousness, the glut of late-20th century ‘plenty’ that made us increasingly self-absorbed and consumption-driven is getting a second look; that’s what suffering does for us — it snaps us awake, it makes us consider what life is all about. It forces us to ask the hard questions; to define what’s really important.

One question we should ask, if we want to survive into this new century, is how the constant pernicious din of advertising drives our desires. One night not long ago, watching a favorite TV offering, I tracked what the commercials were peddling in their full 18 or so minutes of prime time, per hour. Turns out we’re continually being bombarded by clever ads for cars, pharmaceuticals, insurance and fast food. Of the three, fast food is the one most of us can afford — if you want to know why the nation is grossly overweight, consider that fresh, healthful food is priced over the budget of too many. The Whole Foods CEO is currently catching hell because he said we don’t need health care reform, just the expensive organic products he offers; this is the ‘let them eat cake’ miscalculation that lost Marie Antoinette her head. The average family would have to cut out several meals a week in order to afford to eat a few well-balanced and healthful ones. Of all the ads, the insurance ads are the most emotional; my favorite is the Hallmark Card’ish offering by State Farm, telling us that we have come to our senses, discovered the joys of playing Jenga with family and barbequing with friends now that we’ve given up the glory days of spend-spend-spend — so now we should spend with them, enjoying the benefits of their heartfelt coverage; cue violins.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

The earthly possessions of Jeane Dixon, psychic to the stars (not to mention astrologer to First Lady Nancy Reagan) were auctioned off on July 26 by Sloans & Kenyon Auctioneers and Appraisers of Chevy Chase, Maryland. Somehow the article in The Washington Post slipped past us; otherwise we’d have at least taken a seat at the proceedings to see who would bid upon the savant’s possessions.

Celebrity psychic Jeane Dixon, who died in 1997, posing with her famous crystal ball — one of many items from her estate auctioned on Sunday. (Washington Post file photo).

Many of the auction’s specifics were reported at News-Antique.com, which said the total brought by the auction exceeded $312,000 — well beyond the predictions made by the auction house beforehand. The most noteworthy transaction was doubtlessly Dixon’s crystal ball, a highly visible symbol of her calling, which was sold for $11,950. However, that wasn’t the highest price paid for one of her possessions; that distinction went to a Continental gilt brass-mounted bas relief cast composition wishing well. Despite a pre-auction estimate that it would bring in no more than $1,200, it ultimately sold for $22,107.50.

Although the auction was only held last month, Dixon had actually died of a heart attack at age 93 in 1997. She eventually achieved fame through her predictions, which could be found in newspapers across the country, as well as through her acquaintances with the rich and famous.

According to Wikipedia, Dixon was born Lydia Emma Pinckert in Wisconsin and was raised in Missouri and California, though she didn’t talk of her past in public. After her death, the article states, “Many of Dixon’s possessions ended up with Leo M. Bernstein, a Washington D.C. investor and a banker whose clients included Dixon. In 2002, he opened the Jeane Dixon Museum and Library in Strasburg, Virginia, to display what he owned. Bernstein died in 2008…” Later that year the museum closed, and eventually some 500 boxes of items were sent to the auction house.

The planned night launch of Space Shuttle Discovery had been commanding pretty much all of the attention directed toward NASA this week. But with the launch scrubbed because of a malfunctioning valve, our eyes started wandering around to see what else was up at the space agency.

Testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in August 2009 is assessing possible maneuvers that the Mars rover Spirit might use for escaping from a patch of soft soil where it is embedded at a Martian site called “Troy.” Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

And what to our wandering eyes should appear but the latest update on the Mars Rover Spirit, the plucky little robot explorer that has exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations during its tour of the Red Planet. However, it’s been stuck in soft sand since May 1, and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been trying to find a way to get it out. The effort has been dubbed “Free Spirit.”

The latest ploy? It’s “crab walking,” as explained by a perky and clearly enthusiastic Ashley Stroupe, a rover driver at JPL. Using Spirit’s six independently maneuverable wheels (one of which no longer rolls), the operators are trying to find a way to move it sideways up the incline where it rests, to get it away from obstacles in front of the robot.

While the rover is still stuck, there’s been some good news. It’s in a windy area, so its solar panels have been swept clean of dust and are providing enough power not only for the extraction attempts, but to continue use of its cameras and other instruments. But even if Spirit remains stuck (maybe until the long-proposed manned mission to Mars becomes reality?), there’s plenty to celebrate: Originally expected to operate for 90 sols (Martian days), it has surpassed 2,000 sols and counting.

Oh, and by the way: The new launch date for Space Shuttle Discovery is this Friday, Aug. 28, at 12:22 a.m.

Over the past decade or so, alternative medicine and health practices that are ancient traditions in other cultures have achieved greater acceptance in the United States.

But with acceptance has come an American tradition: Regulation.

Susan Van Nuys, right, and yoga class participants assume poses at her studio in Herndon. Virginia recently mandated that studios offering yoga teacher training must be state-certified. Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu — The Washington Post.

According to the Aug. 24 edition of The Washington Post, institutes that train yoga teachers in Virginia are now under scrutiny by the State Council of Higher Education, which thinks there may be a need to place strict requirements on their programs.

But the yogis who have been teaching new generations of instructors have proved (pardon the pun) inflexible, and are lobbying government officials in hopes that they won’t be faced with the same certification requirements as, say, vocational instructors. Such certification, the article notes, “requires a $2,500 fee, audits, annual charges of at least $500 and a pile of paperwork.”

Such is the price of once-obscure practices that become mainstays of American culture, and Virginia is not the first state to seek regulation of yogis. New York State imposed a certification requirement, but withdrew it after objections were reported in the media. Michigan began regulating such programs this year.

State officials note it is not the teaching of yoga itself that they wish to regulate. However, the teaching of teachers, they argue, requires certification, just as it is with academies that teach dance instructors, for example.

“We’re not looking at yoga classes. That itself is an avocation,” Linda Woodley, an official with the higher education department, told The Post. “But the teacher training is preparing people for a job. They can take the skills they learn and open up their own studio or just teach.”

By the way, according to About.com, Wednesday was the birthday of Yogi Bhajan (1929-2004), the man who brought Kundalini yoga to the west.

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Dear Friend and Client:

As you may have read on our main page, this week I’ve been working on a Mercury Retrograde Special Report. The retrograde is in Libra and Virgo from Sept. 7 through Sept. 29, arriving with a significant series of events that leads the way into a whole new astrological cosmos, taking us that much closer to the true astrology of 2012. As I’ve written before, this retrograde is a warmup for Saturn changing signs to Libra in late October.

Photo by Elizabeth Joyce.

The idea for the special report came from last week’s lead article, “The Electric Tide.” That article (which you’ve probably read) is included — I consider it my most comprehensive piece of writing on the Mercury retrograde phenomenon to date. I’ve also added a section called “What to do if…” in case you have to make a decision during the retrograde. Today we added an “Expert Guide,” that covers the key dates in the cycle, and which provides the astrological charts for anyone who cares to study them. Because there are a series of Mercury-Pluto contacts, there is a section (in true Planet Waves fashion) called “How To Talk About Sex.”

Finally, there is a 12-sign horoscope for all the signs which calls the theme of this retrograde for each of the Sun and rising signs. This is about as long as the long monthly horoscope, Planet Waves Monthly.

Here is how we’re handling discount pricing for subscribers: you’ll get the pre-order price of $8.95 (the price for everyone else goes up to $14.95 on Friday). Then, if you’re a subscriber you’ll get to give one to a friend, on us. Once you order, send an email to Chelsea and we will make sure your gift recipient gets the report promptly.

Here is the pre-ordering link. Thanks for your business!

Yours & truly,

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, August 28, 2009, #781 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
I spent an hour with my mentor and therapist Joe Trusso this week, working through the theme of how anger and reason are incompatible. The same mind may be processing the experience, but that’s about all they have in common. Mars has moved into a position in your chart where you’re likely to have some emotional chaos stirred up, and that is likely to include some rage. I would ask you to ask yourself if there’s something beneath it: a well of emotion that is translating to hypersensitivity. This is deeply personal territory, and only you can make the journey. I would propose that you not be deceived by anger, particularly at partners or family members, no matter how justified it may seem. Meanwhile, you don’t have to take it out on yourself.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You’re in one of those moments where you can be grateful for what you’ve got: and by that, I mean the emotional content of your life. As far as getting stuff done, well, let’s say that the creative process may be taking longer than you like, but also that it works in mysterious ways. You know something is out of balance, though rather than letting it stress you out (a distinct possibility), identify and work on your most meaningful goals. Let this be the time in your life when you figure out that there are some jobs you’re not cut out to do; and there are some things you really need in a work environment. One of them is a sense of fairness. Another is beauty. If you’re thinking of changing jobs this autumn, start with working in a beautiful place. Or at least righteous.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Many things can spur you to creative action; the most dependable is necessity. You may have encountered a situation recently where you knew that the only way out was art or writing. The clue was, and is, that you could not work through the feelings any other way. That, as well, is the most challenging aspect of the situation. You know you need dedication and discipline to unravel the complicated, seemingly unmovable emotions that you’ve been experiencing for so long, emotions that may be making you feel tired beyond your years. Be grateful that your psyche is giving you options for a fresh approach. I suggest you not worry if friends or loved ones have no idea what you’re going through or why you’re approaching your life the way you are; it’s not anyone’s journey but your own.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You not only have the strength to stand up to the challenges of your life, you now have the passion as well. For many weeks, something seems to have been sapping your energy and dividing you against yourself. If you got the feeling that all at once, something changed, that’s because it did. Mars entered your birth sign after a long stretch in one of the most sensitive, mentally active angles of your solar chart. Problems that seemed to have no source now have a solution. Confusion that made no sense has finally dissipated. One result is that you can feel larger than your various situations in life. Yet the main benefit is that you can focus your intentions and bring to bear the full force of your will. I suggest you begin gently, and get accustomed to your newfound power.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Fear is an important emotion, though we tend to abuse the stuff; I mean we often abuse it like a drug, and it takes over and runs out of control. There’s another problem, which is discerning the difference between fear and intuition. If we have a scary thought, how do we know it’s not an intuitive hint? This takes some sorting out; it takes some authentic self-awareness, of a specific kind. In general, I would advise against trusting the validity of fear in the first instance. Rather, initiate a dialog with it. It may be a tense dialog at first, because if you ask fear what it’s really about, it’s likely to respond with more of the stuff. If you keep asking questions, you’ll go through a series of layers and finally arrive at something unrelated to the seeming point of origin.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Financial issues come into focus now: you’ve reached that critical point where you know the only solution is going to come from applying some serious focus to the question. Think like a scientist, which means methodically. Don’t worry about solving all your problems at once — you’re approaching the time when you finally develop the long-anticipated permanent solution. Consider the following four to five weeks as an experiment in discovering something vital: what is and is not important to you, in this latest incarnation of your life. You thought you knew, but I don’t suggest you assume anything; your priorities have changed, owing to the full-strength maturing process you’ve endured the past couple of years. Some days this has been as much fun as having your leg in a cast, but it’s about to come off.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
If you’ve been wanting to make new friends, now is the time. Here is why. Your planet, Venus, is now in Leo, in your solar 11th house. This adds up to meeting people who will value who you are; which is precisely who you want to meet, and keep, in your life. This is happening at a time when you’re making some surprising discoveries about your identity and sense of presence on the planet. This, in turn, is leading you to a new sense of mission in life; in short, everything is happening at once, but the one thing all these things that are happening has in common is you. Therefore, pay attention to who and what you identify with, and how it feels to do so. Beware of pride; focus on the sense of worth, which will mainly come in the form of comfort being seen, felt and heard.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You have tried many approaches to leadership. The thing to remember about being a leader in the Western world is that we are pleasure seekers, not people who are motivated by discipline. To the extent that most of your coworkers, friends and neighbors are disciplined, it’s all about acquiring the next burst of sugar, salt or fat. Therefore, lead people by making use of their affinity for pleasure. Take difficult tasks and make them fun, and be willing to show up when things are less than fun and add some pleasure to the equation. Just remember your agenda. You, personally, are not out to have a good time; you have a goal, and the more specific you make it, the better. Use your newly recovered charm to bring people on board. They will help because they want to.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
If you find yourself in any kind of hassle over a contract or agreement, appeal to the common good. It’s easy for people to fight or disagree if they have different objectives or values. If you encounter someone who presents themselves as an adversary, and it would appear that just such a person has shown up, seek an understanding of what is important to them, and work from there. You may find it annoying that they are emotionally motivated and can’t seem to think in a cool and clear way, but once you acknowledge that, you will find that they’re easier to handle; indeed, that you could manipulate them easily, as long as you stay cool. You don’t need to resort to any subversive tactics, however. If you give them a few good options, they will do the right thing.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Someone is taking up your invitation and rising to the occasion of knowing you. You’re either thinking: it’s about time; or I wish this person was a little more level headed. You can afford to forgive people for taking their time precisely because life is short; it’s best not to throw good time after bad. Decide consciously if you want to take this person up on their offer to be closer; you don’t have to. You may feel they’re too impetuous, or like they could be kind and acknowledge their prior indecision, conflict or dedication to trivia. This is an assignment calling for character assessment. You need to look below the surface, applying your best psychological skills and insights. That is just the beginning: every relationship is a journey.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
When spiritual doors open, they rarely open all the way. Usually, we get a clue that it’s unlocked. That is like an invitation to open it ourselves, rather than have the energy come blowing in. Over the next few weeks, you will receive a series of hints that certain pathways in your mind are open and available, though you will need to be the one who makes the moves. Observe how the process comes through in layers, which include layers of denial. For example, something you assume could not be true bumps into an experience, and you decide that it might be true. Then you get a little more information and you feel certain enough to act on the information. Therefore, pay attention to what you believe, and what you think you believe; and what influences you to change your mind.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
What seems perfectly normal for you seems perfectly dangerous or even a bit outrageous for someone in your life, no matter how calm they appear. They are anything but calm; in fact that layer of stillness shows up in the astrology as something a lot more akin to fear. I suggest you not be fooled by silence, or the slight chill to the air. Your own heat and passion are getting through to someone specific, and perhaps to everyone in your environment. You can afford to be patient, and the rewards for doing so will increase on a daily basis. You can afford to trust, the main benefit of which will be spreading a sense of peace in your environment and a conscious release from anxiety. Fear is easily converted back to the creative energy from which it originated, and at the moment this is the story of your life.