Dear Friend and Reader:

In my Planet Waves daily diary all week I’ve been commenting about the conjunction of Chiron and Neptune that is now within one degree, in late Aquarius. This is a ‘near-miss’ rather than an exact conjunction but it’s coming in at a nice strength. Neptune in Aquarius, which began in 1998 around when Bill Clinton was impeached, has been the perfect fodder for our whole “lie to me / why deal with it?” mentality that has been such fruitful soil for the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys of the world to plant their fleurs de mal.

Rose window at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. I am not certain the orientation, but I believe this is the rose window facing northeasterly. Photo by Eric Francis.

When Chiron arrived in 2005, I was certain that there would be a gradual public awakening that would peak as Chiron made its exact conjunction to Neptune. The current one is a near miss, which is at its closest on May 31, to within one-quarter of a degree. Chiron will go retrograde before the conjunction perfects, and the exact meeting will take place Feb. 17, 2010. Of note, this is shortly after the one and only contact of Saturn in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn that occurs in late 2009. The two events are connected.

Finally, there is one last near miss of Chiron and Neptune, also within one-quarter of a degree, on Nov. 3, 2010. (Tracy Delaney in Wales programmed the ephemeris where I am getting this information.)

For the current near-miss, Jupiter is there, so the last week of May we have a very close triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune. This puts the two rulers of Pisces in a conjunction (Jupiter to Neptune, which happens about every 14 years). The prior cycle of Neptune to Chiron conjunctions was in 1879-1880, in Taurus. The next cycle starts in 2094, in Virgo. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and therefore it is astrology that will also define an era of history and mark the astrology of a sub-generation.

Usually we don’t notice these events until it’s over. However, as the Internet has begun to make information available to those who seek it, we can now work with transits like this while they are happening, and co-create their ‘meaning’ and explore their creative potential together.

Jupiter tends to magnify what is already there; and the conjunction of Neptune and Chiron is like putting a focusing ray to everything that Neptune represents — from the delusional side to the direct access to creative and spiritual energy. Neptune can represent denial and all the things we deny; Chiron represents awareness, the process of becoming aware and the crisis of becoming aware. One shadow attribute of Chiron is the refusal to become aware of what is obvious. Jupiter will magnify this and also bring in a vast library of available wisdom.

Many feel that the keyword of Chiron is ‘healing’. I prefer ‘raising awareness’. So let’s say that sums up as ‘healing through raising awareness’. This is easier if you have a predisposition to being in affinity with the truth, in particular, your own truth. It is more difficult if your character is structured such that you get by in life by lying to yourself. This is something we need to sort out. Denial is one of the most destructive forces in the universe, and for some reason on our plane of reality it is one of the most accessible. Denial is destructive because our journey on Earth requires awareness, and denial is specifically the refusal to be aware or acknowledge what one’s awareness is reporting in. Another word for this is ignorance. Ignorance is not about not knowing; it’s about not paying attention to what one already knows or should know.

A lot of people are starting to ask about what’s going to happen in 2012. It seems to be coming across in its usual apocalyptic colors, which I suggest we take a giant step beyond. What great enlightening thing happened to society as a result of the Sept. 11 incident? Even if we learned something, there are better, more efficient and entirely less painful ways to make progress.

The Chiron-Neptune conjunction is a warm-up, or rather, an exercise in paying attention to the fact that it is already happening. You could also call this a pre-2012 healer training program. Part of the training is in how to deal with extra potent doses of consciousness; part is processing and applying the healing gifts that many of us have been working toward for so long. Part is others who have delayed starting the process now, in earnest, and taking advantage of celestial speedup to make up for lost time. You can, if you are sincere and you bear in mind what you don’t know.

Aquarius is involved directly. Therefore, the line we who are called upon to help will have to cross is some measure of going public. This does not mean being on Oprah. It does mean being known for who you are and what you do without fear, trepidation or egotism, and working with people who may not be directly familiar to you. That takes a special kind of trust. With Aquarius there is always public contact, and when we are in integrity that means a measure of public accountability.

Rear window from my apartment in Brussels, 2007. Photo by Eric Francis.

This is frightening to a lot of people because we tend to confuse our conditioned, convoluted sense of being sinners with actually being wrong. We were all taught to divide our psyches against ourselves, and those inconsistencies can feel terrifying if suddenly the spotlight touches our individual existence, our ideas, our work, and so forth. There is a lot to learn in being exposed, and one of the things you can learn is developing consistency.

Aquarius says that this is about all of us, and that it’s about how each of us relates to the larger circle of society around us. Pisces is directly involved in this process because of the presence of Jupiter and Neptune, the traditional and modern rulers of that sign respectively. Sagittarius comes in via Jupiter and Chiron. And we have one last link — Uranus in Pisces is in mutual reception with Neptune in Aquarius.

For one thing this astrology is the perfect blend of three signs: Sagittarius, Aquarius and Pisces. We could say a lot about this alchemical mixture. For now I will leave it at this, an idea that popped out of the ethers late Friday night when I was on the phone with my friend Amanda; so her energy is in the mix here.

It would appear that we are opening up an accessible common space on one or more of the higher dimensions that is an actual meeting point. Kind of like the Internet appeared, we are defining and opening a space of psychic reality where can meet, facilitate our work, speed up our learning and enjoy some freedom for recreation and play (essential in any deep evolutionary and healing process). We have, with some restrictions, the ability to be more available to one another, aware of one another, and free to engage one another. By restrictions I mean that when you start to make direct contact with these levels of existence, there is only so much fear and polarization you can bring with you. It would be chaotic and potentially quite dangerous if you could, so basically you have to check a lot of baggage at the door.

If you are someone who maps out the planes, I think this is happening not on the astral or causal levels, the two most accessible to normal waking consciousness, and two of the most hotly polarized; but rather on what is commonly called mental plane. This is not mental in the sense of thoughts and ideas but rather mental in the sense of the psychic latticework that supports the commonly accessible ideas and thoughts we experience the rest of the time. Some call this level 6D. So far as I’ve mapped it out, it’s like an engineering level where we develop the architecture of the succeeding planes of reality, that is, the causal, astral and physical. Really good astrology happens in 6D and what an astrologer does is gently transpose that information to the denser experiences of 4D (astral) and 5D (causal or intellectual).

6D has as one of its properties a distinct lack of the polarized, contentious, intellectualized stuff that we encounter so often. It is an extraordinarily wide space where concepts have great leverage and where there are no commercials.

Yours & truly,

PS, I’ll be back at Daily Astrology & Adventure with coverage of today’s Taurus New Moon.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I continue to marvel at our new direction, orchestrated by the energies that influence us and the growing desire of the public to unearth what has long remained hidden, punctuated by news articles that are both welcome and disturbing. If you are one of those people who think that big things happen around you, to you, but you do not influence their occurrence in any way, then you are underestimating yourself. The news is relevant to your life because it’s a reflection of our collective psycho/social mental structures, driven ahead by our fears and desires.

Beyond: Past, Present & Future. Photo by Neil Johnson.

“How can that be?” you might ask. “Why should I take responsibility for what I have no power to change?” True, you aren’t the Master of the Universe, able to control and direct everything around you with a flick of your hand or twitch of your nose. You have only so much free time to devote to the world and local situation, given your responsibilites and daily challenges; you can’t keep up with everything. Besides, you might protest, this is the United States of America — we have laws to take care of everything.

Yes, and some of them are very flawed. Those laws are determined by the very politics that we find so tedious and confusing, and while the high rhetoric and political drama may be a headache to follow, they are eventually winnowed down to great drafts of legalize that become Rule of Law. Any law struck by our nation should not only be thoroughly understood by its citizens, but thoughtfully and carefully designed. Having spent a bit of time in court this week, let me assure you that law is passionless, deaf and dumb to circumstances; once in place, law has no flex, and ignorance of the law, we’re told, is no excuse. Much the same goes for the cause of our social ills; ignorance will not protect us from consequences.

We’re influenced continually by public relations campaigns, and we should know by now that they are not limited to products we purchase but attempt to sway our every attitude and opinion; PR drives social and political movements as well. This is the equivalent of partisanship; you will hear the ‘up’ side while the ‘down’ will be diminished or dismissed completely. In essence, our society is driven by a loftier version of the pitchmen who hawk their junk at the county fair.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

When it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life, there are a few of the usual stellar subjects that get most of the scrutiny — Mars and some moons of Jupiter and Saturn, for the most part. But the solar system is a pretty crowded place, really, so there are lots of options for seeking evidence of life. Astrobiology Magazine reports that the dwarf planet Ceres, which makes its home in the asteroid belt, might be the target of one such mission.

The launch of the Dawn spacecraft aboard a Delta 2 Heavy 7925H to the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Photo: NASA.

The Ceres Polar Lander was envisioned by European satellite system manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. According to the article, “The idea is to build a low-cost mission using reliable existing technology to complement other larger missions, while benefiting from NASA’s Dawn mission results. Assuming launch by a Soyuz rocket, the spacecraft would take around four years to reach Ceres.”

Why Ceres? The solar system’s smallest dwarf planet, it might have ice at its poles and a layer of water ice beneath a dusty crust. This makes it an attractive subject for study, as water is essential for life.

What kind of life? Nothing particularly bizarre, Thales Alenia Space’s Joel Poncy said in the article. Most likely microbes — which, in and of themselves, would be an amazing discovery.

As for when a Ceres mission would be ready for liftoff, well, that could still take a while. But that’s no deterrent to Poncy, who suggested it might fit in nicely with other upcoming missions, like those planned jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency to Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan, both candidates for harboring life. Those missions should begin sending data back about 2027 and last about seven years, Poncy told Astrobiology Magazine.

“We should be ready for that, and not plan on landing in 2060!” Poncy said in the article. “This is too what motivates us, combined with the opportunity to find something major at Ceres.”

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 24, 2009, #763 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Generally we take having a competitive spirit for granted. Or rather, you take it for granted. It does not make your relationships happier places. There are other options, such as cooperation, listening and sharing. The problem with those options is that like many things (alternative energy, sex, how much money your grandfather really has) they are kept as a carefully guarded secret. The way is open for you to direct your abundant energy into creating a model of consciousness where you support the world and it supports you; where you facilitate life for people who are working to weave the integrity of the world. There is a concept slowly working its way into mainstream language — dharma. This is the opposite of karma, or the results of our actions. Dharma is acting as if to hold the world together. The little ‘as if’ part is included for skeptics who might not believe that honesty or granting the people you love freedom actually matter.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
You have many secret desires; I would propose that you have a few that are secret even from yourself. Why you might not speak up about them could involve a matter of pride. So I will phrase this as a question: would you want to be known for who and what you desire the most? If not, what do you want to be known for, and how do you reconcile the difference? This means more than you may think: to your sanity, to your integrity and to the unity of your consciousness. It’s easier to live as one person rather than as an entity cut into parts, worrying about who thinks what about you. The first step is to become completely familiar with who you are, and I mean becoming intimate and accepting of the new developments that are shaping your consciousness. Then I suggest you notice something unusual about our particular moment in history: you actually can be that without judgment — but only if you step out.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Faith is the thing that you want. I would say it’s the pearl of great price, but actually it is free. I would say that for as far back as it’s practical to remember, you’ve been working on this one, or struggling with it, or responding to its attempts to get your attention. Faith means faith in people and it means faith in love. At the center of this discussion is that pesky thing known as ethics. You have more power than you know, but you will only set your influence into motion by striving for impeccability. If you catch yourself applying situation ethics, that is, something is ‘right’ under one circumstance but ‘wrong’ under a similar circumstance, I suggest you stop and question yourself. Right now you have visibility and a strong sense of presence in the world. This is to say, you are attractive, and your example counts for more than usual. You will get back exactly what you put out.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Most people on this planet would rather keep their sexual reality separate from their spiritual one. The old idea that sex is dirty and God is clean has stalked us clear through the first decade of the 21st century. You are currently standing in a place where your deepest spiritual values are intersecting with your sexual values. This involves healing a split that runs so deep in the human psyche the only thing that could possibly resolve it is a miracle. And that is what appears to be on order for you. Honor sex as the cosmic thing it is. Honor the creative force of the universe as expressing itself through living things as a sexual process. Do this in the spirit of making peace with existence; that is, with the fact that you exist and were created; and that you continue to create yourself.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Relationships involve agreements, be they relationships that last one year or a lifetime. It’s interesting, and tragic, the extent to which so many agreements are not spoken and are based on misunderstandings. You are more clear than others in your expectations, and more generous than others in terms of what you are willing to give to any situation in order to have it work out for everyone. You now have a stunning opportunity to clear the air and the water for the future. There is something vital being arranged or negotiated now. The situation can work out equitably for everyone, if someone is willing to hold that vision; that someone would be you. In any situation involving a sexual relationship or multiple relationships, the psychic atmosphere is calling for two things: one is total transparency, and the other (related) is being clear and negotiable about what you want, and getting clear about what those around you want. That creates a platform for seeing common interests and for honest negotiation.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Saturn in your sign is a heavy influence, but it’s teaching you to hold your ground and give your life some dependable shape. Part of that is learning how to work with time. Then it’s meaningful to remember that there are things that transcend time and our ideas about the right order in which things are supposed to happen. You are living your life right in that zone where relationship experiences are healing experiences, which is a grand thing because most of the healing we need involves the kinds of trust issues that are open to the most positive influences in your life. You are going to be the one who takes the lead guiding your relationships in this direction, but you can trust one thing — that even if your words seem to have fallen on deaf ears in the past, the people you care about and who care about you will likely be more open-hearted and clear of mind than you’ve ever known them to be.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
An important relationship has withstood an important test: an adjustment of some kind, some strange complication or a series of reconciliations with the past. This has all pointed to one thing: the challenge of coming up with a new vision. Now is the time for this vision to demonstrate itself in practical terms, that is, in real ways that lead to the happiness of everyone involved. While this is happening, you are in an important exercise of your own, which is about making sure you live your life fully despite what anyone may think. By living I mean expressing your creative volition in a way that you never have before. Here is the test. If you are free, you are free to take some unusual chance on yourself. Ideally this would challenge the people around you to adapt to your new vision of yourself, which in turn will bring your relationships onto a level where they actually work for you.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You need to live through the end of the matter before you can get to the beginning of the next one; and you are very close. You’re not close if you think in short spans of time, such as last week or even last year. But you’re very close if you think in long spans of time, for example, the past 10 years. Basically, consider your emotional history as far back as you can remember, then imagine that what you are resolving, setting yourself free from and working to recreate about yourself goes back that far. I would add one last point. The transition from old to new does not usually come with a ribbon cutting. In the midst of working out the details on one phase of your life, the new one can draw you in like the time vortex that it is. Things that were delayed in being resolved, or resisting, or which seemed impossible, can suddenly be irrelevant.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Words are important. They are a crucial aspect of commitment. At the moment, that commitment involves manifesting something that does not currently exist. Speak only the words that you mean, and make sure you mean precisely what you want to say. Images are meaningful, perhaps more meaningful, but they can have an ambiguous property and thus lack precision; but they make up for it in impact. In your personal healing process, or creative process or both, I suggest you work with both, using one to support the other. One is probably going to turn out to be more influential than the other — but not without the integration of the two. There will be a product of this sacred union: an idea. There is something visionary about your sign, and at the moment both of your guiding planets — Chiron and Jupiter — are perfectly integrated with Aquarius, the sign of ideas. Not just any ideas: when these two signs get together, ideas are born that change the course of history.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You are under enormous pressure to change; to let go not only of old personality patterns and behaviors, but also to bring all your files up to date. Pluto in your sign is about renewal, it’s about passion, and it’s about letting go of the dull expectations that others have projected onto you most of your life. We often get trapped in the visions that others have for us, and the reason those visions exist is that many people before you were also trapped. At the moment there is nothing that can withstand the forces of growth that have taken over your nature. The truth is this. You are neither as conservative nor as narrow as others have made you out to be, or that you have made yourself out to be as a means of giving yourself a little security in the world. At the moment your safety is not going to come from wearing blinders, acting politically or being cautious. You will feel the safest when you let yourself be a new person every day and judge nothing on the criteria you have used in the past. Not, that is, if you want to truly live in the present.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You are taking on the attributes of many other signs of the zodiac right now. There is no simple interpretation of this, except to say that you have many currents of energy to draw upon. And because the truly unusual astrology of this month takes place in your sign, that means you have many resources that are not normally available. The question is: how are you going to use them? I suggest you create something that is built to last; designed to grow; and where the conclusion is open-ended. The best and most important movements of the planets are what I call threshold transits. They happen to us, but they do not end, per se; rather, when they are ‘over’, we are like a different person. Right now you are standing in that threshold. You are involved in one of the deepest processes that a human can experience, which is focusing on the notion of ‘who you are’ to what you value and are ready to live for. You are indeed ready. You feel the winds of change and see the lights on the horizons of your mind. Let them carry you and guide you to where you have long wanted and needed to be, and please let no compromise of truth mar the beauty of the moment.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You are under the influence of forces that you cannot see and would not necessarily understand if you could. Then again, you do have a mind that spins in odd enough directions to comprehend the incomprehensible. Yet consider that understanding only gets a person so far, only counts for so much, and can get in the way. This is partly because the facts and factors that lead to that understanding are constantly changing, and you need to reassess the available data from moment to moment. That is a fancy way of saying what you can be certain of is that you are being held safely in the gentle hands of the cosmos. Listen for your spiritual guidance: the still, small voice within. It may speak first; it may speak second; it may speak in your dreams. You will recognize its advice by its simplicity, its clarity and how well it fits your circumstances. Though much of what you are currently experiencing is going on behind the scenes of your life, and will not fully manifest until 2010-2011, what you do and create now is a vivid harbinger of the future, and of your future self.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Oft times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right Well manag’d.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost; 1667

Dear Friend and Reader:

When we look back honestly on this phase of history, we’ll see that one of the most profound issues of our day is a pandemic-scale crisis of self-esteem. We don’t need to look far for the manifestations of this, or for the causes. They surround us so completely that we barely notice them; or if we do, we assume they are an indelible part of existence. They are built into our relationships, which are often designed as shelter from the storm, but which don’t usually work.

Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

As Brian, my editor at Chronogram magazine put it when I ran this article idea past him, he’s noticing this most in people feeling like they are going insane because the world doesn’t appreciate who they are or what they have to offer. This is particularly strange in a world that has nothing but ever-increasing needs; in theory we should all be in greater demand.

To describe something as a crisis of self-esteem is to use a byword covering a great many potential situations. Ultimately they all come back to how we feel about ourselves and our existence. Do we feel good about who we are? On a deeper level, do we consciously notice our existence? Do we feel like we have a right to exist?

We may not be so articulate with ourselves. Usually, we get the data in emotional form. If we’re struggling, it may arrive as anything from depression (literally, the sense of being pressed down) to the challenges of adapting in a world that is not the same place from hour to hour. Adapting takes energy and being in a constant process of adjustment can consume nearly all of our energy.

But there is something else unique to our time in history that I think may hold the key: as a society and often as individuals, we live as if we have no responsibility to anyone or anything; not ourselves, not our society, not the world. I’ll give you an example. There is a large swath of society that feels like it’s entitled to do absolutely anything at all. There is a larger swath that allows them to get away with it.

It’s not just how we feel about ourselves that is suffering, but rather how we feel about very nearly everything. And in a word, that would be cynical. Cynical is another way of saying having no respect. Another way is suggesting that we live in a time of ethical bankruptcy, which is taking a personal toll in the form of a great many people feeling worthless. It should come as no surprise that most have done very little to earn that sense of worth from themselves.

Let’s get a definition of esteem up on the blackboard. According to Etymology Online, esteem means to estimate the value of something. The word dates to 1450. It was initially used the same way we currently use the word estimate, so that a conscious evaluation is implied, not simply a notion or a quality. The term self-esteem is neutral: it can represent a high value, a low one or something in between, pending evaluation. There is an accounting involved; and that implies accountability. This is precisely the opposite of getting away with anything you can, or letting others get away with anything.

As for self-esteem, Oxford English Dictionary defines it, perhaps too simply, as “a favorable appreciation or opinion of oneself,” and one of the first to apply the term was John Milton. The term was popularized by phrenology (a kind of pseudo-science involving reading bumps on the head), which assigned it a bump in the early 19th century.

In astrology, this is 2nd house territory, which is related to Taurus. It’s possible to get a fairly clear understanding of a person’s concept and experience of self-esteem by a careful reading of the 2nd house. Pretty much everything shows up there, though it’s often necessary to look at the planet that rules the 2nd house (which will usually be placed in another house) and see what it’s doing. The 2nd house is how a person feels about him or herself. It’s also about one’s personal assets, such as money and other valuables. Most of us have to work to build our assets, which suggests that self-esteem is not something that we’re born with or that we inherit, but rather something that we earn.

Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

When that bank account goes into negative numbers, which can come from our own actions, our refusal to invest in ourselves, or from others intentionally plundering us, the results can be a devastated sense of self-worth.

In practical terms, the pain we associate with low self-esteem can show up as any of the following: the feeling of being worthless or useless; having no sense of purpose; feeling like one’s life is out of control; feeling submissive to the needs of others; feeling unworthy of love; hating oneself; walking around thinking everyone hates you; being stalked by guilt and/or shame; feeling like no place is actually home; obsession with relationship in the midst of any or all of this; constantly feeling lonely, even if you’re in a relationship; being terrified of intimacy; or feeling like relationships are prison cells.

Let’s add to that the feeling that life has already passed you by, such as feeling old at age 19.

What exactly is going on? How did this come to be? Well, let’s start with the chaotic households that nearly everyone was brought up in, and how little time is devoted to children. Let’s consider kids growing up around parents whose lives are nearly constant struggles, as has happened to so many of us. Adults living in a world of pain teaches kids to feel badly about themselves, which is a form of plundering them. Kids take on and blame themselves for the pain of their caregivers. Too often it’s not possible for children to get the focus they need; most of us grow up neglected, which is another way of saying that we start with a negative example and persist in doing the same things to ourselves.

Many parents teach children specifically not to invest in themselves. The child or teenager wants to make an investment, such as learn a skill; an adult thinks it’s a waste of time; the kid gives up. Note, some of us don’t listen. My father told me numerous times not to be a writer; rather, he supposed I would make a better postal worker.

If we don’t make these investments, which are spiritual as well as physical, we can exist in a world where everything seems to be better than we are. There is an estimation involved, and we typically count ourselves out. If we don’t feel beautiful, every photograph of a glamorous model is going to seem more beautiful than we are. If we don’t feel strong or successful, the images of men that portray guys with less to do, more money, fancier cars and sculpted muscles are an invitation to feel like shit. That supposedly calls for action, which is how most advertising works: by preying on our sense of inferiority.

My favorite example of this is that ad for the ‘Army of One’ — a military recruitment ad (which I am now discovering from a Google search has been brutally, viciously satired a number of times). This masterpiece — which, incredibly, we cannot find on any website, nor can we find still images from it — features one soldier flying in a transport plane, fighting a war and so on. On the surface, it tells kids ‘you’re somebody special’, but what it’s really reminding young men about is how worthless they feel. There is twisted logic to the subsequent recommendation: do something about it; feel good about yourself and join the Army.

Be a hero. If you’re not a hero, clearly you’re a loser. Now divide this out over an entire society that has been primed to be vulnerable to precisely this message. We are susceptible to feeling like the greatest thing ever, or shameful and worthless. Because of how painful it is, we bury the whole conflict.

Graphic confusing the meaning of self-esteem with narcissism. Credit: Vision.org.

Let’s give this a name: exiled narcissism (coined by my friend Maya’s therapist, Steve Carroll). Exiled meaning pushed into the shadows of the psyche, and narcissism meaning the belief that we are better than someone for no good reason, or self-fixation at the expense of others. This can also involve obsessively fighting to prove we’re better than others; a kind of competitiveness that our society loves so much but won’t call by its real name. (For example, jealousy is considered precious, but it’s rarely described as an attribute of narcissism.)

We are going through a phase of mental history wherein the only thing that’s interesting is competing. Competing is a form of estimation; but it yields a value based on being better than someone else, not worthy in your own assessment of yourself.

You can no longer just be a good cook, and use food as a source of nourishment and pleasure. You have to be the top chef; and if you’re not the top chef, then what are you? And at the same time, narcissism is allegedly a bad thing. So we shamefully have to shove it out of awareness. Then it comes back with a vengeance, because we “know we’re special” and “deserve the best” and so on. Or we “lost the game” and are devastated. The sick part is that usually, this has less to do with Top Chef and more to do with being (or not being) Top Wife or Best Father.

We often flip back and forth between grandiosity and shame; between being the most beautiful and not beautiful enough. Grandiosity can feel like being righteously indignant and powerful and like you have the right to reject anyone or anything; shame is when you feel so worthless, the obvious conclusion is you deserve nothing and no one. If we can observe this process for a while, we can see that neither of these polar extremes are true values. Neither would serve us in relationship to ourselves or to others; and in a true estimation, neither one actually exists.

Somewhere in here, we might decide it’s time to love ourselves. But in doing this, we might seem to tread dangerously close to narcissism, or the fear of being labeled as such. I would say this may actually be true, particularly if our ‘self-love’ does not involve an actual estimation of our value, in our own eyes. Usually from this position we feel too worthless to start investing in ourselves; after all, what is the use?

This crisis goes deeper than psychology. Its roots are in something underneath ‘esteem’. That something is the awareness of existence. In other words, maybe the problem has more to do with self than it does with esteem.

It’s not just that many of us do not esteem ourselves (and harshly judge those who do), but that we don’t even know we exist — that we, in fact, stand out and stand open as a place within the cosmos where both a world and a person mutually unfold, manifest and reveal. We are so busy playing roles — wife, mother, businessman, cool guy, someone busy getting rich, suffering poet and so on — that we don’t realize we are simply people.

Relating to death with awareness is a crucial part of maturity. Photo by Eric Francis.

Many of us don’t believe we have a right to exist and to be the creators of our lives. In other words, we’re not accountable to ourselves; and we don’t feel we have a right to respond to our own needs. Why would we? This shows up, then, as low self-esteem. First we have to acknowledge existence, then claim our right to it, and finally esteem ourselves in the process.

Implied in this process is the acknowledgement of death. Not dealing with death consciously creates a crisis because unless we acknowledge the other side of existence, which is to say, nonexistence, then we cannot really appreciate either. Death is covered in the 8th house of astrology — which is opposite the 2nd house. Notably, the 8th also involves the value that we get from others; and that includes the marriage contract. How many people get married because they feel worthless, or like they found the one person who will value them? The one person for whom we can be a hero, which is to say, worthy in the eyes of others so we can feel good about ourselves.

Here is a thought from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker:

“The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its under­side, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus. Here we introduce directly one of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death. After Darwin the problem of death as an evolutionary one came to the fore, and many thinkers immediately saw that it was a major psychological problem for man. They also very quickly saw what real heroism was about, as Shaler wrote just at the turn of the [20th] century: heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.”

How do we put this information to work? First I think we need to raise awareness about the fact that existence as we know it is a transient thing. Everything is in motion; everything changes; existence is a process of change; we are part of that process. This is exhilarating to some people and it makes most others despondent. And it is indeed possible to get caught in the thrill of death, which is a form of heroism. At this end of the spectrum as with any other, a conscious, healthy relationship has to be established, and that really means coexisting peacefully with the ongoing process of change.

Maybe reaching that point of positive self-esteem is the moment when we feel we are worth an investment in ourselves, despite the fact that time goes on without us. The death connection can be useful in that it’s a reminder that nobody is inherently better than anyone else, and that what we choose to do with our time is entirely up to us. As is (with the exception of our children) who we spend it with: people who care about themselves and act on it; people who care about us and act on it; or someone else entirely.

All of these are decisions we make on the way to personhood. As others have noted, I don’t think we are born people; I think that becoming truly human is something we work at every day, all our lives. Why we would be struggling with this in our ‘dehumanized’ world today is easy to see; but if we want to do something about it, we first must recognize the need.

With additional contributions from Maya Cook and Christine Farber.

To read and participate in an interesting discussion thread on self-esteem, created for the preparation of this article, you may visit this link on Planet Waves.

Venus stations direct in Pisces today, Friday, at 3:24 pm EDT. It is in the last degree of Pisces, meaning it’s in the last degree of the tropical zodiac. Being so close to the first degree of the zodiac, this qualifies as an Aries Point event. Because it involves Venus and Pisces, it’s deeply personal. So we stand at an intersection of the most intimate and private feelings, and the state of the world.

Click to enlarge.

This Venus retrograde began March 6, though the echo phase — when Venus entered the degrees where it would be retrograde — began Feb. 2, 2009. Venus will now re-cross the same degrees of the zodiac it’s been in for the past two and a half months, and finally enter new territory on May 20.

If you’re working with this transit as part of your personal history, Venus last crossed the Aries Point the first week of April 2008.

When Venus stations direct, the Sun will be in late Aries and the Moon will have just entered Aquarius.

Venus is in Pisces, along with Mars and Uranus. Pisces is also a focus because its two ruling planets, Jupiter and Neptune, are forming a triple conjunction with Chiron, which will be exact the last week of May.

The Sun enters Taurus at 6:44 pm EDT Sunday, April 19, with the Moon in an exact conjunction to Neptune, and less than one degree away from Chiron.

While I’m on the subject of inner planet retrogrades, note that Mercury will be retrograde from May 7 through May 31. The echo phase begins April 23, and the second echo phase (when Mercury enters new territory for the first time since the retrograde began) ends June 15. Those times are available at this link.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The sound of the world is getting more insistent, don’t you think? There are at once the high-pitched wails of sorrow, discordant cries of protest and the occasional grinding squeal of minds locking against change. There’s a low buzz of anxiety that undercuts all the other sound, a tense beat of fear that rat-a-tats against the symphony of our daily lives and all of this is orchestrated through an insistent melody of excitement and expectation.

A lama while creating a sand mandala. Photo by Luigi Fieni.

Ahhhh, dear ones — listen to the music; it’s a wondrous time to be alive! Our interesting times may well be a Chinese curse, but they are full to bursting with opportunities for growth and progress. How to best experience that is the question. As these extraordinary energies of transformation came to visit us, Mr. Bush created even more chaos in order to take advantage of the plunder it offered; Mr. Obama came next to take custody of the mess, and sees this period as one in which great progress and reforms are not only possible but necessary. For each of us, this is a time to not just shake ourselves awake but step into our awareness and personal power.

If you think you don’t have time to attend to all this growth, given your challenges and responsibilities, then fear not: it’s happening with your assistance or without it. If you choose to cooperate, of course, you will not only enjoy a smoother ride through this transition but be a much happier human and add to the collective joy of the planet, but nobody is twisting your arm. This is, so I’m told, a planet of ‘free will.’ Then what ‘will you’ do, say, think today?

Will you cheer when upstart pirates are blown out of the water or will you do a bit of research to discover the dreadful circumstance of the Somali population and the deep poverty and deprivation of that failed state? Will you growl back at your grumpy neighbor without considering what toxic load s/he may carry, invisible to your eyes but apparent in every attitude and action? Or will you stand in your circumstances, however difficult, knowing that you are loved and loving, able to embrace the adventure of this life because within you is a sure knowing that you came here for just such a purpose?

We have powerful allies when we decide to awaken to our authentic selves. We aren’t just little people on autopilot, scrambling across the face of the planet like ants; we’re complex spiritual beings that gather information on myriad levels to inform ourselves. Neale Donald Walsch breaks that down into three major areas when he tells us that, “The mind is the last part of yourself to listen to. It thinks of everything you can lose. The heart thinks of everything you can give, and the soul thinks of everything you are.”

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 17, 2009, #762 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Your life may be entirely different than it was a few days ago, and if it’s not, you’re getting a clear idea of how you want it different. What you’re being called to do is match the visible and invisible dimensions of reality; the implicit and the explicit worlds. Notice what you have in your psychic closets and at least bring it to your own awareness. Get used to what you’re thinking, feeling and understanding about yourself on the most personal level. Once you get used to your emotional contents as a conscious gesture, you’ll find it a lot easier to share your truth when that moment comes — and it is arriving fast. You know there’s a lot you have not said, and that you need to say.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Look through the layers of yourself, your circumstances and the world. Review all that you’ve been through the past six months, and give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished and who you have become. Remember that you accomplished this yourself. You had help, but you can finally say you were instrumental in making progress on your own terms. This implies strongly that you can embark on the next phase of your life with confidence that you don’t usually get to express. There are times to have a fixed idea about what you want and times to have a more relaxed concept, working from a general vision, without a script. Your astrology suggests you’re in the second kind of landscape at the moment.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You may be wondering if the opportunities that have arisen recently are real, or are flashes in the proverbial pan. Think of it this way. Everything you see, from a movie to the computer or newspaper you’re using to read these words, started with an idea. It’s a long journey from a concept to a tangible, valuable or useful object. But it’s we who give life to our ideas and opportunities. The energy of this moment is truly unusual, though it draws its beauty from another quality, which is its creative flexibility: a rich meeting point of what is ‘artistic’ and what is ‘practical’. The elements are in place to suggest that what you see is as real as potential gets in this world; you will never know until you actually start the experiment.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You’ve made more in the way of what I will call invisible progress in the past couple of months than you’ve given yourself credit for. It’s true that you’re still trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. But don’t spend so much time figuring that you miss the fact that you’ve arrived somewhere that is interesting, innovative and which meets your main qualification for being worthwhile: being inherently useful to others. I am here to tell you that you are developing something that is about to make you a leader in your field. You merely need to cooperate with the process; stay out of your own way; and send yourself positive messages from moment to moment.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You have plenty of energy bound up in what may feel like conflicting emotions, yet the planets are aligning in a way that is allowing you to purge yourself of anything that is not useful. This includes all that is not your own material, not helping you to grow, and in general, not true. It also includes any relationship patterns that are not serving your interests and by extension, those around you. Those who appreciate reality tend to avoid lies. Yet one of the more astute spiritual teachings of recent generations suggests that we need to spend our time seeking what is not true, that is, identifying the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, and let the truth take care of itself.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
The Sun arrives in your sympathetic earth sign Taurus this week, joining your ruling planet Mercury. I trust this will help you sort out your thoughts. Basically, you can now think less in terms of what you must give up and more in terms of what you have to gain. You’re someone who tends to profit when you remember your ethics and are in alignment with your own values. You’ve spent quite a while considering the values of someone close to you, and you’re finally at the point where you’re figuring out what works for you and what does not. The key to remember is you’ve been here before, and it’s taken you longer than necessary to act on what is important to you.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
One particular relationship is starting to make more sense — the one you have to yourself. In the world’s obsession with hooking up, this is the one connection point that we not only miss, but that we are taught to skip over. I think you’ve figured out that this isn’t going to work, and more recently have noticed how well it works to be in alignment with yourself as a direct part of making contact with others. What’s different about the astrology now is that you’re in a connecting point where you and the people around you can be accommodating to one another about your basic needs; though you seem to be the one spurring this discussion based on your own agenda, which primarily involves emotional healing. The agenda makes sense; usually this does not happen by accident.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You need to account for the projection factor in your relationships. Do you see people for who they are, or do you see them for who you want them to be? I think we all do some of both. We cannot help but be immersed in our own perception; the idea at the moment is stepping far enough outside that process that you can see it happening. It’s healthy and sensible to test your perceptions. That is to say, you can ask the people close to you about their experiences and take what they say under advisement. The most meaningful question to ask is: who are you becoming? Who do you want to be? Your part is to do your best supporting the authenticity of the people you love.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
When extraordinarily rare astrology occurs, things can have a way of feeling nonchalant and normal. It’s easy for astrologers to overstate the significance of aspects; I prefer to make a subtle case, leaving you room for original discoveries. That might be a good approach for you to take, under the circumstances. You are in the process of doing something that’s usually extremely difficult, which is changing how you think. I am not referring to something superficial, like taking a gardening class. It’s almost as if your brain cells are rearranging themselves into a new alignment. You are doing this on such a fundamental level that you may not be aware of the process: but you have your moments, and you’re about to have more of them. The question to be asking is, what is the result you are seeking?

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Your calm exterior is like an elegant façade over your impulsive emotional nature. You can even go so far as to fool yourself that you’re mentally poised all the time, but you know that’s not true when you notice that your thought process stops making sense. At the moment you seem to be making perfect sense to yourself, and the reason for this is because you’re allowing your emotions and your thoughts dialog with one another. Remember how this feels. Remember what it’s like to maintain two different kinds of awareness and not have them conflict with one another. At times it will seem like two things that should cancel one another out are both true at the same time. That’s when you can be fairly certain you have an understanding with yourself.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You’re working on the very edge of your consciousness — the place that we’re trained to avoid, unless of course we cannot avoid it. You may as well admit that this is not a comfort zone; that there is no predictability to how things are going to shape up, or for that matter, how they are going to dissolve. Because you’re in an actual, undeniable growth process, you’re working with the factor of irrevocable change. This is progress because it will compel you to stand in the center of your own life, and confront how you feel, what you see, and one last thing: the extent to which your unconscious expectations are blinding you to what you really want. To address this, put your own expectations on the table in front of you, and consider them one at a time. You may notice that something better is possible.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
Events developing behind the scenes of your life are moving closer to where you can perceive them for what they are. And what would that be? Try this on: you are learning that you create yourself from the inside out. One way to say this is that you build your life using intention. Another way to say it is that you are learning to mix patterned thought and imagination in such a way that you can self-create in an ongoing, fully conscious process. Or rather, you are gaining consciousness over the whole experience, and in this case consciousness is power. There are a lot of things that you’ve wanted to change.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Due to some horoscope schedule shuffling, there is not a monthly horoscope today, but we will be doing a radio edition tonight.

Planet Waves Radio will webcast our Venus stations direct edition tonight, Tuesday, at 10 pm. Venus retrograde often comes with unusual experiences in love affairs, the return of former partners to our lives (if only briefly) and with significant personal encounters. I’ll be taking calls from listeners around the world, discussing your personal astrology, your Venus station direct experiences and how you feel about the state of the world. We will webcast on Blog Talk Radio at 10 pm ET / 7 pm PT tonight, Tuesday, April 14, 2009. Either of these links will get you there.

Yours & truly,

Dear Friend and Reader:

When news broke that the National Security Agency was tapping telephones and skimming emails of American citizens, I wondered why people were not more concerned. This was in late 2005, when we also learned the same day that The New York Times had sat on the story for a year. We learned simultaneously what was happening, and that one of the great newspapers of our civilization had covered it up. It was funny, in a sick way.

“Wet Pain.” Click for larger version. Photo by Eric Francis. Stylist: Sarah Bissonnette-Adler, Book of Blue Studio.

But the response from nearly everyone but political bloggers seemed placid. Given that people often get upset about violations of their privacy, and don’t like having their picture taken on the street, it seemed strange that the government and its contractors having access to everything we say and write in electronic form did not get people more worked up.

We’re all aware of how much salacious personal material is exchanged on the Internet. Long before sexting (that is, teenagers using their cell phones to snap a nude picture and send it to a friend, who sends it to another friend until everyone is charged with kiddy porn and gets a ride on CNN), people were sending one another naughty pictures, explicit emails and engaging in live video play sessions with long-distance lovers. It all started with AOL, the first bit of the Net to catch on hot. Andy Warhol predicted that some day everyone would be world famous for 15 minutes. He did not predict that anyone who wanted could be a porn star.

The first thing I wondered was: what, exactly, would the United States government do with its massive database of pictures, calls, videos and messages? The obvious thing to do would be to make it available to subscribers. It would be the world’s largest amateur porn site, called porno.gov. We would get a useful entertainment service and an important source of revenue for the government. We could even borrow from the concept of C-SPAN and stream ourselves live.

The second thing that occurred to me is that people were taking the news in stride because they were relieved. As hung up as we are on keeping secrets from friends, parents, children, lovers, the boss and whoever else, I believe living with the tension that we might be revealed is extremely uncomfortable, verging on unbearable. People who live under patriarchy already have a guilty conscience; the fact that we try to hide so much from ourselves and from one another doesn’t help. (In homeopathy, weakness and diseases associated with trying to hide ourselves have a name: the sycotic miasm.)

I think most people want the truth about themselves to be known; we want to be seen for who we are. In the right moment, few things feel better. Even in the wrong moment, it can be amazing; and this is one reason why I think our society is so obsessed with exposing the private lives of famous people. My theory is that the authorities having access to everything we email or say on the phone helped ease peoples’ conscience. “The government,” with its omnipresence and omniscience, was standing in for God. You could text someone privately, and God would know; then it would be okay. I’m not saying people thought this consciously, but it was one of my explanations for why we didn’t seem to care very much.

This looped back into a concept I was first introduced to doing A Course in Miracles, which is that there are no private thoughts. The idea first surfaces in the workbook in Lesson 18: “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing,” and the next day, “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.” The underlying concept here is that minds are joined; that we are all part of the same thing. The boundary that the ego presents us, of being a self-contained entity ending at the edge of the body and the reach of normal perception, is not strictly true. The ego supports and is indeed based on the illusion of separation, but not the reality. By this time everyone has experienced some form of telepathy, a premonition or having the same dream as a friend. These events shake our faith in the strict rules of space, time and boundaries.

Bonds of Union by M.C. Escher. This is a reproduction of a 1956 lithograph.

Here is an example that surfaced at the same moment I’m writing this paragraph. Earlier today, I was thinking about a woman in my community who died in 1993, named Liz Grant, leaving behind three young kids. I didn’t know her well, but we had good friends in common, one of whom was a guy named Dean Jones — who I absolutely adore, who I haven’t seen in about 10 years and I had not thought about him in nearly as long. He often took care of Lizzy’s kids. This morning I was wondering about Liz, trying to put together the lines of one of her poems that I used to perform; and wondering where Dean might be and how he was doing. Moments ago, he strolled into Dominick’s Cafe, where I’m writing this article; I could barely believe I was looking at his face. But of course I could. We tend to brush these events off, like when we notice that someone is staring at the back of our head even though we don’t have eyes pointing in that direction. To me this shows that there is either information available coming in through something other than the usual channels; or I have some connection with Dean that extends beyond our normal perception of space and time: beyond the seeming boundaries of the body and of the ego.

Many, many experiences like this, including direct transmission of private information (for example, written in my diary) to others, or people dreaming things I said to other people, has made me question these boundaries and basically accept the idea that there are no private thoughts. What we think of as privacy is an illusion; it is a concept. We often think of it as a legal concept, the “right to privacy,” which in those exact words goes back to a young lawyer named Louis Brandeis, who first introduced the notion in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article co-written with Sam Warren. Nearly a century later, this concept became the foundation for two of the most important Supreme Court decisions in history: Griswald vs. Connecticut, which allows people the right to birth control; and Roe vs. Wade, which allows women the right to choose an abortion.

Then Came the Internet; then Came Facebook

The other day I was driving in my car and my phone rang. My car has a Bluetooth system that makes it possible to converse pretty safely. It was my mother calling. She sounded concerned about something. A relative from my father’s side of the family who she hadn’t seen in about 35 years had called her home. Her husband took the call and deflected it; she had no idea why the guy wanted to talk to her, and she didn’t want to talk to him. Then she called me. I told her everything about him that I knew, reassured her that the guy was basically harmless, and promised to help her sleuth out how exactly he had located her. The fact that he had succeeded in doing so was spooky to her, since she had been living under her second married name since the mid-1980s.

Artistic Rendering of “The Great Library of Alexandria.” by O. Von Corven from Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001.

This took about five minutes worth of research. I went from searching her Sicilian maiden name, which is unforgettable like Soprano or Lasagna, to a map to her home in about three easy steps. A Google search of her maiden name led me to her current married name, which in turn pulled up a White Pages listing with her husband’s name, her address and even a map to her apartment. This was using free services available to anyone who can get online. I sent her a series of screen shots going from the first Google search to the map. She thought she was difficult to find.

The Internet emerged right around the same time people were figuring out how psychic we all are. My theory is that the network you are currently using is a model of consciousness based on the truth that minds are joined. We create machines that are capable of things we think we’re incapable of, and suddenly one day we woke up and were surrounded by psychic devices. Besides the Internet itself, personal favorite is this Apple gadget that basically turns your apartment into a little radio station.

Sooner or later, each of us realizes the Internet is not a private place. In fact, it would seem to be entirely transparent. As far as I can tell, the whole concept of privacy is nonexistent online. Some people can keep a very low profile; however, the easiest way to do that seems to be if you died before 1995. One of my early moments of revelation came when I discovered the Google cache system, which saves the most recent copy of webpages that the search engine indexes. I remember the moment sitting at my desk when I realized that I could no longer correct an error or edit a page and be sure that someone cannot find the original. Even if Google updates its cache, the Archive Project might have saved the original, and that is indelible. Lots of old websites are preserved by this project in Alexandria, Egypt, the home of the famous library that burned down around 48 BCE.

Then we learned that search engines were archiving our searches; that email providers were keeping copies of our messages; and that any server (sometimes a dozen or more) transmitting the data across the Internet could keep our “free floating packets of information” on file. Chris Clark, our database programmer (who is in charge of keeping your transactions secure), says that email is laughably easy to hack. Then just this week, we learned that the European Union has required Internet service providers to store information about users for one year.

Secret room at AT&T where the government spied on the known universe (using the Internet).

In the midst of this came Facebook. With the five-year anniversary and the service topping 200 million users, they’ve been in the news a lot lately. The questions all seem to involve privacy. People post things to their Facebook page; their parents or boss or partner sign up and find the page and presto: everyone knows you’re bisexual, got a tattoo or tried E. Of course, people reveal this data voluntarily in Facebook, and as Brandeis and Warren wrote in that 1890 law review article, “The right to privacy ceases upon publication of the facts by the individual, or with his consent.”

Some very powerful astrology led to this, particularly the series of Uranus-Neptune conjunctions in 1993, which were in Capricorn. This represented a breakdown of the traditions, boundaries and compartments represented by Capricorn, which would make room for something else. That something else started to emerge when planets began arriving in Aquarius, beginning with Uranus in 1995. The Internet seemed to descend upon us like an entity taking root on the planet and in consciousness. To me this represents a technological revolution and a social shift. Both Uranus and Aquarius represent groups, and the Net became the biggest group revolution in the history of the world.

Then in 1998 Neptune arrived in Aquarius and the real fun started: the Net began expanding wildly, and social boundaries and structures began melting away. Neptune (among other important themes) is about creating illusions, and suddenly many people had one or more alter egos, leading to today’s standard of having an identity for every occasion. Part of this illusion involves maintaining the notion of privacy in the midst of a total meltdown of privacy.

Nowhere is this contradiction so beautifully displayed as in the Facebook experience. The other day someone sent me an activist video warning about the evils of Facebook, including the fact that they keep all their information. I’ve never liked Facebook, but this had nothing to do with how they keep data. I figure everyone does, and just about everyone online makes and archives numerous backups of their systems. Yet many people seem to be in a tizzy about this: you know, how they type in all their personal details into a public database, complete with photographs and videos, then worry about how other people might find out about it. This, without ever bothering to set the privacy settings that Facebook provides (and which it says that 80% of users ignore).

Only 20% of users apply Facebook’s privacy settings. For everyone else, the whole world knows they’re at the winery, even though you haven’t seen them since 3rd grade.

In light of this, I think we need a new concept of privacy. We need to understand that in a world where most of what we say and do ends up in a database, that privacy is merely a scrim; a thin veil. I would also propose that we question why exactly we’re worried that someone might know a certain fact, or why we find it acceptable that some people know certain things about us and unacceptable that others know the same information. I’m not suggesting that everyone should know absolutely everything about us; rater that we question and understand our criteria for how we distribute information. There seem to be two opposing forces in the psyche, one of which wants to lie or give a specific version of events to nearly everyone, and one of which wants to publicize the details of our lives and be totally transparent.

Most people are worried about two things: one is being discriminated against at work. For example, you’re a school teacher, and your supervisor signs up to be your “friend,” and then finds out that you go to swing clubs; and fires you because this supposedly renders you unworthy of teaching math. Sooner or later, the prevailing lesson will be that we all have “private lives,” and that we will all have to deal with this fact about one another. In other words, we’re fast approaching the point where so much will be known about so many people that it will barely matter. To the extent that it does matter, there are many other means of harassing or torturing a person besides using information that they themselves publish to the world.

At the same time, I believe that the deep craving to be known will prevail over the often very uncomfortable desire we have to be private or secretive. These boundaries have been dissolving for a lot longer than we’ve been aware of it, and the Internet is just a reflection of this. It’s a model of the new mental environment. The real change involves a fundamental rearrangement of our ego structures, which is dissolving the concept of separation that is so isolating, debilitating and cumbersome. This change is a response to both incoming energies and an evolutionary step that is calling on us to recognize that we are not separate people with separate interests.

I think that, in the midst of this new reality, we need to question our assumptions that we can do things that people don’t know about, or won’t find out about. Everything from E-ZPass to your credit card statement to your cell phone bill is creating an unprecedented diary of your daily activities. While I think we have a right to not have this information used against us, it’s foolish to think that people or corporate entities aren’t going to find out what we’re up to if they want to. You would be stunned what can come up with a Social Security number and $20 for a database search; for example, when you sold your boat, purchased your condo or moved to Seattle. I don’t suggest you leave your SS card in your wallet, and I suggest you resist every time you’re asked for it. Legally, that number is between you and the Internal Revenue Service — not the people who supply your cafe with broccoli or rent you a storage locker. I am sure that the employment files of most companies are not actually locked.

Facebook: The Perfect Chart

Testing my theory that Facebook is an example of Neptune in Aquarius, I went looking for a chart for the organization. I learned that the site was launched by two Harvard computer science students out of their dorm room in 2004. I also learned that the history of the company begins with a hacking incident: one of the principals of the corporation hacked into the Harvard student ID database and posted student ID card pictures online, creating a contest to see which person was “hotter.” [The incident became the subject of a university judicial procedure, which was eventually dropped.] From there, Facebook spread through the Ivy League universities and then finally ended up the venerable institution that it is today.

Click to enlarge.

Here is the chart. The time of the launch is not available to me at the moment (I will set out the hounds), so for now I’m using one minute past midnight. Note that Facebook was launched in early February with the Sun at the cross-quarter position called Imbolc — one of the four high sabbats when the Sun is at the middle of the fixed signs (these also include Beltane, Lammas and Sahwen). These dates mark the exact midpoints of the seasons, and because of a mathematical relationship to the first degree of Aries (the Aries Point), they all have that resonance between the public and the private worlds. Everything we say and do on the Internet is a public gesture; this is a living example of Aries Point energy.

Next, notice that in this chart, the Sun is conjunct Neptune in Aquarius, with the Sun at 14+ degrees. Interestingly, the domain “facebook.com” was created years earlier, in 1997, with Jupiter in the exact degree that the Sun was in when the site was launched. (The founders purchased the domain for $200,000 after launching their original site.)

The Sun conjunct Neptune personifies the melting boundaries of Neptune in Aquarius; it’s a beautiful image of the persona we present on social networking and personals sites, function like publicity agents; and it emphasizes the blurring of personal and collective boundaries that is so vividly developing under Neptune in this sign, which I will come back to in a moment. Note also that Facebook is driven by conformity. Most people would not get involved if everyone else was not doing it.

The Moon is in Cancer, opposing Chiron in Capricorn. The Cancer Moon gives us that cozy, homey feeling. The opposition to Chiron pierces the boundary and sanctity of the home. Moon to Chiron can represent hurt feelings; it can represent hypersensitivity; it’s associated with the pain of not getting our emotional needs met, or the vulnerability we must embrace to do so; and it has that “no illusions” feeling that can confront us with the truth, regardless of how it feels.

The most adorable feature in this chart is that Mercury is conjunct Nessus. Mercury will be a factor anywhere that communication or media are involved. Nessus has two main levels, the first of which is structural: it represents any situation where karma goes in a long circle and returns to where it starts. It’s also about situations where there is potential abuse or potentially inappropriate contact, particularly of trust where sexual encounters are concerned. With Mercury, this would mean information about sexual and relational encounters. Built right into the Facebook chart is the crisis over what we do with information, and since Capricorn is involved, this includes personal, corporate and governmental involvement.

Vesta is close by, which to me represents a sacrifice, in one aspect; and the archetype of the sacred whore, in another. We are “putting ourselves out there,” but why exactly are we doing it? Does this medium give us contact, or the illusion of contact?

As we head for a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius next month — the central astrology of 2009, and one of the peak experiences of the decade — we will surely be making some discoveries about this.

Yours & truly,

Definition of “private” from Etymology Online Dictionary.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

When Pluto got downgraded from planet to dwarf not long ago, I could almost hear the Universe chuff with disdain. During that period — one I still look back on with a sense of bewilderment and sorrow — we ignored traditional wisdom while embracing the shallow virtues of tribalism. We got more church and less God; more power brokering and less governance. More patriotism and less freedom; more heartburn and less heart. But more than anything else, we had a long era of authoritarian corruption; as Pluto moved into Capricorn, it had cosmic revenge written all over it. Dwarf planet, indeed. Who’s laughing now?

Time Magazine cover for January 28, 2002.

Saturn is structural and Pluto is transformational; since the structure of society has disproportionately become a giant corporation taking its populous on a thrill-ride of exploitation, we must take a moment in our discouragement to remember this generational transit as a necessary, if not entirely comfortable, step forward.

In the combination of Saturn-ruled Capricorn as a serious reformer and the intensity of Pluto, eliminating what no longer serves and exposing hidden secrets, we are experiencing a rush of sunlight into the dark caves of power. We should not be shocked at what we find there; we’ve long suspected.

It can come as no surprise to the astro-literate that the inevitable meltdown is upon us; I think what’s got us spun up is the sheer enormity of it. The national gloom is infectious. There doesn’t seem to be a system or structural entity that isn’t disintegrating before our very eyes. And, although we may think this has all struck suddenly in some kind of hideously perfect storm, we had plenty of warning.

Remember the old adage, “A stitch in time saves nine?” Back in 2002, the January cover of TIME Magazine showed a baby’s face slapped over with these questions:

Could an Enron happen to me?
Is my phone service ripping me off?
Who’s looking after my 401(k)?
Can I trust my HMO?
Can I count on my broker?

“So many choices,” declared the cover in extra-large font, “and no one to trust. In today’s world, YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, BABY.”

A stitch in 2002, had we been wise enough to attempt one, would have involved a major repair to the rent in the fabric of commonwealth — the nine we contemplate now is akin to creating a patchwork quilt from the shredded bits that have ripped apart. It may be mendable or it may not; repairs may hold or perhaps only hang together a brief time. At least, after years of neglect, we have the needle in our hand.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

Mars conjunct Uranus is earthquake weather, and there was a notable one this week, in an italian city dating back to 1254. Rescue efforts continued among aftershocks in the Abruzzo region around L’Aquila, Italy. The death toll from Monday’s earthquake rose to 260, as reported in The New York Times. The earthquake struck at about 3:30 a.m. local time and registered 6.3 on the Richter scale; many buildings in the tightly packed city and surrounding villages were destroyed during the quake and subsequent aftershocks.

Click to enlarge.

The chart has 28+ degrees of Capricorn rising, which feels like an unstable structure. The ruler of Capricorn, Saturn, is in the 8th house, which is often about the theme of death. In this case, the cause of death was the structures that people live in. Nearly every building in the city was damaged or destroyed by the quake.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi told news agencies that some 17,700 people were homeless and living in temporary shelters such as tents, while another 10,000 had been put up in hotels in nearby coastal towns. Meanwhile, Bishop Guiseppe Molinari of the Roman Catholic Church was overseeing preparations for a funeral service for all the quake’s victims, to be held this Friday.

By midweek, few survivors were being found; officials said rescue efforts would continue until Easter Sunday.

The city of L’Aquila is located in central Italy, northwest of the capital Rome, in the Apennine Mountains. The capital of the Abruzzo region, its population is about 73,000, though that can be swollen to 100,000 any given day by tourists, students, and workers. The region is known for its earthquakes, and that has defined the history of the Medieval city.

Wikipedia tells us that the city “was stricken by earthquakes on December 3, 1315, January 22, 1349, in 1452, 1501, 1646, 1703,  [and] 1706.” There had been a series of minor tremors since the start of this year. This was the deadliest quake in Italy since 1980.

One sure way to get protesters out into the streets is when there’s another globalization meeting. Last week it was the G20, and the plutocrats got together just as Mercury was conjunct the Sun, and Venus was backing into a square with Pluto. This translates to big news in a conflict over values. Yet the Venus-Pluto square raises the question, what is important to us as individuals? And how does this affect us all?

Click to enlarge.

The international Group of 20 (G20) summit of developed and emerging nations was held in London, and by its second day on Tuesday, March 31, police had already arrested 111 protesters. This coincided with Barack Obama’s first official state visit to the England and Europe. Later in the visit, he apologized for the United States’ recent arrogance (without saying so, referencing the Bush administration) and called on Europeans to give up their anti-American attitude.

In the past decade, an impressive international activist movement has emerged around these global summits, which began with the WTO protests in Seattle in the autumn of 1999. The “Battle in Seattle” coincided with the watershed conjunction of Chiron and Pluto in early Sagittarius. On Monday, the Sun and Mercury were exactly trine the position of the 1999 conjunction, Mars was square the position of that conjunction, and the Moon was opposing it. So the chart for the latest round of protests aligns beautifully with the one that started the movement. This is also the chart for the turn of the millennium and the Y2K non-incident.

While many protesters had objected to last week’s summit with vandalism and violence, others, did so by taking off their pants. (Be aware, this link is not safe for work.) Is there anything about the chart that says naked? Well, Aries does: they are the little kids that like to dance naked on the coffee table. Some finally do give up this activity as an adult, but maybe they are the ones who show up at protests and undress there.

By the close of the session on April 2, participants had pledged $1.1 trillion dollars “to revive the world economy, a joint call to fight protectionism, and concrete actions to tighten banking regulations,” China’s Xinhua news agency reported.

So, why all the fuss? Many people believe these conferences — this was the second G20 meeting — serve only to promote the interests of wealthy nations and big businesses at the expense of: you name it: developing nations, the environment, the poor, the hungry, small businesses, Iraq, Afghanistan, social programs and so on.

Not everyone raising objections at the G20 is on the street. French President Nicolas Sarkozy took the opportunity to lambaste the Anglo-Saxon Model, a reference to “survival of the fittest” capitalism that European nations say Britain and America have promoted to the detriment of other nations.

While there were violent clashes with police, it seems that most of the protests were peaceful, leading Business Week to declare them “More fun than violent.” In activism as in everything else, if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 10, 2009, #761 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You may feel like the world has more influence on you than you have on the world. Usually this is true. Yet you may not have a clear sense of how you can direct the flow of events around you, or how you are impacting the hearts and minds of those close to you. Venus retrograde in your sign, your consistent questioning of your self-perception, is having more of an influence than you think. If anyone notices the process you are in they can get drawn into the vortex. They’re not necessarily comfortable with the feeling; likewise you may notice a strange edgy quality in the back of your mind that peaks over the next 24 hours. Pay attention to what comes up for you. The chaos and the questions are fertile.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
For the next week or so, you’re in an unusual position to experience some aspect of your future self. Or rather, your astrology says that your mind and other energy bodies are in a perspective that will allow you to envision your future. What you need to know is that this is an inside-out visioning process. It’s more about who you are becoming than what you want to do, though the two are related. There is also something here about breaking free of a self-concept that has done little other than box you into a perception of yourself that is firmly rooted in the past, and which is difficult to see. You seemed destined to finally witness what this has done to you, but I suggest you quickly move past that and embrace what is possible.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Mercury has just entered the angle of your chart where your deepest visions are kept. Vesta is about to leave that secret room and enter your birth sign. The fourth asteroid, Vesta is about the ability to offer yourself to others without your own needs getting in the way. While most astrologers use Vesta to understand the issue of “work as a substitute for relationships,” in my astrology Vesta is about devotion and in particular about offering sexual service to others. What often comes up is the idea of sacrifice. We have mastered the energy of this meaningful little planet when we can give of ourselves, and hold space for others to be themselves, with no sense of sacrifice. This is easier said than done, but it’s an interesting and beautiful journey if you choose to take it.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Significant developments are brewing in what we westerners call your ‘professional life’, which actually translates to your most meaningful mission, and I would point out how vital this is to your sense of grounding, identity and self-worth. Things seem to be taking a long time, I know; and lately you may be feeling less certain than ever that there is a correct path. The astrology suggests strongly that you need to be visioning your future. You can do this in your mind; but something tangible, such as writing, drawing or a scrapbook, would be especially valuable. To get visioning going, it would help to use a visual tool, so you can see what you want and what you are trying to create.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
You are about to experience the benefits of keeping your beliefs flexible. You may have an opportunity to explore a situation where two opposites both seem true, but actually it’s more like a situation where every possibility is valid. Some people will undoubtedly consider this confusing because it challenges certain key values they hold (such as fixed ideas about right and wrong). If you pay attention you will see how this condition grants you exceptional freedom, particularly from the values of others. At this point in history, nobody can afford to be too attached to any one viewpoint, and the game of ‘either this, or that’ is getting extremely old. I suggest you remain open to the many potentials that exist, even if you cannot see them and even if nobody else believes they are there.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Once I had a cat named William who walked through a solid door. We were playing the ‘do you want to be in or out’ game that is a favorite of cats everywhere. I closed the door and he ended up on the wrong side; that is, opposite where I had just seen him. To this day I wonder whether this was some kind of David Cooperfield illusion, kitty-styled. You can look at the movements in your relationships in a similar light this week. Someone you thought was on the outside is about to end up on the inside, even though you thought the door was already closed. From there, anything is possible, as long as you notice what just happened.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
So many matters involved with emotional healing come up in our relationships you would think we would get the message. Which message would that be? It could be that love brings up everything unlike itself. Or it could be that we make people out to be who they become in our relationships with them. This is a central message of relationships: we tend to see our own perception, and this counts for the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ aspects of who a person is; which is in turn based on either what we want, or our experience of the past. You’ve reached a point where you can see the effects of your projections, and give reality a moment to be itself. In this way, you will discover a new depth of who you are.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You are starting to blur the line between work and play, which is precisely what you need to do if you want to be happy, much less be enlightened. To ‘play at work’ usually gets chalked up to goofing off, but your current work assignments suggest strongly that you need to bring an element of exploration usually associated with taking your mind off of responsibility. What you are looking for is a way to let in your imagination, which is abundantly active at the moment and will be getting more fiery as the next week progresses. The last thing you can afford is frustration, so you need to feed yourself with pleasure and sensuality. The results will speak for themselves.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You generally follow your instincts; it’s now time to follow your intuition. This is a difference not often enough made. Among the ways we could slice this apple would be to say that instincts are more closely connected to the animal nature (predatory activity, survival) and intuition is more closely associated with the best elements of human nature. Intuition is subtler. It’s less like a tug and more like being gently presented with an idea you suspect might work. As the next few weeks develop, you will also be presented with opportunities to collaborate that you will suspect might work, even though you know of no special reason why that might be. Remember one word: affinity. It’s subtle, and sublime.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
The problem with emotions is how self-centered they can lead us to be. Feelings are a more relational way to experience existence; they imply communication rather than reacting. The other problem with emotions is that they can seize control of consciousness, leading us to believe that they are the only possibility capable of existing right now. Feelings tend to offer us options. These two qualities are going to come extremely close to seeming like the same thing over the next couple of weeks. I suggest you keep your inner eyes open for what you are experiencing at all times. The distinctions are important, and there will be several key turning points in your relationships that hinge on your correct perception of your experiences.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Pattern recognition is one of the most important mental skills that a human is capable of. At the moment, you’ve got it. There are patterns everywhere: especially in what seems random, and especially where you observe problems that seem like they cannot be solved. This is always a matter of viewpoint, and people tend to cling to fixed perspectives, mainly because they believe they will create predictability. This is just the thing to let go of right now, because the best ideas and the best solutions will manifest in an unpredictable way. At the moment, this pertains to one particular financial situation, yet when you see this method of problem solving actually work, you will move onto more challenging issues.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
For an extraordinary 10 days, Venus is going to perch on the edge of your sign; Mars will form a conjunction to Uranus; and then make a conjunction to Venus. There is a lot going on inside this astrology, and inside you, yet what I see as the most vivid theme is the gift of working through a sexual issue of some kind. It’s like a question you’ve been asking for a long time is finally answered with an actual experience that demonstrates the veracity of what you perceive. Part of this — the most important part — involves an aspect of gender identity. You seem to be squirming around looking for the place where your soul fits into your body and where your body fits into the world. Relax for a moment, set aside your agenda and you will discover you actually have a fulfilling place to be.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

By Eric Francis

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Usually this is an outgoing time of year for you, though lately one eye seems to be turned inward. That’s a good direction for it; there is no vision like inner vision. Be patient as you go through the deep experience of Venus moving backward through your sign and when it’s over in a few weeks, you will have a lot better understanding of what you want out of a particular love affair.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
There are times when success does in fact breed contempt, and successful people learn not to take it seriously. Or, they develop a political skill that allows them to convert the energy from negativity into something constructive. Be it with another or with yourself, this is a skill you need to work on every single day right now, as you bravely face the fears you cannot speak.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You must be feeling like you’re in a burning building, drooling over travel magazines to places where there are ancient great temples or strange modern cities. You’re not merely dreaming. This is the year to take a trip, but you need to make it to the one place you have absolutely wanted to go, above all others. Think carefully if there are even two on the list. There is a reason you need to visit one of them.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
All your astrology is leading you to focus on the agreements you make. The idea of ‘sacred contracts’ is finally starting to get some respect. I suggest that at this point in your life, you consider every contract, agreement or understanding a sacred gesture. Fair to say that every encounter where love, money, erotic energy or intention is exchanged is worth honoring in the way we think of marriage.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
This is no time for self-doubt. If anything, you’re in a moment when you can confront your misgivings and resolve any lingering feeling that you’re a stranger on a strange planet. People count on you specifically because you’re the one who holds the light of who you are most brightly, though few see the shadow side of that strength. You have nothing to justify, nothing to explain. As these weeks progress, allow your quest for self-understanding to deepen into true confidence.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Lately, someone always seems to be pushing you to be more than you think you are. Now that someone is speaking in words similar to ones you’ve used before to encourage them to be bolder and braver, you owe it to yourself to listen. You are actually free to make even those choices that seem the most fearsome or complex today. Once you pluck up some courage, complications have a way of melting like castles of sand as the tide comes in.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
There may be no telling what is up with a love interest lately; it’s nearly impossible to actually understand another person. The feedback from your environment is offering you clear information about your feelings for yourself, and what role you think you deserve in the life of another person. I would propose that if anything, you’re being invited to take a greater role rather than lesser; it’s just that this month anyway, the time does not seem right. Be patient.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
The time has arrived to stop thinking about your feelings and to start feeling them. The difference is sometimes subtle, but here is a clue. Thinking will lead you toward frustrated states of mind. The more you are feeling, the more expressive you will be; the more doors will open up, which may be creative, loving or sexual or all of the above. That’s a pretty easy way to measure: in pleasure.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You have so many ideas you don’t know where to start. I can help with one thing, at least: trust that they are in fact excellent ideas. If you don’t know where to begin, pick the one you feel the most passionate about. Don’t think about your output; rather, work on about the inner process of developing a concept into reality, no matter how simple it may seem. This is the skill that sometimes goes by the name ‘achievement’.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You may wonder whether you’re feeling generosity or greed; don’t take the question seriously. What I propose you need is, without any judgments or reservations, that you sort your finances and treat your life like a business. In fact you have a lot to offer others, and the world has plenty of wealth to offer you back. But if you cloak yourself in doubt, success will never see you.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Doing what is important to you feels different when it exists as an idea, and when it exists as an experiment. Ideas feel illuminating; experiments are often frustrating. But they are the only thing that leads to experience, and the only thing that can possibly lead to a breakthrough. Your theories are good; but you need to test them carefully, the sooner the better.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You may not feel like you can express all of your potential, but a little is more than you need to convert to reality. Basically, you just need enough success to demonstrate that success is possible. At the moment, I suggest you not measure whether you’re doing the right thing in dollars. Rather, honor the intangibles: like that strange, beautiful sense that you actually know who you are.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Today, Venus retrograde is in an exact square to Pluto, inching her way toward the Aries Point. The square was exact at 6:21 am ET and because Venus is slow and powerful in the sky, it’s within exact orb as you read this.

Venus is visible above Earth’s moon, which is illuminated solely by light reflected from Earth. Because of Venus’ nearness to Earth and the way its clouds reflect sunlight, it appears to be the brightest planet in the night sky. Photograph courtesy NASA.

I’ve been working up to this aspect in previous columns all year, and the Venus retrograde series of events are described in the most precise astrological and psychological detail in the Next World Stories editions for Taurus and Libra (the signs with which Venus is most closely associated).

Let’s consider the theory of the square for a moment. Remember that the square aspect is about inner tension that the psyche is trying to resolve and build on. In natal astrology, typically when we’re younger, squares create a kind of split personality. We will jump from one side of the square to the other, living it out in pieces. This can feel like a deep inner division that cannot be reconciled, but it will keep demanding our attention.

As we grow and grow older, if things are going well, we’ll gradually integrate the two sides of the energy dynamic, which results in an increasingly mature, consistent person. If things are not going well, some people will camp out in one side of the square, in denial of a crucial, deeply influential side of their nature. This other, neglected side will erupt from time to time (usually when under transit) and can cause a lot of problems. We’ve all met these folks, we meet them every day and we may even live with one.

With a transiting square, we all go through a similar process. Venus square Pluto is particularly strong because it happens three times in close proximity: Feb. 6, 2009 (with Venus direct), April 3, 2009 (with Venus retrograde) and May 2, 2009 (with Venus direct).

When a pattern like this takes place, nearby standing points in our chart will also be activated repeatedly, and from two directions (from each side of the square). Many people can seem to be going through the same kind of change, crisis or growth process at the same time.

From Aries and from Capricorn

Let’s take the current Venus-Pluto square one side at a time, starting with Venus retrograde in Aries. Here, she is learning to center on herself, and also encountering the fact that this is about the struggle of getting to a point of emotional independence. I am working from the theory that this transit is primarily about what women learn growing up, and what it becomes later in life. I recognize that this topic is clouded with controversy, delusion and deception, not to mention what many mothers (inadvertently or intentionally) taught and teach their daughters about the nature of love, sex and relationships. It also pertains to what boys are taught about girls and women, but no matter how enlightened someone is, it’s nearly impossible to contradict the power of another person’s belief system.

Buddha stands guard over one of the first-ever pregnant mannequins, designed by Ara Sona in the 1970s. Photo by Eric Francis.

Over and over again, by family and by the media, the message is given to girls that you are not complete unless you have a man. Worse yet, one is not socially acceptable unless this is the primary goal of their life.

First wave, second wave and third wave feminism, Suicide Girls and every tattoo parlor in Toledo, Ohio notwithstanding, this message is still given to girls seemingly endlessly. Email me and tell me that things are different now. I will email you back and say this is what I have observed from twenty years of reading tarot and astrology for women, confronting this very crisis, from what I can see primarily turns up as a crisis of self-esteem or not feeling good enough.

Girls are still given the dichotomy that you can either have a relationship or you can have a life. We are once again seeing this drummed into millions of young girls in the form of Hannah Montana: The Movie. This is Cinderella, in modern terms and in grand style, and I really don’t think that many girls are going to miss this movie. Is anyone really looking at the effects of these messages on girls? I can think of one professor who is. Nobody is revealing the end of this new cinematic masterpiece, but the entire structure of the plot is the division against oneself and one’s goals; the man versus the career; personhood put on the sacrificial altar to relationship. Even the premise of the plot is that Miley, in order to have a musical career, has to be ‘two different people’ (Miley and Hannah). She has to split herself in half, and cannot be a whole person, known as such.

We might well question whether the male ego could withstand the notion that one’s female partner could be talented, famous and wealthy, but that is another conversation.

So, back to our astrology. The current square dials in all of these values, which are symbolized by retrograde Venus in Aries. It has an inner searching quality: for the true feelings associated with an autonomous sense of identity, or any sense of identity at all.

I’m not speaking here in metaphysical or cosmic terms, which is to say, I’m not arguing that the soul is ever separate from its source, or that there is not something authentic about this thing we call the ego. I’m speaking about the personality shell that we live in like a hermit crab, often unaware that this is what we’re doing: inhabiting something that we identify with very closely, but which is not strictly who we are. Venus can also represent the emotional body, the subtle intellectual dimension and the desire nature. Venus can represent any set of values with which we identify.

The retrograde emphasizes tuning into the receptive nature of this inner reality, that is, how we are informed by our environments, and take on what we observe; and also, due to the retrograde, seeking something from the past. Hold that thought: I’ll come back to it.

Pluto in Capricorn

Let’s go to the other side of the square.

Pluto, the one we know from astrology, deepens everything, and puts us into contact with what we tend to deny. Pluto’s subject matter runs a fairly consistent agenda from enforced change to transformational processes; soul-type growth; shadow material such as fear; anything hormonal; and death in its many forms, including transitioning from one major personality phase to another.

French existentialist writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Uncredited photo taken from Spiegel Online, the German news magazine.

On one level, Pluto in Capricorn (2008-2024) is about blowing through the ludicrous ‘traditions’ we live with in our society. Many of those are expressions of stoic, stodgy, joyless and blatantly boring Christian and capitalist values.

Remember that Christianity was foisted upon society along with the murder of the sacred Vodan trees, the slaughter of Mother God, the spilling of an ocean of human blood and the sacrifice of thousands of women as alleged witches, along with many of their cats. After that a real measure of docility could be counted on, but if you ask me it’s never really been complacent.

We don’t know exactly what this New Order replaced, but pre-Christian rituals such as Beltane suggest strongly that there was a more equal emphasis on maleness and femaleness as collaborative, complimentary energies and as attributes of nature.

It is the core of that female self that we are now in a process of dialing in and attempting to recover and explore. This can be lonely; the poignancy of emotional birthing can often discover itself as alone first. But here is the really interesting part: The Aries Point (the first degree of Aries) is involved. As individual and private as this experience feels, it’s widespread, collective and ultimately a public phenomenon. The Aries Point is that place where every private reality adds up to what we all share and must contend with, and where collective movements of society influence the consciousness of an individual. This is not theory. All you have to do is look.

If you want to live in a bubble and think you don’t matter and be convinced that nothing actually affects you and that you don’t have any power, this is precisely the thing to deny. But good luck with Pluto in Capricorn right there.

Combine this with a square to Venus retrograde and we get (potentially, under a best case scenario) a profoundly introverted process of shedding emotional attachments that clutter one’s sense of identity or make it directly inaccessible to oneself. This could lead nicely to an awakening that individuation is a process of building the confidence to take part in society in the ways that you want.

Under this astrology, you’re going to find out who you are, at least one or two more layers in. Who you are may have something to do with who you were before you forgot. In women, this would be who you were before puberty, when you had a true modicum of emotional autonomy and a sense of yourself as a distinct entity in the universe.

For many reasons, most eloquently covered by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, that autonomy is systematically stripped away at puberty and another female entity is transformed into: we call that a ‘woman’. This is a social and cultural construction, not a biological entity. In De Beauvoir’s view, the concept ‘woman’ is different than ‘adult female person’. The girl who had many dreams of being an independent person still exists, though she is down there somewhere deep and must be located, recovered, made friends with and nurtured back into conscious existence if we want to know her; if she is to do anything but rage. Often that independent girl rages while the woman who surrounds her must endure so much that she was not planning on.

To Die, or to Mature?

What blocks the maturing process are beliefs, attachments and obligations. We all know about these; what the world does not like to acknowledge consciously is that women are given, take on or are saddled with many obligations that are (on one level) basically impossible to change, mostly because they lack the cooperation of other people who would make that change possible. Many of these situations can only be addressed and worked with. Many are cemented in specifically by inner attachments that create the problem. These attachments seem external (i.e., to a man or the need for men; to ‘succeed in the career world’ instead of doing what you want to do with your life) but they are actually internal in nature. They are so closely connected to the core operating system that it seems that to change them would literally be ‘to die’ and that is in a sense true: one version of the personality would have to die, Pluto-style, and metamorphose into something else.

The cover of the 2005 edition, calling itself a “new edition for a new era”.

Venus retrograde square Pluto is inviting us all to do just that. Have you noticed? Like, have you noticed how deep into core self it’s been relatively easy to go this week? I know it’s not just me because I’m in numerous email correspondences with people saying basically the same thing. The true beauty of this transit emerges as we move from this seemingly private, interior space of questioning and breakthrough into the recognition that we are standing on common territory.

That common territory begins with the body: the biological level of reality. By that, I mean recognizing that female is first and foremost a biological entity; and that as it extends into personality, that includes the relationship we have with our bodies. In many girls and women, that relationship is basically hateful, painful and essentially guilty. Have we weighed the cost of nearly all pleasure arriving with some seemingly mandatory attachment to guilt or shame?

Hand-in-glove with this is the relationship women have to seeking their sense of self-grounding in connection not to themselves but to a man and often struggling profoundly to do it any other way. This never would have occurred to me, had I not learned it from women.

If we’re going to get anywhere, we need to start with biology, we need to start with sex, and we need to start with educating young people. I call upon parents, first, to take this up as Dharma Yoga.

I think that young women, when they get around the time of the Bat Mitzvah (age 13, when a conservative, patriarchal culture begins to consider them women) is that they be given a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and a very good vibrator. This would be a rite of passage. With this would come a real conversation with an older woman who is not vaguely embarrassed or attached to one viewpoint (it could be the mother, it could be someone else) who explains the basics over a phase of time until the concepts and facts are internalized.

I have heard a stunning number of horror stories involving girls and birth control pills. Nobody seems to be talking about primary and backup methods of pregnancy prevention any more. Girls need to be taught how to use condoms, and told where to find them. The conversation needs to include applying them to bananas until they are good at it, and this thing health workers try to teach in Africa, called condom negotiation.

Boys need to be taught many things about themselves and about women, but the first and most important is that they are 100% responsible for what happens to their sperm.

Yours & truly,

Related: World AIDS Day: Pass the 7-Up

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

As spring arrives with its colors and smells and delicate light, all calculated to refresh our spirit and renew our senses, I find many folks oblivious to what’s happening around them. They’re preoccupied; I understand. For many of us, our daily challenges — some of them completely out of our control — have overshadowed our ability to process the larger picture of our experience.

Spring 2009 looks at Sonia Rykiel, left, and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. Photo: Imaxtree.

There is a lot of ‘new’ out there in the world — a new president, a new wave of hopefulness and collective compassion, a new sense of possibility. Old systems, broken down, are being refurbished; old ideas, proven wrong-headed and anachronistic, are being discarded. Still, many of us are caught in the crosshairs of this cusp between old and new; trying to figure out how to proceed, and too often not hitting on all pistons. It’s a quandary for those of us who have perfected our skills at successful living in 3D, now to discover ourselves shaky and frazzled.

For any number of reasons, both mundane and transcendent, we find that much of what used to work, doesn’t. Creatures of habit, we are having trouble accepting that the way forward is seldom straight ahead in this void space, but sometimes a step back or a lateral move; not clearly defined but fuzzy, requiring baby steps that include a muttered prayer and a leap of faith. Knee deep in alligators, on the lookout for open jaws and sharp teeth, it’s difficult to turn our face to the sunshine — to look up.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 3, 2009, #760 combined with Eriscope April 2009 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Beneath your familiar personality is another layer of psychic reality, one that you make contact with from time to time. Now happens to be one of them. Gradually you are melting your way through the false floors and into feeling the essence of your existence. Here is the main difference between that and what you think of as yourself: on the essential level, everything about who you are is a flexible possibility rather than a fixed idea. You can melt into the world of potential rather than needing to push yourself there. And with this feeling comes a new sense of your erotic potential: in particular, the feeling that within your psyche you contain all possibilities of male, female, masculine, feminine and every combination thereof. Once you touch that truth, the full expression of who you are is only a gesture away.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
In order to make contact with the truth of who you are, you’re being asked to give something up. It may be an idea about partnership, a fantasy or something about how you idealize your existence. It may be some piece of yourself to which you’ve been attached for a long time, but not knowing why. The moment of truth may feel like being put through an emotional wringer, and you may indeed be experiencing something akin to isolation and potentially loss. If so, I suggest you do nothing to drown, stuff or hide from your conflict, but rather stay fully conscious and go with it. If there’s a ‘lesson’ here it’s not the kind that takes years to learn. What I see is a moment of fully embracing a hidden, even shadowy side of your sexual nature or desire nature long enough to set yourself free into something much lighter and more nourishing.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Among the many sets of pairs that you can use to divide yourself is your ‘public self’ versus your ‘private self’. This can and does lead people to put far more emphasis on their image than on the substance of who they are. It’s true that many people you meet on the street emphasize image precisely because they feel a lack of substance. Maybe you’ve figured out how slippery this can be, the whole business of trying to maintain appearances for the sake of preserving something about your reputation that is actually the opposite of what is true. I would say that now is the time to be known for who you are inside. This would mean presenting a true picture of yourself to the people around you, contending consciously with the fear that you might be judged for doing so. If you wonder what has been dragging you down half your life, it is this fear of judgment, and there is only one way to dispense with that: confront it directly.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Once you burrow through to the ethical question that is behind your doubts, you will feel a lot better. You seem to have given up on something that is dear to you, such as a goal or a vision for your life. You seem to be under the heavy influence of another person in this process. I would propose that their influence, if you perceive it as discouraging or negative, can and must have a strengthening influence on what your intentions are. This would be a good time to remind you that having a goal feels like one thing and entering the reality where you begin to accomplish what you set out to do feels like something else. In a sense, one is an idealization and one is a world you must live in. You can, and it can be rich territory. Yet in that world there are certain places you can only go alone.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
The hottest sex is spiritual in nature, so far as I can tell: which is to say, it somehow goes beyond individual love and enters a space that is universal. If you get to this space, if you feel like you have suddenly left the realm of the ‘interpersonal’ and the ‘familiar’ and are in a new cosmos, open up and embrace this dimension of reality. It is indeed reality, though unfamiliar to many. One potentially frightening aspect of this is that in the transpersonal realm, individual ego identity seems to matter less, or not at all. In a sense, anyone could be anything. Second is the connection between erotic experience, death and the inherent transience of relationships. You can feel almost anything you want on Earth, but due to the nature of this plane of reality it is temporary. Let this be your cause for celebration.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You are about to touch the edge of territory that you can occupy if you want. Other factors have been pointing you here, particularly a person who seems to have a bigger idea of what is possible in life than you may be comfortable plunging into. Or you may be brewing this idea yourself, visioning an experience that feels like it might be deeply pleasurable. I sense you are seeking for the relational aspect. That is, sexual experience is one thing, but most people would say it’s more fulfilling when it’s mingled with meaningful human contact. Your cosmic assignment seems to be making all human contact meaningful. Be aware of when others try to detract from the meaning of some kinds of experiences in order to build up the meaning of others. This is deception, but it’s not always obviously so.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
If it’s true that you seek self-knowledge through others, then how can you help others seek self-knowledge through you? Would you be willing to do that consciously, and moreover, would you feel up to the task? The more meaningful question, though, seems to be how we can step out of this constant need to mirror and be mirrored in a way that blurs the boundaries between who is who in a relationship. I know that this is one of the easiest ways to seem to escape the boundaries and limits of the individual ego. Yet often we escape one trap and walk into another. Imagine a world where we felt like we actually existed without needing one another for validation. Imagine a planet where we could be a whole person without needing to prove that point by having someone else. That would leave us free to relate as individuals. I don’t think we get all the way there in one jump, but we definitely can take significant steps — and you seem ready for a few of those right now.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
I got an email today from some commenting that for weeks I’ve been mentioning something about a story involving the supposed partner of Scorpios; but what if you don’t have a partner? In that case, the references pertain to your perspective on relationships. If there is not a specific person involved, what is involved is your relationship to relationship itself. Not only can this now change, it seems to dearly need to, and like that progress is probable. If you focus first on healing — whatever that concept means to you — as your first agenda item, you are the most likely to find yourself exploring a world of feeling, sensation and imagination. I think it will work in this order, better than the other way. Healing is an intention you would apply to yourself first, most likely starting with an emotional or relational pattern that you’ve been struggling to get free from. Give it a name, so that you can talk about it; and proceed for a while with this out in the open, rather than veiled.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
I would propose that for most people, sexual reality is predominantly emotional or physical, rather than creative. I don’t mean using costumes or body paint, but hey that sounds like fun. I do mean self-creative, that is, a conscious act of exploring your identity and sense of self and stretching into new places that you’ve never gone before. We think of sex as being procreative, rather than as self-generative. It is both. It would seem that in recent months you’ve gone quite a few old places, and they have been interesting, but now it’s clearly time for something different, and that means daring. Look specifically at what you would fear the most, and consider this a valid possibility. Don’t let your head get in the way: your old agenda, your prior expectations, or the judgments that were laid on you when you were younger. You are more than entitled to experiment with who you are: doing so is specifically who you are. And if you can get to this space of unfettered daring, without clinging to yourself or anyone, other people will very like be interested, and come to you.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
If you express yourself, you will find some clarity. You may feel like you have to hold your silence until you actually know what you need to say, before you say it. I would propose that if you try to get out what you think is lurking in your feelings, you will get part of the way there, and if you revise this a few times you will actually figure it out. Okay, now for the contact point. Consider the sexuality of the parent about whom you know the least; the one who seemed to be absent, vague or to lack the ability to focus on you. I’m aware that the eroticism of their parents is the very last thing they want to think about; many people think it’s disgusting. However, I would propose that how you feel about your parents’ sex relates to how you feel about the fact that you exist. From here, how you feel and what you need to say to yourself will be much easier to access.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Over the next few weeks, it’s going to become easier to be honest with yourself. The reasons you have to conceal anything from your own awareness have been melting away for a long time. You probably figured out that to be honest with others, it’s necessary to be honest with yourself first; this is one of the few places that emotional reality actually follows logic. If you take this path, it follows further that the person who you are inside is the only person you can actually be in relationship to another. Whether you are losing or gaining ground in your relationships directly involves your ability to be entirely authentic within their sphere. You do not have an alternate self who relates to others; you relate to them as a whole being. There remains the question of what to do with the past. Here is a suggestion: if it is nagging you, and you have to keep stuffing it down, then let it out and be real about it.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You are being presented with a series of opportunities that will help you directly mediate your freedom. In other words, you are the medium of your own liberation. Other people will be involved and it’s clear that recently, they have been involved. Yet something is different; there is something self-directed that is unfolding. You are no less interested in relationships than you’ve ever been, but Mars in your sign is giving you a relatively rare opportunity to see that you are both the ‘thing’ that desires, and the ‘thing desired’. This may seem pushy. I suggest that the quality of feeling, to the contrary, is about receptivity rather than expression. Notice what your emotions and your senses are telling you. Notice who notices you — don’t worry about why. This experience of feeling and observation opens up a horizon to anywhere.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

They come here alone and they leave in twos
Except for you and me who just came to use
If you’re all done like you said you’d be
What are you doing hanging out with me?

— Elliott Smith, “Whatever (Folksong in C)”

Dear Friend and Reader:

Kaila Ann Watson didn’t have an ideal childhood. Nobody does, but she was born with her heart on the right side of her chest, and with only two chambers, when a normal human heart has four. Between three months and five years old, she underwent four open-heart surgeries at Boston Children’s Hospital to have the condition repaired. Her parents, family and community did everything they could not only to take care of her but also to make sure that her life was as full as possible; that she lived like a child and not a medical specimen.

Kaila Watson, on the way to surviving four open-heart surgeries between the ages of three months and five years old. Image of family photos by Eric Francis.

Many people got involved; for a family to go through something like this takes plenty of community support. Because Kaila’s mom, Tobi, works for Ulster Publishing, the company that publishes a number of local newspapers, Kaila was the subject of many articles and a focus of community attention well beyond the family’s circle of friends. She was a famous little kid and seemed to endure her ordeal gracefully. I worked for those newspapers during the late part of the heart surgery phase, and the drama around Kaila was something widely embraced, like she was a little piece of everyone who knew about her.

Had she died then, it would have been a collective tragedy. When she died at age 20, it still was. And it was not her heart that gave out.

On the night of March 15, Kaila overdosed on heroin. Everyone close to her knew she was using, and she’d had several previous near-miss experiences. She was delivered unconscious by her also strung-out ex-boyfriend to the emergency room after up to 30 minutes of respiratory arrest. Doctors were able to resuscitate her, but there was no activity in her brain. She was placed on life support, but after several days, her brain began to swell. On Thursday, March 19, her parents made the decision to remove her from life support.

Her mom stayed with her, in the hospital bed, with her hand on her heart. Kaila’s pulse got weaker and seemed to stop at 6:45 pm. Then as often happens in the death process, there was a surge of energy and her pulse returned, and then her heart stopped. It was 7 pm, a few moments before sunset, with the Sun in the last degree of Pisces, hours before equinox. Venus retrograde in Aries, taking its role as evening star (traditionally, the death star), was hovering above the horizon.

The next day, her childhood friend and longtime lover Simone contacted me about what had happened. Simone has been one of the models who has deeply influenced my studio photography. When she showed up for her first session in late November 2007, she had Kaila in tow, with a secret plan to get her into the photos. It worked. We made pictures till about 1 or 2 am, and after figuring out that neither of them had eaten any time recently, I made them breakfast in the middle of the night; and this was how I came to know Kaila Watson as a young adult, experiencing this pair of lifelong friends together.

Now, many people are asking: what happened? Her death has raised many questions: for parents wondering how they can prevent such an outcome in their own children; for her longtime friends, who wonder how she could have left them behind for her new group of associates; for others feeling her family’s pain, or wondering what this means.

How Astrology Might Help

Astrology, if used consciously and carefully, can help understand and deal with the loss of a loved one. Since Kaila’s life had a number of public overtones, and her existence seems to reach into a much wider sphere of reality than one person’s life might ordinarily, she can serve as an example of what can happen here.

Kaila watching her friend Simone be photographed in my kitchen. Photo for Book of Blue by Eric Francis.

Using astrology, we can take some of these “life lessons” and use them to both help our understanding of the human condition, and to make us better astrologers. There are occasional times when we can see trouble coming and either point it out, or recommend ways to address the problem. It is not often that we can help, and it’s not always advisable to try to help; but it’s good to be prepared if the time arrives.

Kaila was born with the Sun in Cancer, the Moon in Libra and Taurus rising. [See her natal, progressed and death charts here.] These influences confirm a secure, loving home and real relationships, despite her medical needs. Indeed, the fact that she had survived her surgeries indicates that someone cared enough to help her pull through.

But there are three features that truly distinguish her chart, and provide a sense of the prolonged struggle and unbearable tension that characterized her life. And there are transits to go with them, which will help make the timing clear. Many factors in this chart that suggest she would have issues with addiction or toxins. They include the Moon in a tight square to Neptune; Mercury opposite Neptune; and Mars square Neptune. These are all addiction warning signs, and unfortunately there is not much that can be done about them except be aware when you see them in advance.

The Moon (ruler of the 3rd house, of siblings) also represents a childhood influence: the addicted half-brother who initially turned her on to heroin. I would also propose that there was a heck of a lot of anesthesia still in her body from all of the operations, all of which include many drug experiences (such as pain killers, when in recovery).

The involvement of the Moon and other personal planets (Mars, Mercury) with Neptune puts addictive tendencies at the deepest levels of conditioning and need. They are part of her personality on some inherent level. If there is pain to escape, it’s going to either come through a spiritual path (not widely available), or through drugs and alcohol (which are widely available). Note, we are talking about an 8th house Neptune in Capricorn: not exactly optimistic, living on the edge, and giving the feeling of spirit trapped in matter rather than dancing in it.

Saturn, Uranus and the Galactic Core

Let’s take a closer look at her 8th house, which is the house of growth, death, transformation and which also includes involvement with others. The 8th is the topmost of the four houses depicted in the diagram below; there are three planets in it. (I’ve written a lot about the 8th house and nearly all of it is searchable.)

The 5th through 8th houses of Kaila’s natal chart. For the full chart and two others, please see this link.

One of the defining factors in her chart is that she has a very, very precise conjunction of Saturn and Uranus in the 8th house. This house is illustrated in the diagram to the left. The conjunction is in Sagittarius, aligned with the Galactic Core — that is, the core of our Milky Way Galaxy, which is close to 27 degrees Sagittarius. The Galactic Core sums up the spiritual potential of Sagittarius, and reminds us that there is, at the center of our island in space, some central reality of which most of us are not aware. In the 8th you can get a lot of “life after death” imagery, as well as the feeling of an extraterrestrial source of life. The GC was not even discovered until 1933, when its radio sources were detected by a very smart guy named Jansky. The conjunction conditions and defines her response to this spiritual influence.

With Saturn, we have an archetype of what is traditional, orthodox, structured and restricted. Saturn in Sagittarius can present a significant block to spiritual awareness, because it can say that we think God (that is, our God concept) has limited powers. This is conjunct Uranus, which is spontaneous, forward thinking and willing to take chances. Uranus in Sag says God can do anything. So we have the image of profound inner tension or conflict, and it’s in a “life or death” house. As a child, she was kept alive by science (Uranus) though she may have not appreciated that (Saturn).

From the videotapes I saw at her wake, as a child she was bursting with energy, focus and power. Yet beneath that expressive energy, there was a constant inner struggle. Children have a different relationship to existence and death than adults do. Kaila spent most of her early childhood on the brink of death, constantly under the scrutiny of powerful, world-renowned doctors and in the hands of many other medical professionals. Notably, much of this occurred when her brain was still forming before age two. Her trip along the edge anatomically shaped her view of existence. That view might have included the feeling that she didn’t deserve to live. It took a lot to keep her alive, and if she doubted her right to exist, she may have felt anything from grief to resentment to self-hatred about the fact that she was given a chance. Just a short time ago, she would have died as an infant.

Then, as a young adult, came a once-per-lifetime transit event. Through 2007, Pluto went over that conjunction, making contacts in January, June and November. This transit would be a profound quest for anyone, calling for the highest degree of awareness and support. There is a need to deeply transform or release that tension suggested by Pluto making its repeated contacts. In any event it’s going to be a near-death type of journey.

Tobi believes that by the end of that year, she was addicted to heroin, which provided both a point of release and an ongoing near-death experience — that is, a flirtation with the ultimate release from physical existence. Notably, it also provided her with the comforts of childhood. I am reasonably certain from looking at this chart that her addiction to opiates had its roots in the medical environment, though this was, of course, an inevitable result of such intensive and painful medical treatment. If this is true, she associated pain medication with surviving rather than with dying.

Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, described this combination of energies — Saturn-Uranus-Pluto — as “titanic pressure reaching the breaking-point,” and reminded me that now the whole world has entered this same complex. Saturn and Uranus are now opposed for the first time since Kaila’s birth, and we are gradually building to a T-square between Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. (It is not a coincidence that Kaila was born with the conjunction and died at the opposition; her life spanned exactly half of the 40-year Saturn-Uranus cycle.)

Natal Yod: Saturn/Uranus, the Sun and the Ascendant

The conjunction I just described makes a precise aspect structure with the Sun at 27+ Cancer, and the ascendant, at 27+ Taurus. Here we have a collection of very large, potentially overwhelming cosmic forces (Saturn, Uranus, Galactic Core) acting on extremely personal influences (ascendant, Sun). This, by the way, is one definition of an “intense person.”

Kaila Watson and her mom Tobi. Picture of family photos by Eric Francis.

This shape is called a yod pattern; there are several kinds of yods (all of them planets grouped in the shape of an isosceles triangle). The type of yod in this chart is the one the most frequently talked about (a finger of god, or planets in a sextile and two quincunxes). It’s like an arrow pointing to the Saturn/Uranus conjunction, involving everything with a 27 next to it.

Yods are strange energy formations because they bind together many different energies with properties said to be incompatible. You don’t really resolve them; you adapt and live with them, and in that process of adaptation, they can become very strong influences; so strong that some astrologers associate them with fate. The Sun quincunx (150 degrees away from) Saturn creates stress on both points. Sun quincunx Uranus is extremely restless. Jupiter is close to the ascendant, and this is connected to all of the other planets as well; it just feels like a lot of bound-up energy wanting to let itself go.

When one part of the yod takes a transit, the whole structure takes that transit, so all during those heroin years, she was responding to the intense pressure to grow and change that is suggested by Pluto acting on so many major points. In the space of one year, Pluto repeatedly aspected Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, the Sun and the ascendant — all at once.

There are other ways to deal with this kind of event than heavy narcotics, but those depend on your values about life and death, and many other factors. If you grew up constantly living at death’s door, you might be comfortable there and no place else. And the conjunction of Saturn and Uranus in her 8th makes me wonder if she didn’t resent the burden of having to live in a very challenging world. By the time she had to be an adult, it was obviously extremely difficult for her to cope with the responsibilities and necessities involved.

Mars, Ceres and Chiron — and the Aries Point

There is one last aspect structure to look at in this short overview of Kaila’s chart, and it begins with Mars conjunct Ceres on the Aries Point. The Aries Point is the first degree of the zodiac; it includes the first few degrees and several other points that aspect them. Here, we’re talking about the actual thing itself. You can see the aspect up in the top left side of the chart: Mars is the “male” symbol and Ceres looks like a question mark.

Kaila with one of her many cats. Besides the herd of felines, she had every possible domesticated animal except maybe a llama.

My first impression hearing this story was that it involved Demeter and Persephone. These are the mother and daughter of Greek mythology who became separated when Persephone was abducted to the underworld by Hades. In astrology, we substitute Ceres for Demeter and her feelings about her daughter; and Hades for Pluto. Ceres, in one expression, represents the grief of mothers, and here we have Ceres conjunct Mars — on the extraordinarily public, deeply personal Aries Point.

How personal, and how public? Consider one transit. Kaila died with the Sun in the last degree of Pisces. On Friday morning the Sun entered Aries. On Saturday it formed an exact conjunction to Kaila’s natal Ceres, and on Sunday, the night of the wake, it was exactly conjunct Mars. The wake was a public event that surrounded this deeply private tragedy. In the two hours I was at the wake, I would say that about 200 people came through the room; here is an image of the personal intersecting with a public event, directly involving the Aries Point on several counts.

Chiron is part of this aspect structure. Mars and Chiron are in an exact square; Ceres and Chiron are in a very close square. Chiron, as a result, is also involved with the Aries Point and here we have another image of a family situation (Chiron in Cancer) that is also public in nature (the Aries Point).

But let’s take a look at that Mars-Chiron square on its own. I have seen that women with this square struggle acutely with the expression of their sexual and creative power. It gets blocked, they get stuck and frustrated, and seem to have no clue what to do about it. This is a culture-wide struggle, but in many women it’s not focused; that is, it does not have a name or an identity. With Mars-Chiron, the person is usually fully aware of the crisis. They know the subject matter. The square points to a profound inner battle to work both energies. That struggle may be so poignant that, like other things in the chart, the seeming necessity or “only option” is to escape from the struggle any way you can. It is also possible to take charge, which involves embracing and expressing the tension of the square fully, and build on it; or to live passively.

The Issue of Choice

There has been plenty of conversation among Kaila’s friends, our local community and the Planet Waves community about whether Kaila’s death was the result of her own choices. This is all in the context of everyone knowing that her half-brother is the one who got her involved in the specific addiction that killed her.

Friend at Kaila’s grave the morning of March 23, 2009. Photo for Book of Blue by Eric Francis.

We live in a time when one of the pseudo-spiritual cudgels frequently used is on the subject of choice. It is obvious that we make decisions and that we have made many that contributed to how we got where we are. It’s clear that the power of choice is what we have now, if we notice. Yet I would propose here that, on Earth, one can only choose from among the known options; and that if everyone is making choices and we are in relationship to one another, we are all subject to the influences of one another’s decisions. This includes ones made by other people for themselves, and the ones made by others for us.

Did Kaila choose to have open-heart surgery at three months old? Legally and logically, she did not. We could only say she chose, speculatively, by proposing that she chose her parents and her body and her life course, but that is speculative and it also implies “fate” as much as any other possibility. When adults tell me they chose their parents without specific documentation to back it up (such as a past life or bardo memory of having made the decision; or a series of readings by practitioners unknown to one another), I am usually concerned that they are blaming themselves for what their parents did to them.

What leads me to believe that Kaila’s death was the result of her choices is that she knew she had options. Unlike most people in her situation, she had a family that loved her and that would do anything for her, and she knew that fact from plenty of experience. Her parents were always available and while her mother did not approve of Kaila’s heroin use, she did not judge her for it. The night Kaila overdosed, she had the choice to do a creative project with her mother, or meet the boyfriend coming back into town with some really good stuff from California. She made a decision.

Kaila also possessed a history that was unlikely to have been related to her family. She has three points aspecting her lunar nodes; I use the nodes to tell me about things that must be accounted for in other incarnations or levels of experience. She has Nessus close to her South Node, conjunct the Black Moon Lilith. This is a dark and troubled history that she is bringing in, and we’re unlikely to ever know the details.

This conjunction is square Pholus, a centaur that is involved with drugs and alcohol, and with events that have consequences that go beyond what we were expecting. Pholus points not only to childhood influences but also the total results of the generational line, and though the influence is indirect, the results are not. Pholus in this chart describes how present-life factors could have intersected with past life influences. The aspects to the lunar nodes suggest a pre-existing environment into which she was born; that is, some dark karma to work through or not work through, one way or the other.

We who have survived Kaila have the choice to make about how to consider her life and what it meant to us. We all know there is a lot more here than one little girl’s story. And in true Aries Point-style, there are very few people who cannot relate to her somehow.

Yours & truly,

with David Arner and Chad Townsend

Note to Readers: I’ve been covering Kaila Watson’s life and death in the Book of Blue diary. It’s covered in there pieces: It’s Not Hard to Die; The Faces of Kaila Watson; and How These Things Happen. There are also many posts with comments at the Planet Waves diary, particularly this entry.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Hurry up and wait. That’s where we are, these days; living life in a mad dash but too often bumping our nose against unaccustomed barriers of doubt. Hurrying to make an extra buck but waiting to decide what to do with it, if anything other than stash it under the bed; running to fill the tank in the car while gas is cheap but waiting to see what a new car might eventually cost. We’re rushing to circle the wagons, button everything up and protect what we’ve got.

Will Obama’s Stimulus Package Work? Photo by Jim Young / Reuters.

We’re tapping our toe for Obama’s stimulus package to leech out into our various states and make a difference, waiting to see if the economy is stabilizing or if there are more surprises lurking behind the doors on Wall Street, gathered to spring on us. We might be on the lookout for a new relationship or job — but we’re holding back on decisions because we’re not sure what comes next. We’re experiencing life in fits and starts lately, impatient for everything to get back to normal.

Well, here’s the good and bad news: we’re living in the new normal. Between the busy-bee impulse to hurry up and get somewhere, and the necessity to hang back — this new, cautionary concern to see how things evolve, get our ducks in a row and discover our direction — is our life. And even if we’re exhausted worrying about what’s going to happen next, on the off chance things get too slow, we rush to fill ourselves up with more more more; we’re kind of like bulimics, binging and purging and unable to stop the cycle.

For several decades now, life has had a frenetic overindulgent quality that is clearly evident in our entertainment venues, complete with subliminal messages we’ve missed; we like extreme sports, for instance, and adore confrontive and embarrassing reality shows — but we can’t move ourselves to confront the last administration for its culpabilities. We’re hooked on CSI-type television offerings that show us the darker side of death through the clean, specialized filter of forensics — but we don’t want to discuss the details of war in Iraq or rape in Darfur.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

It’s an intriguing sight: Three photos, played in sequence, showing what looks very much like water beading up on one leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander, which arrived on Mars last May 25 after a nine-month trip through space. Of the many Mars probe missions in recent history, this was the first to successfully land in a polar region.

Droplets on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander are seen to darken and coalesce. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute.

That little clip on MarsDaily.com has Mars-watchers all a-twitter over whether it is just that: water (as opposed to just ice) on the Red Planet. And the response of the scientific community: Sure looks like it.

At least, that’s the judgment of one of the co-investigators of the Phoenix mission, as reported at the San Francisco Sentinel. Nilton Reno, a professor in that school’s Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, says it’s most likely salt water. And it may mean Mars isn’t as dry as conventional wisdom has said it is.

“A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars,” Reno told the Sentinel. “Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars.”

According to the report on MarsDaily.com, “The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil.”

MarsDaily.com said that Reno’s research was presented March 23 at a conference in Houston, and that a paper written by Reno and many Phoenix mission colleagues is under review for possible publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

It’s not your father’s trademark lawsuit: The Miami Herald reports that Latin astrologer Walter Mercado may have lost the rights to his own name, in perpetuity, to a promoter in Miami. Go figure.

Walter Mercado. Photo by A Media Syndication.

The contract that is under dispute dates to 1995. In 2006 Mercado, 77, terminated the agreement, and Bakula sued him for breach of contract. It’s been in court ever since. And a federal jury recently ruled in favor of promoter Bill Bakula.

Herald reporter Lydia Martin says of the astrologer: “Mercado is one of the Latin world’s most beloved stars, mainly because he always gushes positivity. Yes, you can, his horoscopes affirm. And then he’ll offer Leo a recipe for a love potion and Aquarius some numbers to play in the lottery. He remembers to stay upbeat, even when things are thorny.”

Flamboyant and known for wearing makeup and rolling his Rs, Mercado countersued Bakula for $5 million he says he’s still owed, but the jury found for Bakula. No damages were awarded, but at issue is whether the astrologer, or the promoter, can now use the Mercado name to make money.

“He wants to own me through all of my incarnations and across all of the stars,” Mercado told the Herald.

Liberace, reached for comment in heaven, said he would not be suing Mercado for using his name as a moniker.

India may not have yet felt the full impact of the global economic downturn, but many people in the world’s second most populous nation are worried about the signs they’re seeing. And they’re consulting astrologers, palm-readers, and other clairvoyants in record numbers — which is good financial news to that ancient industry.

Parrot fortune-teller. Photo by Icy.

According to Bernama.com, the web portal of Malaysia’s national news agency, worries about job security, children’s marriages, and the future in general are driving huge numbers of people, mostly in their middle years, to seek news of the future.

Bernama.com spoke to several people in the industry and found similar stories of burgeoning clientele and increased revenues.

“People are worried about their future and parents are worried over their children’s marriages during these hard times,” said S. Govindaraja, president of the 300-member Astrologers Association of Chennai, in the article.

And M.K. Pandey, who manages astroguru-india.com, was described as “jubilant” as he noted, “Our business has grown by 10-15 percent since the worldwide recession started last year. Our consultants are busy 24 hours.”

Home to some of the globe’s oldest cultures, India has an ancient astrological system, which Bernama.com noted is “based on astrological dynamics like the movement of the planets is deeply rooted.”

It has an atmosphere. It has liquid lakes on its surface. It has water ice.

Titan seen from the Cassini–Huygens spacecraft.

Sound homey? Well, Saturn’s moon Titan, second-biggest planetary satellite in the solar system, isn’t exactly habitable, what with gravity of 0.14g and nitrogen, methane and ethane making its air less than breathable. But, as UPI.com reports, new images and videos from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens probe confirm that the “planet-like moon” has some distinctly Earth-like features.

It is also believed to be an early prototype of an Earth-like planet. Titan has been an important focus of the Cassini mission, including the Huygens Probe, which in 2005 was dropped to the surface of Titan in order to analyze the atmosphere, and made it to the surface.

“These flyovers let you take in the bird’s-eye sweeping views of Titan, the next best thing to being there,” Randy Kirk of the Astrology Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey, and a member of the Cassini radar team, is quoted in the UPI article. “We’ve mapped many kinds of features and some of them remind me of Earth. Big seas, small lakes, rivers, dry river channels, mountains and sand dunes with hills poking out of them, lava flows.”

According to the Wikipedia entry on Titan: “The atmosphere of Titan is largely composed of nitrogen and its climate includes methane and ethane clouds. The climate — including wind and rain — creates surface features that are similar to those on Earth, such as sand dunes and shorelines, and, like Earth, is dominated by seasonal weather patterns.”

To look at images from the Cassini mission, as well as information about the program, visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Saturn site. Space news website SolarViews.com also has an entire section devoted to Titan photos.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, March 27, 2009, #759 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You may be in a profound moment of your self-esteem falling through the floor. Everything is supposed to be fine. In fact, everything may look fine. But there is a question lurking behind what feels like the backdrop that is your life. I suggest you ponder what that question is. I can offer a sketch, but it won’t be the real thing, only a few lines and brush strokes. The issue has to do with the solid ground you’re standing on, or rather, whether you are standing on any solid ground at all. It’s not that you don’t know what’s important to you; but it looks more like you’re wondering whether anything is important to you. I would go so far as to say you’re questioning whether you have a value in the world. The good thing about asking that question rather than avoiding it is that you will get an answer.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Your charts tell me this is an odd time in your life, a time when any concept of who you are is sitting in a vacuum packed jar. It’s in there, but you cannot get it. At night, you may think you can detect its scent coming through the glass. If you allow your dream body to get up and look inside that bottle, you will be able to see a story unfolding. You’re looking for something from your past. Something, or is it yourself? Yes, you’re looking for a long-ago left-behind idea of who you are, and who you wanted to be by this time in your life. You may think your secret is safer inside that jar, but in truth it needs to be exposed to light, water, earth and air in order to grow.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You need to stand up to your friends, whatever they may think, and no matter how high their opinion is of themselves. I also suggest you beware of anyone making indirect statements or attempting to move sideways through their version of the truth. You may not be able to initiate a straight-up conversation, and listening to what they say may reveal as much about your inner reality as it does about theirs. I am just suggesting that you be in contact with your environment, and recognize that there appear to be a diversity of agendas at work. In this atmosphere it is crucial that you be in touch with your own agenda: your motives, your needs, your desires and how you plan to get them fulfilled, because clearly, you do.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You need to proceed, despite some factor that’s telling you it might be difficult, or that you might fail in your effort. There is so much momentum carrying you forward that you can take advantage of that, but making sure that you apply enough awareness to know that you have this doubt or question in the background. I suggest you use it as a factor that helps you to gather strength, determination and most of all, awareness of your goals as an expression of who you are, at your roots. There is one other thing — remembering old, crucial and perhaps abandoned goals; at the same time you put them into the context of your current existence. Remember that everything has meaning, but only in context, and for you this is especially true right now.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Question your ethics, and then answer the question. If you drag out this discussion you’re missing the point. The idea is to get to the point. One thing to bear in mind is that just because you are right does not mean that someone else is wrong. I could see you potentially holding back on affirming your perceptions because they might somehow invalidate the perceptions of others. I will say this, not everyone understands ethics. And the problem with people who don’t understand ethics is that they either lack the concept entirely, having replaced it with something more important (such as “success”) or they define it in a way that you would consider twisted. And if you see it as such, than it most likely is. And, notably, that does not make you wrong.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Does someone want something from you, do they want to give something to you, or do they want an exchange? Look at the facts; or rather, both sets of facts. When you add them up independently, do they come out to the same thing? Here is a harder question: to what extent are you using the transaction to validate yourself? I think this is the deeper issue. It would be helpful if you sized up the situation from the standpoint of needing validation in the context of a relationship. On one level it may seem about sexual validation, but to me it looks like you are seeking evidence for the existence of your soul. You can do this with the help of another person, but it’s easier outside that context.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You are about to make a discovery in a relationship, and it’s likely to change the way you see things. The discovery may involve your own intention, and it may involve someone else’s intention. Here is the danger. It’s usually dangerous to try to make sense of another person’s intentions because it always involves a projection. Also, there is a continuing discovery process in motion, and no matter how vivid your perceptions may seem today, there is something in motion, indeed, the very experience of meaning itself is in motion. Therefore it would be better to suspend your judgment about what anyone thinks or knows and allow the miracle of perspective to show you that from several other viewpoints over the next month or so. Beware of false simplicity.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and Libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Meaning is only meaningful in context. Change the context, and the meaning changes. Therefore I suggest you look at the context of what is occurring. The actions of someone you love might be construed as self-centered and vain in one context, and as healing, investigatory and honest in another. If you are tending to view them as a negative phenomenon, then shift the context and look at them within that framework. The discovery you make over the next few days has the potential to speed you on your healing process; it has the ability to open your eyes about what another person is experiencing; and the two can be seen as part of the same thing. For your part, there comes a time when you have to focus on yourself in a way that you may have been told is wrong, and this may be the thing you’re questioning.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
I believe that the reason most people avoid actual creative process and sex for exploration is because they feel guilty about being self-centered. This is a ruse, concealing the extent to which our culture is based on narcissism as a fundamental religious principle. We live, breathe and lie another mixed message, which is that sex is evil or untrustworthy, but in order to be valid, something must be sexualized. This split carries through to many aspects of our lives now, and it’s up for discussion in your life. You more than most know that sex is how each of us is called into existence, so any struggle or mixed message with sex is really a mixed message about the fact that we live and breathe. That’s about being a self, and if you start from there, it’s actually possible to relate to others.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
If you felt like some of the attention had been taken off of you recently, I suspect you’re either back in the spotlight, or are about to be. You may, however, be wondering whether you’re getting attention for the ‘wrong’ reasons, or there is someone in your life telling you this. I don’t think their opinion matters as much as you think, and I think that as long as you’re questioning your motives long enough to get an answer, your own opinion matters more. Remember, what you’re doing is not about you, it’s about the values you hold; and those values go beyond you. They are something you share with many people. You are coming through a long stretch of not being sure about what you espouse, and not being sure there is a larger connection. As the days and weeks of this season go by, your doubt will clear like mist.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You seem to be alternating between identifying with being all right and all wrong. Think of it like waking up from a morning dream. The logic of the dream seems impeccable, even though it sounds ridiculous to state it out loud. The other identity you were seems completely convincing, but it exists only in the context of an alternate reality. What I see you doing is trying to integrate two different sets of concerns, or to align two seemingly conflicting identities. I can tell you this. One of them is based on an exaggeration: it could be of childhood conditions, or a personal flaw; and it would make sense to put that in context. The second is based on denying something about yourself, and you’re just beginning to get an idea of what you were pretending did not exist. Clearly, it does.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
There is a recession, and there is a global crisis of self-esteem. The economy is depressed, and hundreds of millions of Westerners are walking around on anti-depressants. There is a connection between our self-worth and our economic worth; between how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about life. You can magnify this phenomenon to any degree you like; you can shrink it down and put it on a microscope slide. You can see, feel and work with this connection now. You have your doubts, and you need to listen to those doubts, rather than letting them stop you. Your doubts contain information, and if you will, acknowledge it, and work with it. The key to feeling good about who you are isn’t about having no doubts, it’s about how you process them. Prosperity takes a similar course: you must know your flaws, trust your talents and work consciously with both.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.