Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly for Nov. 16, 2012
Remember that sex is an experiment. It’s also an interesting morph of expressive, relational and introspective. It’s not always easy to get your partner onto this page, or to find someone who is — and it’s easy enough for you to forget. Yet right now this experiment is calling you in a profound way. It’s as if your fantasies are aching for exploration and expression, yet you are wavering in your balance between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ focus. This may manifest as questions about what you will and will not say — about what you want, need and want to do. I recognize the potential delicacy of this situation, and the edge you may be perched on. What I suggest is this: get clear with yourself in words, over a series of days. Describe to yourself what you want, preferably in writing or recorded, that is, in a form you can retrieve. Then take the leap and share it with someone you trust. This may or may not be the person you would prefer to explore with; the first step is to transcend your inhibition about sharing. If you notice fear or shame, work with these things consciously, and tap the erotic energy they contain.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
SO MUCH HAPPENS in astrology that it may seem impossible to keep up with. That’s what astrologers are good for, if you find any you can trust. And that’s one reason I’ve established Planet Waves as a place you can get many points of view. This week is the first of three conjunctions of Venus and Jupiter, and it’s also the Capricorn Full Moon.
You will get a number of different perspectives on those events, by me and by other astrologers; in writing, in audio format, and in video format. That’s pretty cool, or rather, it’s warm — what you’re really getting is the caring and aware contact of people who share what they’ve learned in many long years of study and practice of astrology.
VPhoto: Jason Ahrns, Source: Flickr Title: Jupiter and Venus.
Planet Waves is currently running a membership drive. We are a membership project, one that is sponsored by our readers, a little like NPR or PBS but without any corporate, foundation or advertising sponsorship. Like any other media, we have costs associated with doing our job responsibly. True, they are modest costs, though it does add up. That’s where you come in.
Because we offer so much content for no charge, it’s easy to overlook that we depend on your support, which means your business, not only to keep Planet Waves on the air — but to maintain our active experiment, our ongoing exploration of new territory and new ideas. That’s the thing — to be effective or even interesting, astrology must always plunge forward, treating each day as the new event in the universe that it is.
You depend on us. We are depending on you. Those of you who are training in healing and awareness understand the importance of an energy exchange. Here’s your opportunity. If you want to get involved, there are two things you can do. One is to become a Core Community member (there are several options how to do that). The other is to take a look at our catalog of offerings, which includes some excellent astrology readings and four different classes for those with a deeper interest in astrology. Additional options are below.
When I stumbled upon Planet Waves sometime in 2010 I realized I had essentially found my soul mate in a website. The fact that I could find intelligent, honest, sensitive and shrewd writing that covered current events (the ones that truly matter and that are often ignored), sex and relationships, and politics all ensconced in the astrological paradigm was kind of like a wet dream come true.
Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day
Since then, I’ve set out to follow my passion: healing myself and helping others to heal themselves through what I fondly refer to as “practical woo.” The gratitude and sense of incredible fortune I feel to be able to follow this path cannot be understated.
I also feel a great deal of frustration at how difficult it can be to be of service in this way, although I am careful not to sink into bitterness. There are times when it seems like our cultural infrastructures are not only impossible to work with when trying to establish oneself in a business model using a modality that is outside the norm, but that they are somehow actually trying to prevent it.
I feel quite strongly that apprenticeship and community work are important to the growth of a healer/therapist/social-service type. It’s an integral part of learning the craft as well as contributing to community. I struggled at first to ask for money for astrology readings and coaching services, and was reminded time and again that the exchange of value is an important part of spiritual services — and that that container is worth having, and that being compensated for it is necessary.
I worked through those blockages pretty quickly, but also felt the need to keep my services accessible to people who exist outside of the normal demographic that can afford something like an astrology reading. There is such value in astrology and I’m hard-pressed to contribute to a society where that knowledge is locked up in the middle and upper classes, especially as I increasingly find myself to be part of the lower class.
Just recently I reached out for help from a practitioner whose work I value greatly and learned that they could not see me because they did not have room for sliding scale clients. On the one hand I understand the business model, but on the other hand it’s frustrating to feel that desire for assistance, reach out for help, and know that you can’t have it because someone else can pay more. Ah well, these are the experiences that help us learn how to heal ourselves, right?
Balancing the desire to be of service and the desire to afford life can be tricky at times. Finding Planet Waves has not only provided me with an incomparable resource for growth and knowledge, it has helped me to understand the Art of Service, which very much has to do with finding that balance. Knowing that what goes on in these pages is accessible — memberships come at a variety of accessible and reasonable prices — is hugely important to me. Ensuring that the website remains sustainable is also hugely important to me.
I am consistently humbled by the dedication, loyalty and passion that flows through these pages — and how much I’ve come to rely on this forum for a dose of reality and a sense of stability and sanity in a world that feels increasingly chaotic and insane. Being able to participate in the form of a weekly offering is an honor and also brings me in close contact with the incredible effort it takes to keep this community going.
In the interest of full disclosure, it is perhaps important to note that my contributions here are part of my community work and are not monetarily compensated. But the value I receive from participating is huge, and as I say in this space so frequently — I truly believe that claiming responsibility for the wellbeing of our communities is vital to shifting our paradigm into something that supports life.
The kind of service provided by the folks at Planet Waves is truly an art form and one that tends to be undervalued in the ways that can keep it sustainable. So, if you’re able and haven’t done so already, please do consider one of the membership options here. In the true ethos of accessibility, Eric’s fantastic team is willing to work with you if you need the monthly fee to be lowered a bit, once again showing that the priority here is, in fact, service — but we all need to claim membership in order to keep it viable.
Planet Waves — the Art of Service. Digital Illustration by Lizanne Webb.
Note to readers: This full Planet Waves issue is open to all visitors this week. It contains your extended monthly horoscopes for July, as well as links that can help you get friends involved with Planet Waves.
Dear Friend and Reader:
This week, timed with the solstice and Mars entering Cancer, we are launching a membership and fundraising drive for Planet Waves. All of our work here is sponsored exclusively by you, our readers. For many reasons we remain free from corporate sponsorship and outside advertising.
We create the work that we offer to you and the world — Planet Waves newsletters and horoscopes, our daily magazine with many writers and artists, its diversity of topics and professional editing, the annual edition with written and audio readings, Planet Waves FM and Planet Waves TV, my classes and birthday readings — all with only you as our sponsor.
Planet Waves is not a blog. We are a web-based publishing community doing something genuinely creative with astrology, and with art, and many other modes of writing — all with the message: this is your moment to live your life.
My goal with this letter is to get you so psyched that you want to subscribe, and if you’re already on board, to make a donation or give a gift subscription to a friend.
First I want to begin with a story. When Planet Waves set sail on the Internet in December 1998 — just a few months after Google launched its search engine — the Internet was a quieter, simpler place. There was a sense of mystery, potential and discovery. Every website offered some new curiosity to be explored.
Publishing anything — a picture, an article, a graphic — seemed daring and liberating. It was viscerally exciting to reach people in far-flung places, and to hear back from them.
Before you read this week’s tarot reading, which, itself, is about service, I wanted to speak a little to a phrase you might have encountered on Planet Waves if you’ve been visiting recently: the Art of Service.
Planet Waves is small enough to embody that most precious of experiences in this vast, often impersonal, place called the World Wide Web: community. It was community that drew me in when I visited some eight years ago; it was community that encouraged me to take part in many of the post discussions; it has been community that has helped me find and enjoy many friendships, online and off; and it is community today that feels critical when so much is telling us that we, individually and collectively, are not important, and that we have no voice.
We do. We all matter. Planet Waves matters in the lives of those, both vocal and silent, who come here to find meaning and a sense of place. That is community and the Art of Service in action.
Community supports us; and it continues to thrive in turn through the support of its members. We who write here could not do what we do without you — and I know that this relationship is reciprocal, as one who has come here, not knowing what to do, and finding the guidance I needed at just the right time.
So, please, consider taking out a membership if you haven’t already. If you have, then consider introducing someone else to a Planet Waves subscription. Community is dependent on its existing members, and also has the potential to expand its support base through the welcoming of new ones, their ideas and their contributions. The more we weave the web (Web), the greater the support available.
Today, left, centre, right: past, present, future. The Hermit, Five of Disks, Ace of Cups.
This is a chronological reading, telling you what is passed and forms the foundation to your reading this week; what you are currently experiencing; and what you are moving towards and into. It is an evolution, from self-contained and isolated seeking, to the radiation of what you have found in your inner Soul travels.
The Hermit, Five of Disks, Ace of Cups from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.
You don’t have to worry. Or — rather — feel free to acknowledge that there is something weighing upon you, and it is not the full story of your travels and travails.
It is leading you from something and to something. Your worry is the waypoint between two states, where you feel left, holding the world on your shoulders, with no apparent way forward. You feel held in place by something that is both so big that you cannot easily see it, and perhaps so consuming of your time and energy that the challenge is incumbent on you merely to stay upright through it all. You may feel you are not up to the task.
You are up to the task. More than that: this is the task. This is your work right now, a progression from a particular role that you took on some time ago — one where you committed yourself to the practice of a skill of how to be in the world. Whether a formal commitment or one that may have felt thrust on you by circumstances, Disks describe a tangible way of operating in the world. Think back to a moment where these words may have come to you, either consciously or just beyond the level of everyday perception:
“If not now, when? If not you, who?”
It’s an old ‘un, but a good ‘un. And, whether you know it or not, you are the embodiment of this in a specific form and expression.
As The Hermit, you were recently living in a mode of separation — from others, from the world. The Hermit is not the most uplifting of cards at times, especially if you are someone who relies on or feels more comfort in the company of others. Not that you were completely alone, all of the time. That’s not The Hermit — not most of the time, anyway. But what The Hermit is is that time of personal integration after the expansion of The Lovers, the forward motion it leads to (The Chariot), and the leonine ROARRRR! of the discovery of your animal instinct.
After this delving into the other and the erotic, it has been time to close the door on the outside world of distraction — and the potential to squander your new-found eros on pursuits that merely have you running in circles — and to take what you have been given, and use it. Own it. Be it. Live it. Dive under the surface and find the deeper gift — the one of service, both to yourself, others, and the divine.
As The Hermit, you have had the opportunity to become discipline, embodied. As The Hermit, you turn away from sexual power as distraction and learn about sexual power as the extraction of that elixir within that serves everyone and everything.
In psychological terms, you learn to sublimate: the act of channelling eros towards creativity — one that has its roots in a Will that is larger than your own will. This Will is unconcerned with individual wants and needs. This Will is the drive to become more fully yourself, and by doing this you hold the key to bringing something of value into the world.
The frustration inherent in this is that you may have little idea of the “what” and “why” of your specific role. Surrender to Will means surrender to a higher wisdom. Surrender to a higher wisdom means not always knowing what the process or the outcome will be. Surrender to the process means the surrender of the trappings that you thought were the final story in your animal-driven, instinctual experience of yourself as a sensual body in a sensual world.
After Lust, the laundry.
So, this burden that you feel you are carrying may indeed feel worrisome.
“Where is my support?”
“Why is this all starting to feel a little heavy?”
“Do I know what I’m doing?”
“Am I able to find balance at a time where it seems others, or my faculties, have deserted me?”
But through this, you are finding and refining an equilibrium in the physical world.
Think of it this way, intrepid traveller: when you learn new skills, you also bring in the opportunities to try them out. As a unicycle juggler (you, the figure in the Five of Disks), you got your three-ball routine down pat … and now the clown on the sidelines has just thrown you a couple of new balls. Whoa! Wobble, wobble! Back-and-forward on that unicycle you dance, the wheel searching for that midpoint that will bring you fully upright again.
It is nothing you didn’t ask for. It is nothing that wasn’t asked from you.
Keep going. You’re in that ring. You might feel alone, but there are others around you, witnessing your work. Yours is a performance that is part of a greater performance. What you are holding is not the final point of it all, but it gets you there: to the moment when you know why it was that you are doing what you are doing. And the paradox of that moment is that, then, the juggling act will no longer be necessary.
Because what you are moving into is connection. The Ace of Cups. Pure and simple. The point is not to complete your task; the point is to connect through its endeavour.
Your juggling is simply the doorway to the Ace. It is the tangible method through which you begin to feel what balance is. You lock into what lies at the Heart of you. You re-member. The three-ring circus disappears. There is no separation between you, those around you, and the roles that each of you have assumed.
You throw the balls into the air in a round of riotous applause, your arms spread open. It is then that you understand that you’ve never needed anyone’s applause. The joy of who you are is its own ecstatic reward.
“I stand in golden rays radiantly
I burn a fire of love over and over
Reflecting endless light relentlessly
I have embraced the flame forever and ever.”
Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Hermit (Virgo), Five of Disks (Mercury in Taurus), Ace of Cups (the purest, infinite potential of water)
If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.
Today’s Oracle takes us to the Aries monthly for Jun. 24, 2008
I suggest you direct your energy and aggression toward feathering your nest. Such is not the pinnacle of human civilization, but in a sense it is the foundation of it. For the next couple of weeks, you may feel like you’re banging your head against a wall where work-related projects are concerned; you may be up against all of your limits; and there may be someone driving you to the edge of your patience, and you may have got the idea from somewhere that it’s your job to fix them. In the alternate, you may decide it’s your job to fix yourself. Growth, however, consists of more than mental or mechanical tinkering, and in a fairly short time you’re likely to have decided that so much you thought was wrong is simply well enough. Perfection for you is now a matter of easing back rather than driving forward. You clearly want a sense of belonging, of safety, of an environment that can support you; but the way to be there is to receive and accept, rather than to conquer and be aggressive. This is a fancy way of saying despite the many pressures you are under, take it easy.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
This has been quite a week, starting off with Obama getting his Fast Track and ending with a double whammy of Supreme Court decisions favoring people over politics. This is also the week my computer died, so I’m pecking this out with one finger on my little tablet, a severe strain to my patience and good humor, but I didn’t want to miss sharing this moment of celebration and gratitude with my Planet Waves family.
As we explore the Art of Service in our lives and this online community, it’s clear that the ability to gather together in like mind and heartfelt, authentic communication serves not just ourselves, but all of humanity. Nothing illustrates that so well as does the sea change in marriage equality which could simply no longer be denied.
Planet Waves is one of those spots on the cyber-map that is truly egalitarian regarding sexual, religious and political practice, so long as it is not harmful. If you can’t find a comfortable place at this table it would only be because you can’t open your arms wide enough. And even discomfort serves — some would say especially discomfort — so all of the cousins are invited to this picnic.
While some might say we lean far to the left in our worldview, Eric once wrote a marvelous piece regarding our shared conservatism and intent to protect and conserve history and science, environmental resources and species, Constitutional guarantees and civic protections as well as freedoms of speech and dissent. We are more like than we will admit.
And if liberty and justice for all is our national template, then we can’t rest until it is true for every citizen. Which is why, today — with some 6 + million fellow citizens still guaranteed healthcare coverage and our LGBT brothers and sisters free to enjoy the legal protections of marriage in all fifty states — we can pat one another on the back and hug everyone we see (at least the ones with a smile on their face) knowing that we’ve added our bit of conviction and intent to a game-changing progressive human victory. With so many saying it couldn’t be done, Hundredth Monkey won the day.
Over the years, I’ve assured friends and readers that marriage equality was coming soon and –although I’m no longer a big fan of the institution — I’m delighted my intuition proved sound. I’ve also signed off many Planet Waves articles with the meme of the day, love wins, and it’s reassuring to hear it echo across the nation, although my reference was more to the full-spectrum of ‘agape’ love as all-inclusive and unconditional.
That is such a HUGE concept, so empowering and Light-filled, I find that the continuing challenges we face as a nation and a planet take on a slightly different feel, at least for the moment. Our winning tactic for facing these restrictive challenges must continue to be our ability To keep on keeping on, always believing that what must be will be, so long as love leads the way.
And so, fingers cramping and battery running low, I invite you to bask in that feeling of overcoming great odds, and ‘bookmark’ it so you can return whenever you need a lift. Nothing builds enthusiasm and determination like success.
To my loved ones whose marriages are now legal everywhere, to my friends who now have dependable medical coverage for the first time and to my Planet Waves family, with whom I share the pleasure of this moment, allow me to sign off one more time, united with each of you in service to one another and a waiting world: LOVE WINS! Amen and amen!
Today’s Oracle takes us to the Sagittarius weekly for Aug. 13, 1999
Modern “spirituality” has placed its focus, rather obsessively, on “healing.” As the decades of the culturally-accepted, buy-the-book desire for enlightenment have proceeded, the focus has largely remained on getting well and feeling good, which are good starts but only go so far. As a Sagittarian (Sun, Moon or rising sign) you are very likely blessed with eternal optimism, so such processes do relatively little for you. What we’re now facing in the consciousness movement is the necessity for vision, and for the warrior spirit that will make that vision real. You, in particular, are headed for a brilliant few years on this path, starting right now.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
