Tag Archives: Occupy movement

The Way Forward

Dear Friend and Reader:

Rarely has the Earth felt like such a dangerous place, on the constant brink of crisis and chaos. I don’t know anyone who is not working the edge in some way, trying to keep a grip or make sense of their lives. Many are feeling pushed to one limit or another, and there is the sense of time being vacuumed out of some hidden opening. Over the past week, I’ve heard an unusual number of stories of personal losses (parents, partners), relationships being rearranged and individuals going through changes on the level of what one astrologer said felt like her DNA getting a makeover.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta speaks at the ceremony to mark the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq at the airport in Baghdad, Dec. 15, 2011. DOD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.

The world is indeed in crisis, and it’s taking us with it — though we have many distractions from noticing, and the excuse that we cannot do anything about it. But let’s take a quick look around. I heard on Thursday that 97 million Americans are at or close to poverty. The euro and numerous European banks are on the brink of default, which if they collapsed would ripple through the United States economy like a tsunami. American and British banks were recapitalized after the meltdown of 2008; the European banks were not, and they are still sitting on tons of bad paper.

It seems like we’re suddenly being confronted by every global crisis at once, as if we’re just discovering they existed. Fukushima and the BP oil spill are still happening — neither crisis is actually under control, they’ve just been ‘forgotten’. I’ve read many reports of new undersea leaks from the BP site, and radioactive water from Fukushima is still flowing into the Pacific Ocean. We still have no real idea how much of that stuff is ending up in our food, but we know we live in a time when it’s more convenient not to check; when most people would rather not know.

One bit of good news is that the Iraq war is ending. Thursday at 1:48 pm Baghdad time, the flag of the American forces was lowered in a symbolic gesture of the nearly nine-year occupation ending. The troops may be coming home, but more than 16,000 contractors will stay there, protecting the United States’ largest embassy. We’re being told we won the war, but Leon Panetta, the defense secretary, made his victory speech Thursday, telling us how fantastic things are going in the new, free Iraq, from the airport in Baghdad. The airport? Not the halls of parliament, or the president’s office?

Why do you think that was? I’m thinking it was the only place they could actually secure, and get him out fast enough so his life would not be in danger. And as for winning: at what cost? Okay — Saddam Hussein is gone. Yet think of the millions of lives lost or displaced; the families shattered; nearly a trillion dollars spent (before interest); and the war being used as a recruitment pretext for jihadists; the occupation leaving Iraq crushed and susceptible to invasion from Iran and Turkey.

George W. Bush delivering his infamous “mission accomplished” speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln as it steamed toward San Diego on May 1, 2003. The White House helped create the banner. The war raged on for eight additional years and cost the lives of 4,500 American troops (not counting the epidemic of suicides) and more than 104,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths (the real number is much higher).

Remember the lies that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 incident, the nonexistent yellowcake uranium, Condi Rice promising a mushroom cloud if we didn’t take action?

Remember the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the use of banned weapons in many battles, the entire country, and its population, and our troops, contaminated with depleted uranium and the tens of thousands of troops coming home with brain trauma and PTSD? Coming home to no jobs and struggling families, in many cases with homes under foreclosure.

All of this was done in the name of freedom, of protecting our way of life, of making the world safe for democracy, even as the civil rights of Americans were stripped away in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 incident. And now this very week, Congress is set to pass the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which Pres. Obama says he will sign. Have you heard about this one? The law that will allow for the indefinite ‘detainment’ of American citizens, on American soil, for the mere suspicion of terrorism or association with terrorist groups?

But wait: what terrorism?

Last week we discussed the pepper spraying of student protesters at U.C. Davis. This chemical weapon has been repeatedly used on Occupy Wall Street protesters in cities across the United States. More than 5,000 Occupy protesters have been arrested for speaking up about an economic issue — the criminal conduct of the banks, and the purchasing of the American political system. It is in this context that the National Defense Authorization Act is rather frightening.

So the government is talking about terrorism but taking action against ordinary activism, and that should make anyone a little nervous. Then Congress and the president want to expand their powers to detain people without charges. As The Guardian put it, “The law, contained in the defense authorization bill that funds the U.S. military, effectively extends the battlefield in the ‘war on terror’ to the U.S. and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.”

Selling out our national soul: This photo of an Iraqi prisoner being tortured by American forces (hooded, forced to stand on a box, with electrodes on his hands) was seen by everyone with access to a newspaper or computer. But who exactly objected? To this day, politicians and presidential candidates argue that torture is appropriate and necessary. By what miracle do we think that same treatment of prisoners will not be turned loose on the American people?

Please — read that paragraph a second time. Any American on American soil could be considered an enemy combatant and detained indefinitely, in defiance of every constitutional principle we say we hold dear; the ‘freedom’ for which we supposedly went to war for 10 years. It would be one thing if domestic terrorism were going on all the time, but I only hear about the most ridiculous cases, not enough to justify turning the whole country into Guantanamo Bay. Does this sound a little (or a lot) like the American government declaring war on the American people?

I don’t mean to sound like Alex Jones or like I’m a columnist for Above Top Secret, but being concerned about this is not paranoia. We are watching the American people get sprayed with chemical weapons for exercising their constitutional right to protest, then hearing about how anyone could be presumed a terrorist without a trial.

Now, what exactly is a ‘terrorist’? Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told The Guardian Wednesday, “There are laws on the books now that characterize who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect, according to the Department of Justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist,” Paul said. “If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention?”

Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision to support the law “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the U.S. and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” They are correct: these powers have existed for a long time, beginning under Cheney and Bush. But following a fairly typical historical pattern, Republican presidents break the boundary and then Democratic presidents codify that breach of trust into the status quo.

Speaking of Obama, there is a presidential election next year. Let’s consider the political situation. First, bear in mind that many states have passed laws attempting to restrict voting, including placing nearly impossible to fulfill requirements on the elderly, students and the poor (these types of restrictions always impact Democrats more strongly than Republicans). Districts are being redrawn to get rid of ‘problem’ elected officials or to favor one party or the other — Barney Frank, regarded by many as one of the most progressive people in congress, has had his Massachusetts district taken away by gerrymandering.

Is this what democracy looks like? You have to stand back a little further to tell for sure. Photo: HuffPo.

Just a few more points and I’ll end my pessimistic-seeming rant.

Have you been following the ongoing fight for the Republican presidential candidacy? I have not been giving it the coverage it deserves, but this has been the parade that includes Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain — people who don’t know the voting age, who believe being gay can be cured, who cannot name one Supreme Court decision or the newly appointed justices, who don’t know the date of Election Day and who want to shut down federal agencies they cannot name.

We’ve seen debates where the crowd cheered for executions and applauded the possibility that someone without health insurance might deserve to die. It was like the crowd was hand picked from a pool of people reincarnated directly from ancient Rome.

Some of these candidates displayed ignorance that made Dan Quayle look like Socrates. As The Onion said of former candidate Herman Cain, “Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn’t Know China Has Nuclear Weapons.” Well, not just an extramarital affair — Cain broke the record for the most revelations of sexual harassment in one week, then it emerged that meanwhile he was having a 13-year affair behind the back of his wife, who we’re supposed to believe holds him as a prince. And that is correct — he could not identify China as one of the world’s nuclear superpowers, and he has no taste for foreign policy.

The reason these candidates don’t seem to stand for anything is because they don’t. The reason they have to make curing gayness an issue is because all of the real issues are too difficult, or will get them in trouble if they mention them. These candidates and anyone who takes them seriously are posturing in the midst of a global crisis, trying either to hold up the status quo that enriches them, or not admitting the collective problem we face. And, it would seem that the Republicans are about to name Newt Gingrich, one of the most corrupt politicians of the past century, who will say whatever he is paid to say, as their presidential candidate.

If the economy is still struggling at the time of the election, or if there is some big shock to the system (such as another round of major banks failing), he could easily be president, despite all the supposed odds against such a thing happening. Frankly, given how little people seem to know and how much they will put up with, nothing would surprise me.

Yesterday the federal government was on the brink of yet another shutdown as senators debated the urgent national issue of mandatory drug tests for the unemployed. Personally, I’d love to run blood work on our esteemed congress and find out what they’ve got going on. It would be frightening.

Which Way From Here?

So what is the way forward?

I know, we’re in a pretty serious situation. I’ve read a bit of science fiction, and I have to say of the confluence of conditions we face — from the overcrowding of the planet, the prevailing state of ethical vertigo, the environmental and economic crisis, rampant debt, fraudulent business and political leadership, a political system wholly owned by the wealthy, the rise of a police state, half of all people getting cancer, many, many people suffering from depression and alienation — and a mass media that laughs at the problems — damn, this is on par with the most dystopian scenarios I’ve ever read.

Cover of Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

True, in Hyperion, the hegemony crashes a small back hole into the Earth, intentionally destroying the planet because it favors their business interests. I am still haunted by Dan Simmons’ visions of ‘replica worlds’ that are like ghost-town clones of what once was our beautiful planet. I guess it could be worse. But we’re not living in a fictional scenario. We are living on a planet and in a society spinning out of control, that we are leaving to our children, and their children.

A lot of people are wondering what we can do about this, or at least wondering what is going to happen. We always tend to look outside ourselves for the solutions; that’s a big part of the problem. We’re told over and over again that we don’t matter, and we better play the game. One problem is that game no longer works — not when someone goes to college or grad school, accumulates vast education debt and then cannot get a job. Speaking for a moment to Americans — the whole purpose of the American experiment was to get away from the old system of kings, lords and serfs. If you haven’t read the Declaration of Independence, take 15 minutes and give it a look. Remember that the “long train of abuses” was fresh in the minds of the founders when they adopted the Bill of Rights.

The solution has got to start with you focusing your awareness and your energy — even if you think that doesn’t make a difference to the big picture. I recognize that being alive in a time like this is scary, and it can seem hopeless, especially when you have so many other concerns. The thing is, it actually is hopeless — and hope is not the answer. You may need to give yourself a reason to care. That reason may be your children. It may be realizing how close you are to becoming one of the 97 million Americans, or the equivalent in other countries — or you may already be there and you know it can get worse. Those are deeply personal reasons to care that still don’t get you above the teacup’s edge to see that we need a collective solution to a collective problem.

The point is, there will be no progress without a lot of individuals focusing and working together. What gets in the way of our own awareness is specifically denial and ignorance, both of which are voluntary states. And those are the very states of mind that got us into this mess. I could make a long, depressing list of things that people did not care about when it mattered, including stolen presidential elections, fraudulent wars and the biggest bank heist in the history of the world (the 2008 ‘meltdown’ which was really a draining of what remained in the federal treasury by the super rich). If you voted for the Cheney/Bush ticket in 2004, have you apologized to anyone?

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has earned his billions through the distribution of news, but he has arrested dozens of working journalists trying to cover the Occupy movement. Many of these reporters were accredited by the New York City Police, representing organizations such as The New York Post and the Associated Press. Here Mayor Bloomberg visits Zuccotti Park before uprooting that demonstration. Image via the gothamist and DJ Unicorn Thunderhearts.

Maybe the concept of civil liberties doesn’t matter to you — or perhaps it won’t until one night you go out for milk and end up in a police car for being out past curfew.

Let’s phrase the question this way: What would you be willing to do, if you knew your awareness and participation mattered? Let’s assume that particular best-case scenario. What would you offer? What would you be willing to give up, to create something better for everyone else?

Let’s put it another way. What if you were to set aside all of your excuses for not getting involved, or being informed? Then what would you do?

The purpose of my writing, and I assume the purpose of your reading, is to see the affairs of the world in a way that is deeply personal, and where the framework is in essence spiritual. The lowest common denominator of all these seemingly separate problems is a spiritual issue: what they all have in common involves a lot of individuals cut off from source, who create a situation where the easiest way to get out of pain seems to be to cut off some more. Apply the concept ‘cut off’ any way you like.

Even if the whole spiritual thing doesn’t work for you, I suggest you consider the psychological impact of suppressing the grief, or even the mere awareness, at what you’re witnessing. Not participating and not speaking up are specifically ways of denying the problem. Taking this on the micro-level, one question I would ask you is, when you’re confronted by injustice and you don’t say anything, how do you feel? And when you encounter something that’s wrong and you speak up, how do you feel in that case? Early attempts to challenge authority can be met with a psychological backlash — usually arriving in the form of guilt. We are indeed taught to expect punishment when we challenge those who supposedly hold power over us.

One thing that the Occupy movement has taught us is that when there is any resistance against the machine, it can strike back with brutal force, and reveal its true nature — you know, the nature of the beast. We actually keep seeing this happen. That is scary, and fear is both a psychological problem and a spiritual problem. How you perceive the world is how you perceive yourself. In order to perceive yourself as capable of healing, growth and expressing your potential, you would have to project the same properties onto the world, unless of course you plan to join the cannibalistic feast.

So if you have any plans for creating a better life for yourself, if that’s really going to be true, it’s going to involve creating a better world for everyone. Not fixing your life or fixing the world — rather, creating the next phase of existence. As the astrology of 2012 fully engages, and pushes the crises we’re seeing to a new level, it’s also going to push your potential to a new level. And you may find yourself walking a balance where you feel you don’t know the outcome.

There is a way forward. It’s going to be different for everyone but what works for each of us will have something in common with what works for everyone else. That’s the point of contact; how to tell what is real from what is not.

Lovingly,

Note to Readers: For the next two weeks, Planet Waves subscriber edition will publish only on Wednesday nights. These editions will include the monthly horoscopes for January 2011 and related materials. Daily Astrology & Adventure will continue to update on its regular schedule. Look for additional sign-up information about Revolution. Revelation. Reality Check. — my 2012 annual readings for all the signs, or visit this page about The Most Important Year of Your Life.

I’ve completed the third recording in the Top 5 Events of 2012 series on Planet Waves FM. This week’s covers planets entering the water signs: Chiron in Pisces, Neptune in Pisces and Saturn in Scorpio. This is an unusual amount of energy in the water signs, which is — first — calling attention to water. The process actually began last year.

Photo by Elizabeth Joyce.

Chiron initiated this by arriving in Pisces within 24 hours of the BP oil spill in April of 2010. Neptune visited Pisces briefly in 2011, and will return to stay for more than 12 years in February 2012. Then Saturn arrives in Scorpio in Oct. 2012.

The themes focus on emotional awareness, healing and maturity, something that we tend to resist here in the land of Starbucks and Prozac. And we’re going to need to take care of the water on the planet: protecting the oceans, banning fracking and little things like making sure we drink enough water. Soda and juice do NOT count.

You can hear the whole series of Top Five Events of 2012 on a special archive. This series previews Revolution. Revelation. Reality Check. — the 2012 annual edition of Planet Waves, with detailed, generous astrology readings for all the signs and rising signs, plus many articles and resources to help you do your best in the most important year of your life.

Subscribers to Planet Waves receive an incredible discount on all 12 signs, which you can access at this link. For additional information about the 2012 annual, you can read more about The Most Important Year of Your Life.

The Moon is in Virgo all day Friday, and late tomorrow it squares the Sagittarius Sun to form the last quarter (waning) Moon. Moon ingresses Libra at 3:06 am EST Sunday. Also today Vesta conjuncts Neptune in Aquarius; Black Moon Lilith (a calculated point also known as the mean lunar apogee) enters Taurus. The asteroid Psyche in Virgo makes a square to Ixion, which is hanging out at the same degree as last weekend’s total lunar eclipse (18+ Sagittarius). On Sunday, Venus in Capricorn squares Saturn in Libra. Monday the Sun makes a conjunction to the Galactic Center in late Sagittarius, and a sextile to Saturn.

The last quarter Moon generally feels like an urge to finish up whatever projects you have been working on for the last three weeks, rather than starting new ones, in the last week before the New Moon. This year we have a New Moon on Christmas Eve. If you celebrate that holiday you may feel an extra sense of pressure to finalize gift-buying and other preparations, with a natural sense of completion when done. Since tomorrow’s quarter Moon is in Virgo, don’t be surprised if you find yourself a bit more particular than usual about how your holiday preparations and projects get done.

The Sun’s alignment with the Galactic Center (the core of our galaxy and our spiritual homing signal) on Monday offers a sense of contact with something we long for — if we’re open to feeling it. With the Sun making a sextile to Saturn in Libra at the same time, see if you can let this sense of contact and spiritual clarity or spaciousness infuse your relationships. This could happen in how you perceive these relationships emotionally, or in how you actually structure them. With a sextile, you can work the flow of energy from either side of that equation to inform and evolve the other. Either way, the idea is to allow contact and a feeling of surrender to genuine, loving kindness. Then by Wednesday the solstice can arrive with the feeling of time compression letting go, a destination reached.

Mars, the planet of drive, desire and libido, is in Virgo. It is nearing a square to Pholus in mid-Sagittarius, and we tend to feel Mars aspects strongly as they approach. Feel like if you let go of any inhibition, you’ll become the scarlet whore of Babylon? That’s Mars-Pholus talking — but is there any truth to that feeling? Pholus can have the sense of letting the genie out of the bottle, and has the key phrase, ‘small cause, big effect’. But rather than keeping your inhibitions rigid, it’s more useful to keep any self-critical thoughts in check — especially with regard to who and what you desire sexually, how you want the desire of others demonstrated to you, and how you do or do not allow the concept of ‘healthy service’ in your relationships.

Mars in Virgo square Pholus in Sagittarius can also come with insights about facilitating your own spiritual (possibly ancestral) healing around desire and exuality — plus the desire to do so. And it’s an advisory to notice the effects that alcohol has on your sexuality.

You may alternate between feeling constrained and then wanting to bust out over the weekend. The square between Venus in Capricorn and Saturn in Libra carries some tension. Part of this is a case of mutual reception: these two planets are occupying a sign that the other rules. This can sometimes feel like a hostage situation, and that term at least vaguely describes many ‘monogamous’ relationships where there is some sense of being captured.

On the one hand, you may feel an urge toward the material and pragmatic; on the other, there’s the potential to demand reciprocation as the rule rather than allow it as a freely given gift. Ask yourself, ‘Do I truly want relationships in which we both receive what is offered graciously? Or do I just want what I want’?

Holder Signals Tough Review of New State Laws on Voting

Austin, Texas — Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections.

Declaring in a speech that protecting ballot access for all eligible voters “must be viewed not only as a legal issue but as a moral imperative,” Mr. Holder urged Americans to “call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters.”

The speech by Mr. Holder could inflame a smoldering partisan dispute over race and ballot access as the 2012 campaign cycle intensifies. It comes as the Justice Department’s civil rights division is scrutinizing a series of new state voting laws that were enacted — largely by Republican officials — in the name of fighting fraud perpetuated by individual citizens that everyone knows doesn’t exist.

Gemini Total Eclipse and the Sibling Society

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Saturday’s total eclipse of the Moon is in Gemini — the sign of siblings, often associated with young people, young attitudes and easy-to-grasp ideas. Many factors suggest that this is a volatile moment, calling for discernment and embracing the faculty of conscious choice. [Note, this is the last eclipse before the series that leads into the Venus transit of the Sun and Uranus square Pluto in late spring 2012. I have covered that group in my newest special edition podcast.]

French student drums on the shield of a riot cop during a takeover of Bastille Circle during the evening rush hour in Paris one afternoon in 2005. This is my idea of the police exercising actual restraint. Nobody was arrested, nobody got hurt, and the protest was diffused in a few hours. The cop is probably thinking, “Now how can I slip her my phone number?” Photo by Eric Francis. More related photos here.

Part of the volatility involves the eclipse spanning the mutable sign axis of Gemini/Sagittarius; some of it comes from the polarizing effect of a Full Moon (all lunar eclipses happen during the Full Moon). Mutable signs can have a nervous and unstable feeling, which will often serve as a power source. When those properties are prominent, it helps to impart the structure and discipline factor of Saturn, which thankfully is in harmony with the eclipse in fellow air sign Libra.

Another aspect of the volatility comes from planets that are close to the Sun’s position in Sagittarius. I’ve been writing a blue streak about this since the fall of 2010 — a collection of newly-discovered, slow-moving planets that span the middle of high-energy, high-velocity Sagittarius. The combination of slow-movers and the fiery energy of Sagittarius is pushing us to get clear about what we believe, and to embrace both ‘spiritual’ lessons and the direct information coming through about our origins. By origins I mean from the distant past, whether ancestral or cosmic.

They are related. We are stardust, and we are the children of our ancestors. You might not be pondering this stuck in traffic on the 101 or running for the D train, but it’s thinking of you, and the pot is currently being stirred at full strength by both the presence of these new planets and the accompanying eclipse that is compelling us to get practical in our ideas about existence. Internalize the learning, the spiritual theory, the concept you’re trying to grasp in therapy. Understand that growth is something pragmatic rather than esoteric.

Be proud of what you are! This womens’ ADHD T-shirt contours to your shape and always looks flattering, even if you forget where you left it. (Use the link to purchase the shirt.)

Then, the eclipse is square Mars in Virgo. That’s focusing attention on getting real about two points — anger, and perfectionism. Mars is slowly stationing retrograde in Virgo, compelling us to come to terms with all the ways we want to change, and focusing a demand on impeccability. But this may be manifesting as perfectionism and that, in turn, may be coming across as the feeling of being damaged if you cannot get yourself to that theoretically perfect place. The two are closely related.

Remember, this is not about theory: these aspects all point to taking practical action. The Virgo piece of the puzzle comes with an asteroid conjunction that offers some caution. The points are Apollo conjunct Psyche. Apollo is the experience of making the same mistakes over and over; of not getting ‘the lesson’. Psyche is the sense that you’re wounded, as in mentally wounded, and won’t ever be able to ‘fix’ yourself. It’s the loss of faith in healing, particularly where psychological material is concerned. In our era we tend to take these feelings and diagnose them into disorders that can be treated with meds: social anxiety disorder, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, restless leg syndrome, and so on. That’s a way of compartmentalizing the situation, cutting it off rather than taking it on holistically. Instead of working through the many factors that contribute to a symptom, too often we give it a name and a drug — and many people are doing this to their children. Many of us had it done to us.

There are two other points in the Virgo mix, square the eclipse and close to Mars: an asteroid called Hebe, which often describes the codependent quality of the relationships involved; and Arachne, which imparts the sensation that this is all one vast conspiracy (ancestral in nature, that is, related to the family line and family of origin).

The ultimate in cynical politics, the Tea Party rallies outside an Obama visit to Portland, Maine. For all their sincere efforts, they will end up with Mr. Fraud himself, Newt Gingrich. Photo by Eric.

Alcohol is almost certainly involved. This may not involve current alcoholism but rather the legacy as it has been passed on through both the family and the social network that surrounds it. Remember being a kid at a ‘grownup’ party where all the adults did was drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes? That social ritual had an effect on you — and this eclipse is about figuring out, and healing, whatever that effect was. The emotional conditions around the abuse and even unconscious use of alcohol can be extremely debilitating in family relationships, creating isolation and deep distrust that can take decades (or generations) to finally unravel.

In the most basic colors, there is a petulant quality to this eclipse. It has the sensation of childhood rage, which would be rage against something much larger than oneself, and it’s combined with the sensation that the expression of anger is useless — but yet something that we cannot help. When that anger burns out, we’re often left with cynicism. That is the feeling of being burned out and defeated, with toxic, smoldering rage. This paralyzed sensation is not what you would call healthy — and if you’re feeling this eclipse you may be feeling a release point.

Enough is enough. It’s time to grow past this stuff and take command of our lives and our mental health in a tangible way. The eclipse square Mars is an action point. How long have you waited, or tried, or efforted? What is the one thing you’re not doing? What is the obvious factor, the obvious point of action that you’ve avoided for whatever reason?

The Davis Pepper Spray Incident and the Sibling Society

In a 1997 book, Robert Bly described what he called the sibling society, a world of half-formed adults who don’t want to take responsibility for their lives. This, he says, is the world we live in. We see it as the people who don’t want to pay taxes, who think someone else’s kids should fight the wars, and that someone else should stand up to the banks. Since The Sibling Society came out, the situation has only proliferated with the massive surge of infotainment that has come along with the Internet and lives lived mainly through apps and devices.

Iconic photo by Louise Macabitas of Lt. John Pike — a campus peace officer — casually spraying UC Davis students in the face with MK-9, an extra-strength oleoresin capsaicinoid (OC) weapon.

Saturday’s eclipse reminds me of his theory, in particular the relationship between the Moon in Gemini (siblings, children) opposite vast ancestral forces we cannot control (all those planets in Sagittarius) compounded by the square to Mars in Virgo. Add to this the frustrated ‘adult’ feeling of wanting to be perfect.

I remembered that book when a friend sent me the “what really happened” video of the Nov. 18 University of California at Davis pepper spray incident. This supposedly shows the context of what happened after riot police cleared a small Occupy protest off of a lawn at UC Davis. That is, instead of the short video of Lt. John Pike spraying the students, you see 15 minutes of video that led up to the actual spraying. Of course, this is not the full context. That goes back weeks, or even months; you’re never shown a single tent, for example. What you see is an out-of-context fuss, over what, you’re not sure unless you know.

Then, you’re treated to the scene of an officer in full riot gear, backed by about 30 of his colleagues (those visible in the frame), stating into a megaphone, “This is your last warning. Should you choose to remain, you do so with the understanding that a peace officer will place you under arrest for a violation of the law. Any resistance, whether passive or physical, shall result in additional charges. You shall be arrested, handcuffed and may be transported and incarcerated at the Yolo County Jail. Will you leave at this time?” The cop then barks into his megaphone something about “unlawful assembly.” He does not mention the potential use of chemical weapons.

Career Day with Lt. John Pike, one of countless parodies of Macabitas’ photo circulating on the Internet.

After the tents are cleared and some arrests are made, you see the young students with their book bags and preppy attire, circling about a group of heavily armed riot police, chanting “set them free.” Some of them sit down on a campus walk; these are the students who are sprayed at point-blank range with MK-9, an extra-strength oleoresin capsaicinoid (OC) weapon.

A lot has been said about this incident, which in the eyes of most people amounts not just to excessive force by the police, but to torture. When we tacitly (or directly) approve of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, we are inviting the same thing in our own communities. Is that obvious yet?

Meanwhile, local police departments have been militarized against terrorists, and in the absence of terrorists, any dissenter will do. I don’t say this lightly. One of the reasons conservatism has become so popular in recent years is that it’s a safe point of view to hold. There is a long tradition in the United States of treating anyone whose views are one inch left of center as a subversive or threat.

California is not new to the issue of police abusing chemical weapons, however. Given what it’s cost them in the past, you would think they might exercise a little restraint, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Use of pepper spray has been litigated up to the U.S. Supreme Court, in a famous case involving eight people who were protesting the killing of redwoods, and who were both sprayed point blank and had the chemical applied to their eyes by police using Q-tips. The protestors sued the police, and the litigation went on for years.

In that case, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the police officers’ “repeated use of pepper spray was also clearly unreasonable. As we recently concluded, the use of pepper spray ‘may be reasonable as a general policy to bring an arrestee under control, but in a situation in which an arrestee surrenders and is rendered helpless, any reasonable officer would know that a continued use of the weapon or a refusal without cause to alleviate its harmful effects constitutes excessive force’.” [Read the full decision here.]

Wake Up, Empire.

The “what really happened” video is an attempt to show how reasonable and restrained the police really were, because the kids were chanting and, for a few moments, had formed a one-person-deep ring around the cops. To my eyes, the video is an attempt to vindicate the sadistic behavior, in effect saying it was the fault of the students. One ex-FBI agent, the parent of a UC Davis student, wrote on a discussion list, “After viewing the entire video, I believe that the police acted with great restraint. I can only guess how the NYPD or the LAPD would have reacted to being surrounded by a hostile crowd demanding that they release their prisoners.”

Realistically, this “hostile crowd” consisting entirely of young students reminds me a lot more of the audience on the kids’ TV program Wonderama than an anarchist riot or even an ordinary student demonstration. And it started as a bunch of students living in tents on a lawn, protesting the demolition of the economy by a few banks and a few individuals who have profited from the losses of many, many people. That’s my view; I’ll leave it to you to decide if the police with their batons, helmets, sidearms, rifles, tear gas, Tasers, bulletproof vests, pocket knives and practically unlimited backup available, were justified in feeling threatened when confronted by unarmed kids dressed in clothes from The Gap chanting “set them free.”

Okay, now for the consciousness piece — the spiritual piece of the discussion. Let’s go deeper than the apparent circumstances to the underlying levels of causation. My take — as a matter of conscience — is that police are never justified in using weapons against unarmed people, and we have become a country way too willing to accept the use of violence by police on anyone who dissents. On a campus, in particular, I believe that the administration is morally bound to avoid hurting students by the legal doctrine In Loco Parentis, or “local parents.” This is one reason why campuses have their own police departments; the cops get to know the campus community and we have a truly local police force. It’s a great idea and usually it works pretty well.

But clearly something went wrong at Davis. A friend named Eric Traub offered another point of view that I’ve been considering carefully, and I will share it with you. Here is what he wrote (note, it’s a long quote, going to the end of the article):

Lt. John Pike, about to be surrounded by little blue people whose language only has one word, defends himself before something really bad happens. Apologies to Pierre Culliford and Papa Smurf.

“In Loco Parentis is exactly the takeaway I glean from the Davis video, in this way: human beings are still a childlike and developing young species. Whoever steps forward as a ‘parent’ tends to dominate. We are only now just beginning to emerge from the patriarchal paradigm that has dominated the past dozens of millennia of societal progress. Humans being human will, for the time being, seek somebody to be the parental guiding force in their lives, abdicating their will, intelligence and choices.

“Rather than allowing the bankers, government, and various other Saturnine structures to parent us, it’s time for ‘we the people’ to rise up and be as parents to ourselves and stewards to the world around us. The healthiest form of parenting is often called ‘authoritative’ versus authoritarian
parenting. Authoritative parenting takes the stance, ‘We will find the best way together.’ It leads, but from partnership. But it DOES lead, not just team up leaderlessly. This is parenting from a self-reflexive standpoint that recognizes respective roles, i.e., I’m the parent and it’s my role in our relationship to guide you as the child, but that doesn’t make me a demigod, just the parent at this time with a responsibility to fulfill. It’s a responsibility-driven orientation, balanced by reflexivity and compassion.

“The OWS movement so far has been more like children rising up against parents, than a new form of healthy, holistic leadership. Consequently, it reinforces and exacerbates the very thing it protests against. And here enters my bottom line to watching the Davis video.

And of course, the presentation of the Declaration of Independence by the drafters to the First Continental Congress. People seem to have a clue what the conduct of police during the Occupy movement actually means.

“We have to decide: do we truly want to effect change and accept all the implications of that change, including a far greater share of responsibility for making the world and its systems work, and the tremendous labors that entails? Or, do we simply want to protest and throw a collective tantrum against the way it’s been?

“The Davis incident illustrates, I believe, the latter. And demands the very question I am asking to be answered. The cops were wrong in almost every way. But the students were equally absurd in their tactics, lowering themselves to the same level of unconsciousness as the forces arrayed against them. The cops behaved exactly as one would expect them to behave, and actually with a reasonable degree of constraint for cops. The students, granted though they be immature and in need of In Loco Parentis, needed to be the more evolved human beings in that moment and they could have demonstrated something very powerful: that the ruling structures are unnecessary now; that we are rendering the old way of running this planet obsolete.

“If we are going to Occupy Wall Street, we better start thinking more like adults with responsibilities to one another, and less like petulant kids who want parents to rebel against as a cheap and fast means for carving out our identities. Davis turned into a fiasco, and I think its best value is to precipitate dialogue about how we can accelerate the maturation of OWS and get something accomplished, which accomplishment may well determine the future of humankind. This is not a task to be treated with childish emotionality. It’s time that we ALL grow up. Together.”

I think this is a sensitive and informed point of view, and it does not justify spraying unarmed students with pepper spray at point blank range. I would love to hear what you think.

Lovingly,

The Moon is in Gemini today, the sign it will be in for tomorrow’s total lunar eclipse at 9:32 am EST and Full Moon at 9:36 am EST (they are the same event, but the Full Moon is listed by most ephemerides as happening four minutes after the eclipse — we will explain why that is in the next edition). As the Sun in Sagittarius moves into position to oppose the Moon, it forms a conjunction with the centaur Pholus (small cause, big effect) today. Several hours before the eclipse on Saturday, Uranus stations direct in the first degree of Aries. Also on Saturday, the Sun makes a conjunction to minor planet Ixion (anyone is capable of anything) just before the eclipse. The Moon enters Cancer Sunday. This weekend marks the beginning of the Mercury ‘storm’ phase before it stations direct Tuesday Dec. 13. Monday, Mars squares the North Node and the Great Attractor, which are conjunct in Sagittarius as of Saturday. Also that day, the Sun squares Ceres in Pisces.

Easy does it as we move through Saturday’s eclipse and the reverberations that spread out from it. You must simply proceed with care and caution under astrology this potent. It is easy to take things for granted. Beware of polarized situations, people who are acting unconsciously or recklessly, and situations where there is too much talk and not enough awareness or action. This is a time to guide your life carefully and to learn from the example of others who choose to do so.

If you find yourself in a situation that is deadlocked, back off and allow the momentum of the astrology to carry you to the next place. We are past the point where pushing the river can work; what is most important is that you see contrasts for what they are, and look for the decision points that present themselves organically. Know what you’re feeling and under no circumstances is it wise to defy your intuition.

Eclipses imply completion, something that most people could use some practice at. Note what you’ve been through the past six months, where you’ve been and where you are heading. As the Moon sweeps through late Gemini and into Cancer, it enters the cardinal cross, squares Uranus and opposes Pluto, reinforcing the sense that you’ve come to a new phase of your life. This is not something you can control, but it’s definitely something you can work with and influence, making choices that are appropriate to the circumstances in which you find yourself — which are rich with potential.

Uranus is about to station direct in the first degree of Aries, signifying that it will be leaving its direct contact with the Aries Point and moving on. The Aries Point is famous for its “the personal is political” effect, which translates loosely to “the news actually matters” or as David Byrne put it, “the world crashes into your living room.” With Uranus occupying this degree, that has certainly been the case.

The very day when Uranus shifted into Aries to stay for the next seven years (March 11), there was a 9.0 earthquake in Fukushima, Japan, setting off the worst nuclear disaster in the history of science. This week, The New York Times reported, “At least 45 tons of highly radioactive water have leaked from a purification facility at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, and some of it may have reached the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator said Sunday.”

The story continues, “Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said. The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.”

The Resurrection of Newt Gingrich

After all that — after falling in love with, and rejecting, five other candidates, and the bus tours and the protests and the death panels and taking over Congress and getting the bad stuff out of government, and all its supposed “don’t tread on me” and social purity principles, the poor Tea Party is about to end up with Newt Gingrich (pronounced ging-rick, according to his sister) as its presidential candidate. The consummate, indeed verging on eternal Washington insider, adulterer and influence peddler, astro-biographer Lois Rodden described Newt thusly: “American politician who had a rapid rise to popularity in 1994 when he was named the first GOP Speaker of the House in 40 years, followed within two years by a downfall for indiscretion, lying to the House Committee and the illegal use of public funds. He has a reputation as a tart-tongued verbal congressional street-fighter who relishes a confrontation.”

Newt’s chart has unverified birth data (rated by DD by Rodden — Dirty Data, because there are conflicting reports) but is good enough to work with. He has Aquarius rising, for one thing, which is perfect. An aggressive political warrior, he has Mars (god of war) in Aries exactly conjunct Pallas Athene (goddess of politics). This is not as confident as it may seem, but at least he knows to work with a plan. He has more planets in Gemini than anyone could ever reasonably handle (okay, four, but that’s still a lot — the Sun, Mercury, Uranus and Saturn), which accounts for why he can have countless positions on any given issue. Add to that seven — yes, seven — points in Leo and a Sagittarius Moon, and you get the perfect image of the blustery, self-serving gasbag who is going to treat us to the most illustrious presidential campaign in postmodern history.

Prosecutors Drop Death Penalty Case Against Mumia Abu-Jamal

Philadelphia prosecutors have announced they will no longer seek the death penalty for the imprisoned journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. For decades, Abu-Jamal has argued racism by the trial judge and prosecutors led to his 1982 deeply-flawed conviction for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Two years ago, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a United States District Court judge who set aside Abu-Jamal’s death sentence after finding jurors were given confusing instructions that encouraged them to choose death rather than a life sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court then ordered the Third Circuit panel to re-examine the decision. In April, that ruling was upheld, and prosecutors had to determine whether they would seek a new death penalty against Abu-Jamal. On Wednesday, Philadelphia prosecutor Seth Williams said he opted for a life sentence rather than face what amounted to a whole new trial — because the ‘death’ phase of a capital prosecution is a trial of its own, and now that would require a new jury. The problem with a new trial is that nearly every witness lied at the first one, a fact to which everyone is hip. Eric has covered this issue here.

We cannot figure out who took this photo, but obviously it has gone viral.

Gemini Total Eclipse and the Sibling Society

This week’s edition of Planet Waves FM is ready. In the first half, I read and consider the chart of Saturday’s total eclipse of the Moon in Gemini. This eclipse happens across Gemini/Sagittarius while both Mercury and Jupiter are in the process of stationing direct. I take a close look at the conjunction of Psyche and Apollo that is square the eclipse (prominently aspected, which brings out the message of these two asteroids).

Then we take a song break, featuring the musical ensemble Girlyman. I am looking enviously at their tour schedule — they played Nashville tonight, then Decatur, then Durham, Asheville, Birmingham, McCook, NE and Loomis, NE. I don’t see a NY or MA or PA on the list. Come north, Girlyman! We will feed you and read your charts and donate publicity photos if you want, and I have a fantastic luthier if you need your guitars adjusted.

In the second half of the program I talk about what Robert Bly called “the sibling society” — that is, a society of non-adults who refuse to take responsibility for their lives and the culture around them. This is in the context of the Occupy movement, in particular a video about the UC Davis pepper spray incident that sparked the conversation.

I read from a PBS interview with Bly from about 15 years ago. Here is the thing — Bly took some shit for what he said when the book came out, but his perspective has only been supported or even proven. If you’re looking for the book, you can get it for less than a buck from Half.com.

At the end of the podcast I mention a paper called Are Student Governments Obsolete? by Ray Glass, one of the founders of SASU — the now-defunct Student Association of the State University of New York. Ray is a friend in spirit. He died when I was 11 years old but his work and his ideas have influenced my thinking, and I am happy to share a PDF of his paper on the Internet for the first time.

Today’s program is about 1:14 — a little longer than planned, but there you have it. Remember that Planet Waves FM is sponsored by your subscriptions and product purchases. We have cool stuff for you — well it’s not stuff, it’s ideas that you can take with you to your next incarnation!

P.S. The pocket watch dates to the 16th century.

Friday, Dec. 9, 2011. Weekly Horoscope #884. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — You are in a seed moment. They come occasionally — phases of your life when what you do, think and feel creates who you are becoming; when you express intention through action, not by planning. You’re in a moment of not knowing what you’re getting yourself into, making choices you would not necessarily have made if you knew what they implied. Yet there are few other ways to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Remember that one definition of an adventure is that you don’t know where you’re going to end up, and I promise you that this, at least, is true. What you do have control over is whether you are authentic in the moment. In a world where most people are taught to fake most of the time, that might be a stretch. Your most dependable path to right action is being entirely real, all of the time.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You may feel like you’re racing toward some kind of limit, where an inner resource (such as faith in yourself) is running out. That sense of impending limitation or crux point is clear in your charts, but what stands out more boldly is that another limitation you cannot see is about to give way. Your current sense of urgency is more closely associated with the second situation than the first; in other words, something is happening other than what you’re obsessing over. Don’t waste time fussing over the form of the problem, or what you perceive your problem to be. This would be true especially if you are defining an issue in a way that has resisted resolution in the past. Take care of the practical matters at hand as efficiently as you can. Learn from your day-to-day experiences. Emphasize the positive role you play in the world. Heaven and Earth are indeed moving, and you are moving with them.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Occasionally you have a stunning breakthrough appreciating the person you are. It’s as if some mental block lets go, or some veil drops, and you can actually recognize and experience yourself as the strong, nurturing person you are. Something like this is happening right now. Your realization seems to come in two phases, something like this. You remember something amazing about yourself that you keep forgetting, which shifts your sense of identity. Just when that’s far enough in the past that you forgot it happened, a relationship changes. You become free within the relationship, or free yourself of the relationship. You may not see the connection between the two, but the turn of events proves that authentic self-respect can take you past any limitation in your relationships. If you remember that these two are directly related, you will save yourself incalculable time, energy and grief in the future.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You may not consciously keep secrets from yourself, but you also may not see the ways you work against your own cause. What feels like the revelation of some deep inner truth is really about you aligning with yourself in a tangible way. In fact, you are healing a split in your mind that has presented you with many challenges that you did not understand. The split has outwardly manifested many ways: as holding competing goals, divided loyalties, or a sense that you could not get the ‘two halves’ of yourself working together. The thing is, once you can see something like this, however dimly, you increase the chances of doing something about it. And you are about to get a rare glimpse at this outdated aspect of your inner makeup, or rather, your self-perception. The simplest way to put this is that honesty with yourself will get you real results in the real world.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You are bigger than your public image. You are bigger than all the chatter or gossip in the world. Somewhere between nothing and exceedingly little that could become known about you would negatively influence the opinion of anyone who really mattered. Therefore, you are free to let the truth about yourself be known. Take the initiative and express your most daring innermost thoughts if that is what you choose to do. This can be in the context of an intimate relationship, or some much larger social context wherein you finally arrive at the recognition that you want to be known not just for what you do, but also for who you are. What most people have not figured out is that any aura of concealment breeds negativity just as dependably as truth and clarity dispel it. The sensation of potential risk you may be experiencing is not the same as an actual danger — it’s a lot more fun.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You make your own definition of success — or rather, when you learn that you can, you will be much happier. One problem with what we think of as success is that we tend to be told what it is, over and over again, then we try to live up to the myth. Usually that comes in the form of approval of authority figures, fame or supposed security, all of which are transient. There is very little security possible; only confidence is worth reaching for, and that is an inner state. Success is about what you want, not what someone else wants for you. You are the one — and the only one — who must approve of what you do, so that you may have a clear conscience and grounded sense of purpose. What happens next will reveal these concepts as the simple and obvious facts that they are.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — It’s impressive, when you look at it, how beliefs get in the way of reality. This often happens below the boards of awareness, though of course at other times it gives people a false sense of control. If you don’t like a fact, you can always pretend it’s not true. Now, however, you are being called upon to understand not only the actual data but also its implications. Suspending your beliefs of what is true while you conduct this investigation is essential. And, I would remind you, none of this suggests that what you believe, or perceive, is wrong — only that it’s subject to verification. Along the spectrum of ‘true’ and ‘false’ I would add the distinction of ‘true enough’ — for a given purpose, for a given time. As time progresses, you may apply a different standard or metric, but the important thing is that you have a basis for validating what you believe — or not — without resorting to prejudice.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — I’ve mentioned a few times this year something about not being afraid to be unpopular, while not going out of your way to have people dislike you. Typically how you handle any issue on this side of the spectrum is by brushing it off, but that is a way of denying your deeper emotional sensitivity. Who you are, what you say and what you do seems to be having a profound effect on someone. You don’t need to be self-righteous about your values; you don’t need to compensate for what you perceive as the weaknesses of others. All you need to do is to recognize the dynamic between you and someone close to you. Be receptive to the changes they are going through. This will help both of you, it will ease the tension of the situation and you will get to experience the pleasure of being consciously resonant with your environment in a new way.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You may be outgrowing a relationship or even a whole volume in the history of your relationships, and if that is true, I suggest you welcome the change. Yes, this can be easier said than done, but you have a lot going for you, and a lot going on, and it’s not healthy for you to suppress your energy or to give anyone else the role of doing so. That said, the situation you’re in could easily transform itself into something much better, on a different level of existence. And, that said, the thing to do is release your attachment to the form of the relationship, and then discover what the content actually is. Something that was veiled is coming to the surface, but it will take you a few days to figure out what that is; in fact, what you’re experiencing is a journey that will take you about six months to ‘figure out’, and during that time, I suggest you remain open to everyone and everything.

Sagittarius Birthday Audio Report

Dear Friend and Sagittarian:

Whiskey and Owen. Photo by Beki Herrbach.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — There is no way to understate the size and scale of the transformation you’re going through. I would say that ‘it’ feels like it’s coming at you from every direction, but there is only one direction — from within. This weekend’s total eclipse of the Moon is encouraging you — indeed, necessitating — that you find a healthy and creative outlet for your energy and any frustration you may be feeling. If there is a healing agenda that seems to involve a relationship, I strongly suggest you do your part of the work first, then wait several days (say, till Wednesday) before you take any discussion into a situation involving a partner, spouse or adversary. If you don’t install a delay, you’re likely to get your wires crossed and blame someone for your material and potentially take on responsibility for what is not yours. Sort it out first, then have the conversation.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Somewhere in A Course in Miracles is the notion that “you are an idea that can never leave its source.” This is directed at those who feel separate from spirit or from the rest of humanity; who feel alienated from the flow of creation. I bring it up today because your astrology presents that very image of connection that would obviate the sensation or illusion of being separate. Thought is creative, and you are made of thought. Thought is free, and you are free to create yourself into who you want to be. Yet the key words here are create and want — which imply conscious choices. This, in turn, implies taking full responsibility for the process. That one fact is enough to deter most people from ever daring to create who they are, or rather, from doing so consciously. You create yourself all the time, and the power to do so has never been more palpable or accessible to you.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Imagine how different your life would be if you had felt confident and secure the whole time. Consider how much energy you have wasted on the fear of developments that never came to pass, on lack of faith that you could come through, and on anxiety that had no special source or identifiable topic. Saturday’s lunar eclipse illustrates a breakthrough on this theme. The essence of your fear is the experience of being divided against yourself, and you are now in a moment where those two seemingly different halves are joined together. Or, more accurately, a moment where you recognize they were never separate. This is something you will feel in your body first, before you begin to recognize it as a concept. In truth, this has been developing for a while, and now it’s finally becoming obvious enough to translate into authentic confidence you can apply toward your most cherished goals.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

The Nature of the Beast

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Protest in New York City on Thursday night, walking from Foley Square toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Photo by Miah Artola for Planet Waves. Thank you to the many Planet Waves readers who faithfully called with field reports or sent in photos and reportage of the N-17 protests Thursday and overnight.

“The future’s here. We are it.” — John Perry Barlow

Dear Friend and Reader:

There is a kind of combat happening on the streets of New York City, and many cities across the United States. Evicting the calm, sedate protest from Zuccotti Park Tuesday morning caused the Occupy Wall Street movement’s two-month celebration, long planned for November 17, to cascade into a massive event that New York City officials could not control. There are more people than police in New York City and every city in the world. Nearly everyone is affected by the economic issues that the Occupy protesters are organizing around, and crackdowns are only having the effect of bringing more people into the movement.

Dorli Rainey, age 84, was pepper sprayed this week by Seattle Police. She would have been trampled after the police started a stampede by plunging their bicycles into the crowd, but she was saved by an Iraq veteran who got her to safety. Image: Screen shot from Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

We’re now witnessing a standoff on the streets of the United States that has been brewing for decades, as wealth condensed into the hands of a very few people and one war after the next was fought for profit. Many of the wealthiest 1% have made their money profiting from the national security state that has emerged since Sept. 11, 2001. Now, the economy is so top-heavy that it’s toppling over.

As I write Thursday, I’m watching live video of a doctor with the organization PNHP.org talk about how the number one reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States is medical costs — even among those who have health insurance. He described a patient who came in with a broken leg with the bone sticking out who told him, “Do as little as possible. I cannot afford this.”

When people with legitimate concerns rise up exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protest and are pushed down by armed police, who broadcast pepper spray into a crowd or plunge bicycles into groups of people, that is not civil society; it’s a combat situation. It’s a coordinated assault on human beings and on civil rights. I believe that this week’s multi-city eviction of Occupy movements was part of an organized effort to deny people their constitutional right to protest.

Yet it’s more than that. When police shoot videographers, arrest accredited journalists and inflict critical injuries on military veterans, that is open combat on a free society, and that is exactly what we’ve been witnessing in recent weeks.

When the powers that be react to political speech with a show of absolute power, responding to unarmed people with violence and aggression, you can be sure they feel threatened. They are outnumbered, and they know they are the less popular side, when it comes to hearts and minds. And they know more than we do. We’re experiencing massive, nearly nationwide protests with the banks open, funds moving and food available in stores. I am sure they dread to think what might happen were that to change.

New York City Council member Ydanis Rodriguez, who represents northern Manhattan, was arrested by the NYPD Tuesday morning as he observed the eviction of Zuccotti Park. He was held for 17 hours without access to an attorney. Photo: Video screen shot.

As I write on Thursday afternoon, the NYPD has barricaded hundreds of people into Zuccotti Park. There are police with helmets in every direction. Let’s remember that this is not a student protest. It’s a statement by people of all ages and many backgrounds demanding redress from the ripoff of the economy by bankers, the corporate money that controls politics and government, the untold thousands of jobs that have been converted to slavery in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Thousands of people have figured out they have nothing to lose. And they are under psychological pressure they experience mainly as fear, and then that bursts through and comes out as energy. That is the Occupy movement: an economic civil rights movement. What historians don’t know when they question why this is happening now is that the astrology is right. The confluence of oppressive events in the economy and the rest of society is meeting with the astrology of revolution.

There are always mass uprisings, revolutions and unprecedented cultural breakthroughs when Uranus and Pluto get together. That’s what we’ve been seeing all year. (Incredibly, Arab Spring was just a few months ago, even though it seems to be in the distant past.) As I have written many times, this is only the beginning; the first exact square of Uranus and Pluto is not until June, and the last one isn’t until late 2015. I know I keep saying this. We won’t really have a clear picture of what this energy is going to bring until the first square next spring. That is when the real acceleration begins.

What we’re witnessing now is a process of polarization. People are being radicalized, coming to terms with the nature of existence, and taking a stand, many for the first time in their lives. In the process we’re realizing we’re neither alone in what we feel or what we’re experiencing. Then the power structure is responding with unrestrained brute force, and rage that almost seems personal in nature. Years ago, Mike Frisch, my American Studies professor, explained that the purpose of a protest is to bring out the nature of the beast. By that, he meant that the nature of the power structure, its agenda and its conduct are latent until they are challenged. Then they show their true colors.

Riot squads arrive Thursday at Occupy Los Angeles. Photo by Kyle C.

That’s what you’re seeing when you see Iraq or Afghanistan veterans being clobbered by the cops, young women being pepper sprayed and people being corralled someplace they would never go and arrested by the hundreds. Then others respond to this, and the protests grow. City officials and police feel more desperate, fearing they’re going to lose control, and they act more aggressively, which only feeds the protests and raises awareness of the issues.

Thursday, you had to produce corporate ID or proof of local residency to walk down a street in lower Manhattan. At Brooklyn College, there was an incident where an Occupy general assembly being held in a campus building was interrupted by police, who demanded student ID and would not give them back to the students until they left. Students were then pushed by campus security down a hall, down a flight of stairs and out into the rain. We don’t even need to ask whether this is necessary. It’s not, but it’s telling us something about the people who are responding this way. We can gather a clue that they fear this is going to get larger.

As this goes on, we are seeing just how much firepower the civilian police actually have: the kinds of weapons and tactics, the sheer numbers, all of which is being brought to bear on protesters. Someone just told me they were concerned that the NYPD might bring out the Hercules Teams, which New York magazine describes as “elite, heavily armed, Special Forces–type police units that pop up daily around the city. It can be at the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, or the stock exchange, wherever the day’s intelligence reports suggest they could be needed. These small teams arrive in black Suburbans, sheathed in armor-plated vests and carrying 9-mm submachine guns — sometimes with air or sea support. Their purpose is to intimidate and to very publicly mount a show of force.”

Actually that would be worth something: let’s see what power they are willing to bring out in the face of little kids riding piggyback on their parents’ shoulders, young people with their dogs and pet rats, unemployed nurses protesting the lack of jobs, people playing drums and young women holding placards about peace and love.

Centaurs, Personal Planets and the Great Attractor

On Tuesday, I summed up the astrology that blended the personal planets (Venus, Mars and Mercury) with highly potent planets called centaurs (at the moment, Chiron, Pholus, Nessus and others). These in turn are aligning with the Great Attractor, and the mixture is illustrating a kind of rapid acceleration and transformative alchemy. My impression from this astrology was that we would witness events that would have impact far into the future; that this would be a week of both history precipitated, and catalysts of future developments.

Protesters in New York City. Photo by Sherry Mazzocchi.

Yet this kind of energy movement can raise the sense of fear and conflict in many people. How you feel under potent astrology depends on your density level. The more fearful and contracted your energy, the more panicky you’re likely to feel. The more open you are, the more exciting and momentous it’s likely to feel. This is not a time to be caught in ideology, in denial or even in anger. It’s time to hang loose and pay attention.

In January 2010 I wrote that the next few years would make the 1960s seem like a walk in the park, in the same article proposing: “When the energy rises like this, many people feel it as something passionate. Yet for those who are struggling with obstacles, it can be extremely frustrating. We can find ourselves at a moment of awesome potential with nothing but chores to take care of. I suggest we remember that we’re in a moment of quickening. There are no shortcuts to growth, but there are moments of rapid acceleration, and we’re about to stroll into one of them.”

That was nearly two years ago, and we’ve been through this over and over again. This week, some of the most emotional planets, the ones that are closest to the core of how it feels to be human, have been (and still are being) catapulted through the realm of the centaurs — energies which for many people are the most uncomfortable. For most people, centaur energy is so far beyond the edge they would never go there voluntarily. Centaurs can represent the emergence of subject matter that (at times) is no more pleasant than the pus coming out of an infection.

In the midst of this acceleration, there is something extremely personal developing: the Penn State child rape scandal. This may seem entirely removed from the Occupy protests, but I would say they are aspects of the same thing, developing under the same astrology. The common thread can be summed up in one word: power. There is another common theme: group dynamics.

The difference between rape and voluntary sex is precisely the exercise of power as opposed to choice. That power can take many forms, and in the case of Jerry Sandusky, the coach accused of 40 counts of sex crimes, it took many different forms. By that, I mean within the one-to-one relationships he had with the boys he raped.

Hundreds of police surrounded protesters as they marched through nearly constant rain and rapidly falling temperatures in New York City on Thursday. By most accounts, police were hostile but restrained; there were relatively few arrests and only isolated incidents of violence against protesters. Image is from video by Tim Pool.

Yet there was part of his power that came from beyond him, which was the vast, decade-long conspiracy to cover up what he was doing. It extended through the ranks of the Penn State athletic program and administration and straight into the judicial system.

The cover-up included an active, aggressive and persistent form of denial, and lots of seemingly passive but equally toxic looking the other way. From testimony we’ve heard so far, Sandusky apparently had the active cooperation of university officials in committing his crimes, which is why the president and many other campus officials have been prosecuted or fired in recent weeks. I described this Tuesday as an aspect of the centaur Nessus in Aquarius, the sign of groups. Nessus is a focal point of the Uranus-Pluto square, and it’s calling group dynamics into focus. This can reflect how otherwise ‘good’ people can surrender their power and become a group that perpetuates evil. It’s almost as if many people have two identities — the one they show to people one on one, and the the other that emerges when in some form of collective. I believe this is a dangerous form of psychic fragmentation, responsible for much pain in the world.

Now that this is spilling out, we’re hearing on TV that there are many, many Jerry Sanduskys in the world. Actually, the Jerry Sanduskys, that is, the serial pedophiles of non-related children, are fairly rare. The vast majority of child sexual abuse happens inside households.

Photo by Wesley Middleton.

Yet in terms of the denial element, and the power element, what happened at Penn State — up to the revelations of the crimes, that is — is the same thing that happens in many households where the children are sexually abused by adult caregivers right under everyone’s gaze. That is the more common setup and it’s in many ways worse, because the betrayal is so intimate.

I am aware as an absolute fact that many of my readers have been harmed this way, and many others have been stricken indirectly (for example, they’re aware of or unconsciously struggling with what has happened to their parents, siblings or cousins), and the repeated exposure to this story is likely to be stirring up old wounds and unresolved anger. So too is the current astrology (please see ERO section below).

All of this is happening in a sexual environment where there is constant feigning of care and concern for underage people, whether this involves federal regulation of sexual imagery on the Internet or the potential suspicion of anyone who takes care of kids. Today, two 14-year-old girls who voluntarily choose to have sex with one another can be charged with statutory rape. Yes, it’s rare that they would be charged, but the laws are in place, and prosecutions do happen, despite the lifelong pain this can cause to kids who simply do not deserve it.

Now we find out what was going on, and being suppressed, in one of the most famous university athletic programs in the world, and how many well-placed, influential people had to cooperate in order for it to continue as long as it did.

The positive side is that this takedown is providing some healing for the many people who were raped by Sandusky, they will have access to civil damages, people will go to jail, and some future attacks may be prevented. There may be a sense of poetic justice and some healing for those who have suffered at the hands of others. Yet this whole incident also offers evidence of how much work we have to do on the personal level, even if we succeed in creating economic or political reforms. I suspect, however, that engaging in actual inner personal reform is the prerequisite for any meaningful changes in society as a whole.

The negative side is that any sex scandal is bad for all sex. Publicly associating attack, grief, shame and humiliation with any form of sex, no matter how evil, may evoke a sense of justice, but it also chills the entire emotional and erotic environment. Even as the toxins are cleansed from that one situation, they enter the total environment, adding to the pain that is already there.

Photo by Eric Francis — Book of Blue, New York.

This verges on impossible to see because the background level of guilt and the feeling of wrongness about sex is so pervasive even in those who have done nothing to intentionally harm or abuse others. The feeling of betrayal of emotional trust is so pervasive. The dishonesty that surrounds sex is so ubiquitous, and many respond with an attitude of sanctimonious purity — despite whatever they may actually do behind supposedly closed doors.

What are we going to do about this? I am pretty sure there’s a sexual revolution on its way. I can’t exactly tell you what kind, but sexual mores have become so restrictive on the one hand and so ridiculously unbridled on the other, that they are due for the kind of revolt that Uranus-Pluto events are famous for. Has anyone read the story about the Egyptian woman who decided to protest against macho by undressing on her blog? She nearly caused the Internet to explode. We might think, oh, that’s a Muslim country. But Westerners carry most of the same inhibitions as everyone else, rooted just as deeply. And we’re at a huge disadvantage for thinking we’re so free.

During the last sexual revolution, the thing that didn’t happen was an actual renegotiation of relationships. Sex became more available, but the terms largely remained unconscious and rooted in the economic discrepancies between men and women. If power relationships changed, much of the change was superficial. One starting point is learning to openly negotiate the terms of our relationships, and to be able to communicate our own point of view clearly enough for someone to understand it. We have to make room for one another, but closer to home, we have to make room for ourselves in our own lives. If you ask me, the next sexual revolution will start in the mirror and expand outward from there.

It’s truly beautiful and exciting that people are rising up in the face of economic injustice and political corruption. What we need just as much is to go inside, and begin to make peace with ourselves, and then to reach out to the people around us.

Lovingly,

Publishing Schedule Note to Readers: Planet Waves will be on a Thanksgiving holiday schedule next week. There will (most likely) be just one horoscope — the December monthly edition, with its month-ahead introduction. I’ll also do a basic guide to Mercury retrograde. I have not settled on the dates of these mailings. Please watch your inbox for more information. — efc

Something to Try: Infrequently Asked Questions

Patricia Thomas of London, a friend of Planet Waves (and Eric’s former editor at The Ecologist), has created two virtual decks of questions designed for anyone who would like to challenge their assumptions and shift their thinking — and anyone who already feels this process occurring and would like to engage with it proactively.

Questions have a way of creating momentum, of moving us forward. They make the mind active rather than passive, make us attentive to new ideas, open up new worlds and possibilities. Questions define and refine our thinking and our philosophy of life; they are the basis of our search for the truth of things. Questions are a manifestation of curiosity — and curiosity helps build awareness, appreciation and understanding.

What started as a way to remember the questions that were most important to her personally and in her work as a journalist — questions that often get forgotten under pressure of life and deadlines — evolved into two rough decks of cards, and eventually into a web-based project, Infrequently Asked Questions. The website features two virtual decks of cards with more than 100 questions each. The CultureShift and InnerQuest decks prompt the user with the kind of questions each of us needs to ask when we find ourselves on the threshold of a new challenge — whether personal, cultural, technological or philosophical. They work like Tarot in that we often draw the cards to us that we need — even if their meaning is not always immediately apparent. It’s a game — but it also has a serious purpose. Have fun with it and feel free to help it evolve further by providing your feedback.

Today is the last quarter Moon, which is when the waning Moon makes a square to the Sun — in this case, from Leo to Scorpio. The Moon then enters Virgo just before 5:19 pm EST this evening, and continues through that sign until Monday evening, when it enters Libra. Mercury is about two-thirds of the way through its shadow (or echo) phase, as it continues to slow down in Sagittarius. It will station retrograde on Nov. 24, and continue retrograde until Dec. 13. Right now Mercury is still close on the heels of Venus, also in Sagittarius. Venus, moving a little faster, makes a sextile to the centaur planet Nessus today. Currently Mercury is quincunx (or inconjunct) Jupiter in Taurus, and Saturday it will make a sextile to Vesta in Aquarius. The major news in the sky this weekend is the Scorpio Sun making a square to Neptune in Aquarius. That aspect is exact Sunday, but we are feeling it now. Both the Sun and Neptune are very late in their signs; the Sun ingresses Sagittarius Tuesday.

Sun square Neptune, exact Sunday but with a long time orb, offers a caution that you might not know what you’re feeling, or that you might keep forgetting what it is or changing your mind. I suggest you let this pass like a wave rather than trying to fight the sensation. Friday as the Leo Moon passes through last quarter phase, it also makes an opposition to Neptune and a square to the asteroid Ophelia, which is conjunct the Sun. The natural turning point (or stress point) of the quarter Moon can trigger just the kinds of paranoia and sense of betrayal that the astrology is warning against. As the Moon moves into more pensive, analytical Virgo (making aspects to both Chiron and Mars), that’s the perfect setting for excessive self-critique — so you might want to find a creative alternative to that.

This is the weekend to discuss and indeed to embark upon authentic sexual healing. Both Venus and Mercury in Sagittarius make sextiles to Nessus in Aquarius. That’s a way of saying that Venus (female desire nature, deeply-held values) and Mercury (androgynous, communication tools, reasoning ability) are in a position to negotiate with the wounding/healing power of the centaur Nessus. Despite a strong sense of potential, you may have the feeling of wading through uncertain territory. That is exactly the sensation you want in any form of a therapeutic situation: a sense of certainty is usually counterproductive. Remember that healing is usually something that happens in layers, and it takes many forms. This astrology is suggesting you go for another layer or two deeper, and that one form the process will take is being able to share with intimate partners what has been bothering you. Putting things into words is more significant and helpful than most people realize. As you do, notice the emotions that come up, be they anger, a sense of powerlessness, a sense of empowerment, pain, desire or pleasure. If you choose to focus on this aspect of your life, you may experience a mix of feelings. Mercury slowing down toward its retrograde suggests that the conversation may be an extended one, which takes you far deeper into the past than you were expecting to go.

Centaurs in the Fog

A new edition of Planet Waves FM is ready. Our current astrology is happening in two dimensions — many planets aspecting centaurs (Pholus, Chiron, Nessus) and then the Sun square Neptune. One is a wake-up influence, the other is a fog-over influence. Which one will win the day? There are other clues. Mars in Virgo is also saying pay attention to the details. Mars will be retrograde in Virgo fairly soon.

In this edition, I also decode some current news events, including the Penn State scandal. The fans (including students) are experiencing a deep struggle in coming to grips with the truth about the coaching staff there; the centaur planets are working to shift us to another level of consciousness.

I also get into the apparent low IQ Republican requirement from its presidential candidates, a kind of ignorance test; and a catch-up on the Occupy movement. Over 200 people were arrested Tuesday when police broke up the New York Occupy encampment. Said NY mayor Bloomberg, “There is no ambiguity in the law here — the First Amendment protects speech — it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space. Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” We’ll see what the astrology has to say about that.

Here you’ll find the full archives and a downloadable zip file. They’re also available on iTunes.

Friday, Nov. 18, 2011. Weekly Horoscope #882. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Are you feeling like you’re about to explode? That’s what it looks like from your chart, more or less. There is indeed something in you that’s pushing to be reborn into the world, which is a version of yourself that has faith in your own confidence. You keep going through this, and every time you hope you’ll get it right. Try this visualization. You’re standing face to face with a being you perceive as much greater than yourself: taller than you, enormous on a scale different than human, and the essence of creative power. Now imagine this being morphs into someone who resembles you, before your eyes. It is you, and you can ‘become’ this seemingly separate entity — and then you remember. You’ve made a promise to yourself. It feels more like a sacred vow, and you know that the time has arrived to honor that commitment. But how? I am sure you know.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You may feel like you’re out of place, in over your head or that too much is expected of you. Yet at the same time, you’re a determined, persistent person, who loves a challenge and who has some real ambitions to do the right thing in the world, and for the world. How can both conditions be true at the same time? Well, they can be, though the meeting point is making peace with being called to live up to your potential. Yet called by whom? If it feels like you’re being called by someone or something outside yourself, you may be projecting the matter. But then, that’s often how ‘callings’ arrive in our lives. We are presented with opportunities, and the means to explore them. What is presenting itself directly to you, in your immediate environment or your mental environment? What are you doing in response?

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — When we admire someone, the question is, are we seeing something in them, or seeing something about ourselves that we identify with in them? And is one more legitimate than the other? These are questions you have to ask for yourself, with regard to one particular relationship. Both conditions may turn out to be true. This would also be worth inquiring about if the situation is a negative attachment of any kind, which might be a judgment or the perception of someone as egotistical, self-serving or arrogant. I know that first impressions mean a lot; if that is the case, go back to your very first impression for more information. In the meantime, I suggest you give this involvement the rest of the year to work itself out, and make careful observations before you take any action or make any commitments. In the world of personality, anything can be a mirror, so use your discernment.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — This may feel like a particularly messy or alienated time where your relationship commitments are concerned, but what if those mattered far less than being true to yourself? You may think that you’ve lost your way, but your astrology suggests that your true quest has just begun. It’s far less about your relationships and more about a soul journey that you’ve been preparing to embark upon. Most of the time, this gets confused with having a ‘soul mate’, which is a distraction from the elemental truth that your journey through the world is an experience unique to you. The intimacy you’re seeking is a state of spiritual harmony with yourself. This is something you can share with others; and the more in tune you are with yourself, the more meaning their self-presence will have for you. I would just remind you that this is not about relationships, it’s about being in tune with your own existence.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — The next few days you may feel like you’re walking through a fog. It’s likely you’ve driven through a fog, and you know what to do: slow down, increase your mental focus, and relax at the same time. The problem with this fog is that it has a psychic charge to it, and the charge is a kind of reactivity. If you have any sensation of mistrusting others, or the feeling of lurking betrayal, slow down. I don’t know the source of these thoughts, but a careful reading of your solar chart advises caution about believing your own fears. Once the Sun enters your fellow fire sign Sagittarius next week, you will proceed with new confidence, but I suggest you be vigilant any time you feel your confidence falter. You’re stronger than you think, and your awareness gives you more information than you know. Proceed with care rather than caution, and faith rather than hope.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Be careful what promises you make for the next few months; make sure you’re fully prepared to come through immediately when you offer something to someone. I also suggest you conduct an inventory of promises you’ve made but have not kept. You don’t have to fulfill all your old commitments at once, though I suggest you keep them in mind, and get in contact with anyone you feel you’ve neglected and let them know you’re aware of that fact. You’re doing this more for your own sake than for anyone else’s. The chances are that you’ve injured people far less than you may fear, if at all. Yet the way things go in our particular world, people are always grateful when someone voluntarily makes amends. Often the result is a greater overall gain than if the whole thing had not happened, coming with the subtle but authentic feeling of faith in humanity being restored.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You’ve had an unusual week, that’s for sure. I suggest you write some diary notes about what you experienced, thought, felt, heard and said — because it’s going to come in handy. The beauty of it all is you’ve had a chance to assert yourself in some unusual ways, but this is not the moment to stop: rather, it’s your jumping-off point. You may not at this moment recognize the influence you’ve had, or the strength of your ideas; you may not know the power of what you’ve discovered or indeed that you’ve discovered anything at all. This is why I’m suggesting you put some notes in your journal, take some photos of yourself, save a few artifacts and bookmark the whole thing. What you’ve created is a formula that blends freedom and responsibility, neither of which is meaningful without the other.

Your Libra birthday audio for 2011 is finished. I’ve prepared a comprehensive reading for you, covering the astrology for your sign in about 70 minutes (in two segments) and offering a tarot reading of just under half an hour. Visit this link for additional information.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — As the Sun moves through the final degrees of your sign, it’s making an aspect to Neptune in Aquarius — a square, which implies tension, emotional conflict and the sensation of not knowing what’s true. This looks like a playback of confusion you’ve experienced many times before, particularly around your birthday. If you’ve never quite arrived at the point where the confusion became your teacher, now is a great moment to let it be just that. The space of not knowing is a vital one to enter fully. Usually we react with denial, which often comes in the form of false certainty. The thing you want to watch out for these days is false uncertainty. You know you’re pushing certain issues a little more than some people who say they like you would prefer. Don’t worry about being popular. Don’t argue for your cause. Pause and walk away before you respond or react in an emphatic way. You may think that others challenge you at their own risk, but if you overreact, the peril is yours and yours alone.

Hello Scorpios! Your 2011 Birthday Report is ready. It’s about an hour of astrology, plus a 20-minute tarot reading. Prepared with the Sun in still in Scorpio, it’s hot with transformational energy. I focus on your ruling planet Mars, your imagination and desire nature, and a phase of solid achievement. Please check this page for more information.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — If our culture is infused with narcissism, how can we distinguish it from anything else? We live in a society that confuses self-esteem with arrogance, self-love with vanity, creativity with self-obsession and self-awareness with having a big ego. Yet there’s another layer as well. Having grown up in such an environment, many people lack any sense of who they are or what they want, since that rarely mattered to their early caregivers. Being raised by narcissistic people means their goals became your goals, and their fears became yours — another way of saying that you didn’t exist in your own right. In the midst of a sea of narcissism, the first step is often to come back to — or find for the first time — what we value and desire. Be aware of that, and take the next step and encourage others to discover what matters the most to them.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Someone close to you may be offering intuitive or common sense guidance, but you may still have your doubts. I suggest you take a look at why you feel that way. It may be reluctance to take any guidance at all, or it may be that you’re questioning their motives. You may be concerned that you’ll have to rearrange your life if you change your mind about something. But most likely you’re resisting information that comes from this elusive thing known as intuition. Fear may be getting in the way of your own subtle senses, and you may think you’re getting conflicting information. Anyone who is offering their viewpoint is likely to have a lot deeper information than they’re letting on. If you want to know more, ask. In the end, you’re responsible for any decisions you make, but decisions are best made having considered several points of view.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may feel like you’re under some unusual pressure that you have no idea how to respond to. It’s like the air is getting heavier and the walls are growing closer in, but I suggest you pause and ask how much of this is some combined effect of your mind and your feelings. This is adding up to a sensation that feels like it’s coming from your environment. I suspect this is true, though you’ll have confirmation (and some relief) soon enough, when the Sun changes signs to Sagittarius next week. Meanwhile, Neptune has just stationed direct in your sign, about to exit after a 12-year journey. There’s some natural advice that comes with this: you have a window of a few months to tidy up any matters of self-deception that have afflicted you going as far back as you can remember. The pressure you may be feeling is the need to be real with yourself, something that’s best done gently.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — I suggest you do a little study of the times when taking care of your own needs was used against you. This can include anything from being responsive to your own feelings to taking care of your dietary needs. Start with your parents and other dominant adults who were present when you were a child. One result, especially for you, can be a guilt complex around taking care of yourself, which many try to assuage with self-neglect. It doesn’t work. But neither does fighting for the ‘right’ to look after your own basic interests. You can go a long way by noticing when you’re having either response — guilt, or fighting. You may have the impulse to run from either. I suggest you hang out with the feeling and see if you can map it out, and learn something from it. Then, observe how you feel as you focus on basic self-care with a clear conscience. I know, it can be a little strange.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

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Dear Friend and Reader:

This week I’ve been enjoying the stream of paranoid emails and Facebook messages that have started to reach me, wherein people are freaked out about how there is actually a populist uprising going on the United States. I concede that we have good reason to believe that the power brokers will be nervous that someone is actually noticing that the average Goldman Sachs employee makes $292,000 per year. This is the same company that placed bets that an oil rig would blow up in the Gulf of Mexico. Remember that? Fabulous Fabio and his infamous, “Suck it up, fishies and birdies”?

Occupy Wall Street poster created for the original Sept. 17 action, by Adbusters in Vancouver, BC.

The big boys have had the luxury of thirty years to take advantage of a public that has, until now, yet to call them to task. Most recent polls I’ve heard of give the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the support of at least 57% of the American public, with many more who don’t agree with them saying they have the right to protest. Some neighbors of Zuccotti Park are, understandably, annoyed at the drumming and 24-hour activity in a neighborhood that after 6 pm previously resembled a cemetery. I heard this week that the drummers were asked to go elsewhere, in order to address this problem.

Meanwhile, most other New Yorkers are into the protests, which have sprung up literally from coast to coast and many places beyond. This sounds like the United States of my wildest fantasies. More to the point, it sounds like the Uranus-Pluto cycle heating up, so reliably you could set your atomic clock to it. Though neither the protesters nor the protestees are likely to know this, this movement is going to have traction because it’s synced with an astrological cycle that is specifically about revolution and social progress on real issues.

One concern I’ve heard is how the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD are trying to infiltrate the movement. (This is an old story — cops have tried to infiltrate activist movements since they both existed.) The main fear going around is that they will try to provoke the activists into coming off like the scruffy mob that Fox News is making them out to be. One person writing to me is worried that Anonymous, the hacker collective, is really a CIA front operation. We have a commenter on the Planet Waves blog who is tweaked by the Guy Fawkes masks that people wear to the protests. She thinks those are the actual members of the Anonymous collective, who you cannot trust because they’re wearing masks. (If you get on their bad side, a mask is the last thing you’ll have to worry about.)

One astrologer in New York City tried to send me an encrypted file that had all the goods, but after a few tries the encrypted email would not go through. I encouraged her to just email it the old-fashioned way. After several tries, the PDF arrived last night via the ultra-secret, immune-from-domestic-surveillance Hushmail. I clicked on it with the eager anticipation of a document junkie.

Poster for “Buy Nothing Day,” the second-most famous event created by Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate magazine that got the #Occupy ball rolling.

Scanning over its chaotic pages, I read about the links between the Wall Street sit-in to the Sandinistas, Barack Obama, MoveOn!, the Independent Media Institute, Adbusters magazine, ACORN, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, Public Citizen, the Rainforest Action Network, Refuse & Resist!, the Ruckus Society, the Service Employees International Union, San Francisco Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sierra Club and the Soros Foundation Community Fellows.

Wait — the Sandinistas? Really? Those cool people down in Nicaragua who were into building farm cooperatives, community hospitals and schools? Who supported mass literacy and gender equality? The ones Ronald Reagan hated so much he nearly lost his presidency trying to destroy them? They still exist? Where can I send a check?

And the Ruckus Society? No wonder this is all causing such a ruckus.

And what about George Soros? Isn’t he one of them? Why would he be going against them when he’s really one of them? There has to be something weird going on. He must be a double agent, or maybe a triple agent. He’s going to infiltrate the movement by having one of his front organizations send a shipment of air mattresses and a case of chai.

The involvement of Adbusters I learned about after someone posted a comment to the website of the Daily Freeman here in Kingston, really nervous and concerned, after there was a little protest march in front of the courthouse, with the participants’ average age looking like about 60. The commenter said that Occupy Wall Street was started by a “Canadian ad agency,” insinuating foreign infiltration.

Occupying The Other Wall Street — protesters in Kingston, New York gathered outside the county courthouse on our Wall Street last week, staging their own demonstration. Nobody slept over, and nobody got arrested. Photo by Tania Barricklo for the Daily Freeman.

I asked around and put this comment together with the splashy, snarky anti-consumerist magazine that your local Barnes & Noble gets all of five copies of each month — Adbusters. The magazine critiques the ‘mental environment’. Count on them for articles about how it’s wrong to be forced to watch 10 advertisements sitting in a movie theater. They’re the ones who invented Buy Nothing Day (commemorated each year the Friday after Thanksgiving).

Adbusters’ editor Kalle Lasn, a refugee from the advertising industry, was the one who first put out the concept of occupying Wall Street in a July email to his reader list. With a little help from the deputy inspector of the NYPD who pepper sprayed some women just because he felt like it, #Occupy is the coolest thing in the world. Or rather it is unless you’re freaked out that if anyone questions the legitimacy of the corporate-government-national security state, or dares to blaspheme the religion of the Free Market, or questions that some dude sitting in a cubicle ripping off the economy should make $292,000 a year — then clearly whole system we love and benefit from and pay handsomely for the privilege of using debit cards is going to come crashing down on our heads.

Today, someone posted an undated picture of a riot to my Facebook page and said in that frantic tone that can only be conveyed in sentence fragments, “look at this ‘peaceful resistance’!…somebody will say it’s nothing to do with wall street occupation…let me tell you — they (on the street) declare opposite!..it’s just ..not everybody is ready and has right consciousness for a change..and there is someone leading them in a trap.” Um, not everyone has the right consciousness? Therefore call the whole thing off and go back to yoga class?

Guy Fawkes mask, a reference to the film V for Vendetta. The mask image is sometimes used by the hacker collective Anonymous, which has been supporting #Occupy various ways. Photo by Eric.

The posh New York City astrologer who smuggled me the top-secret file, for her part, is absolutely certain that this is all a setup for martial law. I asked her about her spiritual training on the issue of ‘fear’ and she replied, “While spirituality is very important, unfortunately there are some not-so-nice people on this planet with us.”

No, really?

I replied, “To say that something is a setup for martial law is, at best, presumptuous. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but to me there are many other possibilities.” Since she’s an astrologer, which at least implies some metaphysical learnings, I added: “The plane of reality to which you’re attached or typically reside will influence your perception of the flow of events and the validity of information. Indicators [of your mindset] are things like the polarization level of your experience, your love/fear quotient, and what you perceive as real.”

People who are paranoid about Occupy Wall Street might have one of a few things going on, psychologically speaking. First, they may have authority issues, which result in a blowback of guilt when they or anyone they see challenges authority. (This connects to unresolved relationships with their parents, which by the way usually involve money issues.) Or, they are getting off on the self-importance of warning people about a big threat that nobody else is informed enough to see. Trying to send the file by encrypted mail comes with the message, “I’m so important, they’re spying on me.” And many people feel too cool to support the protest, like economic justice was a good thing until it became trendy. So naturally, all of a sudden it’s a CIA plot. Personally, I take the suggestion of David Byrne, from the old Taking Heads song: Don’t worry about the government.

I would say that the real problem the Occupy Wall Street movement has is great expectations. We are a country so starved for leadership and moral guidance that many people actually expect this uprising to solve the nation’s problems. One question going around is, “How are they going to influence Washington?” As if to say — finally we have something that actually might do so.

The Chart for Occupy Wall Street

And the funny thing is, not only might it work, it’s likely to be having an actual influence even in this nascent stage. Earlier in the week, a friend documented the birth data for the Occupy Wall Street movement. According to a poster that was circulated announcing the event, the first protest was called for noon on Sept. 17 in New York City. That’s good enough to cast a chart. Here it is.

Note Mercury at the top of the chart, the planet of messages and messengers in the house of corporations and governments. Many planets not shown in this rendering are aligned with Mercury — see the table below. Click for larger version.

The first thing that leaps off of the page is that green planet at the very top of the chart, next to the dark line. Can you see that one? The one with the little horns? That is Mercury, the messenger. Mercury is strong in this chart: placed in Virgo, one of the signs it rules, and also it’s the most elevated planet in the chart. It’s located in the 10th house — the one about the government, the corporate system, and in general, influence, reputation and fame.

Mercury so powerful in the 10th house translates to “speak truth to power.” So far as I can see, whatever constitutes power is going to be getting the message. What they do about it remains to be seen, but Occupy Wall Street is coming across in their boardrooms loud and clear. Mercury in Virgo this prominent is also about thoughtful, intellectual leadership in an era when you usually have to be an idiot to get on TV.

Contrary to this being a confused movement that is looking for a message, it is the embodiment of a message. The movement has, in one month, re-framed the discussion about the economy. At the time this little gathering happened, the national discussion was about why we could not pay to rebuild bridges in Vermont after Hurricane Irene. But how come we have trillions for bank bailouts and wars and executive bonuses? Now suddenly we’re talking about economic equity, jobs creation and puttying the Glass-Stegall act back into place.

The reason so many people are sympathetic is that they already understand the issue, or rather, they understand how all of the issues being raised by the protesters (which means, the public) are related. Yet there’s another factor, which is that Mercury is hooked into a lot of energy coming from a group of minor planets in mid-Sagittarius.

A few days before the first Occupy event, I wrote an article about the Pisces Full Moon, called The Chaos Generator. This was a rather strong Full Moon, and it too aligned with the cluster of minor planets in Sagittarius, but not as closely as that Mercury, which nails it to a fraction of a degree, right at the moment of the first gathering. When you align a fast-moving planet with a group of slow-moving ones, you ramp up the power of the fast planet, giving it extra purpose and influence.

Here is a thought from that article: “The Pisces Full Moon also makes a square to the solar eclipse in Gemini earlier in the year (both are mutable signs … this will add public resonance — eclipses have that sensation … it’s a potential turning point, which includes all of the themes associated with the planets in Sagittarius.”

Minor planets in the Occupy Wall Street chart, focused on 14+ degrees of the mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) which function as one influence. Many planets are aligned with Mercury, the most powerful planet in the chart. Included in the alignment are Sappho, which brings people together, and Panacea, which is about far-reaching solutions. Ephemeris calculation from Serennu.com.

I also pointed out the presence of the Great Attractor, located at 14+ Sagittarius, which was part of the aspect structure. “What aspects the Great Attractor takes on part of the energy — especially a conjunction. People who have natal planets in aspect to the Great Attractor can have an odd kind of charisma, where they seem untouchable. It’s as if they have an invisible boundary around them, that makes you keep your distance but want to get closer at the same time. The word attractor is used because everything is rushing toward it, but nothing can ever keep up.”

Continuing: “It can also have a magnifying effect on whatever is there, like a cosmic repeating station that might take the relatively subtle theme of a planet or asteroid and broadcast it outward. Remember, the Great Attractor is the mass of many thousands of galaxies; it’s positively enormous. Then things come along and line up with it, and that’s exactly what we have going on now.”

I concluded the article, “The simplest way to say this is that unless we take our political problems to a higher level, what you might call a spiritual level, we’re going to be caught in the same game endlessly. The issue is evolutionary. We might ask ourselves not about when we’re going to come up with a solution to our political problems, but rather to the problem of politics.”

One thing that’s interesting about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s being run as a collective. There are mass meetings called general assemblies held a couple of times a day. It’s further organized into working groups that take on specific tasks. But there is no name or face associated with Occupy Wall Street. It does not have an ego identity and nobody is ‘claiming credit’ for it. This is actually a reasonable first step in solving the problem of politics. Obviously the absurd rules of the U.S. Senate have outlived their use; it’s dumb to have one drunk politician be allowed to hold up progress for the whole country.

As for how it all unfolds, we influence that with our choices. I mean this actively, each of us. Leadership is now in plasma mode. This is a new mental environment for some, perfectly natural to others — but it’s the environment we are in. We are in a different universe from the ‘freaking out is mandatory’ environment of the post-9/11 decade. How we think and how we feel contribute to the greater body of thought movement. This is not merely a sit-in or series of protest marches; it’s an evolution of thought in a highly quickened psychic environment. I suggest you learn to navigate the energy. It’s lighter and requires more agility. And if you stay flexible, you can have a lot more fun.

Lovingly,

Friday, Oct, 21, the Sun is conjunct Juno and trine Neptune. We’ve covered this aspect here. The Sun ingresses Scorpio at 2:30 pm EDT Sunday. We’ve covered the Scorpio ingress here. In other news, the hypothetical planet Transpluto has ingressed Virgo, changing signs for the first time in 70 years (to the best of our research, it has a 686-year orbit). Ignored by most astrologers, Transpluto (associated with narrowness, focus and self-criticism) will crawl back and forth over the Leo-Virgo line for the next couple of years, though the first ingress is one to watch carefully. This will get extra emphasis as Mars makes a conjunction to Transpluto when it ingresses Virgo on Nov. 11. This conjunction will be exactly opposite Chiron in Pisces, bringing it into the discussion. For those who are Chiron trivia buffs, you may have noticed that Jupiter is currently sitting in the Chiron discovery degree, 3+ Taurus.

The Moon is past last quarter and is in waning phase, about to approach the waning crescent. The Leo Moon is conjunct Mars Friday, suggesting some combination of anger, passion or creativity. Be aware of being angry at women, or your mom. The Moon moves into Virgo Saturday morning, first making a conjunction to self-critical Transpluto (which is in Virgo for the first time in 600 years — this is a new kind of event, and the point was undiscovered the last time it was in Virgo). The Moon ingresses Libra Tuesday just before noon EDT. While the Sun is early in Scorpio there will be a New Moon, which happens at 3:55 pm EDT on Wednesday. This is an interesting event — the New Moon is conjunct Atlantis, which we covered in the article Here at the Edge of the World. This is a clue to watch the fear index carefully. Note that most people who are scared are actually horny but don’t know what to do about it.

Questions of attachment and what to do about it, and with it, dominate this week’s astrology. Mercury and Venus are in Scorpio — anything in Scorpio stokes passionate sex. But then there’s the relationship question. Friday’s conjunction of the Sun and Juno is suggesting that we need to separate our identity from our identity as a relationship partner. This is a bigger issue for some people than for others, but it seems to be underappreciated as a mental trap. In any event there is an opportunity to dissolve some of that energy and unfold one’s sense of personal identity within a relationship or beyond it. More significantly, there’s an opportunity to recognize the degree to which we tend to consider ourselves whole people as a benefit of being in a relationship.

Astrology of Marriage; My Theory of Healing

In this week’s edition of Planet Waves FM, I look at the current astrology, which involves a Sun-Juno conjunction in Libra — an aspect that is asking some questions about our concept of marriage. I include a discussion of Juno as an astrological factor, as well as some approaches to what it tells us about ourselves. In the second half of the podcast (starting at 30 minutes in) I explore the concept of healing — one of the most misunderstood ideas there is.

This is a follow-up on last week’s discussion with Elisa Novick and I offer some of my thoughts about healing process, what a healer is, and how to work with one. I suggest we go beyond seeing a healer as someone with magic powers, or the ability to fix us with their technology, and look at them a someone who holds space and facilitates our process.

Toward the middle of the program, I mention a CD, called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This is a masterpiece of found art, an experimental collaboration based on random sounds and assembled with composition by two of my favorite Tauruses, Brian Eno and David Byrne. If you haven’t tuned into the solo work of either of these two composers, you’re in for a treat. This is their first collaboration (as composers — Eno had produced Talking Heads for years). They recently came out with a second one, called Everything that Happens Will Happen Today. These guys are not really musicians — they are artists who happen to express themselves through music (both are excellent painters as well).

Here is your program — and the complete archives — in the old player.

Friday, Oct. 21, 2011. Horoscope #879. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — What are you up against? Do you have the sensation that you have some kind of an invisible obstacle or adversary? Does everyone seem to be treating you with the same attitude? It can be difficult to see how your internal psychological dynamics manifest as events, situations and trends in your relationships — but now would be a good time. There is something here about the ways you were treated as a child that is showing up in your life now. Most people have little idea what their early environment did to inform them about the seeming ‘bottom lines’ in the world. If you find yourself having strange or inexplicable encounters, or getting drawn into peoples’ dramas, I suggest you try making the lines directly back to your early history. With these added points of reference, you’ll be able to change your mind about things that have troubled you for a long time.

Aries, your birth sign or rising sign, is getting some of the most potent transits of them all right now. I’ve recorded an hour of astrology and a tarot card reading for you. Learn more by visiting this page.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You seem to be experiencing considerable sexual tension. This appears to be less about how you relate to others than about how the male and female polarities within you relate to one another. There is something in psychology known as projection. In sexual relationships, projection often comes in the form of seeing the attributes of your inner male in the men around you (usually, this happens to women), and of your inner female in the women around you (usually, this happens to men). In the current setup, this may be reversed, and you may be looking to same-sex examples for who you want to be, or what you can confidently express. If you perceive certain people as ‘more sexual’ than you, make contact with the aspect of yourself who is just as intense and passionate. Note your same-sex attractions and fascinations. Sex and gender are a puppet show — remember who is the master.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — As the next few days unfold, make sure you know what’s bothering you. Keep your energy moving rather than bottled up. A steady burn-off will prevent larger explosions. Be aware that you could pick up on someone else’s rage, or be extra sensitive to the injustices that others around you are facing. If you’ve got jealousy on your mind or weighing on your feelings, I suggest you ask yourself what good that particular emotion ever did anyone. I think people avoid understanding jealousy for two reasons: one is that it can veil something we really think is hotter than hot, but are afraid to admit; and it can veil the fear of death, disguised as the fear of losing a relationship. I suggest you investigate. The deeper you take your inquiry, the deeper emotional healing you will access — and that is the point.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — For the moment, I suggest you keep financial matters and sex as far apart as you can. They often get intermingled, whether it’s the dinner date that leads to sex, the trip to Vegas or the intricately woven erotic-economic threads of marriage, do your best to separate these two topics. People can have this weird tendency to vindicate sex because there was a cash exchange of some kind. I suggest you give your pleasure away for free, and see how that feels. For free would translate to without expectation of some other return. If someone you love or desire has another erotic interest, I suggest you surrender to that experience and explore how you feel doing so. Right now your charts are all about tapping into unusual sources of passion, exploring taboo emotions and leaving yourself free to feel exactly what you are feeling. Start with allowing sex to be sex for its own sake, with no other value.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Pay attention to what someone close to you has gone through, and how it still may be influencing them today. You may think that it was clearly more intense than something you went through — and it may have been, but there will be parallels in your own life. Indeed, what happens over the next few days could shed light on your experience of relationships going back many years. This involves how people respond to you when you desire them. It also involves how you perceive the desire of others, directed toward you. Have you noticed what conflict this can cause? I’m inclined to say that it’s needless conflict, but there is a cause, and it involves the relationship of desire to power. An astonishing number of people have been subjected to some form of sexual abuse, and this always involves the conflation of desire and power. We would all relax a little, if we could see this for what it is.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Virgo is famous for its self-critical tendencies. However, they are really a problem when your judgments are lurking below the level of awareness. Once you become aware of them, they are easier to address; they are easier to see as being distortions. You are entering an extended phase of your life when the theme is learning how to relax these strict expectations, rules and standards that you have set for yourself. Before you get there, you’re going to see them in a whole new light, and you’ll become aware of the cost to you in energy, pleasure and freedom. As you do this, you’re likely to notice something else: you can bring out specific talents and intentions and focus on them with unusual power. That, by the way, would be a result of using the energy you gain from relaxing your false or negative expectations on yourself. Your gifts are much more beautiful seen in the light.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — We usually think of relationships as involving two people, but they are always part of a larger human constellation. We’re taught to wear these little blinders: If it’s not a marriage/official partnership, it’s not an official relationship, and every pair-bond is an island. There is this subtle paranoia that if we let go of that notion even a little, the result will be anything from an instant orgy to the decline of Western civilization. Well, cheers to orgies and the decline of civilization, but that’s not what usually happens. Many relationships need to be let out of their jar. They need a walk in the park. Many people in relationships need to go to a party on their own, flirt with everyone, and maybe meet someone for coffee the next day. Many people not in relationships would benefit from noticing the many, many possibilities for how two or more people can relate to one another.

Planet Waves

Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

Your Libra Birthday Reading is ready for Libra and Libra rising people. This is literally a fireside chat about your astrology for 2011, recorded in the hours before the Aries Full Moon. It covers the unusual events in your relationship, family and creative angles. Going well over the usual hour or so, this presentation was recorded outside on the land, after crossing the stream and scaling the side of the waterfall with my gear, collecting firewood and getting the fire going, ending shortly after dark. The Libra Report includes three sections of astrology plus a reading from the Voyager Tarot. The chart and a photo of the reading are included, along with access to special discounts on other projects. Here is your link to purchase.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — The Sun is about to ingress your sign this weekend — that’s excellent news. Even better news is that the first thing the Sun does is make a trine to Chiron, which will help open up the flow of passion and emotional energy. You will have many choices where to direct that energy, and an invitation to participate in an experiment. But I suggest you be conscious of one thing, which is that passion, erotic energy and love can have a tendency to flush out many of what we call negative emotions. Many of those emotions show up as projections — things we see in others, and which are calling for some resolution within ourselves. For you, a place to shine the light is where erotic energy meets control. You’re in an unusual position to see this emotional dynamic for what it is, and to take a step toward setting yourself free.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — All kinds of deep and dark emotions seem to be brewing at the bottom of your psyche, and as the Sun moves into your neighboring sign Scorpio this weekend, you’re likely to get some insight into what’s going on for you. It looks like there’s a lot you’re not expressing, but at the same time you don’t have the words to do so. I think that’s the first step — gradually identifying what you’re feeling, at least clearly enough to make a short sentence. As you do so, you may discover that these emotions go a lot deeper than you think, and each new discovery may be wrapped in a layer of frustration. Don’t let that deter you. Keep your gumption. You’re the one thing in the world that you need the most information about. Nobody is going to tell you; you’re going to discover it yourself, and that will take some gumption. Be patient and dauntless and you will learn a lot.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You have the solution to a joint financial issue right in your hands. It’s so obvious and so close to you that you might look right past it without seeing it. Said another way, the solution to the puzzle is exactly the thing that your intuition is telling you it is. One clue I can give you is, you have recently gained some insight into the larger forces that are operating around you. You’re aware that there are people with agendas, some of which affect you directly and some of which don’t affect you at all. Make sure you can tell the difference. You may have this idea that if you want something, someone else will automatically not want it, or prevent you from getting it. If you have this notion, I would say it’s time to test the theory. Take a step outside the established rules (or unspoken rules) of your situation. Notice what happens when you decide you’re not going to let fear or resentment run your life.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You have a theory of relationship, and a corresponding reality that does not always match. No matter how idealistic you are, it always comes down to who or what pushes your buttons, or treads on your most sensitive spots in an insensitive way. It would help if you bear in mind what those spots are, and rather than defending them or guarding them, gently guide the discussion in another direction. This may be challenging, as you’re likely to have at least one situation in the coming few days when you feel like someone is treading directly on one of your deepest injuries. Whatever this may represent, bear in mind that the person involved may not be aware of what is going on with you — nor may they be in a position to help you talk it out. You may decide it’s worth daring an actual conversation — but that will work better if you don’t blame anyone for what is yours to work through.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Patric Walker, the master of the horoscope column (1931-1995) once wrote that if you scratch a Pisces you will find a Virgo under their skin. I would say if you put your fingers on the wrist of a Pisces, you will feel a Scorpio pulse running through their veins. This will be especially true now, as the Sun enters Scorpio this weekend, lighting up Chiron in your own sign as it does so. This translates to an easy flow of passion and desire — as long as you get out of your own way and allow the energy to flow through first. Said another way, take care of yourself. Don’t let the emotional or mental blocks of others frustrate you. There may be nothing you can do to help them — and there are others who are in a better position to exchange energy with you. Then look around for others who are curious, adventurous and creative — you will find them, and you will have plenty to share.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Notes from #Occupy: Looking for Common Ground

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Breaking story — ABC News ticker informs protesters at Times Square in New York City on Saturday, Oct. 15 that the #Occupy movement has gone global. Photo by Eric Francis. More Times Square images here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

On Saturday, I went to a big rally in Times Square that was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Around the world in an estimated 1,500 other cities, similar protests were happening. This was one day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg wisely chose to not clear out the movement’s base camp in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district. I arrived a little early, wondering what would happen. By 5 pm, the stated time of the protest, Broadway was packed from 42nd Street north up to 47th Street. A small ocean of friendly, sincere people had come out to make their presence known to the world — not to celebrate New Year’s Eve but rather to state their objection to greed.

For many years, we have all watched the injustices mount against the American people. I’ve long wondered when we were going to hear an objection, and this event was something of a miracle. A decade of war, years of economic decline, jobs being shipped overseas, people with enormous college debt unable to find work — the silence was deafening and disturbing. Suddenly I was standing in Times Square, surrounded by people aware of the problem and choosing to join together as one voice. As the crowd gathered, the news ticker above ABC studios delivered the message, “Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide.”

Notably, this was the first coordinated day of global action since the F-15 protests against the Iraq war on Feb. 15, 2003 — just over eight-and-a-half years ago. I’m not sure what is more amazing — that the F-15 protests happened at all, or that they didn’t continue. But they put on the record, before the fact, the public’s objection to an invasion that went horribly on every account. The current movement is happening in a different era of history, presumably for a different reason. In 2003, the economy was still riding from bubble to bubble, and objecting to a war was seen as a political statement; a statement of principle or of moral objection to what in fact became a moral outrage.

In 2011, we have another situation on our hands, one requiring neither prescience or an especially sensitive moral compass. There are millions of people for whom the economic system is not working. The real unemployment rate is closer to 20%, poverty rates are increasing, and one in five Americans is having trouble feeding their family. At the same time, people are seeing headlines over and over again about huge banks that took bailouts reaping profits, giving bonuses to top executives and laying off workers. You don’t need to be an economist to understand this is a problem.

Every day, we are told again that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans will lead to more jobs, and after a decade of those tax cuts the economy is where it is today. The people who create these problems, making huge profits, are nervous. They know that everyone else is starting to figure out what happened, and understanding has a way of rippling out, once it gets rolling. And it is now rolling: awareness and a movement of people who are at least willing to get off the couch and step out from behind their computer and get together and discover that they are not alone.

Stop the Drones: By linking the economic crisis to the war, protesters are risking being perceived as being a ‘left wing’ movement — but this has not hurt the movement’s popularity with the public (including city residents). The #Occupy demonstrations have spread to many countries around the world and are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. Photo by Eric Francis.

Mainstream news outlets may keep portraying Occupy Wall Street as a movement of unwashed people who have never accomplished anything and who are confused about their goals, but for the moment, at least, we can tell the story ourselves. There is now an alternative media that is so far-reaching it would have been incomprehensible 20 years ago when I was writing for In These Times and Sierra. When two dozen people get arrested at a Citibank branch for trying to close their accounts, the video goes viral within hours. That both informs many more people than would have heard the story otherwise, and puts significant pressure on the bigger news outlets to at least acknowledge what happened.

This is a very special moment we are in. When I say that we must use it wisely, I mean that we all have something precious and useful in our hands, something that many, many people recognize, however dimly, belongs to all of us.

Set Your Watch: It’s Time for Uranus Square Pluto

A few times at the protest I was asked what I do, and I said that I’m the editor of an astrology website. In answer to, “Is this in the astrology?” I said yes — it’s the Uranus-Pluto cycle. It’s the same cycle that was going off in the 1960s. I know I’ve explained this a few times. It’s not easy for everyone to understand. We are now entering an extended peak of this cycle, and at the moment we have many options for how we use this energy.

The Earth Day flag made an appearance at Times Square on Saturday night, a reminder that we live on one world. Photo by Eric Francis.

Uranus (the faster of the two planets, orbiting the Sun once in just over 84 years) has the themes of sudden upheaval, surprises, invention and forward-thinking. When Uranus gets into the picture, events proceed quickly. The best advice any astrologer can give is to expect the unexpected, and work with it rather than against it. Pluto (the slower of the two planets, taking 251 years to go around the Sun) takes anything it touches deeper. In the psyche it’s related to the drive to make contact with one’s soul, as well as profound transformations. In society, Pluto can represent control dramas as well as profound restructuring of cultural institutions: for example, the government, banks, corporations and the empire itself.

Put these two planets together and amazing things happen. Uranus and Pluto will make a big aspect every 40 to 50 years or so, which is like a shakeup of the accumulated material, outdated ideas, stuck institutions and stuck people. It’s almost always a revolutionary era.

It’s astonishing how dependable this particular cycle really is. When I say that the current movement is just getting going, and is going to last for years, I am speaking with authentic confidence that is grounded in history. Perhaps the most famous time frame associated with Uranus-Pluto is that of the French Revolution. Uranus and Pluto were opposite one another (literally, on opposite sides of the Sun) from 1787 through 1798, closely overlapping the revolutionary era of 1789 through the late 1790s. This revolution was not all fun and games. The accumulated outrage both at centuries of repression by the monarchy and the church came busting out violently. It did not end well; in many ways the opportunity was squandered. After a brief period of a constitutional republic, by late 1804 France had an emperor, in the person of Napoleon I.

Another famous period was the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1848-1849. This was the peak of a wide-reaching wave of change that culminated with revolutions spreading across Europe faster than the mail could travel, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Dresden, Baden, Prague, Rome and Milan. Astrologer-historian Richard Tarnas describes this as “the sudden eruption of a collective revolutionary impulse affecting an entire continent with mass insurrections, the emergence of radical political and social movements, revolts for nationalist independence, and the abrupt overthrow of governments.”

The heart of the matter: sign saying that the richest 1% of Americans control 40% of the wealth. Photo by Eric Francis.

Then there was the conjunction of the 1960s, which had a similar revolutionary spirit. This was expressed in student uprisings, stunning advances in art, music and technology, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the Moon landing and Woodstock — to name a few events we think of that happened during a concentrated time in history. John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which was a kind of revolution, and Richard Nixon both came to power and was finally thrown out of office as the conjunction waned. That also had the feeling of a revolution, perhaps more poignantly than the JFK assassination. After a brief period of collectivism, we then embarked on a 30-year phase where politics and nearly every other facet of public life swung toward corporate power and military domination of the world.

It’s fair to say that Uranus-Pluto aspects are amazing while they last, and then the end result is a gamble. It’s easy to throw out the stodgy old jerks who were oppressing you; it’s hard to build a new world. What world we are going to build is exactly what we need to be thinking about right now. What we would do if we had the power to make changes is not just something we need to be pondering but putting into action right now.

Beyond Left and Right

One of the first things I think is essential is going beyond the usual left/right, liberal/conservative storyline. We all have human needs, and yet many people are stuck to their old tales of why things are wrong. If so-called liberals and conservatives would listen to one another, they would discover plenty of common ground — especially on economic issues, which are the core theme of these protests. This is going to be as challenging for many people as a lifelong Catholic going to Jewish services every Saturday. And certain facts (such as about the actual current distribution of wealth) are going to need to enter the picture.

Photo by Eric Francis.

As Matt Taibbi, one of my favorite journalists, wrote Monday [Oct. 17] in his blog at Rolling Stone, “What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that’s a story our media won’t want to or know how to handle.”

Yet it’s essential that we who care unify toward some common goals. This is not easy for people who are programmed to be divisive and divided. For this to happen, I think two things are necessary. One is that the person or group with the greater understanding has to work to reach for the common ideas that underlie the problems we all agree are real. This is evolutionary work. You could say that it’s the Pluto side of the equation. Pluto represents the need for all of us to go deep and therefore reach a place where there is more likely to be mutual understanding. If we own our shadow material — our fear, guilt, anger and related emotions — we will be less likely to project those feelings onto others, and therefore less likely to blame them. There’s also something here about taking personal responsibility for that aspect of the problem that was caused by individual greed — such as the many people who used their home as an ATM, or who got their mortgage by lying about their income.

Taking this on the level of personal responsibility in order to actually do something new: to not only let go of the patterns of the past, but to create new patterns that are fundamentally different. You could say that instead of working this out as a cultural game of left versus right, we each need to get the left and right hemispheres of our brains talking to one another.

Our tendencies to divide against ourselves and hence against one another can seem intractable. They involve cultural and family patterns, emotional patterns and ideas about relationships, and I believe all these things are rooted in our DNA and what some call karma. That is to say that in addition to any revolutionary activity, for the revolution to stick, we need to do some deep healing work and understand how we got to where we needed a revolution in the first place. Fortunately there are a lot of people who have been doing that deep healing work for many years. You may be one of them. And as the revolution spills out into the streets, we will need to guide it into the hearts and souls of those who would be free.

Lovingly,

Stay tuned for pre-ordering information for Reality Check: The 2012 annual edition of Planet Waves.

The Foiled Plot to End All Protests

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Last week, I cautioned that some kind of false-flag event might be used to disrupt the Occupy Wall Street protests that have now spread to 1,100 cities in the United States. As of press time, the protesters had too strong a presence in Zuccotti Park for New York City to move ahead with its proposed ‘cleaning’ of the park first thing Friday morning. Protesters spent the night mopping and scrubbing the plaza in the financial district. That is a real movement, and it’s going to grow as the Uranus-Pluto square — the 2012 aspect — comes into focus. Unlike protesting a war, which might be seen as ideological and unpatriotic, there’s nothing un-American about wanting to feed your children. Wednesday night Keith Olbermann reported that according to a new survey, one in five Americans said they had trouble feeding their families the past year.

Her sign reads, “I inherited money at 21. I have had health and dental insurance all my life. I want to live in a world where we all have enough. I have more than enough. Tax me! Rich kid for redistribution! I am the 1% and I stand with the 99%.” Photographer unknown; city unknown; source: Electrical Audio website.

Directly or indirectly, it seems that the world economic crisis is affecting everyone, and even if it’s not affecting you, you may still be outraged by the ways in which the ‘bailouts’ of Wall Street firms and U.S. banks seem to have gone directly into bonuses for top executives. Bank of America, which got nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in bailouts, is about to lay off 30,000 workers.

This kind of greed is what the Occupy Wall Street protests are about — and they are catching on. Saturday is the planned worldwide 15 October event, which officially takes the #Occupy movement global. Though this protest movement started a month ago with the big story being how it was being ignored by the media, I would say it’s doing very well right now. Sure, much of the coverage has been pretty stupid, which The Onion summed up this week as, “Nation Waiting For Protesters to Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them.”

Though Fox News portrays those protesting as a bunch of anarchists who have never worked for anything in their lives, in truth this is a broad-based movement of educated people who know that our society is being ripped off and our economy is being destroyed. To my ear, those so-called conservative elements calling for dismantling the government (what they call deregulation) so that it’s easier for them to do business have as much credibility as the mafia calling for the dismantling of the organized crime unit.

As author and war correspondent Chris Hedges put it last week, “Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they’re calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a corporate reconfiguration of American society into a form of neo-feudalism. And that’s what we’re really asking for — is the restoration of the rule of law.”

That is an interesting image of Pluto in Capricorn — and this is going to be an interesting revolution. The hippies are now the conservatives (who would preserve the power of the state) and the self-acclaimed conservatives are now the anarchists (who are doing a good job taking it apart).

Speaking of the rule of law, on Tuesday, the federal government’s top cops held a press conference and announced that a big terrorism plot had been foiled. Let’s see if I can get this right. The Iranian government was going to hire a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, while he was in New York. This was supposed to happen in a restaurant and in theory lots of innocent people would have been killed. The plot was disrupted and it never got anywhere near actually happening.

Protest at Chase bank in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2011. The signs say, ‘Make Banks Pay’. Photo from open-source Flickr stream.

“Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real, and many lives would have been lost,” said Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, claiming victory on behalf of the nation.

Funny, this was the same scenario for an action-thriller I suggested to my literary agent last month, though in my version, the plot was foiled by an astrologer who was asked by Iran to cast the perfect chart for the event. The astrologer had a friend who was an FBI agent, he passed the tip along and saved the day. Okay, just kidding about that part.

My favorite critique of this ‘terror plot’ came from Glen Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com. He wrote, “The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it.”

In case you don’t know those names, Bill Kristol was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff when he was vice president, he’s associated with several prominent neoconservative think tanks, and is the godfather of the Neocon movement. John Bolton is the big guy with the walrus moustache who wanted to blow the top 10 floors off of the United Nations (to which he was a delegate under Bush). Now imagine them taking LSD together, and dreaming up something really weird. That’s what this plot sounds like.

Queens Galley soup kitchen in Kingston, NY, which feeds anyone who walks in three meals a day and provides emergency housing for 50. According to a new survey, one in five Americans has struggled to feed themselves or their family this year. Photo by Eric.

Thursday, The New York Times informed us that Mansour J. Arbabsiar, the suspect allegedly at the center of the alleged terrorist plot, was someone who was so disorganized he literally could not manage to wear matching socks. “He was perennially disheveled, friends and acquaintances said, and hopelessly disorganized,” the newspaper wrote. They quoted an old friend: “He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan.” Hmm, he’s got something in common with many of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

The Times noted, “American officials, who say the plot was endorsed by top Iranian authorities, were exploring why the sophisticated Quds Force might have chosen to rely on so amateurish an agent as Mr. Arbabsiar.”

Maybe astrology will give us a clue. Let’s take a look at the chart for the big announcement that the terror plot had been foiled. When I first looked at this chart, the story seemed plausible. But as I studied the placements more carefully, the whole thing seemed, well, the word is tidy. Tidier than a chaotic lead conspirator who could not keep track of his cellphone. Tidier than an international conspiracy to commit mass murder. How was that Mexican gang going to get into the United States? I guess they were going to sneak past right where the fence along the border is supposed to go.

The chart is basically that of the Aries Full Moon. Federal officials made their announcement Tuesday just a few hours before the Moon reached its exact opposition to the Sun. It’s true that the Full Moon can have a precipitating effect, like the wind blowing through a tree full of ripe apples. [That was the case in August 2006, when another such plot was uncovered on the Full Moon, this one in the UK. That was the famous one that led to not being able to bring more than a few ounces of liquid onto an airplane. It turned out to be a domestic plot, based right in England.]

This chart has Capricorn rising, and we find Saturn (the ruler of Capricorn) standing at attention up on top of the chart — about to be conjoined by the Sun. So we have a Sun-Saturn conjunction straight up at the top. This could be the image of the servants of justice and government doing their job — which is precisely what it seems like: an image. In Libra, this image has come out of Central Casting and been attended to by $400 an hour stylists. It’s so realistic, it makes me want to stand up, put my hand over my heart and wipe a little tear from my eye.

Chart for Eric Holder announcing that the U.S. government had foiled a terrorism plot by Iran. Click for larger image.

The Aries Moon for its part is down in the 3rd house (of media) and it’s precisely — to the exact degree — square the ascendant. Very neat and tidy.

Here is something interesting as well. The Moon in this chart is also exactly on the horizon of the chart for the Sept. 11 incident — the relationship angle, one of the most sensitive lines in the whole chart. If George Bush had made this announcement, he would have come out with a hunk of still-smoldering debris from the World Trade Center. The Obama administration is somewhat subtler in its sales approach, evoking the sensation of Sept. 11 rather than the gory details. But the theme is ‘terrorism’ and the effect is a distraction. I don’t think the guys in the Obama administration want to rain havoc and death on anyone, but they do have their agenda.

No matter how long I’ve looked at this chart, I could not see the chart of a foiled terror plot. But I do see a chart about government, money and banking. The houses in this chart that have the most activity are that 9th/10th blend (the government going about its business, looking very handsome as it does so) with the Sun and Saturn blowing in the breeze. The money and finance houses have a lot going on, and the theme is that it’s 1) extremely narrow and 2) deceptive and 3) aggressive. We see this among many other places as Mars in the 8th house of banking, combined with a variety of other planets (some not shown in this chart) that speak of a focused, closed-minded conspiracy to do something very specific — involving money.

In any chart of a conspiracy, there is a way to check and see who the main conspirator is. That will be by studying the 12th house. If we check that house, which tells us about the ‘secret enemy’, we find Sagittarius on the cusp. Follow that to the ruler of Sagittarius, which is Jupiter, who is wealthy, fat and happy, retrograde in Taurus lurking right at the bottom of the chart. The secret enemy in this chart of a foiled terror plot is a banker, at home, sipping Romanée Conti from a good year.

Still standing — the occupation of Zuccotti Park was alive and well Friday morning, apparently too large for Mayor Bloomberg to evict for cleaning of the privately owned plaza. Cellphone photo by Beth Bagner, who will have lots more photos on our website later Friday.

So, the plot to end all protests didn’t work. Thursday’s lead story on CNN.com was about Republicans being friendlier to the protesters. Heck, Mitt Romney said he’s worried about the 99%, and “I understand how those people feel” despite his being one of the 1%.

Even Eric Cantor, whose chart could work as drain cleaner and who was just last week referring to ‘mobs’, on Wednesday said, “People are upset, and they’re justifiably frustrated. They’re out of work. The economy is not moving. Their sense of security for the future is not clear at all. People are afraid, and I get it. When we have elected leaders stirring the pot, if you will, that’s not good.”

Speaking of stirring the pot, we’re aware that as of press time Friday morning, the presence of protesters at Zuccotti Park was too strong for the city to move in on them. The last time Mayor Bloomberg took action against the protesters was on Oct. 1, which helped send #Occupy international. A new phase of this is planned for this Saturday with the 15 October day of action. Perhaps Bloomberg has figured out that this movement is bigger than he and his billions — something the protesters apparently figured out long ago. Good thing, too.

Lovingly,

Saturn and Libra Sun are currently opposite Eris in Aries. Eris, a relatively new discovery, is a longterm visitor to Aries, taking more than a century to cross this one sign — and redefining it as it goes. Sun and Saturn opposing Eris present an image of the rigid human ego gazing into the chaotic mirror of human nature as it plays out in the world. It’s also a comment about how we seek and use relationships for stability of our own personality. Venus opposes Jupiter at 7:53 pm EDT Friday. The Moon ingresses Gemini at 10:15 am EDT on Saturday. Venus squares Vesta at 9:07 am EDT Sunday. Mercury opposes Jupiter Monday at 2:55 pm EDT, though both of these personal planets opposing Jupiter will be in effect all weekend. Beware of an emotional exaggeration effect as that happens; things are unlikely to be as big as your emotional filters make them seem, so be careful not to overreact. The Moon enters Cancer Monday evening, doing its weekly thing of ringing the bell of the 2012 aspect, Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn. If events, discussions or emotions seem tense, Monday is a possible release point, as the Moon makes a trine from Cancer to Chiron in Pisces, and also trines Mercury and Venus in Scorpio. One last: though Mercury and Venus appear close together, they don’t actually form a conjunction until June 2012, the same month that everything else happens all at once.

This weekend’s emotional tides are being driven by Venus and Mercury in Scorpio opposing Jupiter. Yes, that’s a bit more emotional than it is erotic, but anything with Scorpio so prominent is going to have a sexual flavor. But first we need to sort out the power struggle or negotiation indicated by the opposition aspects. Venus in Scorpio wants what she wants, and Jupiter retrograde in Taurus may not be in the mood to give it up. So if an opposition carries tension, this one especially does, with extra emphasis considering that Venus (in Scorpio) rules Taurus — the sign that Jupiter now occupies. Venus is opposite a planet in her own sign, and feels kicked out. There is an intervening or mediating factor in this push and pull experience: Both planets are square Vesta. With Vesta in the picture, nothing can ever be a quest for self-interest, no matter how interested anyone is in pushing that agenda. In Aquarius, her role will be to raise the discussion to the level of ‘the greatest good for all concerned’. This may call for what seems like a sacrifice of some kind, but that’s a loaded word; you can think of it more as making a contribution to the common good. Mercury has entered Scorpio as of Thursday, and this may represent the interests of another party — such as a child or young person — as part of the picture. The Moon will be in Gemini most of the weekend, at least providing an intuitive pull toward putting feelings into words.

Translating this aspect directly into sex, it looks like two available people rejected by a third person get together and have some fun. Or, it could represent a threesome, though this is becoming a lost art. Or one last potential – a situation wherein someone is apparently withholding. I would suggest that in any form of sex, the space be honored — that’s a Vesta thing, creating the appropriate setting. This is more important than most people recognize, especially if the sex isn’t the ‘taken for granted’ kind that can occur in a ‘committed’ partnership but rather something happening under other circumstances. Many object to the notion that sex can be planned; it’s supposed to be spontaneous and therefore romantic. Sex can definitely be planned, and is often better for being so. Yet this starts with making the space available, guiding social situations gently, and then seeing if the energy catches on. What may develop is more like a safe, steamy, very unusual conversation (a factor of both Vesta and the Gemini Moon). All this Vesta suggests that the sex that may happen is the ‘non sex’ kind, which might be erotic writing, hot talk, masturbation or sharing masturbation with a friend or lover. Once the definition of sex is expanded, the possibilities are endless.

Note, this was written Thursday night, prior to Mayor Bloomberg making the decision not to raid the occupation at Zuccotti Park. I’m leaving the original text: As mentioned, Mayor Bloomberg was planning to clear out Zuccotti Park Monday morning at 7 am. This is a loaded chart. Sunrise happens at a few minutes past 7, so both the Sun and Saturn are exactly in the ascendant of this chart. Venus, the ascendant ruler, is opposite Jupiter. On the 7th house cusp we have Eris, who can be a chaotic influence. The upshot of this chart is, everyone better keep their cool or it will be a bad scene for both sides. It will help that there are going to be a thousand or so video cameras trained on the situation, and city officials know that the non-Fox News-watching public supports this protest movement. It appears that the protesters are the ones who are practicing discipline and restraint while the city has a harder time keeping its forces in line. Check the Planet Waves blog later today for photos and updates. And check the 15 October website for information about demonstrations in your city.

A Conversation with Elisa Novick

Greetings. We’re ready with a new edition of Planet Waves FM, this week featuring an interview with Elisa Novick. I would describe Elisa as a master healer — words I don’t use very often or speak lightly. The longer I know Elisa, and the more I work with her and learn from her, the better I understand what that means.

Elisa Novick, photo by Eric.

I spent an evening with her Monday at her home in Great Barrington, MA, speaking with her about what she does and how she does it. You will hear things in this discussion that are definitely out of the ordinary, but — as I prefer to keep all matters of a spiritual nature — eminently practical. She is someone who works on a planetary level but also serves groups and individuals.

Anyone who aspires to this kind of work would benefit from hearing from her. I’m curious to hear your responses to both the material she presents and how you feel listening to her speak.

I give a brief overview of the week’s astrology at the top of the program, then I quickly move on to the conversation. The whole program is about one hour and 15 minutes, without a music break. If you would like to contact Elisa, you can reach her through her website, ThrivingPlanet.org. She mentions a Tree Play workshop, which will be held near Rhinebeck, NY (right near the Omega Institute) on Saturday, Oct. 29, and this is open to anyone who is interested. Check her website for more information.

Here is your recording in the old player, as well as the zip file, with the complete archive of all of my podcasts. The old player will open in a new window.

Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Horoscope #878. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Beware of subtle tensions that could be brewing under the surface of your professional or social contacts. Things you barely notice have the potential to trigger disproportionately large reactions from you or from others. The first person to monitor is yourself; in particular, any sense of pressure that has the feeling, ‘if I don’t deal with this, I might explode’. The real subject matter may be masked by more obvious dramas or conflicts that are in truth meaningless. Carefully look past any drama for the actual subject matter, which will relate to circumstances that you have not been able to change no matter how hard you try, or qualities in yourself that seem intractable. Don’t wait for any kind of straw to break the camel’s back, or the fire to start that runs out of control. There’s a long-established pattern pointing back to what you are trying to work through here. Be patient and connect the dots.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — How often, or rather how dependably, do you see the world from the viewpoint of others? Now it would seem that you have little choice, though to do so means indulging in some complexity and sorting out what may be a mixed message or some exaggerated point of view. The real information you’re seeking will come more in the form of a whisper. When you really notice something about another person, your confirmation will be that it tells you something about yourself. The sensation will be one of closeness rather than alienation; of common ground rather than a polarity, and your own desire to grow and evolve. It’s true, there is plenty you can point to that is different about someone, and the helpless sensation of a deadlock is always available. Go below the surface and tap into something more creative, a feeling or observation that draws you toward contact and empathy.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Most people choose to remain ignorant because they think that exposure to new information will not only threaten their viewpoint — it will threaten their identity. I suggest you let go of any such irrational fear. I suggest you be most willing to embrace anything that contradicts or challenges your point of view. Make a conscious effort to see all of the sides of any situation without being judgmental or dismissive. Pay special attention to your environment, and notice the agendas of anyone involved. Someone seems determined to create a conflict where there otherwise would be none, but they are leaving clues along the way and you may have had a run-in with them recently. Listen carefully and keep your sixth sense on. You have the ability not only to defuse this situation, but to make sure that it’s turned into a positive gain for everyone.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — The feelings of others may be especially compelling right now, but don’t lose your center. You could easily have your emotions drowned in an issue that someone is claiming is extremely important but is really just an over-reaction. The key will be to listen without getting caught up in the current. Over the next few days you may have a tendency to forget yourself, or at least to forget what’s important to you. Meanwhile, if you keep your focus and maintain a sense of perspective, there is an opportunity brewing that is likely to appear quickly and disappear just as fast if you don’t take notice. The opportunity relates to a financial situation that you recently determined was top priority. It’s not just about money; you have a lavish creative opportunity that’s on the verge of opening up. Remember your potential and how many times you have promised yourself to do something about it.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — I suggest you directly confront something that you don’t understand, no matter how confounding it seems. You will benefit from doing so, even if you have to encounter some confusion along the way. You may think you have to sort everything out, but what you’re really trying to do is get yourself out of a corner you’ve somehow gotten yourself into. Your sense of being overwhelmed has more to do with your viewpoint than it does with your environment. The more flexible you become, the clearer you’ll feel about what’s going on in your environment. You may have to feel really, truly stuck before that happens, but it won’t last long; and as you get to the breakthrough point, you’re likely to recognize that you can make many similar adjustments to your thought patterns. Looked at another way, you’re seeing the beautiful difference between thinking clearly and not thinking at all.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Something has been bothering you — potentially for years — and you are about to discover what it is. I may have used this analogy before: imagine you got a shard of metal embedded in your skin as a child, then forgot that it happened. Over the years, your body has gradually pushed the shard up toward the surface. Then one day it breaks the skin, and you can grab it with a tweezers and pull it out. The little injury that you get from the skin breaking is nothing compared to the sense of relief of the thing coming out. An odd tension you barely noticed will release itself, giving you new flexibility. What is this thing? It’s something old, and it’s directly related to the ‘self-critical’ thing that so many astrologers — and Virgo natives — have noticed about your sign. Working out the unfinished business of the distant past has been a theme of recent years of your life, and this is one tangible result.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You are different from the people around you. We all are, I know — but you’re in the midst of a major discovery right now. Certain individuals in your life can stand a lot more chaos, uncertainty and instability than you can. Yet the more you hunker down and cling to stability, the more you notice how much instability annoys you. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s really going on. One way to look at the situation is that everyone is just being who they are. Another way is that you and the people around you are influencing one another, as living things coexisting in one environment will always do. There are specific things you can learn about how to integrate change into your life. For you, this is more about working with variables than it is about embracing chaos. There are patterns that make perfect sense, and which point to viable options — as long as you look at the world with an open mind.

Planet Waves Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You seem to be considering something you never would contemplate otherwise. I get the feeling that you like the sensation of doing this, and you seem poised to make a spontaneous decision that might leave everyone wondering what got into you. From the look of your solar chart, this involves your career — you finally figured out that you could not be boxed into an old idea or goal, and the desire to grow took on a life of its own. Even if you make a significant change now, you will be able to find the roots of that thought process going back years; you’re reaching the critical mass point now. Carrying through on a decision is sometimes more challenging than making the decision in the first place, so make sure you take one step at a time and keep going till you get where you want to be. Let your passion guide you. That will be a lot easier now that you know in which direction to head.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You can indulge your fantasies — no matter how lurid, ‘inappropriate’ or hormone-drenched. If I had to guess these won’t feel like your usual erotic daydreams but rather like some form of actual, living contact, though on a slightly different plane of existence. I’ve noticed that the more vivid and easy a fantasy feels, the more likely it is to happen. It’s like you think a thought and then it thinks you back just as fast. The contact between you and the focus of your desire is so palpable, it’s vivid and alive. I would ask you a simple, potentially controversial question — how does it feel to be so turned on? Do you feel drawn in, a little panicky, or both? I would say that a touch of fear would be normal given the placement of the planets, but it’s something you can brush aside to claim the pleasure that’s directly on the other side.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Someone may be getting on your nerves. Since you’re the kind of person who can handle really, really annoying people, this is saying a lot. Translated into Goat Speak, someone who has been irritating you for a while is on the verge of becoming such a significant pain in the ass you might have to whack them with your head once or twice. However, the planets suggest one fact pretty clearly — this person is more of a hazard to themselves than they are to you. So I suggest you keep your distance and let the situation unfold. I think you’ll get one of those ‘lessons of leadership’, which amounts to: sometimes you don’t need to do anything. Therefore, keep your agenda moving forward; focus on what you want to create rather than fixing anything that’s bothering you. Many other forces are working in your favor; your friends love you and want to help you.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Belief is a strange thing. Consider how if you believe something that is utterly and absolutely wrong, it can have the full force and effect of being true. You may have just discovered something like that in your life. This is why it’s really healthy to challenge your beliefs before they get around to challenging you. This one had something to do with whether you feel confident enough to assert your authority. That in turn may have involved the confidence of whether you will be liked or loved. This is the thing you sometimes have to chance when you assert yourself. It could be that you’ll be liked more for being authentic, but in any event, the real issue is integrity. And this you have demonstrated, and you’ve learned something in the process of doing so: as in, don’t always believe your beliefs. Take them out for a spin and see if they actually roll.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — When sexy planets show up in Scorpio, I like to remind you that sex is your religion. By this I mean that your notion of what is spiritual is what most people think of as erotic, or at least it starts there. You can leave it to others to proclaim that ‘God is love’ or ‘God is everything’, and then you get to experiment with living as if that’s actually true. The erotic dimension is one your most meaningful points of contact with what others call ‘spiritual’. Keep that in mind over the next few days, especially the part about this all being an experiment. That would include having faith in passion and exploring the ways in which beauty is nourishing. I would offer you one last idea: when most religious leaders use the word ‘sin’ they mean sexual sin. What if this were absolutely not true? What if there were no such thing? There may not be one answer to that question, but rather a doorway to a world of possibilities.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Relationships From the Inside Out

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Dear Friend and Reader:

With the Moon waxing toward full [see Planet Waves coverage of tonight’s Full Moon] the Occupy Wall Street protests spread to many cities and states around the country. All weekend, an Occupy Sesame Street spoof was running loose on the Internet, a clue that the movement has gone mainstream, as protests turned up in many cities across the country. It was fun listening to Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe (the network’s token Republican program) rant about how people were even demonstrating in Alaska, with the implied message: pay attention because this is meaningful. Brzezinski is the reporter who, live on the air, once shredded the script for a story about Paris Hilton being freed from jail, refusing to broadcast the piece, so it makes sense that she might notice.

One theme of this Full Moon is relationships. The Sun and Moon strike a pose across the Aries-Libra axis, stirring up all kinds of tension between the sign of ‘I am’ (Aries) and the sign of ‘we are’ (Libra). There’s usually some exciting tension between these concepts, though the presence of many minor planets aligned with the Full Moon emphasizes the point. There the feeling of restlessness, even fierce independence (Moon, Uranus, Bienor, Eris in Aries), is contrasted with the need for a tight, well-maintained container for fertility (Sun, Saturn, Haumea in Libra).

I mentioned in the recent monthly horoscope and elsewhere that this is about challenging the idea that we can find ourselves in a relationship. At the heart of the aspect is Saturn (structure, form) opposite Eris (personality chaos, identity crisis). Just about everyone has tried to use a relationship, or all their relationships, to feel more like a whole person and even to resolve their inner turmoil, and just about everyone has failed. Of course, after many attempts, we start to figure out who we are, and eventually (with grace and good fortune) we start to find ourselves and choose partners who reflect our emerging state of evolution.

If we cast this in political terms, it’s like trying to learn your personal politics by joining a movement or organization. That’s usually more of a submission of your individuality than it is about finding it. But one interesting thing about the Occupy Wall Street protests is the diversity of viewpoints that are showing up there. It’s not a movement known by its charismatic leaders, or any leaders, really. And it doesn’t have a set of prepared demands. This is being chided in the mainstream media as the lack of a message, but maybe it’s just the lack of a public relations agency.

What the mainstream media is not psychologically equipped to handle is describing the process of people finding their voice and their values. There’s no room for compassion in the script, no concept of exploration, no idea of growth or evolution. Something either is or is not a known quantity that matches their pre-conceived story; if that match does not exist, it’s subject to suspicion and ridicule.

Boston’s Tent City, as seen last week. Authorities in Boston kicked the protesters out Monday. Photo by Kelly Cowan.

Embracing the uncertain and the unknown in ourselves and one another is what this Full Moon is about. There are few perfect matches between people. Part of what we need to do is make space for the imperfections of relationships.

I’ve made a number of comparisons between our current era and the 1960s. Astrologically, the comparison works because the Sixties were under the influence of Uranus conjunct Pluto, and now those two planets are in aspect again. The Sixties were a confrontational time in both politics and relationships. We’re in such an era once again, but the sensation is more of an internal confrontation or perhaps a necessary meeting. We’re starting to figure out how much we have to integrate within ourselves in order to be grounded enough to make any progress together.

Sunday night I was having dinner with soon-to-be Planet Waves contributor James Wanless, the creator of the Voyager Tarot and the Sustain Yourself deck. James was a doctoral student at Columbia University during the late 1960s protests. “It was a war,” he said. Perhaps the energy of direct confrontation is necessary at certain points in both political and interpersonal relationships. It was certainly an issue between men and women in the Sixties, with sex roles changing, women having newfound sexual freedom thanks to the birth control pill and the women’s ‘liberation’ movement. The problem, it seems, is that there was not a corresponding idea of responsibility to go along with the newfound ‘freedom’.

Despite many kinds of confrontations, how much progress did we really make in how we do our relationships? How much did people look at themselves and observe the ways that they could grow and, as a result, facilitate the quality of their contact with others? Was the Baby Boomer generation better and more fulfilled in its relationships than any other generation? Whatever the answer to these questions, we’re now at the next checkpoint — the one where we have to check in with ourselves. There’s a lot of unfinished business from the Sixties that’s coming up for review now.

Today’s Full Moon may be highlighting some of the contrast and conflict in our attempts to make contact with one another. We expect more of ‘them’ than we do of ourselves. The Uranus-Pluto square is calling on us to awaken internally. The theme of this aspect is to make the changes inwardly and then express them outwardly by your actions and your choices. You could say that this is about focusing on our inner relationship first, and our outer relationships second.

This will be a central theme of the 2012 annual edition.

Lovingly,

2012 Letter: Not Your Parents’ Activism

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Note to Readers: Here is your Inner Space October monthly horoscope.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Monday morning I picked up my local paper, attracted by the headline, “Wall Street Protest Grows; Demonstrators Vow to Hang In.” The occupation of a small plaza in the midst of New York City’s financial district has entered its third week and is showing no signs of letting up. The plaza, called Zuccotti Park, is owned by a private real estate development company, not the city, so police cannot raid the protest without the permission of the property owner.

Zuccotti Park in New York City, home of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The vibes were mellow, friendly and introspective. Photo by Eric Francis.

Meanwhile, the police choosing to trap and arrest 700 mellow demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday afternoon sent the story rippling out around the world and gave lots of other people the idea to have a protest of their own. In the game of ‘cops make hippies, hippies make cops’, it’s a lot easier for the cops to make the PR gaffes that stoke the movement. Showing their power, they purchased Occupy Wall Street an international advertising campaign as a gift. A lot of people can relate to what the protesters are concerned about: jobs; financial rip-offs by banks, brokers and traders; bailouts going directly to bonuses; people’s homes being illegally foreclosed. It is a protest against the corporate system, but it’s also a protest to point out the need for basic fairness.

Society’s institutions, or more accurately, the people running them, have failed us. These demonstrations are about creating something new. But that something new is an ethic. There is a message about the need for people to take care of one another. Contrast that with the Tea Party protests of 2009-2010, where you had a lot of people saying, ‘Health insurance for me and not for you!’

Last week, a political science professor named Frances Fox Piven visited the occupation and was asked how these kinds of protest movements spring up, seemingly on their own. “I teach at the Graduate School of the City University of New York,” she said.

“I am here because I am so enthusiastic about the possibilities of this sit-in, over the marches that are occurring over postal worker issues, the sister demonstrations that are starting in Chicago and Los Angeles, and maybe in Boston. I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States. None of us know. I study movements. None of us know the exact formula for when those movements erupt, but it could be. And if that is true, then these people who are here are really wonderful. I would do anything to help them.”

A lot of observers have asked similar questions. Why do these things emerge when they do? Actually, the most passionate and sustained uprisings are reasonably predictable: they tend to happen when Uranus and Pluto come into alignment. When the planet of revolution (Uranus) and the one about evolution (Pluto) get together, there is always an international revolt. The alignments spread out over 10 to 12 years, and we are still toward the beginning of this one.

The last time these two planets got together was between 1960 and 1972. Astrologer-historian Richard Tarnas wrote of this time, “By all accounts the Sixties were an extraordinary era. Intense, problematic and seminal, the entire decade seems to have been animated by a peculiarly vivid and compelling spirit — something ‘in the air’ — an elemental force apparent to all at the time, that was not present in such a tangible manner during the immediately preceding or subsequent decades, and that in retrospect still sets the era apart as a phenomenon unique in recent memory.”

Saturday’s events at Occupy Wall Street included a meditation, a direct action training and a Slut Walk, which unfortunately I was not there to photograph. A Slut Walk is a kind of protest where (mostly) women dress up provocatively to make the point that just because you’ve got a hot outfit on does not mean you’re inviting sex. It’s a lot more fun than Take Back the Night, which is a more aggressive kind of ‘anti rape’ protest about venting anger. Photo by Eric Francis.

I visited the protest Saturday, to take pictures, check out the vibes and lend my support as a journalist. The feeling was nothing but friendly. There was not the fist-in-the-air sensation that Sixties demonstrations are remembered with. The vibe was loving — and there was not a big ego trip about revolution. This is being described as a leaderless movement, one that is based on a collective approach to decision-making and agenda-creation.

One thing about the Sixties movements is that they were led by the ‘big heavies’, leaders who became icons: Jerry Rubin, Abbey Hoffman and others. At least as far as the media was concerned, this was activism on the star system. Even the on-the-ground movements that tried to organize by consensus were not welcoming of women in leadership. Every sub-movement did its own thing until eventually they figured out they were on the same side. Ultimately it was the Vietnam War that was the uniting factor. In many respects it was fear of the draft that was driving most of the young men to stand up and get involved. It is fair to say that there was a strong element of self-interest in the protests of the Sixties.

The next wave of political movements came in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was during the rise of Neoconservatism, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The astrology was focused in Capricorn; there was a rare outer-planet conjunction between Uranus and Neptune that as the image of established social structures crumbling. We are still living with the results of this conjunction more than 20 years later.

Political activity was characterized by a kind of bitterness and sense of futility. Everybody joined a coalition or caucus that was vying for attention. I constantly felt reminded that I wasn’t cool enough to be there, and I discovered over time that this was an intentional message. As a ‘heterosexual white male’ I was ineligible to be part of a minority, and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Many women were alienated by the anti-sex, anti-male attitude at the time. It was a stressed-out movement, because many organizers had the feeling that nobody really cared. I watched these movements get conquered by their own divisions. This was the era of hyperbolic political correctness and Take Back the Night marches.

Simply put it was not a movement of inclusion but rather of exclusion. The one exception I can name was the anti-tuition hike protests at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1989 and 1991, which were amazing — and which got results. There was a military campaign at the time, what we call the Persian Gulf War. As far as I could tell, It barely registered in the minds of student activists at the time, at least on the East Coast.

Actual billionaire joins the protest. Photo by Eric Francis.

By the mid-1990s, the anti-death penalty protests surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal had taken off, and these had a festive feeling. Mumia had a national network of activists working for him. There wasn’t really a sense of serious involvement, though. It was more like a party for a good cause. Mumia is still alive, in part due to the international attention that the protests brought to his case. But I always had the feeling that nobody understood how a death penalty trial worked; they just knew that killing someone was wrong. That movement did not have a wider idea about social justice, though it tried. The confrontation was palpable: supporters of an alleged cop killer versus the cops. The band Rage Against the Machine held a benefit concert for Mumia’s defense, and the Fraternal Order of Police sued and blocked the money from going to his attorneys.

Then in 1999, the first wave of anti-globalization protests were sparked off in Seattle. These were associated with another rare aspect, Chiron conjunct Pluto in Sagittarius. To me this represented an actual spiritual awakening manifesting on the political level. Sagittarius gave it a global feeling.

These went on for years, traveling from city to city like Phish tour but not as mellow. The image you saw over and over was the activist with his or her face covered by an American flag bandanna — not so inviting, but I think a lot of people gave those kids credit for having such guts. They caused a run on the market for tear gas, and were constantly being chased by the new breed of Ninja Turtle riot cop. Every time one of those world management team groups would meet — the WTO, the G7 or whatever — they would have to build higher and higher barricades, to the point where they had to meet inside a fortress. Once again the feeling was one of confrontation, but Chiron favors the underdog and these protests helped call attention to the ripoff of globalist economic policy.

What is interesting is that the emphasis of the protests had finally shifted from the government to corporations. This was a significant reorientation in how to think about problems and solutions. A decade on we are seeing the results of ‘free trade’ (all the jobs get exported).

This is my favorite photo from my day visiting the protest at Zucotti Park in the financial district of New York City. I love the empathy on these women’s faces. To me it sums up the openness and introspection that characterizes the emerging wave of political activism. Photo by Eric Francis. All pictures taken on Oct. 1, 2011.

Before we come to the current moment, there’s one other protest movement to mention: it lasted for a day, Feb. 15, 2003. This was the F-15 worldwide uprising against the invasion of Iraq. It was something of a miracle, involving mass protests, rallies and marches in every major city in the Western world. In retrospect, this feels more like a mirage than a historical event, but it really did happen. The prevailing energy, in a word, was Aquarius.

Now we are back around to a Uranus-Pluto aspect, which directly recalls the energy of the Sixties. That’s because the Sixties happened under a Uranus-Pluto conjunction, and now 45 years later, we have arrived at the first square. This is a major turning point in world history, as we are seeing. The effects go back about three years and will carry us through the end of the decade, and if we use it well, perhaps much longer.

Along with Arab Spring and the uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio earlier this year, we have Occupy Wall Street as one of its expressions. Zuccotti Park was one of the most laid back, friendliest places I’ve visited in a while. The vibe was open but also introspective. People were expressing concern and anger about the economic situation and there was a clear sense of understanding that Wall Street holds a lot of the responsibility for that — but no sense of rage being projected onto anyone. My sense from many things I’ve read and heard is that among this generation of activists, there’s the awareness that we need to change ourselves and change the world in the same gesture.

That would be the essence of a square, especially between Aries and Capricorn. As you think about what this aspect represents, remember that the personal awakening process of Uranus in Aries is about to meet up with the changes in society represented by Pluto in Capricorn. There is potential for wide-scale cultural change, but it starts from the inside-out. That approach, if we follow it, will help us avoid many of the really huge mistakes that were made during the protests of the Sixties.

Uranus in Aries also connects people to groups, but from the perspective of being an individual. Pluto in Capricorn turns over the soil of society’s institutions, bringing out their frailty and their fertility. It will be exciting to see what happens as this aspect builds to its first peak in June 2012 and then develops for the next three years. Remember though, we’re not just watching.

One way or another, we will all be involved.

Lovingly,

PS, many more photos are on the Planet Waves blog from over the weekend. Here is one set, and here are our photos of the Brooklyn Bridge takeover.