Tag Archives: weekly horoscope

One Life at a Time

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened through which will pass free men to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

— Chilean President Salvador Allende‘s farewell speech, Sept. 11, 1973

Dear Friend and Reader:

Finally a bit of good news here in the Anti-Sixties, after a year featuring various scenarios of apocalypse, environmental devastation and intolerance: after more than two months of nonstop work, an international team successfully brought 33 Chilean miners safely home from half a mile beneath the Earth. I stayed up half the night Tuesday into Wednesday watching, one by one, as the men emerged from beneath the ground in a little capsule, and were greeted by loved ones, the president and his wife. It was better than the Beatles.

The last miner out, Luis Urzua, center, gestures with Chile’s president Sebastián Piñera standing on the right. Alex Ibanez/AP.”

In the anxious times we’re living through, this is a triumph of humanity, even though the problem was created by the people who run a massive corporation hiring people to dig for gold under extremely dangerous conditions. This was not a natural disaster. But the solution represented humanity at its best.

We could fault the worldwide vigil around the rescue as a feel-good event, but I daresay that’s what the world needs now: to actually feel good about life and love rather than the stock market or American Idol. We do a lot of getting pissed off and most of that involves how little regard is afforded to the worth of life. Watching those guys come out of the rescue pod one by one, and embrace their families, it was impossible not to appreciate being alive, right then, on the spot.

Yes, we can even feel good about humanity’s ability to cooperate at doing something helpful. There was a time those men would have been left for dead, even if some effort might have saved them. Part of what did save them was publicity — you’re always safer near a TV camera, unless it’s hidden in the ladies’ room. The drilling experts, engineers, submarine scientists, geologists and (actual) rocket scientists got the guys out. The doctors and psychologists on the surface actually seem to have offered some significant help.

Yet in reality it was the miners themselves who kept it together under some strange, extreme circumstances, rationing teaspoons of food and cups of milk for the first 17 days on the verge of starvation. They organized work tasks based on their specialties, keeping their living space clean, digging wells for fresh water and most of all, getting along. Or rather — getting along, eventually. Apparently the sanitized account of events has left out the at-times intense conflict that they experienced, and their darker thoughts of waiting to die during those first 17 days. In the end, the miners decided together that they were going to get out of that stuffy, 90-degree mine alive. For a more complete account of what happened, this article from The Guardian is worth reading.

Efforts for rescue began Aug. 5, without any knowledge of survivors, and for 17 days those efforts persisted nonstop without any success. The government and rescue teams kept trying, drilling bore holes into different layers and shafts of the mine, even sending rescuers down ventilation shafts that collapsed. Everyone is amazed by the success of this enterprise, but if rescuers had given up during those 17 days, there would have been no rescue. From that first day on, the message from the president on down was to spare absolutely no expense. If you look at the news coming out of Chile, you’ll see that the cost was never a factor, was never even mentioned until it was all over.

Chart for the first miner touching the surface had an ascendant of 1 Cancer — activating the Aries Point. Pluto is on the 7th house cusp, representing the escape from a near-death experience. Ceres is also there, as if negotiating for the release of the miners from the underworld. Note the 8th house of death and near-death experiences, which aligns with Aquarius, the sign of groups. The entire sign floats within the 8th house, called an interception. The cluster of planets in that house evokes the image of a group of people, under intense circumstances: the points shown are the vertex, Nessus, Neptune and Chiron.

Let’s go to the chart and see what story it tells. Remember that in doing mundane astrology like this, the first thing to do is observe whether, and how, the chart describes the event. That story starts straight away with the ascendant.

The time the first miner emerged was predicted, er, reported by BBC in its realtime chronology of the event as 12:11 am local time Wednesday. Astonishingly this gives us an ascendant in the first degree of Cancer, activating the world-as-one Aries Point — a kind of astrological jackpot. In case you think this is likely to happen (regardless of how often it’s been happening lately), remember that the ascendant degree changes every four minutes: it flies by. Any chart that highlights the early degrees of any cardinal sign (Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn), particularly the very first degree, qualifies, and in any one location, we get that chance for about 16 minutes out of every 24 hours.

Yes, the rescue of the miners was an event uncannily accurate for the chart for that moment.

With the Aries Point highlighted, the most intimately personal events mingle with the most public. We learned about the family lives of the miners, including some intimate details, but moreover, we felt close to them and their families, a Cancer theme. Over and over this week, we heard reporters from every network comment on how emotional the situation was. Hard-nosed Dylan Ratigan shamelessly asked one man on the scene to describe his experience from an emotional perspective — a giant leap for mankind. We could all empathize with these men and their families. That’s a nice image of the Aries Point with a Cancerian flavor: the world coming together emotionally as a family, including the girlfriends and mistresses.

Exactly opposite the Cancer ascendant is Pluto in early Capricorn, right on the 7th house cusp. Remember the cardinal cross I’ve written about 41 times this year? It made a big cameo Wednesday night, coming up angular: exactly on the horizon. In any chart, that means emphasis, and Pluto was one planet making the point. Ceres (the former asteroid, now dwarf planet) and mythological nemesis of Pluto, was in a conjunction to Pluto, as if directly negotiating for her daughter Persephone to be brought up from the underworld. Ceres had just arrived in Capricorn a few days earlier. It was as if she went down there personally and got the guys out.

Pluto in Capricorn has another incarnation — the corporate agenda that nearly killed these guys. Pluto shows up there as the near-death experience that they’re about to narrowly survive. This is the side of the coin where Pluto actually is the ‘lord of death’ and his realm, his current version of Hades, is the corporate system.

Flashback — one rendition of the cardinal grand cross of 2010, shown in the chart for the June 26 partial lunar eclipse conjunct Pluto. This is an Aries Point event, because all the planets aspect the first degree of Aries. Note the grand cross on the cardinal points — Jupiter and Uranus conjunct in Aries, the Sun and Mercury in Cancer, Saturn in late Virgo on its way into Libra, and Pluto with the Moon in Capricorn. The most intense phase of the cross has passed by, but the energy lingers and key elements remain in effect. This chart is explained in the article The Greatest Aries Point Show on Earth.

This is part of a larger astrological picture. The cardinal cross that has been whipping, flogging and stressing us all year is thankfully not quite what it used to be, but it’s still a potent force. While major elements have either moved on (for example, Saturn is now clear of some extremely tense aspects to Uranus and Pluto, heading across mid-Libra) or are out of the way (Jupiter and Uranus are temporarily back in Pisces, about to head back into Aries), the energy pattern is still in effect. These kinds of astrological events have a long story arc, stretching out for years. We’re still close to the center of the story, but we’re coasting on the momentum of recently past aspects, rather than ones that are building up — with one exception, that is, which I will come back to.

That penetrating energy of Pluto in Capricorn has been all over the news. This year we’ve had at least two other major stories that involved digging deep beneath the Earth — the BP oil spill, and the loss of 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia earlier this year.  We also heard from a volcano in Iceland, which qualifies as news from beneath the crust. During an episode of Mercury retrograde this year, volcanic dust disrupted air travel all across Europe and by ripple effect, around the world.

The earthquake in Haiti had a similar feeling. All of these events are illustrated by Pluto in Capricorn: our relationship to what is happening deep within a solid substance (mountains, canyons, rocky land or the continental plates). Pluto can represent some immutable or unstoppable force moving beneath the crust of the Earth, such as the movement of the plates and geological faults.

One interesting feature of the chart is that the Moon is in very late Sagittarius. It is literally minutes from ingressing Capricorn. The Moon is a powerful force in this chart, because Cancer (ruled by the Moon) is in the ascendant. So in a sense, the Moon is the lead planet in the chart.

When the Moon is in such a late degree, that is often called void-of-course — when the Moon has made its last aspect to a major planet, but before it changes signs. Normally the void Moon is considered a kind of foul ball; what happens doesn’t count. But this late-degree Moon in Sagittarius seemed to represent the end of a long story involving considerable international cooperation. Even the Americans helped, which is impressive on the part of the Chileans given that the last thing we did in Chile was assassinate their president, Salvador Allende, in a CIA-sponsored coup on Sept. 11, 1973.

Rescued miner Victor Zamora is brought to the surface at the collapsed San Jose mine, 800 km north of the Chilean capital Santiago, on Oct. 13, 2010. (Xinhua/Martin Zabala).

The Sagittarius Moon was exactly trine an odd non-planet (a rarely used hypothetical) called Transpluto (narrowness, specialization) which reflected the apparently flawless passage up the extremely narrow rescue shaft by 33 miners and six rescue workers. The Sagittarius Moon floats; it rises up; it always comes back. Interestingly, the Moon was conjunct an asteroid called Eurydike, the wife of Orpheus, which is a myth about an attempted escape from Hades. That story didn’t work out so well — Orpheus looked back toward the gates of Hades and Eurydike was lost. I don’t think any of these miners looked back once they got out of that capsule.

One last image: the Moon on the edge of Sagittarius has the feeling of something about to be born, and that narrow passage, 24 inches in diameter, resembled a birth canal. Even the Chilean president described the whole experience as a rebirth.

Now for the moral of the story: the safety of mines. Will we get the message that mines and mining are extremely dangerous, and that we have to take better care of the people who spend their lives in them?

Venezuelan journalist Martin Granovsky wrote in Pagiana 12 yesterday: “There is evidence that more than two million people die each year worldwide as a direct result of their employment conditions or diseases contracted there. Nobody can seriously claim that the mere exposure of a problem to one billion people at a time, in transmission from Copiapo, will solve that problem. But if the political and trade union action effectively joined the public exposure it would count in its favor with an obvious fact: the rescue that ended last night made more visible to the world what life is like to a miner and what are the risks with the increasing disproportion between corporate profitability and worker safety.”

Glimpse at Hades: the rescue pod parked in the underground refuge. In just under 24 hours, 33 miners and six rescue workers were brought up in that vehicle, which was 24 inches in diameter. It was equipped with oxygen and digital communication features.

So, in the Aries Point moment, when the world is watching and the personal, the corporate and the political are one, let’s stay vocal on the issue.

Unfortunately, much other news has been pretty misanthropic lately. Earlier in the year, I described our moment in history as the Anti-Sixties. The astrology of 2010 is a kind of mirror image of what we experienced in 1969. The main feature of ’69 was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Libra. Earlier this year we had one in Aries, opposite the Libra event to the degree. It’s just like the Sixties right now — only exactly opposite. This has come true once again as we are living through an election cycle that has been dominated by openly celebrated homophobia. The supposed love and peace theme of the Sixties has been replaced by publicly displayed hatred directed at a vast segment of our population: people who share affection with members of the same sex. In studying social history, it’s clear that political forces openly attacking any one form of sexual or relational expression spreads to the rest of them; we might want to consider stopping this pattern, if only out of self-interest.

The Teabagger movement has succeeded in floating candidates who have made homophobia their main platform. It’s the current version of red meat for their electoral base. One such candidate is so determined to make the point that she’s opposed to you having sex with yourself (which is obviously gay). Five different Teabagger candidates for U.S. Senate are against abortion even in cases when the pregnancy involves incest and rape. We now have several generations of girls, young women and early middle-aged women who have no recollection of life before Roe vs Wade and to whom the term “back room illegal abortion” means nothing. We might want to set about educating one another.

I am less astonished by this than I am by the tolerance of the American people for the viewpoint of total sexual intolerance. I mean, I’m really amazed. Even as the views of our supposed leaders translate into teenage suicides and a nationwide epidemic of bullying, most people are silent. The silence involves the nature of homophobia, which is the projection of self-judgment onto others. Most of us may not project that self-judgment, often focused on sex, so violently, but we do quietly harbor the judgments. Usually they involve guilt, and some element of jealousy that someone might have more fun than you.

The current sky is featuring a deep exploration of this subject in the form of three planets in Scorpio. One is Mars. That is the straightforward, no-need-to-be-explained nature of desire.

Relatives of trapped miner Florencio Avalos react while watching on a TV screen his rescue operation at the camp outside the San Jose mine near Copiapo, Chile, late Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010. Thirty-three miners became trapped when the gold and copper mine collapsed on Aug. 5. AP/Natacha Pisarenko.

One is retrograde Venus. That is an inquiry about how we really feel about our inherently sexual nature. Humans are the most hypersexual animals, and most of us go through the day acting like nuns and monks, mortified that anyone might realize we’re so much as thinking about sex. So this hypersexuality meets a kind of resistance that can only be put forth by the human mind, and the result is that many people are like walking pipe bombs. The question being asked by Venus retrograde is, how can we unravel that? What is the source of the challenge, the struggle, the difficulty, the resistance?

Venus retrograde in Scorpio is about going to the deepest aspects of these questions, describing a quest to understand our sexual histories and how they influence us. The retrograde describes a process of exploring how our sexual values influence our relationships and the kind of involvements and entanglements that we create.

Then there is Vesta. She’s just recently joined Venus and Mars, and she is the astrological guardian of what you might call sacred sexuality. Vesta is the faceless (never depicted) goddess of fire; her servants, the Vestal Virgins, tend the sacred hearth, keeping the fire burning around the clock. So there is a call to devotion here: of devotion not to ‘a relationship’ but to your sexuality. She stands as a kind of witness to the journey and the quest for self-understanding described by Venus and Mars in Scorpio. In a few words, I would sum up this transit at its best as a quest to be submissive to one’s own desire.

Vesta is the centerpiece of the home: the hearth. But this is no ordinary hearth; it’s the inner flame, which we must tend, lest it go out. And I daresay many of us have taken that sacred flame for granted, or used sex as a commodity rather than the beautiful celebration that it can be. Which leads me back to Pluto.

Pluto is one of the planets associated with Scorpio. And over the next phase of astrological history, Pluto is going to come into a kind of focus that we have not experienced in half a century. The Uranus-Pluto square of 2012-2017, which is about to start rumbling loudly in 2011 as it warms up to the first exact contact of June 2012, talks about total revolution of both the psyche and something much larger. Part of this revolution will be about the intersection of sex and identity. Then that meets up with the religious/corporate/governmental structure that we try to fit sex into — and where it doesn’t go.

Some of us will burst free because it feels great. Some of us will have to be extracted in a capsule through a 24-inch tube, one at a time. Some of us have no plans to come back to the surface. It would help if you decide which you want.

Yours & truly,

 

 

Judith Gayle’s Political Waves will now appear Saturdays on Daily Astrology & Adventure — the Planet Waves blog. She also has her own blog, called Political Waves.

 

Astrology Looking Ahead: Aries Full Moon #2

We are now at the Mercury-Sun exterior conjunction, which is the exact midpoint of the Mercury direct phase. The next Mercury shadow phase starts in a month, and the next retrograde starts in two months. Looking ahead, that retrograde will stretch from early Capricorn into Sagittarius, crossing a number of planets, the Moon’s North Node and the Galactic Center in the process.

The second Aries Full Moon of the year is next week. The first was on the equinox, across the first degrees of Aries/Libra, on Sept. 23. The next is on Friday, Oct. 22, in the very last degrees of Aries/Libra. Mercury will be in Scorpio, joining the conversation between Vesta, Venus and Mars; and then about 12 hours later, the Sun joins this grouping in Scorpio as well. Many Scorpio-type questions and themes that have long been ignored, suppressed or neglected will come up for conversation, healing and playtime. Part of that will involve speaking the unspeakable. Mercury makes conjunctions to each of those points in the next few weeks, giving them a voice.

Over the past week or so, the first four discovered asteroids — Ceres, Juno, Pallas and Vesta — all changed signs. Ceres entered Capricorn and is now in a conjunction with Pluto; Juno entered Virgo, Pallas entered Sagittarius and Vesta entered Scorpio. A more detailed description of these sign changes is at this link on Daily Astrology & Adventure.

The Chiron-Neptune conjunction is close to its most precise; the two points will not make an exact conjunction for their third encounter of the year, but rather a very near miss that comes within one-sixth of a degree. This is the aspect of clearing the fog, of seeing through the spider webs of deception and of fully appreciating the gift of inspiration, fantasy and ideas that we can manifest. Chiron can bring us out of the isolating feeling of Neptune and into contact with our own awareness and that of the people around us — especially in Aquarius.

Eric Francis

Archive Flashback: Horoscopes — How Can They Possibly Work?

 


Light Bridge, the 2011 Planet Waves annual — Watch your email next week for information about pre-ordering Light Bridge, the 2011 annual edition of Planet Waves. The first letter you receive will tell you how to get the best price as a current subscriber to Planet Waves or Cosmic Confidential. This initial pre-order price will include all 12 signs, a substantial (like 75%) savings over purchasing signs individually. The email header will have the words “Light Bridge” in it — a reference to the last year before 2012. That letter will contain a fairly short, limited-time offer for all 12 signs — valid for about 48 hours). So watch for that email! I will send it twice and post it to the subscriber homepage. Thanks! — efc


 

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 15, 2010, #835 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

I’ve been emphasizing the theme of relationships in your horoscopes for a while. With Saturn in your solar 7th house (pair bonding, meeting the other, marriage, enmity), that’s as basic as it gets, though I’ve recently been asked by an Aries brother about your financial picture. It looks as though you’re trying to sort out your economic worth within a contractual situation, wondering how you could have got so involved in something that you’ve grown to question. In fact, at the heart of the matter is a question: Who sets your fee? Who determines your wage? Venus retrograde in Scorpio is a long episode of claiming back your power, which could be in a business deal, or it could be in some other kind of partnership. Remember that you set the terms of the negotiation, though this is a skill in itself and, as it turns out, it’s a human skill that will always come back to how you feel within the relationship where the transaction occurs.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Our experience of life ripples from the center of our existence outward into the world. Sometimes it seems like it’s happening the other way around, but that just switches the order of operations. At the moment you seem to be deciding how you feel about yourself based on how you perceive someone else to feel about you. Remember that your perception, that is, your experience and opinion of how whomever may feel is in actual fact your experience. This is the tricky part about sorting out projections. While it’s not a good idea to take responsibility for how everyone else feels, nor do you control how they feel, you interpret the data that you get, and you do so through your own inner filters. These, in turn, are based on your opinion of yourself. It’s strange, fun and true: change that and everything changes.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Even here in one of the few moments in modern history where Pagan is considered valid and interesting, many people still make a face when met with the idea that what we think of as ‘sexual’ and what we think of as ‘spiritual’ have anything in common. To some it’s obvious; others see a divide, and contemporary Evangelicals are on the warpath like they haven’t been since the crusades. I would note that both of these are false categories. If sex is at the root of our physical origins, then it’s not just sex. If the cosmic force that is within us, and surrounds us, is a real thing, then it embraces all forms of creation. You may say you believe this, but I would ask, as a reality check: what is the role of guilt in your life? And do you say yes when you mean yes?

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Venus, Mars and Vesta are now transiting across Scorpio, your solar 5th house. The 5th and Scorpio are two of the most erotic archetypes in astrology, as are all three planets involved. Mars is keeping your desire at the center of your emotional experience. That, you can depend on. Venus is calling you deep into your experience of how you respond to the world. There seems to be a question about how, when you respond, it’s based on something happening now, or something that happened long ago — and that something may be hidden or veiled. Venus retrograde is guiding you to understand yourself better, and to be entirely present in your environment. As for Vesta: she’s calling on you to be devoted to the full spectrum of your erotic and creative potential. Devoted, as in attentive around the clock.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re more open to the ideas of others than usual — and they are more willing to share, and to listen. The results can be productive, healing, nourishing — and fun. You’re the one who needs to initiate the contact and get things flowing. I suggest that you take your time in any conversation; that is, let it last for a few days, maintaining some continuity, and allow the deeper subject matter to come forth. You have a lot to share, and you’re more likely to do so when you feel an authentic rapport with someone. You have some questions; you’re free to ask. The subject matter is likely to reach beyond what is considered ‘appropriate’, crossing boundaries with an ease of contact that is unusual for our particular place and time in history. Keep one eye on that, and notice how you respond to this kind of depth.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.  

I suggest you consider erotic and creative activity as vital as food and air. I also suggest you notice where your blocks are, for example, to admitting what you want. If you find yourself having any defensive reactions to your own desires, that’s a good time to pause and consider that you’ve actually made a discovery. The thing to do is take this revelation to the level of experience. Let your curiosity lead you there; it’s one of the most seductive, honest emotions. You seem to be drawn to things that you think you’re too old to do, that you’ve outgrown. It’s true that curiosity is one of the defining features of a child. It’s also one of the best ways to reach into your heart and soul and come back with the spirit of a child. Curiosity dissolves guilt. Remember, if you ever need a dependable solvent.

The Virgo Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Virgo and Virgo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Virgo and Virgo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

We’ve all noted the tenuous relationship between fantasy and reality. You can be all kinds, and do all kinds of things, in your imagination. Then when it comes to trying them, that little barrier known as the ego can get in the way. For the next few days, that crude psychic device that causes so many issues will be tame and under your command. It won’t disappear completely, but you will be able to override its fears and expectations and grant yourself experiences that surpass your usual barriers. The thing to remember is that the real-life experience will be different than the one you envision in your mind; it may be more fun, or it may seem to be less, till you acquire a taste. Where turning fantasy into reality is concerned, I have a motto I keep close to my heart. What’s worth trying once is worth trying twice.

The Libra audio is done. This reading includes more than an hour of astrology and 20 minutes of tarot custom created for those with Libra Sun, Moon or rising. We’re still tying up the technical end of the project and will have the product code available shortly — so check your email in a little while for that.

The thought of consciously pausing sexual activity sends chills down the spines of many people. I don’t mean encountering a dry spell or a phase of low libido; these are considered necessary (if annoying) facts of life. I mean a conscious decision. Vesta, newly in your birth sign, suggests that you may be walking the line between the two points of view, wondering how to handle your situation. Here’s how it looks from another perspective. Mars, also in your sign, suggests that your desire is running at its usual strength. Venus retrograde in your sign indicates a kind of hesitancy, and a calling to be introspective not only about what you want, but what your desire says about your state of growth and healing. Together, all of this points to a contemplative pause: neither denial of your desire, nor of your questions, but a moment to consider what they mean together. Remember a key concept of Vesta: for a specific purpose.

You finally seem to be working with a cohesive plan, or you see the good sense in doing so. You already know the value of moving based on inspiration, initiating action on the energy of your ideas and of riding the waves of synchronicity. Now a guiding or organizing principle has entered your life. It may be a personal code; it may be the clarification of an agenda; you may have decided that it’s time to state a goal, and then create a plan of action based on where you want to end up. Work backward from there. You don’t need to overplan, but rather, sketch out some basic steps that you know you’ll need to take to get where you want to be. The most important of them is stating the goal in a clear way. Make sure it’s what you really want. Remember, you’re free to change your mind.

‘Food first’ would be an excellent guiding principle for the next few weeks. Americans in particular have a knack for eating substances that are clearly other than food: things with ingredients that cannot be pronounced, where the source is unknown, or that we know harm our bodies. Ceres conjunct Pluto in Capricorn is suggesting that focusing on food will have a much greater effect than you think, and also that the topic deserves your focus right now. You came close to making some changes earlier in the year, and now it’s time to bring those developments to fruition. You may feel on some level that this is a matter of life and death; that’s a mental factor any time Pluto is involved in one’s chart. A better way to say it is that your quality of life is directly involved, in the deepest meaning of those words.

Capricorn Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

All the factors that astrologers would normally describe as Aquarian are now focused on qualities related to Pisces. For example, there’s a conjunction involving Neptune (a Pisces planet) with Chiron in your birth sign. Your non-traditional ruling planet, Uranus, is conjunct Jupiter (another Pisces planet). And your traditional ruler, Saturn, is in Libra, a sign connected to Pisces through the planet Venus. What this suggests is that your mind may be stepping outside of its normal processes of logic and reasoning. You may be more inclined to focus on your inner life; on art; on faith; on mysticism. You may find this disorienting, as if your mind is going soft. More likely, this is providing solace and relief in that you no longer need to have everything make so much sense. Relax a bit and appreciate that feeling. There’s a whole new kind of sense available to you.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

For more than a decade, Pluto was crossing your solar 10th house of professional aspirations, reputation and drive for worldly success in many forms. That provided a sense of drive and seemingly boundless energy — as well as a guiding principle. Pluto in this house served as the impetus to pour your soul into your work, recognizing that this is the unstoppable force. Now that Pluto has moved onto Capricorn, you’ve reached a phase of attending to the practical details of applying your ideas; notably, ideas which may be ahead of their time. Over the past few days, a new influence entered your 10th house — Pallas Athene, the goddess who guards the city of Athens. Her presence is suggesting that it’s time to work with a strategy. Not very Fishy, I know — but helpful in ways you’ll soon discover.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

History, Turning on a Phrase

“We don’t want freedom. We don’t want justice. We just want someone to love.”
— David Byrne / Talking Heads

Dear Friend and Reader:

The recent Libra New Moon quietly marked a threshold in world history, if you use astrology as a way of keeping track. We know that the 9th anniversary of the Sept. 11 incident was last month. Our culture is obsessed with anniversaries, but nature works on a little different schedule. Astrology points to its own moments of passage, and we happen to be at one right now. During the New Moon of Thursday, Oct. 7, the Sun and Moon were conjunct within two arc minutes — that is, 1/30th of a degree — to the ascendant of the chart for Sept. 11, 2001.

World Trade Center 7, or the Salomon Brothers building, shortly before it collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. Most people don’t know that a third tower of the Trade Center complex fell down that day. Photographer unknown.

In the nine years since that incident, yesterday’s was the closest New Moon to the chart’s ascendant, and the only one occupying that degree, and it was close. My impression is that we have a rare moment of transparency around an event that shaped our lives, changed the world and, more significantly, reaffirmed something about human nature.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the ascendant, it is also called the rising sign. In every chart there is a sign rising — that is, a section of sky, represented by a zodiac sign, rising above the Earth’s horizon in the east. In this case, Libra is the sign rising. There is also a degree rising, which is like the precise address of the chart and what it represents. Every chart with an exact time has a rising degree, including your natal chart. It’s a good thing to know. On Sept 11, precisely when Flight 11 was flown into the North Tower, that degree was 14+ Libra — remarkable because Mercury was precisely rising at that moment. Mercury in the exact degree rising gave the chart emphasis, and an ominous quality, part of which was ‘this is an event with a message’. (Let’s refer to this as the North Tower chart.)

Libra is an astrological way of saying ‘good show’. The events of Sept. 11 were compelling, even convincing, and they riled up our desire for justice, a Libra quality. But Mercury is the trickster. Behind the elegant image of Libra were a series of layers that remind us that things aren’t always what they seem, and that appearances can deceive.

I consider the North Tower chart to be a world horoscope. The event was used to reshape geopolitics. Several wars were started as a result of the attacks, which have yet to end, and the concept of the ‘post 9-11 world’ was born. So in a sense we have one of the birth charts of the 21st century: what some had thought would be the New American Century. The conservative think tank by that name argued for the new rise of a dominant American military, in a plan that called for waging a multi-front war early in the century. But in September 2000, one year before Sept. 11, it said that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Mercury is a reminder to depend on documentation as a way of keeping track of the facts. Who exactly was in the New American Century group of thinkers? Those who signed onto the New American Century manifesto included Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Dan Quayle — a Who’s Who of neoconservative politics.

The North Tower Chart

I’ve written a number of articles about the North Tower chart, most of them focusing on Mercury rising. Using classical methods of interpretation, Mercury in Libra was the planet associated with the secret enemy who perpetrated the attacks (the planet that rules the 12th house). It’s a perfect description of someone stealthy, clever, able to focus on an image and use images, and who understood how to use the media. Sept. 11 was one of the most spectacular Mercury-type events ever, broadcast on live television, orchestrated by someone with a stunning gift for creating spin.

Chart for the North Tower impact on Sept. 11, 2001. Note that Mercury is the planet in the ascendant on the left side of the chart. Click here for a larger version of the chart.

The planet representing the official government, the Moon (ruler of the 10th house), was void-of-course at the end of Gemini, indicating the government was asleep at the wheel. The other planet for the government — by default, Saturn, representing the ruling structure of the country, and also what you might call the homeland (as the ruler of the 4th house) or shadow government — was in Gemini. That’s also a representation of the twin (Gemini) structures (Saturn) involved and an image of the two faces of the government.

Now here is where the chart starts to reveal its secrets. Mercury is the planet of Gemini, and Saturn is the planet exalted in Libra: they are in reception: that is, they occupy one another’s signs. And they are in a perfect (to the degree) trine aspect, indicating cooperation.

That’s another way of saying that they can switch places. The secret enemy and the homeland government look like they’re functioning as one entity. From the first moment, we had an early warning that something was up, serving as an astrological notation of the many issues that would be raised by researchers and analysts in the decade to follow.

In particular, the relationship between Mercury and Saturn hinted at the government’s foreknowledge or involvement in whatever happened. The idea that ‘Bush knew’ was circulating widely, even in the news, by the spring of 2002. Two years later, the CIA, under public pressure, declassified something called the Presidential Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001. Just one month before the attacks, the administration was warned by the CIA that “Bin Laden [was] determined to strike in the US,” outlining a number of current terrorist threats. Notably, this was the first time ever that a PDB was released to the public.

Detail of Thursday’s Libra New Moon. Note the Sun and Moon at 14+ Libra, two arc minutes from the ascendant of the North Tower chart, and conjunct the infamous Mercury rising.

Even the official 9/11 Commission report said that the “system was blinking red” that summer.

Many writers and researchers have published on these and related issues, ranging from engineers asking how it was possible that the two towers collapsed at all, much less within 29 minutes of one another, to whether there was actually an airplane crash at the Pentagon. And with the thousands of planes intercepted by the Air Force for as little as veering off the course of the pilot’s flight plan, how was it even vaguely possible that these four hijacked flights — an unprecedented event — were not intercepted? Fifty-nine minutes elapsed between the crash at the North Tower and whatever happened at the Pentagon. One would think that an hour was enough time for the Air Force to stop an attack on the military headquarters of the free world.

The problem with these questions does not involve their validity. I’ve looked into them all, and they all have a value worth considering, raising significant questions lacking easy answers. The real problem is social: it involves what others will think of you, or the fear of what others will think, when you start asking. People tend to either get scared or accuse you of being a conspiracy nut. Some become openly hostile if you propose that anything but the official version of events is possible. A few will affirm that actual questions exist. Many polls indicate that the public is suspicious. More than half in one 2007 Zogby poll wanted Bush and Cheney to be investigated for their involvement in 9/11 and in the same poll more than 30% sought their immediate impeachment.

Even if the Mercury-Saturn relationship in the North Tower chart describes only the perception of the event, that perception has come with enormous pain and then a good dose of skepticism on the part of the public, and a lot of activity on the part of policy makers.

In retrospect, what did that look like? In The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007, author Naomi Klein describes “the intersection between super-profits and megadisasters” in which “the preferred method of advancing corporate goals [is] using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” Essentially, the process breaks down to two parts: 1. Create or exploit a shock; and 2. Use the confused and chaotic aftermath to push through/assert a corporate and/or political coup with no threat of backlash from a traumatized public.

Klein proposed that, “This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch — a power grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed ‘a rolling coup’. Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit. Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex — a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad.”

The Chart for World Trade Center 7

There’s a second Sept. 11 chart that I haven’t written much about yet, timed for the spontaneous collapse of World Trade Center 7 on the afternoon of Sept. 11. Most people still have not heard that a third tower of the World Trade Center collapsed that day — a 47-story building with an impressive list of tenants. This building was not hit by any airplanes; it ‘simply collapsed’ at 5:21 pm. Notably, the 9/11 Commission did not look into how or why WTC 7 collapsed, so it came to no conclusions.

Segment of the chart for the spontaneous collapse of WTC 7 at 5:21 pm on Sept. 11, 2001. Note that the chart has Neptune (the blue trident) two degrees from the ascendant, indicating that the situation is veiled in deception and denial, and suggesting that the truth may never be known, and that if it is, it’s subject to being refuted by denial. The full chart is here.

First let’s take a look at the chart, which is for the moment the structure fell in its footprint in about six seconds. Having sustained no impact by an airplane and with several relatively small fires, we are told that a concrete and steel skyscraper fell straight down, on its own, at freefall speed.

Here’s the whole chart in a separate window; to the right is a picture of the ascendant, the most significant piece. In this chart, like the North Tower chart, there is a planet rising — but this time it’s Neptune.

Neptune rising presents a mystery. It’s also a beautiful image of how WTC 7 was a kind of non-event; it was invisible. Neptune is like a veil of fog, and that veil can indicate deception, denial or delusion (words that begin with the letter D tend to attach themselves to Neptune, including Drink, Drugs and Drama). In a public chart like this, one that potentially involves a crime, Neptune rising suggests we may never know the truth, or that the truth will be obscured or seem confusing. The sign involved is Aquarius; in fact the public (one of those Aquarius things) was so confused that most people have no idea that WTC 7 even existed, much less that it mysteriously fell down at 5:21 pm.

There are a couple of other interesting features to the chart. In the 11th house (a public place) there is a lot of activity. In particular, we have Mars in Capricorn on the South Node. In the shorthand notation of astrology we have an old story (South Node) about militarism (Mars) and the corporate/government system (Capricorn) — and we have this in the 11th, right where anyone can see it. In other words, what this aspect describes is happening in plain sight.

In the same house, Ceres is conjunct Nessus in Capricorn. This will be fed to people like poison food, with them convinced it’s some form of nourishment.

Opposite all of this, the Moon is in Cancer, on the North Node and opposite Mars: the people in their everyday lives, their home lives, taking care of themselves and their families, get caught in the mess. The Cancer Moon opposite Mars suggests the public can get emotionally swept away by a perceived enemy and security threat and thus lose track of the intellectual level — and most of us did.

What Larry Silverstein Said, and What BBC Predicted

Larry Silverstein was the developer of WTC 7 and its owner, and he held the lease on the twin towers (WTC 1 and WTC 2) as well. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was the landlord of the whole WTC complex, which included several other buildings. One year after the attacks, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a program called America Rebuilds. As part of a somber, comprehensive documentary that was fitting for the one-year anniversary, the producers interviewed Silverstein.

Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, said in a PBS interview that he told the Fire Department that, ‘”The smartest thing to do is pull it.” Screen shot from PBS.

In that interview, he told the story of what happened to WTC 7: “I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it’. And they made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse.”

In other words, he is saying that the building was intentionally demolished. You can watch this on video here. I recently purchased a copy of the DVD from PBS to verify that this segment is actually in the documentary, and it is there in proper context.

Now, what is interesting is that it takes weeks and sometimes months to prepare a building for demolition. If we are to believe the landlord’s statement to PBS, this preparation was done in less than a day — and that a demolition team was brought in through the catastrophe at Ground Zero, consulted architects and engineers familiar with the structure, then working extremely efficiently, rigged the building with dynamite and took it down. Either that or it had a preinstalled self-destruct mechanism.

The building was occupied by Salomon Brothers, as well as American Express and a couple of other banks and insurance companies. In addition, it had as its tenants the CIA, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS, the Defense Department and the New York City Office of Emergency Management. Like the other World Trade Center buildings, evacuation began immediately when the first plane hit, before 9 am. So the officials in all of those agencies, including many federal officers, had no chance to clean their desks, take copies of disk drives or do anything before the building fell down later that day.

BBC World reporter Jane Stanley announces that World Trade Center 7, also known as the Salomon Brothers building, has fallen down, even though it’s standing up right behind her. It’s the building to the viewer’s right of her head. To the left is the smoke from WTC 1 and 2. Photo: Screen shot from BBC World.

More interesting, BBC World, the international edition of BBC, broadcast that the building had collapsed at 4:54 pm EDT, 27 minutes in advance. This was also announced at the same time by BBC in the UK. In this video, you can see the reporter, Jane Stanley, saying that the structure has fallen down while it’s shown in the frame. We’re really talking ‘in plain sight, but might as well be invisible’ here. WTC 7 is easily identified by its location, and by the little notch at the top, next to the penthouse.

This bit of prescience has been explained away by claiming there was a lot of erroneous news reported on Sept. 11, 2001. Except for one thing: this turned out not to be an error. It was accurate, just a little early.

Indira Singh, a private pilot and EMT who was volunteering as a rescue worker at Ground Zero that day, said that by 1 pm the word was out on the street that the building would be demolished and people in the area, such as volunteers and emergency workers, were backing off and retreating toward safer ground.

“By noon or one o’clock they told us we had to move from that triage site up to Pace University, a little further away, because Building 7 was gonna come down or being brought down,” Singh said in a widely-reported 2005 interview on KPFA in Berkeley. She continued a bit further in, “There was another panic around four o’clock because they were bringing the building down and people seemed to know this ahead of time, so people were panicking again and running.” [Read the full interview here, and listen to it here.]

Apparently BBC was not the only network with a well-tuned crystal ball that day. About a minute before WTC 7 fell down, FOX 5 News in Washington, DC broadcast that a third building had fallen down while WTC 7 is shown in the frame. They are speculating that the smoke actually rising from the heap of WTC 1 and WTC 2 is from that third building that has supposedly already fallen. Then — while they are discussing this — WTC 7 collapses live, on the air.

That Turn of Phrase

The available facts add up to something a little weird, something that does not jive with the official story: controlled demolition was used to take down WTC 7, with all its highly sensitive contents in a rather sensitive moment. That this happened in a day is incredulous, particularly with the chaos of that particular place and time. The implication is that, if the building was indeed demolished, it was planned and set up in advance. If that’s true, the entire story of Sept. 11, 2001 — such as the surprise attack by Osama bin Laden — falls in its footprint at the speed of freefall. And this has both historical implications, as well as psychological ones.

The new WTC 7 has a smaller footprint and environmentally friendly features. It was the starting point of reconstruction of the WTC complex. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

There are some obvious questions here, such as why would Silverstein admit this? My theory is that the way he phrased his statement was a plausible alibi. He claimed the Fire Department pulled the building that day, for immediate safety. Who knows how long it takes to prepare a building for demolition? Who knows that the Fire Department does not do the work of demolition teams? It sounds true enough. Yet there has literally been a decade-long debate over what Silverstein meant by “pull it.” Or rather — what he meant by “it.” Clearly he meant pull something, but what?

When the time came to backpedal on his statement, Silverstein’s office claimed he meant pull the rescue operation — not the building. So let’s pretend that’s what he meant, and reconstruct the sequence of events using that scenario.

The following is a fictionalized, alternative version of events to test the theory.

The attacks happened just before 9 am, WTC 7 was evacuated, and WTC 1 and WTC 2 (the familiar North and South towers) both fell down by 10:30 am. WTC 7 was damaged by debris from the North Tower and there were some fires, but it was a modern steel and concrete skyscraper with numerous safety features, so it was expected to hold up. After all, it supposedly took direct hits from fuel-laden jet planes to knock down WTC 1 and 2.

However, the Fire Department commander was concerned about the fires and the stability of the building. So he called the landlord to check whether he should get his own firefighters out of the building, fearing it might collapse. This insinuates that the Fire Department needed the permission of the landlord, a civilian, on an immediate tactical decision in the face of some imminent safety issue.

Silverstein said, “pull it” [the search and rescue operation]. With that, the firefighters walked out, and everyone watched as the building mysteriously fell to the ground. [End of fictional scenario.]

You would be impressed the lengths to which some have argued — relentlessly, for years — that this is what he meant by “pull it.” Wikipedia has been a particularly intense battle ground, and administrators, for example, have reserved the right to ban users who question this point of view in edits to encyclopedia articles. Others have argued vehemently that as a developer, Silverstein could not be expected to know the terminology of the demolition industry; he merely builds the buildings. However, he does so in a city that’s the demolition capital of the world.

Referring to Silverstein’s use of the term “pull it,” one Wikipedia editor wrote to me, “Any other interpretation of this quote is a fantasy manufactured to fit a preconceived narrative.”

When there is a controversy over what a word means, I learned a while ago to look it up in the dictionary. “Pull” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as to remove a fixed object from its place, and the term “pull down” is noted as meaning to demolish a building. Ontario-based independent journalist Jeffrey Hill called up Controlled Demolition, Inc., a demolition industry leader which was called in by the federal government to clean up the mess at Ground Zero, and the company told him that the term “pull it” means to demolish a building.

Selma the Pullet, who may hold the key to the mystery of WTC 7. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Remember — Neptune is rising in the chart for the building falling down. There is a veil of confusion and deniability. Even the Wikipedia editor refers to “fantasy,” a pure Neptune keyword. And the 11th house is packed with action in this chart. Whatever is happening is going on in plain sight, such as on BBC World, even if it seems difficult to see. By the way — in 2007, BBC’s editors finally issued a statement.

“We’re not part of a conspiracy,” they reassured the public, writing on the company site. “Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.”

However, they added, “We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy).”

Oh, I’m happy it was just a cock-up. I would dread to think that BBC could be part of a conspiracy, or that they might delete their files to cover for such an odd occurrence that just happens to unravel so much of the official version of events. But if they reported that WTC 7 had already fallen down, and then it did so 27 minutes later, that just proves my theory that Brits make the best astrologers and psychics. And we should definitely put Jane Stanley to work covering the stock market.

I don’t like conspiracy theories, but in this case, I have my own. Silverstein was actually talking to his wife in that call, and she said, “Larry, what do you want to have for dinner?”

A devoted chicken lover, he said, “Pullet, pullet.”

Yours & truly,

 

 

Beyond Astonishing

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

In his New York Times opinion piece, That’s Where the Money Is, award-winning journalist Bob Herbert turned a phrase that gave me pause. “It’s beyond astonishing,” said Herbert, that John Boehner has a chance to become Speaker of the House. While many citizens haven’t the slightest idea who the House Minority Leader is, the notion that they might awaken in November to find him leading the nation’s lawmaking institution is, to me, beyond astonishing indeed. Mincing no words, Herbert went on to describe Boehner as “sleazy” and a “slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler.”

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, center, has used his business ties to become a leading fund-raiser for Republicans. Photo: David Lassman / Post-Standard.

Herbert’s candor surprised and pleased me. Frank assessment of Boehner’s leadership should not be confined to the opinion page. Mainstream media has sidestepped its obligation to denounce views that go over the top, leaving truth-telling to risk-takers like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who recently reported on a Palin meet-up that, “The dingbat revolution is nigh.” This is not just an ideological war of words. This is a moment of enormous instability attended by a perfect storm of human petulance, paranoia and neurosis. Orchestrating that movement is a party interested in nothing less than complete power, which makes them, ultimately, ruthless. Mr. Herbert hit the nail right on the head. It’s not too much to name the current leadership of the GOP an extremist movement.

Baggers — the people who earned Taibbi’s comments — have sold themselves to the world as ‘real Americans’, the purest defenders of American values and liberty. They have impressed us with their fury at big, taxing government and captured the media with their passions. Those who are sincere allow an opportunistic political wing to exploit their simplistic idealism. In a reasonable political world, where opposing philosophies wrestle each other to a standstill in round after round of electoral prowess, it would be comforting to think that this season’s minority voter has a taste for something other than snake oil. I am not comforted.

Continued at this link…

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 8, 2010, #834 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

When you reach a communication impasse, that’s the time to take a new approach. It helps if one declares the impasse. That means admitting you’ve reached a place where you cannot pass through. It’s a kind of stalemate, which is an interesting word as well. The planets look like you’re at such a point, and the best strategy that I see is a change in the overall direction. This might seem like a reversal, but what is described is a reorientation that takes into account elements of the past and needs of the future that are factors in your current get-serious moment. The obstacle is not insurmountable. In fact no matter how heavy or loaded with gravitas the issue may seem, it will yield to communication if both parties can agree on a common goal and a couple of common values. Start there.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The theme of applied creativity continues this week. It’s one thing to ‘be creative’. It’s another to put the creative mind to work in a constructive way. One thing that will help is shifting your perception from seeking insight into the psychological level of a partnership to the emotional level. The concept applied means that once you have an understanding of how things are, you put that to work right away. That may take some persistence and focus, but it will pay off fairly soon. You may face the perception that you’re up against something much larger than yourself, which will fade once you start to consciously explore the situation for what it is. What seems like a limit or a boundary is really the key to exploration and adventure — and a way to balance your life.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The key to easing an emotionally challenging situation is by not being so emotional. I’m not suggesting you be cool or chilly, but rather that you take a full-spectrum approach to the question you’re facing. Let’s start with money. What role does that play? Then there is the question of how you handle the impulse by another person to be emotionally independent. Does that turn you on, does it make you insecure or do you have mixed feelings? And how do you feel about having a little more autonomy? One other matter to investigate is how your relationship to authority is influencing your feelings. You may be bringing past feelings about one of your parents into a relationship that wants equanimity and level ground. The power relationship is actually a lot more level than it seems.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You seem determined to break free of emotional patterns that have served their use. This in turn is leading to a revolution in how you experience yourself, and how you perceive yourself. Granted, it’s a subtle revolution, but there’s no doubt that your perception of yourself is thawing, and as the ice melts, what is emerging is a deeper level of emotional confidence. This may initially be the confidence to stand on your own, and to honor feelings and desires that you’re pretty sure aren’t espoused by most other people. Yet you feel what you feel, and you’re beginning to understand what matters to you. There is little point in trying to convert anyone to your cause. Be available and you will notice that the people who understand are available to you.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

It’s all about ideas. Labor counts, the time you invest counts, but the ideas you have count for a lot more. I suggest you pause if you keep having the same ideas over and over, or if the new editions of the old concept don’t do what they’re supposed to do. There is an ease factor involved, and this is true no matter how large, old or insurmountable a problem seems. Extremely challenging situations sometimes have elegantly simple solutions. I suggest, in exploring the possibilities, that you be driven by your sense of fairness, and that you remember what you’ve learned in the past. It seems that you need to take into account some prior experience or lesson and make sure you extract every bit of value that you can.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Venus retrograde is suggesting that you account for the ways in which you try to hide your feminine side. For a woman this could mean trying to conform to male values or rules, or to the desires of early caregivers who wanted a boy. For a man this could mean the ways in which so much as being aware of your feminine side can threaten people. If you find yourself asserting your authority, power or sex drive, check for the equal and opposite reaction. For example you may be trying to veil your passivity or desire to be dominated. More likely, you feel two distinct ways: a profound submissiveness and a potent sense of drive. That may be a contradiction you don’t want to talk about, but it’s as natural as the blue sky and the green sea.

The Virgo Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Virgo and Virgo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Virgo and Virgo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You seem unusually willing to admit something that you cannot usually get a grasp on. Yet for whatever reason, you’ve now got a handle on what it is. It’s almost like catching a dream in a net, or dropping a screen in front of a movie projector. What you have now that you may not have had lately is contrast. This is providing the opportunity to discern what is and is not pleasing to you, and to make some decisions based on what you’re noticing. Contrast is a useful tool, though it implies an exaggeration in perception — so be aware that things that seem off-putting are not as weird as you’re experiencing them, and things that seem appealing are not quite as potent as they appear — but overall your perception is accurate enough to make better decisions than you have in the past.

Libra birthday audio is coming soon.

What are you obsessing over? It seems like you can’t get your mind off of a mistake you’ve made several times in the past, and that you fear you’re making again. You may be wondering when you’re finally going to learn how to stand up for yourself, or how to change your mind when you find yourself doing something self-destructive or exerting too much energy for very little return. The current episode may be exaggerating your sense of isolation. Yet there is a simple enough lesson available, which is that when you assert yourself, you help yourself get what you want. Asserting yourself is another way of saying that you’re committed to what you want, as evidenced by taking action. Yes, part of you still wants to hesitate, but you cannot do both.

There are certain people who may not agree with you, though I suggest you go mellow on any authority trip and keep a flexible position. Someone you’re in contact with, or are about to be, has an idea, and they want to share it with you. I suggest you not take the role of the older and wiser one who knows more, but rather the wiser one who listens to people with ideas and those who are willing to express them to you. This person could become a good friend, and have a positive influence on your financial fortunes as well. Whether you agree with what you hear or not, I suggest you listen carefully, take it on board and consider what you hear. What’s interesting is that this person isn’t as influenced by certain biases as you are and is likely to be presenting an aware, intelligent point of view.

Take assistance as it’s offered, and as it comes to you. You’ve got a lot of responsibility and you’re handling it beautifully, but you will do better with the right assistance. This is likely to come in the form of information about how to handle a technical matter that you may not be familiar with. On anything involving an international situation, I suggest you get advice about the customs of the country you’re dealing with. What you learn in the next day or two can influence you to alter your longterm plans and expectations, and that would be a positive change. The whole point of knowledge is to take action. There are some parts of your plan that are going brilliantly and others that need revision. Remember not to delay things that are going well, and to take control of whatever you want to reevaluate.

Capricorn Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re looking for the balance between what you want and what you must do; between what you inwardly desire and what you’re driven to achieve. This is an emotional state that’s pulling you in a few directions. It may take some time to work this out, and I suggest that you not take any perceived split in your feelings too seriously. You actually have some immediate situation or opportunity to work with, and it may be particularly exciting or a fresh twist on what you can do if you want. The thing is, you may be hesitating because of this emotional split. I suggest you consider the opportunity that seems appealing, and let your deeper stuff work itself out over the next couple of months. Life is an experiment; anything new that you try will give you valuable experience and information, if it feels right at the outset.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The most interesting aspects in your solar chart — Venus and Mars in Scorpio, and lots of activity in Libra — describe your rapidly evolving ideas around sex, commitment and religion. I suggest that there’s no limit to how thorough you can be evaluating these attributes of your life, because you want to be clear on all of them: such would facilitate your happiness. You need a working concept of relationship that embraces all three and that evaporates the concept of guilt having any value at all. Guilt is merely toxic. As such it is menacing. You have much better alternatives available now, and you have the option to recover parts of yourself that you’ve lost to these useless internal power struggles. Your existence is right. Your relationships are mutual. Desire is beautiful.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Glimpse Behind the Veil

Dear Fellow Seeker Along the Road to Xibalba:

Earlier in the week, a reader sent me this article from Monday’s New York Times about the government wanting expanded powers to wiretap the Internet, and asked what I thought was up. I had a feeling she was curious about the current Scorpio astrology covered last week. Scorpio often has a sense of the covert, and Venus retrograde looks like a search for inner secrets of some kind. I also get the feeling of Chiron conjunct Neptune — the truth about the technosphere (represented by Aquarius) coming into focus (Chiron) after a long dreamy delusion of privacy (Neptune).

One sure way to reduce the federal deficit.

After I give you the background on the story, I have a question for you, which you may respond to or take rhetorically.

“Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’ as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone,” the Times article began.

Basically, federal officials want Congress to require that all communication services, such as Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype, have prebuilt interception capability — that is, to be plug-and-play ready for surveillance on you. “The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages,” the Times reported. Under the proposed law, new services and devices would be designed to have back doors built in, and existing services would need to be retrofitted. In theory, only the government would have the keys.

But the Times relayed a story it heard from Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, about an episode in Greece. In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s. “I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Bellovin said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”

In reality, this is nothing new. Law enforcement has the ability to use the GPS in your cellphone to easily track your location, and as long as the battery is installed, they can activate the phone’s mic and listen to you. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, we learned that the Bush administration was organizing wiretaps and secret home visits in the name of national security, bypassing a special top-secret federal court — the FISA Court — designed to oversee just that function. Historically, FISA has been extremely generous granting permission to wiretap, approving 99% of the government’s requests. So if the administration wanted to go around the FISA Court, we can imagine it was up to something that was especially inappropriate. (I once had an assignment to write about the FISA Court from the well-respected journal Covert Action. After researching the thing I was so spooked that I turned the assignment over to my friend Phil. Here it is.)

And just what was the administration up to that it couldn’t collect rubber stamps on its pro-forma, all-purpose search warrants? That may have been the Porn.gov project that I’ve been proposing for a while as a solution to the national debt. The government would take all the millions of photos, videos, text messages and voice recordings that it collects, and make them available to everyone for a subscription fee. This would also fulfill the nearly universal desire everyone has to spend a day as a porn star. I would definitely sign up — for the good of the country.

Don’t Worry!

The Bush-era spy program seemed to be a revival of an older FBI program called Cointelpro that ran from the 1940s through the 1970s, spying on everyone from the Black Panthers to John Lennon to Howard Zinn. Well, it did more than spy on them; agents working on the program would destroy private relationships of movement leaders by leaving fake love letters in dresser drawers, try to get people deported, or in the case of Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States), worked to get him fired from his teaching post at Boston University. Zinn’s crime was being ‘liberal’. (Note to Universe: I am a member of the New York State Conservative Party*.)

The website Raw Story summed it up this way: “The new Cointelpro records on Zinn show the government was obsessed with the Brooklyn-born university professor who served as a fighter pilot in World War II. He turned against the Vietnam War and led rallies in the 1960s and 1970s. One of his targets was government surveillance against anti-war activists. Did he know the government was spying on him? He probably suspected it.”

In a paper published shortly before he died, Zinn encouraged activists to keep exposing these spy programs. Commenting on the FBI, he wrote, “They don’t like social movements. They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things. So the best defense against them and resistance against them is simply to keep on fighting back, to keep on exposing them.”

Now the Obama administration wants to be able to intercept your BlackBerry messages, your texts, your Facebook posts, your email and your Skype calls — clearly, they know how dangerous you are. The phone tap started recording when they heard you say, “Yes we can.”

“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the FBI, reassures us. She told the Times, “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Aah yes, good old national security, and the safety of we, the public; and working to preserve existing authority. Tell that to the FISA Court. Note to those outside the United States — if this becomes policy here, it will most likely become policy everywhere except places that have a particular obsession with and respect for their citizens’ privacy.

For those who live in the U.S., have you ever read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution? It’s short and sweet and one of the foundation stones of our Republic. It says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In other words, as a citizen of the United States of America, you have the right to your privacy. And every time we turn around, the government or some company is mining your data, willy-nilly. Phone company employees have confirmed for me that yes, certain words used in ordinary conversation start the recording devices back at headquarters.

And Now For That Question

Why don’t we care?

Do we believe these surveillance programs will help make our lives safer? I don’t think anyone does, and besides, we don’t need to spy on the entire population for that — and such is not really useful. If we did, everyone would need their own personal spy to keep up with them, and certain teenagers would need one of those black vans with five dudes in suits sitting there — just to keep up with the text messages.

Photo by Eric Francis, Blue Studio – New York.

I took a survey this morning and two of my colleagues said they thought that being spied on makes people feel more important. After all, if the government spied on Martin Luther King and John Lennon, and now they want to spy on you, that makes you special, like them. (It makes me feel less special; I’ve always felt honored that I earned having my phone tapped by writing about GE and Monsanto; now every shmoe with a smart phone is going to get the same treatment.)

I think this is a pretty good theory, by the way. We all want to feel like somebody cares about what we’re saying or thinking. We want to feel dangerous. It’s the same mentality that enables us to update our Twitter with what we’re making for dinner, or update Facebook about having gas.

To sum up, there are three trends that I can identify:

1. We’re being increasingly surrounded by recording and data transmission devices that the government can spy on, and then corporations can use that data to do marketing research and keep the world safe from terrorism. That’s why when I visit obscure websites, they feature ads from B+H Photo (where I shop) showing me pictures of, and providing links to, exactly, precisely the lenses I want to buy (to wit, the Canon 16-35 L Series, f 2.8). Do we think someone installed a cookie on my disk drive? Or are they just taking a wild guess that I love somewhat exotic, top-of-the-line wide-angle lenses??

2. We are using social networking, text messages, cameras, and video cameras to record ourselves and share all sorts of information with people we know, and with lots of people we’ve never heard of. There are people who tweet away all day and night; nothing gets left out. We put everything into emails, post it to our blogs, and store it in various locations in ‘the cloud’. Many people back their whole disk drive onto remote locations in ‘the cloud’. Lots and lots and LOTS of people share sexy photos, videos and text messages. Once we press ‘send’ on a photo, video or document for the first time, it then exists in the virtual world, it can be reproduced infinitely and basically attaches itself permanently to our karma.

3. We are obsessed with privacy. God forbid that anyone knows what we’re thinking or what we want. If some website shares your email address and you get an extra spam, your health insurance will still cover you if you get so freaked out you have a heart attack. Your physical address may be available free in 100 databases you’ve never heard of (start with various online White Pages listings), but you’re still allowed to panic when you think that someone will find their way to your house via your IP address. We would be mortified if people knew what we’re doing or what we’re thinking, or who we’re emailing or what we say to them. That’s private information! But we broadcast it like wildfire.

Yet we do nothing when we find out that we’re being spied on. I have another theory about why.

There Are No Private Thoughts

Those who have started A Course in Miracles (many have started the lessons; fewer have finished) have encountered the idea fairly early on that minds are joined. The whole basis of the Course and many other concepts of healing work with the idea that the boundary we perceive as separating minds (and bodies) is not only a leading cause of sickness, it’s not actually there. One of the most helpful ways we can facilitate healing is to see past this nonexistent veil and dissolve the ‘spell of isolation’. On a linguistic note, the word cancer derives from the Latin carcer, which means to be alone or imprisoned, such as incarcerate.

Male Gaze theory of cinema. Photo by Eric Francis – Blue Studio, New York.

Early Course lessons that cover this idea include “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing” and “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.” One of the concepts here is that how we see the world affects others; we are not perceiving privately, we are transmitting our ideas and feelings with every brainwave.The boundary that we think of the ego as presenting is a penetrable veil. It exists, but mainly in our imaginations. At the heart of the healing theory of A Course in Miracles is the idea that what we keep in the shadows makes us sick and that minds joining their light makes us well.

In the past couple of decades, as cultural beliefs and customs have changed, and as the quickening of energy has proceeded, we have all had some experience of going through or beyond the veil. It might come as a dream that reveals or hints at the future, or becoming aware of another person’s thoughts without any conventionally sensory means of transmission. Nearly everyone has had contact with a dead relative, even if they chose not to believe it later (that is the ego at work, pretending the boundary is really there). Increasingly, the notion that we can ‘keep a secret’ is being recognized as a farce.

Even people who don’t necessarily believe in ‘psychic powers’ assume that eventually others will ‘pick up’ the truth of what they’re thinking or feeling. Or they fear people will, and that experience of maintaining the boundary can consume a lot of psychological energy. It almost always comes as a relief when the ‘wall’ falls down and we can live with the truth.

One of my observations about the Internet is that it’s a model of how our minds really work (with unique identities and locations, but sharing a common psychic space), but established in a mechanical way. Looked at one way, the entire Internet is a kind of low astral plane that, for the most part, is easy to access and is still there when you go back. Looked at another way, we are pioneers in a new dimension of reality, which we are establishing with our thought forms both in data, and in our belief that the thing exists. The Net exists on two levels: as a collection of data, and a collection of what you can think of as everyday archetypes that we build up with our attention and belief in their existence.

In this environment, we get to experiment in revealing ourselves. We get to voluntarily pierce the veil of privacy and express many of our most personal thoughts and feelings. We can do so ‘anonymously’, but always with the feeling that somehow the anonymity might come back to us. The process of revealing, as you may have figured out, can be an incredible relief. We finally have a place to reveal the depths of our thoughts, and be heard by someone who can relate.

We also get to experiment with being different people — that is, with alter egos. The boundaries of name, age, gender, location, social status, marital status, career, sexual orientation and any other ego definition you can think of are temporarily suspended on the Internet. This has provided incalculable relief to many people who otherwise feel totally trapped in their ego constructions and think they have no other way out; no other way to be themselves. This again is a model for what is happening on various astral levels that we can access through dreamtime experiences, meditation, creation of art and use of certain plant allies.

And, finally, we can have our veils pierced for us. We know that people really can feel, sense and sometimes know explicitly what we’re thinking, without our having revealed it to them. Some may invade our borders, and this can be an actual violation, as we saw at Rutgers University this week. Some we may invite in; others find their way there, with us aware of it or not. We hope they feel our fantasies of them. On one level we might be mortified that anyone would know what we’re thinking the last 15 seconds before orgasm — and on another we want people to know precisely that.

On the Internet, we’re immersed in this potential all the time, as we share many of our most intimate thoughts. I think it makes us feel better to know that someone, somewhere is watching; that someone out there cares.

Yours & truly,

 

 

*Before the elections, I will reveal my plan to take over the conservative movement and wage a revolution from within.

 

Who Cares?

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

You’ve got to hand it to our Republican brethren. Even their infighting and vote-splitting do not daunt their confidence that they are destined to rule the world. As is written into its standard operating procedure, the Party of No gives no quarter, admits no fault, and blames the other guy for everything. Some might see that as dedicated and disciplined, but I have had a political month, working the county Democratic booth at local fairs and events. I’ve seen this attitude close up. I’ve debated with it, and I think it displays the temperament of a stereotypical Missouri mule: thick-headed, unteachable and immovable. The GOP expects victory because they’re sure they represent the actual, if unrecognized, will of the people, given by the Divine in a New Testament verse that reads, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” See there? God doesn’t care about business, so they get to do whatever they want.

Pushed in these last months to put forward a leadership plan, and threatened by the popularity of their more radical members, House Republicans issued their newest version of Contract with America this week. The original Contract was fashioned from Newt Gingrich’s alliance with the religious right and Libertarian-leaning conservatives, resulting in a referendum blitzkrieg that ripped both houses of Congress from Clinton’s hands in 1994. The original Contract with America was one of those cyclic flirtations with ‘purity’ that the right can’t seem to do without, drawing in religious conservatives akin to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and giving them a movement to rally around. In such a climate, Monica was the gift that kept on giving, dragging Clinton down into the same impeachment frenzy that the right plans for Obama the Muslim.

The GOP calls this paler 2010 playbook their Pledge to America, a promise to carry Reagan and Bush policies forward until government is completely privatized and as thin as their talking points. To sum up this ‘new’ leadership pledge in the esteemed words of Nancy Reagan, they will ‘just say no’ to anything Obama wants, along with investigating and repealing everything he’s accomplished in the past two years. In their spare time they will continue to promote corporate welfare so that taxes aren’t unfairly raised on the very rich, and attempt as best they can to shut down government. In short, there’s nothing here to see, citizen, move along. Even their own members yawned as they got in party line, save a few who found the economics objectionable. On that front, New York Times economist Paul Krugman said the Pledge was “nonsense,” adding, “Banana republic, here we come.”

Continued at this link…

Virgo Birthday Audio: The Revolution Has Arrived

Dear Virgo Sun, Moon or Rising:

I’ve just finished your 2010 birthday/ascendant audio, and it is fun — a breakthrough audio product in a year when I’ve been learning how to work in this medium.

I appreciate your patience; the letters have kept coming in steadily asking when it would be ready, and I’m happy to say that it is, and it’s excellent. In fact I didn’t realize how much was going on in so many of the most meaningful houses of your solar chart, and how they all work together. Mercury retrograde is over, the fog has cleared and I’ve focused on several other significant transits — though I do offer a new interpretation of Mercury retrograde in your sign. And I have some thoughts about what it means that Saturn has finally left.

I focus on the revolution in your identity that will arrive with Uranus in the 8th house, Aries. This will help you divest from all that you don’t want to be invested in, and establish your true identity in your own life and in your relationships. I look at the movement of Saturn, which has left your sign and is now in your 2nd solar house, Libra — and how this is about identifying your true values, and standing strongly in them.

Venus retrograde in Scorpio is a quest for what it means to be a woman, what women mean to you, or both. This transit, which takes us through late November, will help you discover skills and information that you will depend on for the next 10 years, and I explain how to make the most of it. In the audio I describe Venus retrograde as a course in personal investigative reporting. This transit is designed to help us understand the truth about who we are.

Chiron and Neptune are moving into your 7th house — Pisces — and this suggests many new experiences and reference points in your most intimate relationships. I describe this as putting on 3-D glasses and the whole world jumping into perspective.

And I cover how you identify with your work — that is, how you can become your true calling rather than “doing a job.”

This astrology reading is more than 60 minutes, plus an additional 20 minutes of tarot. It’s direct, intimate and personal, and will offer you much in the way of insights. Is it as effective as a personal reading with me, costing 20 times as much? I would say — it will come close. This will give you all of what you are looking for on some topics and get you most of the way to what you need on others, always leaving you plenty of room for your personal interpretation. In the end you decide what your astrology means to you; in this audio, I do my best to offer some useful interpretations.

Here is the link for instant access.

Thank you for your business.

Yours & truly,

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, October 1, 2010, #833 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Now that you reached the bottom line of a relationship, what have you learned? What is that seemingly ‘final’ piece of information about a person or a situation? I think that what you’ve demonstrated to yourself is that you can see the potential for letting go entirely, that is, the potential for having no attachments. You’ve also encountered an example of how situations have limits, including time limits. Then, having come to these recognitions, you’re in a place to choose based on the information. You may again be feeling your attachment or investment; you may be wondering whether you’re going to get the contact you need. And you may be wondering about someone else who you’ve noticed. I think that the clearest revelation you can have involves something about how relationships are not so simple, but they’re simpler when you make choices based on what you want.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’re starting to see the value of your commitments. They serve many functions, including keeping your life on track. What you may be figuring out lately is how, to be valid, these arrangements have to work well for both people. We’re used to spending our lives saying “what’s in it for me?” chasing the next check, though I suggest you look at all equations from both sides. If you think you’re worth the price of your paycheck, ask yourself why that is. Consider the experience of anyone to whom you devote yourself or your energy. I suggest you set a goal of these relationships being oriented on maximum profit for all the parties involved. There is an efficiency factor here; energy conserved becomes profit made. There is a creativity factor as well: everything that exists owes its life to one creative process or another. Feed them generously.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury has finally entered new territory for the first time since being retrograde on Aug. 20, though the sense of being bogged down in something may have begun several weeks earlier. It’s been a while since you felt emotionally free, and you may be taking your first tentative steps in a while. Life would be easier if you didn’t critique yourself every 15 minutes. There are few places to turn for advice about how to worry less. I would suggest this: take steps where you feel like you’re on solid ground, rather than where you feel yourself sinking in. That goes for thoughts, it goes for people and it goes for actions you take to create a safer world for yourself. Everything you need to know, your mind and emotions are going to give you in direct feedback. And that will work great — as long as you listen to yourself.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You seem to want both certainty and a sense of adventure. Many would argue that you cannot have both. But there is such a thing as having a foundation; then there is what you do with that foundation. Some people keep pouring the concrete; others would build something innovative. This isn’t so much about a structure as it is what you do with your creative and erotic energy. Remember that most of what we cling to that offers a sense of security rarely delivers, and usually leaves us bored and wanting something else. You have the foundation you need; you have some confidence. Now, your quest is to give yourself permission to actually be the person you want to be and to have the experiences you want to have. And if something that ‘makes you safe’ is preventing you from doing that, it’s definitely time to reconsider things from a new point of view.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are at a turning point, but it’s less like making a left turn in a car, and more like the ocean tide changing directions. You seem to be taking the future more seriously. You seem to be devoted to grounding yourself in work that leads to success rather than just a paycheck or something to do. The planets suggest that you take every step consciously, and be certain that you’re not skipping any steps along the way. These involve paying attention to your environment and your relationships. Of the first, it’s clear that you’re involved in a process of many reforms and changes that are long overdue and will help get the energy moving. Of the second, remember that your life is intricately interdependent on the life of someone else. Their success is your success; yours is theirs. Therefore, put the relationship first and the success will dependably follow.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury has finally entered new territory in your birth sign, and this is your signal that it’s time to start moving your life forward in a way that felt impossible three or four weeks ago. Notice how the obstacles that seemed so enormous now look like little models you can move around on the table. Notice how the time pressures have eased enough to give you some flexibility, and how you’re not struggling with exhaustion on a daily basis. Still, you would be wise to conserve your energy and make choices one at a time. Economy and efficiency are two of the most important themes of your life. To a great extent that involves what you do with your mental energy, and I strongly suggest you do a kind of audit accounting for how much anxiety costs you in the way of time and creative potential. In fact there are days when most of your energy goes into fear. There is a better way, and you’re going to find it because you want it.

The Virgo Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Virgo and Virgo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Virgo and Virgo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You seem to be pulled in two directions, as if you want two different things that you believe conflict. Or, you ‘want something for someone else’ that doesn’t quite align with your personal desires. In the next few days you will see that there is indeed a point of reconciliation. You may not get a look at it for very long. It may show up as one of those fleeting possibilities you notice in a slightly altered state of mind or think of right before you fall asleep. But there is in fact a point where everyone’s needs meet in a way that benefits all. Once you have that potential in mind, and you believe that it’s real, you’ll need to go through a process to have it happen. But this will be simpler if you remember that the goal of the endeavor is happiness. If you focus on that at every step of the way, you’re more likely to have it.

Libra birthday audio is coming soon.

There are two basic ways to have intimate relationships. One is to seek another person for a sense of completion, because they have something you’re missing, and hopefully vice versa. The second way is to be a complete person and meet another complete person and have a kind of partnership, journey or human enterprise. Most of the time we seek the first option. The planets are reminding you that your mission is to work with the rarely used second method — another way of saying work with your inner sense of balance. Make contact with the male and female principles you contain, no matter what your sex or sexual orientation. There may be conditions in your life that are compelling you to take a more introspective view of your relationships. Indeed there are some Scorpios or Scorpio ascendant natives that may be experiencing an unusual sense of isolation. Yet by now you know that this is serving a useful, even vital, purpose.

You’re in one of those moments when if you do what you love, the world will respond with love. Remember not to question your chosen purpose. That’s another way of saying proceed with the quiet confidence that you’re doing the right thing. You may not feel like you’re at your creative peak; you may still be taking care of what feel like the minor points. I suggest you keep taking care of those things at the same time you nourish your larger vision. The thing about larger visions is that they don’t take shape immediately, and they do a lot of their taking shape when we can’t quite see what’s going on. However, I strongly suggest you trust that this mysterious process is underway, and that you’ll get results. Even if they’re not quite the results you’re expecting, you will have plenty to work with and some pleasant surprises. For now, every detail counts toward the whole.

There are those moments when you figure out what you’re good at because you do it and discover you’re doing it well. Those moments can be points of decision without you even recognizing that. They can be moments of putting your feet on the true path of your life, and you had no idea what you were doing. Thanks to astrology you have a clue: you can be aware that you’re now at an intersection where the past, the present and the future converge. At this juncture you have the ability to shift the flow of your destiny; in a sense, you can make a choice that does something to resolve the past and activate the future in one gesture. I am not sure you’ll recognize this moment when it happens, but I can tell you that if you live consciously and pay attention to who and what is around you, and what opportunities are open, you will be that much more open and available.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is available. In the format of all the birthday audios, this offers more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

I suggest you shift modes quickly, if you were or are currently doing the push/discipline/focus thing — you’ve gone as far as you can go with that for now, and over the next few weeks you have a nice opening for flow/inspiration. The idea here is not to ease back entirely and coast along, but rather to apply your ideas as they come and develop your talents on an ongoing basis, as a kind of intuitive experiment. You can afford to be a little less goal-centered and a little more exploratory. You will find something that hooks your interest or qualifies as a plan that you can get into through a more circumspect approach. This is the part that may qualify as learning, which is suspending rationality, linear thinking and logic, and allowing your intuition to take over. I realize there are skeptics who argue that there is no such thing as intuition, right along with ghosts and UFOs. But in this situation seeing will definitely mean believing.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You’ve fulfilled several key commitments or responsibilities recently, and I suggest you give yourself a break. This continues the theme of “do what makes you feel like a Pisces,” which might involve music, art, sex, poetry or ‘alternative’ states of consciousness — you have one foot in the dreamtime, so put that to good use. I’m suggesting that you do this as a way to create ‘inner space’ — that is, to open up a space in yourself that can be filled by the inspiration that is currently pouring in, and that will do so increasingly over the next couple of weeks as the Sun makes a trine to the Chiron-Neptune conjunction. For the past week of the Sun in Libra, you’ve been looking right at Saturn, which has been about keeping your focus and maintaining your relationships. Now that the Sun-Saturn conjunction of 2010 has joined that thing known as history, you’re being invited to go freestyle for a while — and that is what I would, in a word, describe as Pisces.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Something in the Night

Dear Reader:

Venus and Mars are dancing around in a conjunction in Scorpio. Mars was retrograde in Leo earlier in the year, and now it’s moving ahead at full speed. Venus is about to be retrograde, and is moving slowly. So we have a fairly rare condition with Mars, which is further from the Sun, moving faster than Venus, which is closer to the Sun, while the two are neck and neck in a near-conjunction. That will happen when Mars overtakes Venus on Oct. 3. Venus goes retrograde five days later.

This setup puts emphasis on both Venus and Mars. These are planets we feel, and energies we live with consciously from hour to hour. Most of us are aware of the interplay between and among men and women in various configurations, particularly as we respond to our various attributes of gender and sex. Some turn us on. Some piss us off. Some are just there. But there it all is.

Scorpio tends to be competitive and it’s a sign associated with power. Putting Venus and Mars in close proximity there may have a feeling of power imbalance, or some struggle to get on top. Of course it could also be a picture of hot and intriguing contact, but that often happens in an environment of competition. We don’t have many other psychological or emotional paradigms within which to consider sex, or for that matter, sexual relationships. If you so much as mention the idea that jealousy does not need to rule over our erotic or emotional experiences, most people will look at you like bees are flying out of your mouth.

There are some interesting features to this setup. Mars is in its sign of traditional rulership; Venus is in its sign of detriment (opposite Taurus, one of the signs Venus rules). Mars is direct, and Venus is about to be retrograde. In theory, anyway, these factors all favor Mars energy. Yet Scorpio is really a feminine sign, despite being ruled by Mars, the planet of masculinity. Venus retrograde in a feminine sign represents a kind of extreme yin condition, what you might describe as the paradox of self-penetration. So looked at one way, this is a study in bringing out the yin sides of both Mars and Venus.

All in all, this sounds like an astrological experiment in gender, sex roles and sexual orientation. I would imagine that this ongoing conjunction is having its influence on many or most relationships. Scorpio is sexual, and it’s also hormonal, and emotional, and ties into reproduction and DNA. Scorpio is an energy field where power in nearly any form (biological, economic, emotional, erotic, relational) is transacted, exchanged and where it mutates into new forms. This astrology suggests strongly that relationships and the people in them are poised on the edge of some transformation that will occur as part of the conjunction, and as part of the Venus retrograde process. One question is whether we’re willing to go along with the process, take it up consciously, or whether we are more prone to resist it.

We’re also seeing the latest wave of gender drama unfold in the world. On Tuesday, the Senate, our most enlightened group of leaders here in the United States, voted 56 to 43 to keep in place the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military. Originally designed to protect the privacy of those in service, the rule actually facilitates investigations that are used to kick gay people out of the armed forces. A majority of senators wanted to repeal the measure, but they didn’t get the 60 that were necessary. So in essence the Senate voted to keep playing charades, and to allow the military to keep playing its mean game of hide and seek.

Katherine Miller resigned from West Point earlier this year in protest of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. She began attending Yale this fall.

We could partly account this to election year politics. Conservatives never want to seem friendly to gay people or their needs, and the conservative movement is fixated on sex (abstinence education, banning abortion, etc.). But it seems like the gay thing has dominated the news for years and years, and it’s at a new frenzy now. Isn’t it weird that every night there are two or three more gay or lesbian news stories about some story or another? Such as: gay marriage, gay adoption, gays in the military, gays who were recently the boss of the Republican party while it put all those anti-gay constitutional amendments onto the ballot, this Republican senator allegedly not being gay while he taps his foot in a public men’s room, what the Bible says about being gay, the gay parade or any other new permutation you can or cannot think of?

You would think there was a gay bar and gay legislative action center on every block, and gay publicists working tirelessly around the clock to bring the latest in gay news to the gay networks and cable news programs. Let’s face it. We’re obsessed. With our friend, who is gay.

In the past 40 or so years since Stonewall, the event in Greenwich Village that started the modern gay movement, it’s true that the definition of gay has expanded from gay to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ). That’s an inclusive definition. It may finally include everyone. Who isn’t questioning?

My impression, though, is that this fuss we’re experiencing/witnessing really isn’t about sexual orientation; it’s about gender, on a deeply personal level. Venus and Mars in Scorpio are making the issues that much more introspective.

Gender is something we all experience and live with. It’s partly biological, partly culturally prescribed and — as we are seeing — partly optional. People have experimented with gender for a long time, but usually it was a kind of secret, or private obsession. Men have dressed like women and women have dressed like men, probably for as long as there were differences in clothing.

Gender bending has been popular for a while — and not just for Boy George. In ‘Tootsie,’ Dustin Hoffman played Michael Dorsey, an unemployed actor, who takes on the role of “Dorothy Michaels,” a female soap opera actress and later falls in love with the show’s leading actress.

We are as a culture going through an ongoing evolution in gender roles; that’s one of the identifying factors of our time in history. This has many sources, including the many women’s rights movements of the 20th century. (Quiz question — what year did women first get to vote?) I am sure that one of them is our postmodern phase of history, where the constructions of the prior eras are basically falling apart, losing their definitions and leaving us to figure out what to do. Many men are wanting to be more emotionally present and many women are expecting them to be that way; that’s a long stretch from the mandatory silent, stoic image of a man that so many of us were told we had to live up to. Many women are moving into intellectual and leadership roles that were unthinkable even when I was a kid. It is no longer a ‘fact’ that a woman cannot design a bridge. Not that long ago, many people would have agreed. And yes that is incredible.

When it first came out in the late ’70s, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was borderline scandalous. Now it is normal fare, and I think that indicates a process of cultural change on a pretty deep level. Of note, on dollars returned for investment, it was one of the most successful films in motion picture history.

For some this is no big deal. We just go along, watching the show, and perhaps exploring our feelings. But for others who have been forced by their cultures into sex roles and beliefs about what constitutes the one-and-only form of proper sex, it can be terrifying to feel the ground shift, within them and around them. For many people their identity as a man or a woman, and as a partner in a heterosexual relationship, is a key component of their identity. If that changes, there are many people who feel they have nothing. When someone feels that male-female marriage really is the building block of society (and in a sense, they are right), they can get defensive when they read about a gay couple who wants to adopt a kid. And that defensive can go pretty far; it’s also subject to being abused by people who themselves don’t care, but who see it as an opportunity to harvest it as political power.

Then there is the chemical hormone issue. For many years, scientists have been warning us that the many chemicals that we encounter both in products and as waste disrupt our hormones. These range from actual hormones injected into meat and sprayed on plants, to products to chemicals that act like hormones (such as in plastic) to flame retardants collecting in the fish we eat.

In 1991, a group of scientists met at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, WI. They reached a consensus which included the following language: “A large number of man-made chemicals that have been released into the environment, as well as a few natural ones, have the potential to disrupt the endocrine system of animals, including humans.” They then listed several characteristics of persistent compounds that accumulate and magnify in the food chain, including pesticides, dioxins and PCBs.

Plastics which find their way into the environment through dumping and burning are likely candidates to turn up as endocrine disruptors in fish. They also leach directly into food. This scene looks like somewhere in the North Pacific Gyre, probably Hawaii. Photographer unknown.

Nearly twenty years ago, they noted, “Many wildlife populations are already affected by these compounds. The impacts include thyroid dysfunction in birds and fish; decreased fertility in birds, fish, shellfish, and mammals; decreased hatching success in birds, fish, and turtles; gross birth deformities in birds, fish, and turtles; metabolic abnormalities in birds, fish, and mammals; behavioral abnormalities in birds; demasculinization and feminization of male fish, birds, and mammals; defeminization and masculinization of female fish and birds; and compromised immune systems in birds and mammals.”

Since that time, the science has become clearer what is going on, and the stories coming in from nature have been increasingly weirder. So, we are swimming in chemicals that alter our internal gender characteristics, by messing with our hormones and our DNA. And this, I think, is influencing our perception of both gender and sex, as well as our emotional experiences of both.

So in our chemical environments we live in hormone chaos. Personally I think everyone is actually experiencing this as some degree of gender anarchy. We can feel the effects, however subtly, and when you combine them with other movements in society, the sensation can be extremely unsettling to those who are camped out in traditional gender roles and don’t want to budge.

We can also factor in one last thing — our imaginations. The Internet has created a giant field of gender variability. One website specializing in role-play games (RPGs) reports that, “Men are 3-5 times more likely than women to gender-bend” in such games. “The demographic that is most likely to gender-bend are men over the age of 25. We know that 85% of [RPG] players are male, so if you do the math, at any given moment, half of all female avatars are actually being played by men.”

How we see ourselves in our fantasies is anyone’s guess, and will often surprise us. Often it does not fit the prescribed model of what our gender is supposed to be. Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

Then there is cosplay, which is playing roles of comic book and graphic novel characters in full costume. This is apparently a wide-open space for gender exchange, called crossplay. The UK Guardian reported on this recently:

“Allison, an American cosplayer from Georgia, enjoys crossplaying (dressing as a character of the opposite gender), in part because ‘it’s really satisfying when you play your part so well that an observer doesn’t realise you’re a crossplayer until you speak’. Fans such as Allison challenge gender presentation in their fan communities, illustrating the fluidity of gender in the context of their subcultures.”

And finally there is what happens in our actual erotic imaginations. Most people are curious about sex and that curiosity can lead to various thoughts that we could file under the general heading ‘bisexual’. Those thoughts can be pretty hot, they can slip into the oddest moments, and at the same time they can threaten our ideas of what our relationships are supposed to be.

We don’t really account for the extent to which this thing known as heteronormative is like a house of cards within which our identities live. Even those of us who are a little more flexible, and a little more experimental, can basically be deeply identified with heteronormative ideas, and when these start to shake or quake or vibrate, even a little, the feeling can be unsettling. But magnify that into outright terrifying if you believe, or if the people around you believe, that you’re going straight to hell.

And this is one reason why, in our current moment of history, it’s so easy to make political hay out of the gay thing, and why the reactions are so strong. Everybody’s feeling, experiencing or at the very least noticing what you might call the global gender shift. At the same time, there is a sense of inevitability that we will have to accept the gay thing as normal even if we don’t like it. To some, even a mild experience of gender dysphoria will feel like their heterosexuality is melting like salt. That’s not what’s really happening. Something else is, but the fear doesn’t quite speak that language.

So now we have Venus and Mars about to do their gender experiment in Scorpio, and in particular, Venus, which is poised for a kind of introspection rarely seen in our world. This is going to be a journey, and it goes deeper than all the superficial expressions of sex, gender and relationship roles that I’ve described. We will be feeling some aspects of this viscerally, and others will stir up material from the deep unconscious. Scorpio is not just what we see, and it goes deeper than what we feel. You could say that on some of the deepest levels we can actually reach, it’s about how we become who we are — that mysterious process, that we often try to keep secret from ourselves.

Yours & truly,

 

 

 

When Reality Bites

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s been more than a decade since populist policy came easily; actually much longer than that, had any of us noticed. Even the Clinton years proved an uphill slog against the Republican culture warriors and their “Contract With America.” With the help of Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the infamous triangulation tactic that prompted Rachel Maddow to call Big Bill a “Republican president” was born. We might have raised an inquiry over Clinton’s welfare reform and NAFTA legislation, but we didn’t. Monica was the distraction of the moment, and the economy seemed sound, so we let it go. Then the bubbles began to pop, the jobs went overseas, the Supreme Court picked our next president for us, and any hint of progressivism disappeared.

While Dubya played commander-in-chief, hunting imaginary WMD — and adding well over a trillion dollars to our military debt, another 1.3 trillion for his tax cuts and 1.5 trillion for Medicare D — his Congress passed six years of laws that favored business over public interest. When the economy tanked three years ago, the least affected were the upper-class, who continue to reap the rewards of corporate welfare and laws designed to protect them. This is an example of the dreaded ‘redistribution of wealth’ eschewed by conservatives everywhere, but don’t mention that to the average class-conscious Republican, who thinks redistribution is only about giveaways to welfare recipients.

The basis of trickle-down economics is a collection of unproven, fanciful myths that play well to uncritical media. Myth #1 is that the business class deserves those big breaks in order to keep opportunities trickling down. Myth #2: top-loading the profits keeps the American Dream alive, even as the disparity between the high rollers and a growing underclass widens. Myth #3, biggest of them all, is that we need those business advantages because some of us plan on winning the lottery some day in the form of founding the next Apple Computer. This is known as “when our ship comes in.”

At a time when one in every seven Americans lives in poverty and a fourth of our families are identified as “near poor,” the notion that we must keep the rich swimming in dough lest they refuse to throw us a crumb from time to time is ludicrous. Statistics show that the trickle-down nonsense promoted by St. Ronnie the Reagan really IS the elusive ‘voodoo economics,’ named by Poppy Bush. In fact, very little trickles back down the pyramid because the rich traditionally keep their money, favored by laws that give them latitude to tuck it into some convenient tax shelter.

Continued at this link…

 

 

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Right now we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.
We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

Please click on the page and “like” us. This used to be called “join” but Facebook changed that recently. Also — there is another option, to invite your friends, and I’d appreciate if you spread the word by doing just that.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

 

 

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.
PPS, In this recent edition of Astrology News, I publish an interview with one of the big gaming websites about my feelings on Facebook. I thought I would share it with you — it’s the second article down, at this link.

 

 

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 24, 2010, #832 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Venus and Mars in Scorpio are all about desire. But it looks like you want that desire to hunt you down by scent and give you what you need without having to say or do anything. Depending on who you are, this planetary setup might work that way, yet at the moment more pragmatic matters of relationship seem to be interfering with your hormonal drives. The two seem to exist as realities apart from one another, which is often the situation given our society’s concepts of relationship that dependably honor human needs only to the extent of providing air and water. I suggest you make peace with yourself about how a situation with a partner, or your ideas about what constitutes a proper relationship, may be entirely different than some deep elemental needs you also have. This feeling will be stronger if you’re feeling trapped, which does not make it invalid: to the contrary, this just emphasizes the point.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

It would appear that you’re trying to remember what you want from a relationship, from life or from both. It’s one thing to let others do the wanting for you; that’s the safe option, because if they are wrong, you are not; and if they are right, you benefit. So step one is to make a commitment to wanting what you want. Just slow down and want whatever that might be, not for its own sake, but for yours. Don’t forget that Pluto in Capricorn is helping you stir up/burn up about 100 lifetimes worth of religious guilt, and that may be one of the things you’re tripping over. If you happen to slip right from desire to guilt, be grateful for the efficiency of that, and notice the sequence. Be grateful that you’re enlightened enough to know that liberating yourself from guilt is vital to both enjoying the life you have and creating the life you want. You can do it — though it will take active, articulate honesty.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may feel that your wounds are still tender and that your psyche is still fragile. That’s a good reminder to tread lightly on the Earth, as you gradually make your way up the other side of the rather deep place you got yourself into the past few weeks. You are still going over old territory, but you’re doing it with a new perspective and a new purpose. That is to say, you have the potential now to benefit from your errors and to learn from your own personal past. But more to the point, you are taking important steps in your journey of transcending the past of the people who came before you. We forget that we stand on the slag pile of history left behind by our ancestors. Yet we also forget their living spirits. You might try contacting those ancestors, in their realized form, where they can guide and support you. They are watching, and they are aware.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Keep moving. Do what you need to feel good and stay visible. Part of you is being pulled back into your cave; part of you knows it’s high time to get yourself more involved with the activities of life and actually create or achieve something that is meaningful to you. You will need to address that dual impulse more or less continuously. Make sure you get enough rest. Make sure you get enough time alone. Then, whether you’re feeling certain about it or not, go out and engage the world. You don’t need to impress anyone; you need to be present, alert and sincere. This is a low-energy output mode. It’s actually easy; you can listen more than you speak, but don’t hesitate to speak when necessary. Meanwhile, Mercury has spent a month making various weird moves in your house of words and ideas. It’s now moving forward at a steady pace. Writing is your best friend right now. I promise.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may be seeking a balance of opinions or trying to please everyone, but soon you’re going to come up against a natural limit and be forced to make a decision. Think way ahead to that time and decide what elements of your plan are the most important and which elements are the ones you can forego. Do the same with others. You can actually reach a compromise here, but it’s going to be a creative one and that mainly means that you don’t want to be doing it under pressure, on the spot. Don’t announce your proposal until the end, but make sure that you know what it is, that you know what your options are and you understand what’s the most meaningful to whom. There are a good few elements that are part of the fringe, not part of the core; but certain points are the meat and bones. Protect those; don’t compromise on what you know is actually useful.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Finding oneself is so much work, it’s amazing anyone would manage to lose themselves again after they do so. However, what we call self tends to change, when we’re healthy; which is to say, not stuck. And there are times that change can feel plenty uncomfortable, vulnerable and pushed up against limits. You have pushed back against those limits lately, and stretched open your potential. I suggest you not be so fast to fill the space up. Rather, look and feel for what’s there. Consider the new dimensions of your psychic interior, and see if you can notice changes in how you relate to the exterior landscape as well. That would include your physical environs and your emotional landscape: in a subtle way, everything is different; you are different; all your relationships have shifted. I suggest you notice the changes that appeal to you and emphasize them, steering clear of old patterns and old feelings.

Shifting your emotional perspective requires those moments of discomfort, the ones that tell you that you have something to process. Move through them quickly and get into the new space, more like a backstage costume change than a session with a psychiatrist. Expect a quick series of these encounters over the next few days — take them in stride, adjusting rapidly. After about a week of this you’ll see that this series of small adjustments offers you a small clue to your mental orientation, and then after several you can deduce where you stand with yourself and with others, particularly those you’re inclined to think of as authority figures. This method of adaptation is preferable to some of the other methods that you have experimented with in recent seasons, where outer circumstances showed up all at once and compelled you to adjust instantly. This is more your style — progress in meaningful, manageable increments.

Part of our shifting psychic landscape has involved the revelation of how androgynous so many people are. Even those who don’t quite admit it are feeling the shift (hence, the vast homophobic backlash of our era). For you, from one perspective, the gender-blending quality feels natural. From another, it’s odd and disorienting. Yet you’re in a particularly rich moment of embodying your gender and sexual opposites. The more you emphasize one polarity, the more you’re likely to encounter the other. If you’re paying attention you will notice many subtleties and nuances, particularly when receiving sensation and acting on desire. At times you may encounter the seeming paradox of needing to fertilize yourself, and having to stretch across certain beliefs and seeming physical barriers. That is one of the great themes of the spiritual and creative history of our era. At first the territory can seem impossible to navigate, then after a while it can seem entirely natural, with many variants in between. Yet that sense of exploration is unlikely to abate, particularly after we’ve all spent so much time seeking inspiration and contact outside ourselves.

Pretend you’re a politician running for office and Election Day is rapidly approaching. You’re probably not running for office and you likely never would, though I suggest that this is the time to keep your focus on your actual goal and the many small steps you need to get there. Unlike in recent months, you see, those steps are likely to go well. You can work with the version of Murphy’s Law that says, “anything that can go wrong already has,” and if it hasn’t something close to it has, so you know what to do when a new variant arises. With a focus on your goal, with determination and most of all with truth in your heart, there is nothing that can stop you. The one place your chart suggests you bring out a little more energy from the reserve tanks is that seemingly elusive, arguably nonexistent thing called creativity. Don’t let it elude you and don’t forget that you have a lot of the stuff. Use it liberally and remember — if you do, it will never run out.

There’s a subtle tipping point involved in your quest for leadership and professional success. I cannot emphasize the point strongly enough that, no matter how much chaos the world is in, and regardless of how much inner tension you may feel, and how much is unresolved, you’re the person most capable of leadership in your environment. As you embrace that role you will see that it’s a fairly large environment we’re talking about, certainly more meaningful than the Thursday night scene at the local bar. I mean real success, whatever that actually says to you. Yet this calls for collecting yourself and focusing on your independence, particularly emotional. Your success is balanced on your becoming a person independent of the emotional traps of the past and the people in your environment. This will allow you to focus what may feel like an uncomfortable amount of energy on your inner development. Feel for that balancing point and lean gently into the changes.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

The Sun moving into your solar 9th house — Libra — says it’s time to start considering your longterm vision in a new way. It may be that as soon as you get any momentum here, you come up against some idea of why something cannot happen, or what is in the way. Therefore I suggest you abandon the logistical angle and stick strictly to the sketch. Draw the building you want to design from the outside in; consider its shape and size. To do this you’ll have to give your analytical mind a rest and activate the illustrative aspect. With Jupiter and Uranus conjunct in Pisces, that ought to be pretty easy, and you’ll like it. Keep making those sketches until your vision has a life of its own. At a certain point you’ll start to awaken to the inward aspects of the concept: the specifics of how to develop what you want. I am sure you follow the logic of proceeding in this order, which is to maximize encouragement and allow a sense of creative freedom.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Feed the Pisces in you, whatever that means. Fertilize your creativity. Focus on emotional movement, ideas and comfort. Jupiter and Uranus are continuing to hold a long and rare conjunction in your birth sign, which to me suggests a seeding phase. Both are retrograde, which is a clue that your mission is to become so familiar with yourself that you always feel confident being you, no matter what the circumstances that surround you. This is also a time to take in worldly learning, in whatever form you want. The art you see, the books you read and the music you hear will profoundly influence the person you are becoming, so choose well and select on the basis of what feels nourishing, inspiring and which offers you a sense of freedom. The same is true of the people you meet; don’t be so eager to take anyone into your life, but keep a keen eye for the ones who you know can truly feel you.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

The Mighty Equinox

Dear Fellow Traveler:

What a year it’s been. I am personally grateful to have astrology as a metric to understand history, and to see where it intersects with my own life trajectory. Some might say that I’m using astrology to force a measure of sensibility onto random events that really make no sense. But long before I had ever opened an ephemeris, I had read and loved these lines of T.S. Eliot, from the poem Burnt Norton: “We move above the moving tree / In light upon the figured leaf / And hear upon the sodden floor / Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”

The September equinox of 1994, the crew of the shuttle orbiter Endeavour recorded this image of the Sun poised above the Earth’s limb (where the curve of the earth meets the blackness of space). Photo: Astronomy Picture of the Day.

All year long we’ve been living through astrology called a grand cross, taking place in the cardinal signs. As described in prior columns, this is made up of many different events, some of which are in the past (a series of Saturn-Pluto squares; a series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions) and some of which are currently unfolding (the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction; the Chiron-Neptune conjunction). This has brought the ever-escalating feeling of tension, drama and near-madness that some people are thriving on, that others are confused by and that others are simply being worn down by.

Kudos to anyone who has the courage to stand up and try something new, to experiment with manifesting a dream, or to make a decision based on something they authentically desire.

While we could say ‘this too shall pass’, that is only part of the point. Mostly, when we go through an extended spell of high-tension astrology like this (the current astrology is rooted in events of 2008, and extends well past 2012, so it counts for ‘extended’), the alignments and what they represent leave us as changed people. It may be nice that what doesn’t kill you leaves you stronger, but only after it’s over. While you’re in the midst of the changes and the challenges, you get to make up the story as you go a long. To the extent that you don’t feel that way, you have the meta-challenge of shifting your perspective from that of passive to active participant in your own life.

We’re about to go through another peak of energy during the next week. This is a fast set of moves, mainly by the Sun and the Moon, which activate, or precipitate, long-standing patterns in the slow-moving planets that make up the psychic backdrop. I’ll go through both for you and give examples of how they might feel in both an individual and collective context.

Next week, the Libra equinox arrives on Sept. 23, simultaneously with a Full Moon in Aries. This is a combination of a solar event with a lunar event. Both involve the Aries Point, the intersection of the individual and the collective. Notice the tenor of the news. Notice the amazing extent of how the political rhetoric is going down everyone’s pants. The party identified with supposedly small, unintrusive government seems more interested in private policy than public policy.

Christine O’Donnell addresses supporters after winning the Republican nomination for Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. She is one of five candidates currently running for Senate who opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest. She believes that masturbation is adultery and considers herself a “secondary virgin.” When this kind of purity mentality is injected into political discourse, that has special meaning. AP Photo by Rob Carr.

Here is where we need to put our finger on the pulse of our own responses and reactions. Is it in some way comforting to see someone rise to a position of national attention who has recently admitted in an interview that she would stop all unmarried people from having sex, even with themselves? If you think through what this would mean, brought to the level of national policy, what do you get? And why is this coming to the surface now? What is the feeling behind it?

Now once again we have the Aries Point back in the spotlight. It’s been quite a year of this, and many of the major planets are in the process of ingressing cardinal signs, which emphasizes the phenomenon. The equinox, by definition, is an Aries Point event because the Sun opposes the first degree of Aries. The simultaneous Full Moon is occupying the first degree of Aries as well. We have the clue that something is up, something extra just out of the line of sight is brewing. This equinox-Full Moon is an impressive synchronicity: and it’s a textbook example of the kind of astrology that shakes out things that have been building, accumulating and waiting in the cosmic wings. I am sincerely happy that Dick Cheney is not in power for this one.

In the days before this double jackpot, the late Virgo Sun opposes a rare event in late Pisces — the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. We’ve heard of this one, though we met it last June when it happened in Aries. When slow planets align in conjunctions, they typically meet three times in a little cluster. Jupiter and Uranus meet every 14 or so years. But these meetings come in unusual patterns. The current cluster of three started in early Aries and then is moving back to nearby Pisces. There hasn’t been a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction there since 1334. This is happening when Jupiter is making a close pass to the Earth — great for people with telescopes or even powerful binoculars.

Jupiter-Uranus in Pisces is some of the most creative, inventive, beautiful astrology anyone could dream up. Many brilliant ideas that manifest over the next decade will have their genesis in these weeks. I would love to know what is being invented and what patents are being filed. I would love to know who is meeting for the first time — some of these encounters will result in collaborations that change the world. On one level this is a source of the madness and insanity in the political landscape: the ongoing invention of a fantasy world because the reality we’ve created is too painful. At the same time, there is an idea in there that works: the only thing that’s going to get us out of the bind that we’re in is creativity. Creativity, however, demands clarity. Looking to late Aquarius, we see that Chiron and Neptune are making a near-exact conjunction right now. That is about filtering out delusion and leaving the essence of an idea.

Passengers on the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island ferry, summer 2010. Photo by Eric.

Here is where the Sun and Moon come in. The late Virgo Sun opposes the late Pisces conjunction between Sept. 21 and Sept. 22, shining some light on the whole circus, or sea of potential, that it represents. At the same time it makes a quincunx to the Chiron-Neptune conjunction, calling for a series of refinements and adjustments as part of the creative process. Then the equinox-Aries Full Moon comes on like a storm the next day, just after the Moon passes through late Pisces and turns Jupiter-Uranus into a triple conjunction. Does something happen? Well, this Full Moon represents a peak of tension and then a sudden release. We don’t get a lot of those lately; more often it seems the tension just builds like a thunderstorm that won’t let go and rain.

Or is that who we are becoming? The times we’re in demand that we hold it together. It’s like we get to fall apart for an hour at a time, at best — then we have to get back on the job. Adults who are managing to pay the bills and parents who manage to attend to their kids have a lot of responsibility on their hands, and everything seems so dire; so crucial.

There rarely seems to be a time to let go, to experiment with moving with the flow. Our relationship to time seems to be increasingly packed into a linear format, even as we hear of new dimensions opening up. For many, their day planner is packed tighter and tighter; everything is planned and there is no room for spontaneity. This is the thing we have to watch: our relationship to time and to potential. Basically, we need to exercise choice in every single moment, and at every opportunity we have.

The planets that are stretched out in this cross in or near the cardinal signs are bringing that tension into each and every one of our natal charts, which means our mental sensation of life. There is a feeling, perhaps in the background, not so distinct or identifiable, but a feeling. There is some sense of urgency implied, and it takes many forms. One of them is a sense of uncertainty about the future.

Whatever you may believe about 2012 or the Age of Aquarius or the rapture, humanity knows that we are passing through a series of energy checkpoints that address issues like sustainability, the ability of our systems to hold up, and our relationship to the Earth and to one another. We need a revelation, but more to the point, we need to allow that revelation to change our relationship to existence.

The simultaneous Libra equinox and Aries Full Moon and the events that immediately precede them are a flash of awareness, to those who are willing to look and see.

Yours & truly,

Battle of the Dueling Narratives

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The Democrats are in a lot of trouble, depending on whom you talk to. The Republicans will sweep the midterm election, no question about it. The President is a one-term failure, an enemy of the business community. Anger with the establishment has hit a crescendo, and the Tea Baggers have seized the zeitgeist, running the board of primaries and positioning themselves to take over the Congress. Obama’s big-spending government is targeted by those who will stop the hemorrhage of money in unrestrained entitlements, turn back the clock on wasteful programs, and bring back “America’s honor” as Glenn Beck would have it. The Baggers are the wave of the future.

Really? Is all of this true? Is any of it true? Are we destined to be a nation led by those who want a repeal of the 14th amendment and absolute adherence to the Ten Commandments, who believe communal bike paths and community gardens lead to socialism and that Girl Scouts are fledgling feministas preparing themselves for abortions? Does the rise of the Tea Party signal the advent of a social order reminiscent of the John Birch Society, or is it just a typical backlash against Democratic politics? In short, is this as bad as it looks?

Backlash yes, but typical, no. We’ve discussed the astrology often enough that you know how critical is this period in history. It’s true that the Tea Baggers are leaving traditional Republicans in the dust at their primaries, which reflects growing disdain of both the establishment and incumbents, considered political insiders. The GOP, who funded the movement to start with, has had to embrace these radicals as their own, leaving their moderates behind. Having fostered the Bagger anger, Republican old-timers are scratching their heads at having lost control of the narrative. They’ve been forced to jump on board this moving train and, as Bill Clinton said recently, this new group of candidates makes George Bush look liberal.

It’s also true that Wall Street has issued an energetic “you’re dead to me” memo to Obama, despite his relatively gentle handling of their corrupt dealings. When progressives curl their lips at the weakness of Obama’s reforms, they should read between the lines of that memo. Obama has pissed off Wall Street. The joyous news that he will appoint middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren as presidential advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should make big bankers tremble as well. Installing Warren in an advisory position allows Obama to bypass a congressional stonewall of her appointment, putting her to work immediately. If that doesn’t encourage you, my progressive friend, nothing will!

Continued at this link…

 

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Join our Facebook group!

Right now we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.

We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

Please click on the page and “like” us. This used to be called “join” but Facebook changed that recently. Also — there is another option, to invite your friends, and I’d appreciate if you spread the word by doing just that.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

 

 

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.

PPS, In this recent edition of Astrology News, I publish an interview with one of the big gaming websites about my feelings on Facebook. I thought I would share it with you — it’s the second article down, at this link.

 

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 17, 2010, #831 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

You may not understand what is inspiring or motivating you, but I suggest you go with it. Over the next few days, the sky heats up to a fast boil as Jupiter and Uranus form a conjunction in the angle of your chart associated with your dreams and your imagination. Then comes the annual Full Moon in your birth sign. The result feels like a lightening of a heavy relationship situation that you have vowed many times to adjust or move on from but which has been more persistent than you imagined it would be. You can create a hybrid of honoring the responsibility and commitment of relationship while opening yourself up to the potential that comes with authentic contact. The catch, if you want to call it that, is that this might not arrive in the form that you think, or with the person you think. Plenty of things work better than expectations.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information. 

Several developments next week will bring some relief from the convoluted mental and emotional experiences you’ve been through for the past month. The good part is that you got a look at where your creative energy goes: into needless obsession. Part of this was obsession with the past, or involved getting waylaid in some of your less-appealing childhood traits. You actually do have the power to be forward thinking, but I suggest you ask yourself if you really want to be; that is, if you think you’re sacrificing anything by letting go of what you believed yesterday or this morning. It won’t be your beliefs alone that make you feel better, but they will help; as the Sun moves into the health, well-being and work angle of your chart, you will shift your attitude and remember that responsibility is something that actually turns you on.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

For now, your thoughts come from your feelings; your ideas are the result of emotional impulses, and those impulses are not always correct. For that reason, you need to be careful — the translation process will happen fast, and have results that extend beyond anything you were expecting. For the next few days, I suggest you be especially careful what you say or do where alcohol is involved in any way (including merely being present in the environment). Don’t be fooled by the notion that you already thought things through carefully — many factors call not only for rethinking but also for reinvention. Even as the pace of certain events picks up radically into the early part of next week, I suggest you take this rethinking/reinvention process slowly. There will come a moment where you think you’ve ‘got it’ and then you’ll need to run it through the hopper one more time. So — steady as she goes.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Next week’s Aries Full Moon reveals something that has been hidden — for example, how much you’ve accomplished, most of which you forgot about or decided was not important. You chalked it up to experience without quite recognizing that it was actually a work in progress. Meanwhile, events seem to proceed on two fronts: one is some potentially dramatic development, revelation or recognition; the other is a subtler, more introspective breakthrough of thought that is actually more potent than anything that happens visibly. Remember this; while outer developments will no doubt be welcome and bring some recognition for all that you’ve done, the more significant matter involves the way you direct your mind, and how you process your ideas into action. Good things are happening, but the best is yet to come.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are starting to set certain things in order that have been resisting your best efforts and your lack of awareness. You’ve learned to pay attention, and to take action when you notice something needs attention. The decisions you make this week, particularly about your finances, will have effects that reach far into the future, and influence things you’re barely aware of today. So it’s vital that you make those decisions carefully, consciously and most of all, applying the full power of your intelligence. You cannot see all the potential repercussions or outcomes; you can only work with what you know, though your intuition might be telling you something. One missing factor has been a level of cooperation with those who have more resources than you do. You hold one piece to the equation, which is a concept. Someone else, or a group of others, has another piece: resources of a certain kind. Remember that the two are equal, or at least equivalent.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury, which recently turned direct, will be in your sign through early October; this will add up to more than two months of your ruling planet in your sign, including one of the most psychologically challenging retrogrades in recent memory. For the next three weeks, Mercury is going to cover the territory that it has already covered twice — first in direct motion, then in retrograde motion, and now again in direct motion. This is a layering process. That is how nearly all discovery, learning and healing proceed. They are less about moments of huge, dramatic breakthrough and more about gradually penetrating to the core. In a similar way, establishing new patterns, goals and a vision for our lives also happens in a way that resembles layering — the gradual building and development of what you might call inner technique. So take the time to build and grow carefully, intentionally, beautifully.

What do you love about yourself? You have some discoveries at hand. Qualities that in the past you may have doubted or thought of as weaknesses you can now consider to be some of your best assets or strengths. Other qualities that you may have previously considered to be your most redeeming assets may be the things you doubt the most. Yet in truth, all of these things make up who you are. The opinions you hold of yourself will change, and it’s helpful that they do; shifting your viewpoint about yourself will help you observe who you are in a holistic way. To be a whole person you need to be friends with all the different aspects of your psyche, or at least be aware of them and at peace with their existence. This is a learning process, and you’re in it now. I can tell you this: at the end of the day, and for that matter first thing in the morning, inner harmony is more important than popularity.

There is a fantastic dance of Venus and Mars going on in your birth sign right now. Okay, fantastic to some — those who love to visit with their seeming contradictions, for example, or who are curious about the inner exploration of gender. Beneath every discussion of sex, sex role, marriage preference, relationship style, gay or straight, dom or sub is the truth that we contain all of those polarities within ourselves. You don’t hear about this on the news, like you hear about the wild controversies about who in the minds of some should be allowed to get married, and who should not. But many of us know it’s true: a human being is inwardly multivalent. We’re all part man and part woman. We can all experience desire in the form of estrogen, or in the form of testosterone; and more often as is the case, a sublime mix of both.

Your fantasies say a lot about you. One thing they reveal is how emotionally driven you are. Nearly every description of Sagittarius that you read will defy this idea; Sagg is supposedly the sign of ‘don’t crowd me, give me my space’, and ‘I’m so detached, I don’t need you’. Which works fine, as long as you forget how prominent Scorpio and Pisces are in your chart — creating the deepest elements of a vast, oceanic sub-personality that is all about feeling, sensation, closeness and contact. These signs are brimming with energy right now. You have Venus and Mars in Scorpio, the angle of your chart that describes your deepest erotic drives, your dreams, your vehicle of escape. And there is a conjunction involving Jupiter and Uranus in Pisces, right on the line where your emotional security meets your desire to take the greatest risks. The planets suggest that this is the time to explore, to envision and to experiment.

This week, Pluto began to move forward again in your sign, after being retrograde since April. One implication for you is the opportunity to see what you’ve accomplished in your most intimate personal growth. For a while you get to go over territory you’ve covered before, but to experience it in a new way, with considerable experience. Then at a certain point you will enter new territory; you will open up inner subject matter that you haven’t considered in this lifetime, or anyway not for a long time. Remember that you’re setting the agenda as you go, and I suggest that agenda include honoring the pleasure-seeking aspect of who you are. That’s the part that will feed you, motivate you, and inspire you. Pleasure is what nourishes you, and allows you to have something to offer others. So when you think of growth, think of fun. I know this can be a challenge. But it’s a good one.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You live in a moment of relative freedom and flexibility. Freedom is always relative; it’s always a direct function of how we feel and what we think, not whether we can physically walk out the door. So what, exactly, is holding you back? Well, I would propose that you’re spending more time trying to understand what isn’t true than you are celebrating and taking advantage of what is true. You may also be trying to strike a compromise, but there is no such thing as ‘partial integrity’. So my question is, what would you need to consider yourself in full integrity? There seems to be a question involving a very specific point in a relationship. Not the relationship as a whole, but something precise and challenging in a specific way that you have not necessarily named, or if you have, you come in and out of awareness of the issue. My question is, how much more awareness do you need, and how do you want to get it?

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

We are now on the verge of an event that has not happened in Pisces since 1334: the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. For our world, that is unprecedented. I suggest you let this be a reminder that extremely rare things happen, and that they can happen to you. There will be an element of surprise with this development. But from the dimension of metaphysics, here is something I can offer you. Whether you feel ready for an improvement in your life will count for a lot. Readiness is not about being desperate, but being open. It’s not about feeling you deserve something but rather knowing with all your heart that it’s available. And it’s not about ‘having’ or ‘getting’ but rather about being. So I suggest you practice being the change you want in your life. This can be challenging if you’re feeling challenged, so I suggest taking any steps you can to set that feeling aside and embrace a space of being open and receptive.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury Retrograde: What Did You Learn?

Dear Earthly Voyager:

My old friend Christopher McGregor, a self-taught lawyer who approaches jurisprudence from a metaphysical angle, is fond of asking people, ‘What did you learn?’

Planet Waves
Laser-engraved, dual-honed redundant gigabit network patch board and modem-router at Brainstorm Computers and Technology in Kingston. They will engrave your laptop too! Photo by Eric Francis.

I always thought this was clever, and I consciously picked up the habit. Now when someone visits a foreign country or comes back from Burning Man or a therapy session, or has a relationship encounter they choose to tell me about, I will often ask: what did you learn?

I’ve learned something from their responses. There are people who right away jump into describing what they observed, experienced and deduced from a seemingly mundane experience. They know without thinking that they learned something, even if it’s something ‘small’. Some know that it’s possible to learn something about the world, and to learn something about yourself at the same time.

There are others who look at me and say, ‘What did I learn? What do you mean?’ — as if it’s impossible to learn something when visiting your aunt or from taking a ride on the Staten Island Ferry.

So, on the cusp of Mercury stationing direct in Virgo (that happens Sunday, Sept. 12), I’m here to ask: what did you learn during these past three weeks of Mercury retrograde? And, since Pluto returns to direct motion Sept. 14, we can expand that timeframe a little — but first let’s consider Mercury.

This has been one of the psychologically deepest, edgiest and most challenging spells of the Mercury dance in a long time. These qualities relate to Mercury being retrograde in Virgo, one of its home signs. Virgo is not an easy energy, being so mentally focused to the point of obsession, often on self-criticism. It’s given to bearing down on small details rather than the bigger scenarios of life; whether we love the details or despise them, they require attention.

Political news during this retrograde has verged on psychotic, in the clinical sense of the word. Rage about the economy is being directed into racial hatred, emulating a condition that those who know 20th century European history might be familiar with. We are living inside an economic and political tinderbox.

Speaking of, there have been an unusual series of fires this week in the United States, in or near urban neighborhoods — one in Detroit, where 85 homes were destroyed, with the cause still unknown. There was a gas explosion and fire in San Bruno, CA, last night, where so far 120 homes have been damaged or destroyed. As of late Thursday the fire was only half contained. Residents said they smelled gas coming out of sewers for weeks. And 169 homes were destroyed and 1,000 families evacuated in Boulder, CO as a fire engulfed the forest near the city, and moved in on residential areas. City residents were being asked to prepare for possible evacuation. As of last night the fire was still expected to burn for 10 more days. Wind gusts up to 64 mph were fueling the fire and making it very difficult to contain.

Speaking of fire, the little minister down in Florida who was going to burn the Koran seems to have put his plans on hold. Everyone but him seemed to get that this was a bad idea. Thursday the Department of Homeland Security descended on his church and set up a security checkpoint. He also got a call from Robert Gates, the defense secretary, explaining that this could cause serious problems for our troops were it to happen.

Fire has been a factor in the minds of some as well, and not necessarily as passion. Mercury retrograde in this sign has stirred up all kinds of doubts and, in a way typical of Chiron (another factor related to Virgo), revealed the weaknesses in the various systems of our lives. If this is true for you, the question is, what did you do about it?

Virgo is a key energy in our lifetimes because it’s so closely related to information technology. In 1990, hardly anyone had a computer in their house, and next to nobody had the Internet. Now many people carry the Internet in their pockets and have three separate connections. When we get a compact set of events involving Mercury or Virgo, that can get overwhelming; hardware and software can fail; we can sense how meaningless it all might be. Yet there are gems at the bottom of all the static.

Planet Waves
Gigabyte logic board photographed at Brainstorm in Kingston. Photo by Eric Francis.

We’ve also had a few visits from the land of shadows. As I described last week, Mercury has been, and still is, contacting a diversity of points in Sagittarius. These are minor planets and a deep-space point called the Great Attractor, which was closely involved in Wednesday’s New Moon. One minor planet is called Ixion. It’s a Pluto-like body, with a 249-year orbit (Pluto’s is 250), though it has a particularly dark theme. My key phrase for Ixion is, “Anyone is capable of anything.”

Among the themes that came up are: what is the world like when people lose any perception of ethics? Everyone knows that locks keep an honest man honest and that there’s a sucker born every minute. So what keeps people from prying into our doors or lying about anything that can give them an advantage? Well that would be ethics. Ixion on the Great Attractor is stretching that concept a little thin. And, it’s going to be with us for a while.

The connection between Virgo and Sagittarius is asking about what material we have inherited from our family line, going back several generations. This includes the information contained in the deeper pool of our DNA. What is the influence of alcohol on our lives, and how has it shaped the emotional environment of our families?

What about those unfinished healing projects indicated by the retrograde (reference to the past) in Virgo (all matters of healing and wellness; holistic themes; mind-body connection). What’s the story with this little kid we contain, who so often tries to get our attention?

Mercury stations direct on Sunday, Sept. 12. The learning process is not over, but by now we should have the hang of things. In fact, thanks to the fact that Mercury covers the same ground three times, we get one last review of the subject matter as it moves from 5+ Virgo to 19+ Virgo, covering the territory where it was just retrograde for the third time — known as the ‘second shadow phase.’ Then in late September, Mercury will take new territory for the first time in six weeks.

The day of a Mercury station can have that feeling of the truth revealed. Odd bits of missing information can come out. Something that made no sense can suddenly make a lot of sense; what you know can assemble itself like a puzzle, though of course it’s really your mind doing the assembling. There’s a question, though: do we use that information? Do we assemble the final piece, which is bringing it into a decision process?

Pluto Stations Direct in Capricorn

Pluto in Capricorn is still a new influence. It’s the transit that is, in many ways, the pivotal energy of nearly every other event we’ve been experiencing this year and indeed going back nearly two years. Pluto was extremely active prior to that, because it spent the last few years of its trip through Sagittarius crossing over the Galactic Center. It was quite a culmination to a long transit that was dominated mainly by warfare and religious obsession.

Planet Waves
DFI Lan Party logic board, sans CPU, at Brainstorm in Kingston, NY. Photo by Eric Francis.

Then came Pluto in Capricorn. Astrologers have understood this pretty well long in advance; Capricorn is about the structure of society, so the combination of the two meant a lot of changes in society’s institutions. Yet it also portends a refreshing of passion and celebration for which Capricorn is lesser known.

Pluto is about the soul’s journey. Often it’s difficult, here on the dense material plane; at other times we can easily flow with synchronicity. Yet in this phase of history, when we’re so obsessed by fear and when so many people live entirely dispassionate lives, and when so many are afraid to have new experiences, we need help: and Pluto in Capricorn is just that. It represents a new phase of evolution wherein we can crack the casing on those areas where we’re entrenched or stuck, and break out of the many ‘traditions’ that low-grade Capricorn represents in our era of history — like the one that tells us how cool it is to be totally hung up, smug or centered on personal ‘necessities’. This is not a time for purity, for orthodoxy or for leaning on the past; it’s a time to be flexible, adventurous and face the future, and that engine is coming right from Pluto in Cap.

Pluto first ingressed Capricorn on Jan. 25, 2008, staying for about five months. It returned to Capricorn to stay on Nov. 26, 2008. That was the year of the Wall Street banking collapse (the official beginning of the economic crisis, in the public’s perception) as well as the election of Barack Obama. It was the year that we began to see the hideous split in American culture between the Obsessive Regressives and the Supposed Progressives. Obama was elected during the last gasp of Pluto in Sagittarius, and we’re starting to see that have its manifestations now.

Pluto is retrograde the most of all the ‘nine planets’ — 44% of the time. This is because of its great distance to the Sun. This is the third retrograde in Capricorn; lately, it goes retrograde in early April and direct in mid-September. Because it’s retrograde so often, it’s a normal feeling for Pluto, which is a deeply introverted, introspective process most days. Then when it turns direct, it will have a moment of expression: growth and evolution are something that seem obvious, necessary, even desirable.

Of course, Pluto has been the focus of a good bit of stress and enforced changes the past year or so. We’ve recently experienced the third of three squares between Saturn and Pluto. This is the turning point we felt but didn’t necessarily see; it’s the one that actually made the difference. But it may take a little time to manifest — and Pluto direct is the time that’s likely to happen.

Among the first events of this Pluto direct is the Ceres-Pluto conjunction. This is about food. It’s about the food we eat as individuals, and the food we all eat collectively — the food supply, particularly the corporate one. The recent egg scandal, where half a billion eggs were recalled for salmonella, and then the disgusting conditions at the factories were revealed, is a hint of Ceres-Pluto — and that is a reminder to go small, to rely on local farmers as much as possible.

The Sky on the Cusp of Many Other Changes

Planet Waves
Coils of Ethernet network cable at Brainstorm. Photo by Eric Francis.

After so many unbearably intense aspects and events through 2010, the sky (believe it or not) is currently at a bit of a lull. Jupiter and Uranus have backed off the Aries Point a little; Saturn has passed its square to Pluto. However, soon enough we will enter one of those phases when everything will seem to happen all at once. Over the next few weeks I will provide articles that detail these events.

Meantime, this segment of a chart will give you a clue. In the image at this link, take a look at those four planets with very high numbers — close to 30. To the left is the Chiron-Neptune conjunction, which is in its last months. Both planets are heading for Pisces; Chiron makes its last ingress in February, and Neptune transitions in during 2011 and 2012.

To the right is the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. We’re about to experience the second of three; this one takes place in Pisces. As I mentioned Tuesday, this is the first Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Pisces since 1334. In astrology, rare qualifies as potent. There will be one other exact alignment early next year, and then both planets will head into Aries again.

When outer planets change signs, life changes in sweeping ways. At such times, it’s vital to become a visionary of your own life. You have many precedents for this working — all the times you actually did something you previously thought was impossible. It’s wise not just to go with the flow but look where you want to be, and guide yourself there. And where would that be? I suggest you give that some thought as Mercury and Pluto change directions in the next few days. If you’ve been keeping any secrets from yourself, they’re likely to come out. Just remember, they’re coming out for a good reason.

See you next week.

Yours & truly,

Eric Francis

PS: In this week’s podcast, I stated my plans to write about the Sept. 11 chart in this week’s edition, but every time I would touch the chart or the associated materials, I would get a heavy feeling that warned me off the issue. So, I will spare myself the umpteenth article about the incident, and provide you with a link to three back issues: Sept. 11, 1984, The Gingerbread House and Were It So. I think that the most interesting current development in the chart is that the lunar nodes (and thus, eclipses) have returned to Cancer and Capricorn, where they were when the initial event happened, only they have reversed positions. This is a little like saying that the karma of Sept. 11, whatever it was, has done a 180, which is partly why this anniversary is getting so much attention.

Meanwhile, in case you don’t know his name, I suggest you check into the work of a guy named Steven E. Jones, an engineer who has proven that the World Trade Center could not have been taken down by an airplane crash or diesel fuel. He is not a hippy conspiracy theorist; he’s a physicist who understands how buildings go up and how they come down. And there is only one way a steel skyscraper comes down: you demolish it. Nearly a decade on, we only know one thing for sure about the Sept. 11 incident: it could not have happened the way the official account says it did. It definitely happened and all those lives were lost — but it happened some other way.

The Courage Of Our Convictions

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Editor’s Note: This article covers the antics of a Florida pastor named Terry Jones, who plans to have his second annual burning of the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 incident. Thursday afternoon certain cable stations were reporting that Jones, under pressure from just about everyone, had called off his book burning. He’s been saying all week that he would await the word of his god, but I don’t think Barack Obama counts. Jude cautioned that there are conflicting reports and that Mercury is retrograde. Let’s hope the little weasel is telling the truth. Meanwhile, last I heard, DHS and other fancy cops had turned the entry driveway to his church into a security checkpoint. The things people will do for a little attention. — efc

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when Americans lost their sense of themselves. I’d be surprised if the majority still considers our country the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave,’ but I’d probably be in the minority in thinking we’re more free than courageous. Deeply polarized, we take advantage of our constitutionally-protected free speech, a liberty exploited by those who limit, hate and oppose the tolerance that democracy requires. We are free to speak our hearts in this nation, and some of our hearts are very small and dark, indeed.

In a tiny church in Florida, a minister named Terry Jones plans a book burning. He intends to gather his handful of parishioners together on Sept. 11 to burn copies of the Islamic Koran. This obscure little group, which calls itself the Dove World Outreach Center, believes that Islam is the antichrist. Last year, Jones’s book burning was attended by about 30 congregants and local press, including The Independent Florida Alligator. Now, thanks to the liberal use of YouTube and an uptick in hatespeak from the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Jones’s book-burning has become a current cause celebre.

General Petraeus, seconded by Hillary Clinton and the White House, warns that Jones’s media event presents a danger to U.S. troops. Even the Vatican disapproves, but Jones is determined. A YouTube segment showing an American tossing Korans into a bonfire will be a made-to-order recruiting video for terrorists, gasoline on the fire of global jihad. Someone from Homeland Security might have a chat with Dr. Jones in the next couple of days.

Nine years ago we surrendered freedom for ‘safety’ and declared war on an emotion: terror. Bush the Younger had systematically dismantled the programs and protections that Americans counted on in emergencies, but we didn’t notice because we weren’t expecting any emergencies. And then it happened, televised on a clear September morning. The planes came, the Towers fell. We were shocked that anyone would want to wound us, horrified that the sanctity of our shores had been breached. We looked for answers and found the easy ones, the kind of simplistic mythology we tell our children to lull them to sleep: don’t worry about a thing — America is a shining city on a hill and Daddy’s got a gun.

It’s About You: Capricorn Birthdays for 2010

Dear Capricorn or Capricorn Rising:

The Capricorn birthday audio presentation for 2010 is ready. This is a combination of astrology and tarot, suitable for Capricorn Sun, Moon or rising. I know Capricorn birthdays often get glossed over in the midst of the end-of-year/new year holidays, so I’m happy to be able to offer you this fresh look at your current astrology now.

Planet Waves
For information about zodiac sign greeting cards, drop a note to sarah@planetwaves.net

It was an exciting report to record, since the focus of everyone’s astrology right now is Pluto in your sign, putting you at the vanguard of internal evolution as you develop your mission in the world — a world ready for your participation and, as I’ve been suggesting in recent horoscopes, your leadership.

Your Capricorn reading is a careful look at your astrology from before your last birthday through 2010. I touch on the significant astrology from the past few years and make connections to Capricorn’s role in the 2012 alignment.

The current astrology directly influences all the most important aspects of your life: your personal evolution, your career, your home base and sense of security, your family life and your relationships.

You are being called to develop your integrity, Capricorn; in fact, one of my readers once described Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn as mandatory integrity. As you’ll hear in this audio birthday report, you are up to the task of leading by example.

I’ve included a 20-minute tarot card reading, using the Voyager deck by James Wanless. You can order now and get instant access. This is high-quality stereo audio which you can listen to as many times as you like, for as long as you like — these files will be preserved in their original location. It’s priced to be affordable — $14.95 for about an hour of material (this is an extra-long edition of birthday audio).

Because my astrology writing is focused on the houses, I recommend this audio for Capricorn rising as well. This audio report makes an excellent companion to Capricorn Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, which is in written form.

Thanks for your participation, and for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

Eric Francis

Do You “Like” Planet Waves? Please Visit Our Facebook Fan Page!

Dear Planet Waves Reader:

Join our Facebook group!

As this Mercury retrograde draws to a close, we’re tidying up some projects and following through on old plans. I have a favor to ask.

We have a Facebook fan page. It’s a great page that gives you access to all our free services, such as new blog posts and new weekly audio.

Please click on the page and “like” us. This used to be called “join” but Facebook changed that recently. Also — there is another option, to invite your friends, and I’d appreciate if you spread the word by doing just that.

We really appreciate it. Thank you!

Eric Francis

PS, I also have a personal page and you’re invited to “friend” me. I promise not to get sucked into Facebook! But it would be great to see you there.

PPS, In this recent edition of Astrology News, I publish an interview with one of the big gaming websites about my feelings on Facebook. I thought I would share it with you — it’s the second article down, at this link.

Planet WavesWeekly Horoscope for Friday, September 10, 2010, #830 – BY ERIC FRANCIS
Aries (March 20-April 19)
In many relationships there is often that feeling of one person being ahead of the other. This might involve personal growth, apparent commitment to the relationship, desire to experience new things within or outside the partnership, and many other possibilities. The current distinctions may involve whether one partner is more into sex, more into relating, or able to understand the way that these things integrate. With Venus and Mars doing an interesting dance in your partnership angle, this theme may surface, and the way the planets are arranged, the story is going to evolve. One day someone may seem to be running ahead of you; another day they may backtrack or need to revisit something from the past. I suggest you participate in this dance as an active partner, which means knowing what you want, and listening to what others want. Remember, desire is subject to change.
Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.
Taurus (April 19- May 20)
The most dynamic and creative angle of your solar chart is connected to the sign Virgo, which suggests that your passions can get bogged down in many layers of psychology. By passions, I mean your creativity, your curiosity, your sexuality and your desire to experiment with anything new. By psychology, I mean things like rationalizing, guilt, denial or critiquing your desires and ideas out of existence. You alone know how much time you waste doing these things, and by time I mean hours and years. Mercury is about to end its retrograde phase in this part of your chart, suggesting that you can work out a chunk of this material with something that equates to a single idea. You may not be familiar with the power of ideas to transform your life; to you, one may seem like another. Yet ideas are no more abstract than you are. If you are handed a solution or an approach, I suggest you try it for a while and see where you end up.
Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.
Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Lately, it seems that everything comes back to safety and security. From airport screening, to every package coming with two or three safety wrappers, to Net Nannies and spam filters and a password for everything, we are a world obsessed with security. Yet rarely do we notice that security is in our minds. Whether we actually feel safe is a thought; it’s not connected to how many locks we have on our door. You inherited your concept of safety from your elders, who in turn got it from your mutual ancestors. If you’re a clear observer of yourself, you see the way the ideas of all these other (mostly neurotic) people influence whether you feel safe at night. Yet you’re entitled to your own absolutely unique concept of what constitutes peace of mind. If you’re paying attention you might notice that it has very little to do with secrecy, guns, locks or things that filter your email for you.
Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.
Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Mercury’s retrograde in Virgo, your 3rd solar house — communications, ideas, writing, state of mind, your neighborhood — has likely come with a reassessment or a crisis. Let’s talk about mental health first, a topic we need to consider in how colonized our minds are by a constant barrage of ‘information’ and messages, all of which we’re supposedly responsible for. This is enough to drive anyone into madness and frustration. You’ve seen the need to not only reorganize but to also be vigilant about the workflow and the impact of data as it moves through your life. But there is something deeper, which is an idea that may be deeply meaningful to you, and something you’ve wanted to act on for a long time. I suggest you do what you need to organize your life around making that happen. Small moves will mean a lot, and one step will lead to another.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
How is your financial reassessment coming? Have you figured out that your resource base comes in many different forms, not just money? We’re obsessed with cash in our current era, to the extent where there is a price connected to very nearly everything. Yet when your neighbor knocks on your door to borrow a cup of sugar, do you write it down in a book? Or have we stopped depending on our neighbors for that kind of thing? I suggest you consider what you’ve learned about how resourceful you are, and how this connects to the diversity of forms of wealth. What they all have in common is that they arise from the Earth. That makes a case for developing grounded ideas about how you come to have enough. Meanwhile, cash itself is the focus, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this Mercury retrograde, taking a look at your accounting methods and, at the least, knowing how much money you actually have.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
I am going to take an educated guess that these have been psychologically trying weeks for you. That won’t be true for all Virgos but I know that this has been a particularly challenging Mercury retrograde for some, given its presence in your sign. What may be making the difference is how much progress you’ve made, till now, addressing the past. If you’re someone who lives with a sense that the past is unresolved, you may be feeling this more than others. It’s true — family history presents us with many challenges. Ghosts of the past can arise in the form of people with new names and faces. Old relationships can haunt our current ones and patterns tend to repeat themselves. However you may handle the past, you still need to navigate through the present, and this comes down to making decisions. Once Mercury stations direct this weekend, you’ll be working with information or at least an angle you haven’t considered yet — and this will make the correct choice seem obvious.

Attention Virgos — Mercury retrograde has NOT eaten your birthday report, but I’m a little delayed. I plan to do it early next week. A thousand pardons! I still suggest checking in with the Mercury retrograde in Virgo report which is like taking a trek on Virgo through the 12 houses of the zodiac. There is an abundance of information in there offered in service of a sign that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Here is the link to connect with that product. Here is the link to connect with that product.

Planet Waves

Libra (Sep. 22 - Oct. 23)
If you hesitate, you’re in a position where someone else might make a decision about what is important to you. The thing is, you may not be sure quite what to do, or what feels right. And you may need some time to decide, especially if the question involves a relationship. I suggest that, despite however much influence someone has had on you, that you pause for long enough to get a sense of where you’re really coming from. That may take you a couple of months. This is a deep situation, and parts of it are veiled in shadow. But here is what I can tell you at the outset. Relationships are based on shared values. Yes, they are based on chemistry and other kinds of attraction, but what makes a relationship last, and grow, is a foundation on values. So I suggest you evaluate this carefully in your inner world, and listen to those you meet and get a sense of what is the very most important to them. Make this a way of life.
Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
I don’t think anyone has to encourage you to experience desire, but what I think could be meaningful to you is some encouragement to explore that desire on the level of curiosity, creativity and play. You don’t need to participate in the exceptionally uptight times in which we live. I don’t think you want to. However, it may be that ‘other people’ have an idea of commitment that interferes with your concept of what it means to simply be free — to breathe, to socialize, to explore your curiosity, to explore your feelings, to experiment. You know, all those things that commitment supposedly prevents. I suggest you not be afraid of what you want. I would also suggest that you ask directly and find out what the people or person closest to you wants. And if you’re not in a relationship situation that prevents you from being a different person every day, well — there are some amazing options available to you.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
The next few days offer something of a cosmic trigger for you to move forward on a career or professional matter that has taken its time, and recently been beset with delays or complications. I suggest that you go over all of your prior work; sort through your files and correspondence records, and give yourself a sense of perspective. You need to know enough of the details to make a timeline, and to have a sense of how this idea has evolved. Remember, you need this overview because you’re the one who has to manage the project. Your role is in part political — that of getting people to work together toward a common goal. For that to happen, you have to know what the goal is, and that means what it was and what it is becoming. And the missing factor you’ve been seeking for so long — it may well make itself known this weekend or early next week.
Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
Be particularly mindful of any correspondence that goes across the ocean or the continent. You can also put this to work for you. If you’re trying to figure something out, call your friends on the other coast, or across the pond. Look for someone with a distant, removed or elevated perspective. In fact whatever mystery you’re now facing would look easier to solve if you personally traveled and looked at it from across the plane of reality. If you’re trying to solve a problem, look carefully about how your beliefs influence your perspective on the situation. You seem to be caught in a small idea where a big one is called for; you’re using an analytical tool where a creative solution is what you need. What you think is the issue may not be the issue at all — and as the next month or so progress, you will focus on what you’re trying to change and become, within yourself.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You have more freedom than you think; you’ve done the deep work of breaking free, you’ve endured the pain and the struggle, and you have experienced many enforced changes. Now comes the greatest challenge and the true reward — taking up life as a creative journey. That journey, if you allow it to, could take you far from where you are today, but you still seem to have some lingering emotional attachment or nostalgia. Just remember, that’s what’s keeping you tethered rather than some huge obstacle or impossible task. Yet if you’re not accustomed to the idea that you create your reality, the notion of doing precisely that may itself be daunting. I suggest you tempt yourself with the idea of what you truly want, especially if it seems impossible to attain.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
Once people start cooperating with you, you will recognize how vital it is that you cooperate with yourself. Or perhaps if you are true to your own cause, others will feel compelled to get behind you. Either way, this is the time to focus on your deepest, highest or best vision. It’s also time to stop assuming that it’s not going to happen and, to the contrary, assuming that it is going to happen. Indeed, what is possible, even probable, is something extremely rare, in fact, a development that may be unprecedented. And while others may play a supportive or pivotal role, I suggest you not delude yourself with any idea of not having exactly what you need right now. The more you focus on the truth that you are exactly who you need to be, and that you have exactly the resources you want the most, the more you will let go of your resistance, get into the flow and let your dreams manifest.
Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

We Will Eventually Figure This Out

Dear Cousin, Friend or Client:

Good morning, on the cusp of the ‘official’ last weekend of summer in the US.

Tree fungus grows in the East Woods, September 2010. Photo by Eric Francis.

The cardinal T-square (or grand cross, depending on what points you count) is taking a little time off. This is the aspect pattern that drove us from the early part of the year until very recently like we were on some kind of wild ride. Uranus, and shortly Jupiter, are spending some time in Pisces, which is like both planets taking a dip in the ocean after a hot day at the beach.

Their next conjunction on Sept. 18, the first ever in Pisces for this 84-year cycle of Uranus, is more visionary than jarring. Saturn is past its series of squares to Pluto (which date to late 2009) and its longer series of oppositions to Uranus (which date to late 2008). This draws to a close the pressure for a certain kind of enforced change; now we just need to get the feeling out of our cells and our bones, and get the hang of voluntarily guiding along the changes that we need to make.

In particular, these developments temporarily take some pressure off of the Aries Point, with one notable exception, which I’ll come to in a moment. Through the end of this season and into the next, the focus is deeply personal. Mercury is currently retrograde and is stirring up all kinds of individual and family-related material and psychological tension by making a long series of aspects to minor planets in Sagittarius. The feeling is like something being on your mind but you know it’s something deeper. You may or may not want to go deeper — though I will say this is an opportunity to explore, work out or put to good creative use psychological material that is usually out of reach.

Venus and Mars are moving in a conjunction from Libra to Scorpio. Venus will soon be retrograde through both of these signs, prompting a deep reevaluation of the meaning of sex and desire in our lives.

The exception to our brief vacation from the Aries Point is the Libra equinox later in the month. The day that the Sun moves into Libra, it’s met by the Full Moon in Aries. This is a Full Moon right across 1 Libra and 1 Aries — the Aries Point exact to the degree. That begins the season with a burst of collective energy that we notice and take personally. But we’re not there yet; first we have the Virgo New Moon next Wednesday, Sept. 8, which is spectacular in its own quiet way — occurring right at the midpoint of Virgo. This happens just four days before Mercury retrograde ends; that is Sept. 12.

Now for a brief look at the news.

I’m guessing you heard about the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that happened Thursday morning. As of press time, details are still sketchy, but no deaths or injuries have been reported. I have not read reports of an oil spill. Despite earlier reports of an oil sheen, U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Peter Troedsson told CNN that there is no evidence of such. Come what may, this is just another reminder that it’s time for oil to go the way of the steam engine.

East Woods, September 2010. Photo by Eric Francis.

I’ve got the chart posted at this link on our daily blog. To save last-minute edits and avoid errors, I will update details of the story there rather than here. The chart I’ve published is set for the exact coordinates of the rig. Its position puts it in a likely explosives dump area or drift zone. As we reported in early May, the Gulf of Mexico was used for decades as an ordnance dump. That means there are old bombs strewn all over the bottom of the Gulf, along with 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that, according to an AP investigation, nobody is monitoring or keeping track of.

So, between randomly strewn bombs, old, leaking wells and the usual dangers of oil and gas production, let’s just say we need a better mousetrap.

The chart we have for the new rig mishap — based on the time the fire was first reported, rather than the actual event — puts the ascendant in the same degree as the chart for the Sept. 11 false flag attacks — 15 degrees Libra, the degree with the image ‘Circular Paths’. The key phrase that Dane Rudhyar has given us to describe this degree is, Coming to terms with the inevitability of establishing steady rhythms of social activity.

Um, no kidding. The other day I figured out that my current car, a three-year-old Nissan Versa with an awesome six-speed manual transmission, may be my last gasoline car. I don’t put a lot of miles on the thing, and I keep up with maintenance; by the time I’m ready to replace it, electric cars will hopefully be affordable and in production. I will miss the clutch and the manual gearshift, though there will be all kinds of cool innovations and of itself, it won’t make pollution. But this will be little improvement if we’re getting our power from nuclear plants, an idea which is a movement gaining momentum.

So, I propose that we get the power we need for electric cars from the Sun, and that we speak loudly against nuclear power. That is, among the many things we need to speak loudly against while we manage and create our lives, and do our part to help the world transition into its next phase of existence and have some fun while we’re here.

Mercury is Still Retrograde

Besides this, the news is at a lull this week, in the midst of Mercury in Virgo retrograde. Congress is on recess; it would be a better world if they stayed there (the opposite of progress is Congress). Most of the primary elections are over; at the moment, the polls favor a Republican takeover of Congress (that would not be progress) and it seems a lot of people think that all the world’s problems were caused by Barack Obama. The upcoming elections in November are going to be some of the weirdest in our lifetimes. I suggest you treat yourself to a few evenings watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC — her coverage of the lunacy has been beautiful. (Judith Gayle in her column below takes on the issues as well.) Glenn Beck declared himself the next Martin Luther King last week, so at least we know who it’s going to be.

East Woods, September 2010. Photo by Eric Francis.

With Mercury retrograde in Virgo, this is a very good week for things to be relatively quiet in the world — this retrograde has been mentally stressful, and it seems to be working behind the scenes of all kinds of computer issues. However, there is a hurricane heading for the Northeast, which seems set to dump a lot of rain on too many places that are easily flooded. Let’s hope we get enough water for the trees and creeks and dump the rest out into the ocean.

Meanwhile, the prevailing state of mental tension is deeper than it seems. Mercury, passing between the Earth and Sun in Virgo (the Mercury-Sun conjunction is exact today, and that means that half the retrograde is over), is playing off of lots of high-potency minor planets and a deep-space point in Sagittarius. So what appear to be psychological themes are actually spiritual issues, but as I’ve mentioned before, ‘spiritual’ is one of my least favorite words.

I prefer existential — that is, relating to existence. The mind — which has so much to do and so many places to pick up messages and so many checks to write and kids to drop off/pick up and so many appointments to keep, batteries to charge, and things to back up, update and upgrade — tends to cloud our perception of existence itself: such as, “I’m supposed to worry about another oil rig explosion? I haven’t gone grocery shopping in two weeks.”

Yet, be it known that underneath the mental activity of our moment are some rich gems that have the power to seed our decisions and our growth. This includes discovering information about the past that can be helpful to our healing, growth and development processes.

Mercury-Sun Aspects Pholus, Hylonome

I will give one example. Today’s conjunction of Mercury and the Sun creates a square aspect to two Chiron-like centaur planets — Pholus and Hylonome, both in Sagittarius. I know there are a lot of little worlds floating around; I try not to name too many of them, though these two are worth knowing about. Their names link to write-ups in a Planet Waves annual edition called Small World Stories. So if this discussion resonates with you, you may want to check out what those points are about in more detail. If you want to see the aspects in an ephemeris, check out this custom ephemeris designed to help me sort out Mercury retrograde and do the recent audio package.

East Woods, September 2010. Photo by Eric Francis.

When Mercury and the Sun make a conjunction, that is a strong focus on anything that the two planets aspect together. Pholus, the second centaur ever discovered, is the one I most often describe as being about a ‘small cause with a big effect’. This is a reminder to be aware of how the things we do now that seem minor may get significant results. The same is true for errors of judgment, so pay attention.

But the retrograde points back to the causes of the distant past. In fact with Pholus in the picture, that’s a clue to go back to what happened in the generation of your grandparents and great-grandparents. Things that happened to them that we don’t know about, and that nobody remembers, can have a profound influence on how we process reality today. I was once doing a session with a healer who had some ability to peer back to past generations and lifetimes and she said that my issues with money relate back to one male ancestor who was a bricklayer. He thought he had to make his money one brick at a time. I really had to ask myself whether that’s what I believed, and it turned out to be true.

Consider the many possibilities here. Working as an astrology consultant, I’ve seen many cases where a woman in the genetic line experienced a sexual assault, and the beliefs and values she developed in response affected the subsequent generations. How could they not? So we have to be vigilant for these causes.

Pholus also points to the effects of alcohol, the most widely used substance, and the one most often used to mask our problems. Within the family line, the presence of one or more alcoholics almost always comes with a condition of emotional distance in the family environment, and that can last for generations. The issue is less about the alcohol and more about what the people involved were struggling with. Like suicide, alcoholism is a cover-up. The question is what it masks; and that may be more transparent as this aspect happens.

Mercury and the Sun are also square Hylonome in Sagittarius. Hylonome is about the deep causes of grief, which range from the loss of a loved one to a prevailing condition of poverty — that is to say, the ‘poverty mentality’. There is something in this aspect about understanding what is in the past so we can understand the present. We can do a lot to improve our lives, but not if we cannot state what we want, and not if we don’t have a clue what has held us back.

On Thursday there was an interesting alcohol-related news story — a 20-year study indicated that more abstainers died within that time period than people who drink excessively. Moderate drinkers lived the longest. Here is a news report on the study — it’s pretty interesting.

As with diet, we have more evidence that balance and moderation are what we need to aim for. I know that’s not easy, with our lives and the world in the state they’re in, but like anything, balance begins with wanting it.

Have a safe, sane and adventurous holiday weekend.

Yours & truly,

 

 

 

Shake the Foundations

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

The nation is wandering in darkness, said Glenn Beck at his ‘Restoring Honor’ rally at the Lincoln Memorial last weekend. Beck’s shtick is ‘standing up for truth.’ His rally, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, included a Moses-like address commanding wrong-thinking Americans to return to the honesty and integrity of our forefathers. Beck’s laundry list of right-wing, Christianist speakers, including Sarah Palin, called upon God to return us to the absolute faith in Christ Jesus displayed by the founders. Beck wished upon each of us the surge of prayerful patriotism he’d experienced at holding George Washington’s inaugural address in his hands.

Predictably, neither of these things is true. The founders deplored the influence of religion on government and vehemently insisted on the separation of church and state. Nor did Beck ever hold any of the founding documents, which are too fragile to be handled by any but trained staff at the National Archives. Mr. Beck’s revisionism is completely untrustworthy, but his faithful followers believe him to be both well educated and genuine. He is neither.

The left looks upon Glenn Beck as a confused and confusing huckster, a showman more ego-involved than political, willing to say or do anything to attract more attention and money. But to the older, predominately white conservatives who consider Beck’s every utterance heartfelt and trustworthy, he hawks a familiar theme: return to the old ways before it’s too late. Beck is the newest prophet warning of gloom, doom and apocalypse. It’s surprising how popular that message is.

Glenn’s followers watch his convoluted blackboard lectures on FOX News and absorb revisionist lessons from “Glenn Beck University.” Now they can also log on to his news site The Blaze, debuting this week as “an honest source of information and counterpoint to the Huffington Post.” Beckofiles dutifully buy the junk his sponsors market, although most of these products border on scam and certainly exploit the fearful and gullible. Credible sponsors left Beck in droves when he moved from CNN to FOX.

Like other recent right-wing celebrities, Mr. Beck is part entrepreneur, part opportunist. Ms. Palin is another. If the American Dream is to parlay charisma into multimillions, both of these characters are living the good life. Stephen Colbert skillfully skewered Glenn on the rally hyperbole that drew nearly a hundred thousand to Washington, D.C., expecting miracles as advertised. Yes, some 90,000 of our neighbors gathered to experience something akin to a big tent revival and patriotic tribute to the nation’s military. Glenn Beck has become a very unlikely de facto head of the Christian political movement. There is a good deal of money to be made by tapping into the Christianist roots of the Tea Bagger movement, gone leaderless since Dubya stepped away from the podium. It doesn’t matter that the facts don’t support the issues that anger this demographic, or that Beck is a Mormon.

Continued at this link…

 

It’s About You: Capricorn Birthdays for 2010

Dear Capricorn or Capricorn Rising:

I just completed the Capricorn birthday audio presentation for 2010. This is a combination of astrology and tarot, suitable for Capricorn Sun, Moon or rising. I know Capricorn birthdays often get glossed over in the midst of the end-of-year/new year holidays, so I’m happy to be able to offer you this fresh look at your current astrology now.

It was an exciting report to record, since the focus of everyone’s astrology right now is Pluto in your sign, putting you at the vanguard of internal evolution as you develop your mission in the world — a world ready for your participation and, as I’ve been suggesting in recent horoscopes, your leadership.

Your Capricorn reading is a careful look at your astrology from before your last birthday through 2010. I touch on the significant astrology from the past few years and make connections to Capricorn’s role in the 2012 alignment.

The current astrology directly influences all the most important aspects of your life: your personal evolution, your career, your home base and sense of security, your family life and your relationships.

You are being called to develop your integrity, Capricorn; in fact, one of my readers once described Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn as mandatory integrity. As you’ll hear in this audio birthday report, you are up to the task of leading by example.

I’ve included a 20 minute tarot card reading, using the Voyager deck by James Wanless. You can order now and get instant access. This is high-quality stereo audio which you can listen to as many times as you like, for as long as you like — these files will be preserved in their original location. It’s priced to be affordable — $14.95 for about an hour of material (this is an extra-long edition of birthday audio).

Because my astrology writing is focused on the houses, I recommend this audio for Capricorn rising as well. This audio report makes an excellent companion to Capricorn Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves, which is in written form.

Thanks for your participation, and for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.

Yours & truly,

 

 

 


Weekly Horoscope for Friday, September 3, 2010, #829 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

What happens this week is likely to stay in this week — particularly at work, where there seems to be some drama brewing. Whether you’re experiencing the best or the worst of what is possible, or if you’re in some wild confusion, I suggest you let it go. Take the current flow of events as an example of what is possible, do your best to remember it (you may forget, if you don’t put some notes into your diary), and disappear into the holiday weekend. Do your best not to complicate matters if they are a little weird, and if you’re in the moment of a breakthrough, keep your focus on the idea at hand, what has inspired it, and your response to what you’re learning. In other words, stick to the facts and concepts and how they influence you. Later in the month you will have occasion to put them to work — this is unlikely to be the time for that.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You seem to be trying to unravel something the difficult way that you could unravel much more easily — and explore an opportunity while you’re at it. This ‘something’ relates to what you usually consider among the most challenging endeavors: allowing inspiration to flow through you into creative results that take you to another level of consciousness or experience. It will help if you remember that there are other levels than the one you usually hang out on. Remember that the world is flexible. Remember that everything you touch, see and hear came into being through some act of intention or creation. You can easily reach a zone of awareness where you co-create the world and yourself at the same time. So allow yourself to be surprised by what you are not expecting.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Even in the most painful family situations we can have moments of contact or clarity that transcend all of history. In the most challenging relationships we can see the clouds part and the love shines in brilliantly. In the depths of emotional chaos a door opens at the bottom that leads to a new place. I suggest you proceed calmly through the next few days, forgetting what seems to trouble you, and focusing on the art of existence. Allow yourself to find the succinct words to express your mental and emotional state back to you. Be articulate about how you feel about people, yourself and your life without believing the words are being scratched into a mirror. Whatever you’ve been through the past couple of weeks, you are entering a space where authentic clarity is waiting for you.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are alive, and the mental and creative processes that exist within you have lives of their own. Much as we try to tame them, harness them, get them to fit routines or professionalize our talents, the mind has its own cycles, seasons and destinations. I don’t intend to describe your mind as something apart from you, rather to suggest that there are different layers in existence, and that you are an organic entity. Therefore if you’ve been experiencing something out of pattern, or feeling resistance or a blockage of some kind, that suggests you’re at the point of breakthrough. I would remind you to make sure you notice, but this one is pretty much impossible to miss. However, to reap the benefits of this experience, you will need to follow through carefully. Ideas don’t morph into books, movies or businesses on their own — they need our focused, ongoing attention.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Money is a game, a puzzle, an experiment, a collaborative venture — think of it as anything but a crisis. In essence, money is what you make of it, and you can make quite a bit of it right now. Remember that from the viewpoint of the physical world we create funds from ideas, from labor or from time. Most of us sell our time or labor — notably, that’s usually the least profitable venture. I suggest you view your financial process as a mix of all three, emphasizing ideas above time and labor. The idea you need is waiting for you, and it would appear to consist as much in something new as in a new way of approaching an old — perhaps very old — problem. You have likely thought of this before, but now the problem and the solution are aligned in the necessary moment.

Leo Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Your father’s house has many rooms. And in our society, father is a mystery on the order of what we think of as God. In fact, our obsession with God is little other than a stand-in for our teetering relationship to father. You seem to be dealing with legacy material that at once is about family and at the same time has overtones of spirituality or religion. I suggest you pull back the curtain on anything that comes cloaked in spiritual, religious or even mystical values, terminology or ritual. State your business in the most succinct psychological and physical terms possible. Think of events with dates, locations with addresses and people with names. Notice direct parallels between what you are experiencing now, and what you experienced much earlier in life. Remember that inheritance comes in many forms other than cash or property — and you can’t use it or give it away till you claim it as your own.

The Virgo birthday report will be ready next week. However, I am offering a Mercury retrograde in Virgo report which is like taking a trek on Virgo through the 12 houses of the zodiac. There is an abundance of information in there offered in service of a sign that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Here is the link to connect with that product.

Current aspects describe situations that feel competitive, but where you’re not sure you have the edge. The approaches that others are taking sometimes seem to work better than the ones you normally take, and I suggest you invest no energy at all in doubting yourself. The question is, what actually deserves to be approached in a competitive way, and what calls for being approached in a cooperative way? We don’t usually see the damage done by turning everything into a game with a winner and losers. I suggest you imagine how productive life could be if we devoted ourselves to designing mutually supportive approaches to life. One of those could involve sex. If you want more or better sex, I suggest you support everyone around you in getting exactly what they want. That approach will help you get what you want.

Making ethical choices takes courage, and courage is what you — and the world — needs right now. You seem to be questioning whether you can find it, but do you really have a choice? Lately it seems like you’re on your own; you’re getting many signals from existence that remind you that you need to be self-sufficient, fend for yourself and, as if that were not enough, face some of your deepest fears. One involves abandonment. This seems to be at the root of many challenges in our relationships; we have not devised a mode of relating that does not, in the end, land most people out in the cold, in court, or left alone. Yet as much as you may recognize this, the question arises: what do you do when you have to move on from a situation? Observe how you’ve been treated in the past, and notice the effects this had on you. You don’t have to repeat the pattern, and there are many different approaches you can take.

You are gradually making contact with the emotional truth behind a sexual or romantic experience. Indeed, the notion of ‘the emotional truth behind’ could be applied to everything in your life, to any question, to any desire — particularly a desire to tap your deeper creativity. You can use this as a tool to figure out whether you truly want something you think you want; you can evaluate what lurks behind your quest for happiness. But perhaps most useful, you’re about to discover why you’ve felt so unstable for so long, and finally be offered some real information about what you can do about it. In short, you have used your sense of instability for useful purposes, such as avoiding getting stuck in certain situations that don’t serve you. But you need a better approach, one that relies more on flexibility and innovation rather than instability or uncertainty.

Everything about your charts speaks both of seeking a new level of achievement and also a new depth of self-understanding. To discover your true longterm vision, I suggest you look back to an idea that you may have given up on long ago. How long ago? Well, what was your very first idea for what you wanted to do with your life? Children are closer to their original intentions for coming to the world; they have had less time to learn, but also less time to forget. Yet often these intentions and desires have a way of being critiqued out of existence. If you can recover this and other early goals that you had, you will also learn something about where they went; that is to say, you’ll catch a glimpse how you talk yourself out of what you want. Once you figure that out, you can stop doing it, and focus instead on creating what you desire the most.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

A discovery or revelation on a matter that involves shared finances or a contractual agreement is offering you precisely the information that you need right now. I suggest you focus on the information that has, and very likely still is, coming to light, and remember that this situation is all about where the resources of you and someone else come together. What belongs to whom? Who plays what role in the situation? I suggest you look at where you’ve given your power away; study this down to the details, and figure out how you got where you are right now. It’s going to require some sorting out of the past to see the way forward. And eventually you will have to get down to the nitty-gritty of the situation, which may have you a bit nervous — you would much prefer these details to work out for themselves.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may feel stretched impossibly between two opposites or situations that have little in common. People may be irritating you beyond the point of wanting to even deal with them; your mind is on other things. I suggest that you keep your distance from any situation that resembles this description. Don’t detach or disappear; rather, work at an arm’s length and things will go a lot more smoothly. What is happening today is on a timeline of about one additional month, as long as it will take for Mercury to station direct in your opposite sign, for the Sun’s dramatic ingress into Libra, and for other critical aspects to help you get an authentically clear vision of where you’re heading in life. The details that matter so much right now will matter a lot less then, so I suggest you conserve your energy for what really matters: creating rather than fixing.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Mercury Stationing Retrograde in Virgo

Dear Fellow Traveler:

Mercury stations retrograde today. Can you feel it? If you have the patience, it’s one of those deep-thinking moments. If you don’t, you may be encountering significant frustration — so practice patience, especially in any form of communication. Prudent astrological counsel is to move gently, slowly, carefully; do so day by day and hour by hour, if you must. The retrograde lasts through Sept. 12, with the peak coming on Sept. 3 when Mercury makes its interior conjunction to the Sun. That moment is when Mercury passes directly between the Earth and the Sun and the retrograde begins to wind down.

Art car at Burning Man 2009, photo by Eric Francis.

This transit has many unusual features. Most of them involve Mercury playing off of a group of minor plants in Sagittarius, as well as a point called the Great Attractor. In other words, although Mercury is retrograde in Virgo, it’s picking up strong influence from Sagittarius.

Many of these contacts involve family history. For example, the retrograde is happening with Mercury square Quaoar, a planet that’s about how we are born into our family of origin and just start picking up the patterns that everyone else is acting out unconsciously, or nonchalantly. As we know, some of those patterns are difficult to see, much less do anything about. The current astrology should be doing a nice job of making us aware of what some of that material is about. Quaoar about describes our personal creation myth — something we may not think about too often. That is the story, deep in your mind, about how you came to Earth, where you came from, and what your existence means.

Along the way, Mercury will also square Pholus, which is a centaur planet (the second ever, after Chiron) that helps us trace things back three generations. Pholus is especially helpful for deducing the origins of addiction patterns, and anything that has been transmitted down the generational line to a point of origin we can actually document. Pholus also comes with the description “small cause, big effect.” We can apply this to Mercury two ways — one is that even a few words or a single idea can have a big influence, beyond what we are imagining. And we can remember that seemingly small things can have a profound influence on our minds, and on our state of mind.

And Mercury will square Ixion, a minor planet in the vicinity of Pluto, which describes the amoral aspect of human nature — the one that doesn’t care about right and wrong. I sum this planet up as “anyone is capable of anything.” We all live with a lot of this, and we may even fear this quality in ourselves. Often when we encounter it, it comes wrapped, that is, disguised, in religious garb. And as Mercury makes its square to Ixion, we will get a look at our own use of religion as a rationale for, well, for anything we use it for.

You are not your avatar. See interview, below.

So this is a Mercury retrograde that reaches into the depths of both spirituality and psychology, if you can even separate those two things.

For those who have a knack or curiosity about the technical side of astrology, check out this ephemeris that Tracy Delaney at Serennu.com created. It covers the whole span of Mercury in Virgo, which spans from late July through early October. This is Mercury in Virgo, making aspects to many influential, deep and at times strange planets. Take it easy on yourself, and gently unhook those points of obsession that keep you trapped in the very mental patterns you want to let go of.

As we move through the Mercury station on Friday, which will ripple into the weekend, we reach a turning point in the history of our current era: Saturn makes its third and final square to Pluto on Saturday. Saturn has been making an astonishing number of aspects the past two years, and this is the last of them for a while: the final of three Saturn-Pluto squares, shortly after we passed the last of five Saturn-Uranus oppositions. If life has been stressful and (putting it politely) eventful, this is a picture of why: the structure of reality, and of our minds, is being rearranged. It’s a turning point, though besides observing yourself, being compassionate and riding it out, there is not that much you can do to influence the flow of events. You can, however, bear in mind that integrity is something that begins and ends with you.

At this juncture, overnight Wednesday to Thursday the United States withdrew its last full combat brigade from Iraq. There are still several thousand combat troops there, who are scheduled to leave by the end of the month; many will be redeployed to Afghanistan. Another 50,000 will stay through 2011, according to the Obama administration’s plan, to do bureaucratic jobs and to advise the Iraqi security forces.

Though this is a bitter victory for those who opposed the war, it is indeed a turning point; I covered it at the time, and you can find that link here on our daily edition, with the relevant charts and an excellent conversation. Of course with Mercury about to be retrograde, I don’t blame anyone for doubting that this is the real thing — that it’s another faux “mission accomplished.” I guess we shall see. It’s important to remember that wars that took years to plan (badly) and build up to don’t end in a day; even Vietnam was a two-year drawdown after the official end of fighting in the mid-1970s.

Speaking of Mercury, this week’s essay is an item I’ve been holding for a few months, waiting for the right moment. It’s in interview format, focusing on the relationship between astrology and technology. The interview was intended for one of the big online gaming magazines — a non-astrological audience. So it will give you a taste of how I speak to people who are totally outside the field.

One last thing — a couple of weeks ago, I promised that I would take a week off. Someone wrote to me and said, “I hadn’t noticed that you did that.” No, I haven’t, and it’s really time. I’ve been running my astrological writing engine a bit hot for the past season and I need to cool down. So, we will distribute the monthly horoscope for September on Tuesday, then I plan to skip the edition of Friday, Aug. 27. Monthly horoscopes are done. Leo birthday audio is done. Capricorn belated birthday audio is done — the last in our series of belated 2010 reports. Mercury retrograde audio is just about done — I will definitely appreciate and enjoy some time away from `my amazing, challenging, actually meaningful job. We will send out reminders on the days of canceled issues.

Till next time — for Planet Waves, this is

 

 

Readers of Political Waves by Judith Gayle — we are having a bitty little Mercury issue that is preventing the code from working in email. Please click this link for the new Political Waves. –efc

 

Metaprogramming With Astrology

Planetary Cycles. Photo of Community Gourmet, next to Blue Studio, by Eric Francis.

Interview with Eric Francis by Savas Abadsidis. Eric Francis is a writer and astrologer who has contributed to the Internet since the mid-1990s — for his profession, since the beginning. He came to astrology from environmental investigative reporting, so he has a background in technology, exposing fraud and how invisible things can affect the whole world. He answered these questions in late March 2010 while in Portland, Maine.

How does the virtual world relate to the world that you function in as an astrologer? Are there analogies?

First, a bit about that function: I’m one of the people who writes the horoscopes that appear in the backs of magazines and on the Internet. I also work with individual clients, conduct research and train other astrologers in counseling techniques. I do a lot of news analysis as well, using the positions of the planets at the time of major public developments.

Capacitor cut from my telephone network interface by friendly Verizon guy, which was slowing down my DSL connection. Photo by Eric.

I have a very old kind of job but I think that the emergence of the virtual world has some deep connections to what I do, and to what many astrologers do. Often astrology seems like a model of the Internet — but an ancient model, created long before it was a twinkle in the eye of a gamer, hacker or academic. Astrology functions as a shared field of connection; and as a system of symbolic representation; and as a language.

I often think of astrology as a metaprogramming tool. It’s a way to describe extremely complicated concepts in short notation, and then to express those concepts in a useful way. But you have to know what you’re doing for it to work effectively; that is, in a way that fosters growth, awareness and potential.

By metaprogramming tool, I mean it’s a way to look at and also to assemble the core concepts of how we think of ourselves, and explore their relationships. I’ll give you an easy example. Venus and Mars are active in the charts of all men and all women. In astrology you’re not strictly “a man” or “”a woman” and stuck to those roles. The moment you open a person’s chart, you see how their male side functions and how their female side functions, and how the two relate — and being aware of this shift in model can change your life in a matter of moments.

It’s also possible to use astrology in a way that reduces people to their symbols, and limits their potential. That’s reductionist. But that’s more about the use than astrology itself. With astrology, as with many things — such as the Internet — you tend to get results based on the creativity and intention you put in. The use of symbols can move a lot of creative energy, if you focus your awareness and intention.

A lot of people don’t believe in astrology. What do you say to them?

Astrology is a tool like any other. It works, but I think it needs to be mixed with plenty of real-world knowledge and experience in order to have ethical grounding and actual use. Here’s an example: You can be a database programmer and be very good at programming, but unless you know how people tend to think and work, your databases aren’t going to be convenient to use. You need to know almost as much about people as you do about computers. If you follow the basic lines of human thought habit, you can create intuitive programs that ease our lives mentally, and help people unfold their potential.

Stan faces down his Facebook profile, after getting “sucked in,” from South Park Episode 1404: “You have 0 Friends.”

Astrologers need to work in the same spirit. We need to remember that people are quirky, that we’re all unique, and most of all, that symbols stand for something else. The thing that distinguishes astrological symbols from many of the symbols that we typically encounter (say, for example, in commerce) is that they’re so well used by so many people that they are archetypes. Carl Jung gave us this term. Archetypes are a special kind of living symbol which moves down the ages and which exists in some form in every culture.

Many or even all of them are already in your mind when you’re born. Imagine if the characters on South Park had been around for 3,000 years, and revered by many of your ancestors and billions of people down the ages, collecting momentum in the genetic memory — that’s what astrological symbols are like. They have residence as living psychic entities in our minds and bodies; they have gravity and cycles. That’s why the concepts associated with them have such validity on the human level. They’re not external to us; they’re part of us.

The virtual world to some extent demonstrates that there is existence beyond the body, as does astrology — we’re overcoming this belief that everything is strictly limited by physical reality. To get into virtuality we need these interconnective devices. So far there are no psychics I know of who can get onto the Net with their minds, but the time may be coming. Without the need to use any equipment at all, astrology can demonstrate that we’re all part of the same reality, and that communication extends beyond the body and the known senses. We try to emulate this with all of our technology. That emulation, much like astrology, can point us toward the reality, or it can keep us trapped in a little model of reality.

From the perspective of the work you do as an astrologer, how do you think what many young people experience in their virtual (online) lives via avatars or role-playing games (RPGs) affects who they think they are?

Both astrology and avatars involve the use of symbols. With both kinds of symbols, we attempt to tell a version of the story of our lives. Sometimes we succeed. Often we don’t. Good astrologers will remind you that the map is not the terrain. A person’s mind is more complex than their chart. A person with an avatar is not their avatar. But it’s clear that you can use your avatar creatively; that you can create a kind of extremely rich parallel world to your own.

At professional astrology conferences, a good few people chirp about their Pisces Moon and Aquarius rising and Venus in Leo, as if that reveals anything about who they actually are. In this mode, astrology is being used as a metalanguage, but it’s also reductionist. There’s no way to make sure that we all agree what Venus in Leo means, and it does mean something different to everyone. In this way, it shrinks our potential, and limits the potential of astrology as a means of exploring who we are.

Animating one’s avatar can be a way of breathing life into existence, via proxy. We do a lot of that these days; we create nicknames and handles and profiles and listings and live through them vicariously. We have different email addresses and Facebook pages for different purposes. I suggest we see this for what it is, the creation of alter egos.

We can bring creativity to this process. Or it can be used to give us a false sense of control, and an attempt to simplify existence in a time when life is exceptionally complicated.

Looked at another way, this says something about the dangerously disembodied state of the Internet. We have to be mindful of these attempts to escape ourselves and live in fantasy rather than taking actual creative risks, daring to encounter others in vulnerable situations.

This can have a psychological advantage, such as tricking yourself out of your current ego reality so you can experiment with other ideas and possibilities. For example, if you’re a shy person, you can pretend to be an outgoing person. If you’re homophobic you can pretend to be gay. If you’re a prude you can pretend to be saucy. But why pretend? Well, there’s no risk in pretending; but there’s not so much reward, either.

Do you think this strengthens human relations, or as some like Jaron Lanier have suggested, “The most popular aspects of Internet life — including Wikipedia, Facebook and digital music — are so detrimental to humanity that they give young people a reduced expectation of what a person can be”?

Human relations are based on direct experiences. A role-playing game is not direct experience; it’s role-playing: it’s a game. An actor acting a part in a play is not that character. A football team representing a city is not that city. I think we’re in serious trouble when we blur the line between our ‘avatar’ and the reality of who we are. It’s the real person who has the relationship, and who grows, not the avatar.

Photo by Eric Francis.

We tend to trust people because they prove themselves trustworthy when we’re vulnerable. We tend to love the people we nurture, and I don’t see a lot of room for actual vulnerability or nourishment in most online experiences, particularly if they’re lived by proxy — by any form of false name or assumed identity, which is an attempt to evade vulnerability. But there are ways to get there, ways to express vulnerability in the virtual world, but they can be extremely slippery. We all know this.

I agree with Lanier’s basic idea, but not with all of his examples. I’m a professional editor, and I participate in Wikipedia as a volunteer editor. To me Wikipedia seems like a process of documentation and consensus building similar to many other time-honored academic and editorial projects. Editors work in a dynamic environment. There’s grounding, in a process of reason; the rules say you have to footnote and anyone can be held to them. Human dynamics come into play constantly, and there’s a work output that’s useful to many. The result is an authentic document of our times, created cooperatively.

Wikipedia can be dangerous if you think it’s the only source of knowledge. If you don’t know how to use it as a reference, it can be a kind of reduction of reality, but so is any one form of literature. To get around that, click on the footnotes and see where they lead. Read the discussion page and see what the editors are saying about an issue. You will learn a lot. Wikipedia leaves open many doors to the ‘real world’. I think it’s one of the most revolutionary things on the Internet.

As for music — just about all music is recorded and distributed digitally, unless you’re at the concert or the drum circle. Yes, there’s fidelity loss, and many people use digital audio editing in a way that would prevent them from ever performing the thing you heard recorded (that’s nothing new — the best recording studios, such as Bearsville, were doing that 20 years ago). But there’s an exponential gain of accessibility. Any artist can get his or her music to an audience with a website. You no longer need a record contract to have others from far away appreciate your work, or buy it. You no longer need a studio to make a basic, decent recording.

What always matters with any form of art is the talent and love one invests into the work. Practice still makes you a better musician, and ultimately, one’s underlying talent and devotion and sense of existence are what come through (or not) no matter how we record or distribute our work.

I think that Facebook is a logical outcome of the Internet in its current form. Many people who don’t have much to say finally have someplace to say it. It’s exciting on one level because we get to post our thoughts into a public forum. For people who in the past have just read the Internet and have never contributed, this is something novel. Yet the way it’s done it’s usually an obvious indulgence in self-obsession, and that is only so interesting. It’s only so relevant. We try to reduce ourselves to clever sound bites and tales of making dinner. It’s a form of 15-second fame. All we get are fragments of who a person is, and our hearts and souls yearn for cohesion, for authentic narrative. You could write a very interesting story about making dinner, but I think you would need more space.

Sure, Facebook strengthens some relationships. Somewhere in the world, high school sweethearts are finding one another for the first time in 30 years. Many other people are collecting thousands of “friends” they will never meet, talk to or care about. It’s all how you use it.

Do you think social networking as a further extension of the Internet has brought us closer or farther apart?

All that matters is the potential. All the ways we’re currently using social networking to isolate ourselves, we can leave behind. All its potential as an awareness tool we can embrace this moment. I will say this, if we think that social networking is actually a form of companionship, that’s going to make our emotional lives difficult. We need one another, for real, and in person — not just on a buddy list.

Why is it that science fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) or Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) were able to use the genre to push the boundaries of sexuality, while the video game makers give us Grand Theft Auto? Is that in its own way pushing the boundaries, or just promoting violence?

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), American novelist and science fiction writer, one of the inventors of modern polyamory.

Novelists write books because they have ideas and characters and stories burning in their minds. The writers you mention were fortunate enough to reach wide audiences and they affect peoples’ lives to this day. The boundaries they were pushing were evolutionary, and had nothing to do with a profit motive. To the contrary — we write because we have something to say, and we take a risk saying it.

Le Guin was one of the writers who introduced us to the idea that gender is optional; we can choose our gender from moment to moment. Heinlein introduced us to the idea that we can love and be loved by as many people as we want, and that we’re only limited by our beliefs about ourselves. These ideas have helped many people evolve their lives, and sparked many other thinkers into action. For example, Heinlein helped launch the polyamory movement, which is a worldwide trend toward people having open, honest, nonmonogamous relationships — and just about every polyamorous person understands who Heinlein is.

In their day, these books were as accessible to peoples’ minds as video games are today — and that is incredible.

I wasn’t there when Grand Theft Auto was created, but the name tells you a lot. Okay, you get to pretend you’re a criminal roaming the streets of a city. And then?

Why is this generation so obsessed with vampires and zombies? And from where do the roots of this stem?

Let’s take these symbols one at a time. Both deal with the state of being undead. Undead is the opposite of alive, but not really dead. I think they reflect how many people are terrified that this is how we’re living our lives.

Al Lewis as Grandpa Munster.

Vampires flirt with the most seductive human experiences, yet for the most part they’re celibate. They represent powerful forces operating under the psyche and yet it cannot fulfill our real human need for contact. The vampire metaphor is that the mortal gives up his or her life force to the immortal; it’s an act of total submission. This description reminds me of immortal corporations vamping off of submissive, mortal humans. In many, many ways we are confronted with this kind of energy theft at this time in history.

In vampires we also have the image of compulsion, of doing what we need to do because we have no way to avoid it. In an era when we are met with so much seduction, and so much compulsive behavior, and so many addictive substances, and when we have so many opportunities to withhold or be withheld from, I think vampire stories give us a way to process our responses.

Zombies are another story. I think they’re a reflection of our fear that we’re going unconscious; that we are living the lives of the undead; of the totally unconscious, who can neither wake up or die properly. To me they’re our symbol of humans living automatically, or as slaves of our technology. And hey, if we do it because everyone’s doing it, that allegedly absolves us of any responsibility for our own lives.

Where in pop culture do you think the boundaries are being pushed?

I’m not sure it’s ever been the job of pop culture to push boundaries, but sometimes it happens. We live in a time when it’s difficult to push boundaries because we either don’t know where they are, or because we’re so caught up in our own heads that the least movement into physical experience is pushing boundaries. Anything we do that involves going beyond a fear is pushing a boundary. Laughter is a psychological sign that we’re abandoning fear; that we feel safe. Comedians help provide that safe environment and we are in a golden age of comedy and satire right now.

Rachel Maddow.

I’m a big fan of The Onion because they have no sacred cows, and at the same time they’re like a divining oracle of the insanity of our moment. It’s one of the few places you can read something that’s absolutely honest and not dictated by what people might think. You can laugh at yourself. Their three-minute newscast videos are just beyond brilliant. Yet they can push boundaries because they have them: the writing is impeccable, they’re funny nearly all the time, and most of all, they’re relevant.

Rachel Maddow on MSNBC is pushing a boundary of proving that television can be honest and intelligent. If you’ve seen her you know she’s funny and that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. The intelligent part is crucial in a world where the main boundary we run into is how stupid people are presumed to be, or rather, presume themselves to be — the “I’m a zombie” factor. She entices her viewers to take on challenging issues, and is basically living proof that it’s cool to be intelligent; not a geek, but sensitive to the many dimensions of an issue. She pushes other broadcasters to be real and to take chances. And she’s a dearly needed example of a woman in her power, who stands on the strength of her own voice and her own ideas. I don’t think you’ll ever see her pimping the Palm Pre.

There’s some great stuff going on at Comedy Central; almost enough has been said about Colbert and Stewart, but as a journalist I will say that I look to these guys as some of the most effective news analysts out there. Danny Tosh is one of the unsung geniuses on Comedy Central at the moment. Tosh.o is a program about how absurd the Internet is, or rather, how absurd people are and what you can find of that madness on the Internet. He’s willing to let people be as mindless as they are; he’s like a dream muse for the online world.

Most of where boundaries are being pushed, you don’t hear about yet. The culture either isn’t open enough, or where it’s open it’s a special challenge to get traction. I think with pushing boundaries, we need to not be pushed but rather guide ourselves to be more daring, to take chances, and to use technology as what it is: a raft to another shore.

 

Mercury Retrograde in Virgo: Aug. 20 – Sept. 12

A Special 12-Sign Audio Edition of Planet Waves by Eric Francis

Dear Fellow Traveler:

Mercury is about to be retrograde, beginning Friday. This is one of those events we all agree has an effect. Some people love it; it gets their creative energy jumping. Other people lose their keys six times, get their cell phone cut off, have their Yahoo account hacked and bounce the mortgage payment. Occasionally it can lead to significant problems — and just as often, truly helpful solutions and shifts of awareness. I’ve often noticed Mercury retrograde as the moment where the truth reveals itself, or (in a Chiron-like way) we discover the flaw in a system just in time.

“Logios Hermes” (Hermes, Orator). Marble, Roman copy from the late 1st century CE-early 2nd century CE after a Greek original of the 5th century BC. Hermes is represented in astrology by the planet Mercury and the apparently real historical figure by the same name is considered, according to Project Hindsight, to be one of the founders of astrology.

In a special audio edition of Planet Waves, I’m taking a closer look at the Mercury retrograde experience and exploring both why it’s so potent and how we can use it to improve our lives. For the next few weeks, Mercury will be retrograde in Virgo, one of the signs with which it’s the most closely associated.

My take on this particular retrograde is that it’s reminding us about unfinished healing projects. What are those projects? What has changed since we forgot about them? Where would be a good place to resume where we left off, and what can we safely move on from? I’ll be looking for ways to help you consolidate your efforts, as well as to focus on specific issues and ideas that will assist like leverage points.

Another angle of this retrograde involves our typical state of mental overload. We wouldn’t get into that, you know, scattered, stretched-thin state of mind, if we didn’t have certain predispositions, and often these are oriented in the past — as mental patterns. Mercury trekking backwards through Virgo will help us clue into the nature of those patterns and give us some hints about what to do with them. Where any of us has Virgo placed in our charts is an aspect of life where we need to be less self-critical, more self-supportive and relax our perfectionism. I would count those as healing goals, and I’ll be reading the charts from that angle as well.

For subscribers, this is a 12-sign report — all the signs for one price. This will enable you to listen to your Sun, Moon and rising signs, as well as those of the people you care about. I’ll present it in an audio package with introductory materials that explain Mercury retrograde in general (offering insights into the more common themes of avoiding bad purchases and our continuing relationship to technology) and offer deeper ideas about this particular one. Then I’ll take the signs one-by-one in 15-minute presentations.

The report is scheduled to be ready Friday afternoon, the day Mercury stations. I’m offering it now for the pre-order price of $24.95. This includes all the introductory materials and all 12 signs. The price will go up to $29.95 after the report is released (or the signs will be sold individually). The report will include an overview of the Libra equinox chart — which includes a Full Moon on the Aries Point the day of the equinox.

Pre-orders will be sent access information and you’ll receive an email as soon as the report is posted. This promises to be a fun, useful project — and one that has a value that will outlast the current astrology as a dependable resource.

Once again, here is your pre-ordering page. Thank you for your business and happy retrograding!

 

 

PS: Here is last year’s Mercury retrograde report — a written edition that was a bestseller and got great reviews. There will be much more information for the 12 signs in this audio edition.

Readers of Political Waves by Judith Gayle — we are having a bitty little Mercury issue that is preventing the code from working in email. Please click this link for the new Political Waves. –efc

 

 

 

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, August 20, 2010, #828 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Dear Fellow Traveler:

It is better to have a slow start than many false starts. Therefore, proceed with care and awareness through the 12th when Mercury stations direct, and even then, don’t trust everything you see and hear. As for trusting your feelings, I would say yes — as long as those feelings consist of something besides hope or fear. Complicated is different than complex, and what you need now is a multi-faceted approach to exploring the potentials in your life. Collect the facts, check them over a few times, and see what they add up to. This will provide some grounding for your thought process. Yet two powerful conjunctions that occur around the time of the equinox — Jupiter conjunct Uranus in Pisces, and Chiron conjunct Neptune in Aquarius — both say essentially the same thing: trust your intuition, and trust your ideas.

Yours & truly,

 

 

I suggest you avoid competitive situations, and do your best to make sure that you purge a spirit of competition from your intimate encounters. I would not need to say this if the playing of games, and putting people through the paces, were not such a common experience where erotic and emotional encounters are concerned. But playing at love as if it were a game of Top Chef will be the single fastest way to eliminate any sense of intimacy in your relationships. It’s also likely to be a cover story for a sense of disconnect that you may be feeling with someone you want to be close to. And this invokes the deeper and perhaps more challenging part of human contact, which is developing your connection to yourself as you explore the journey of being close to others.

Aries Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You are close to a breakthrough in a relationship that is dear to your heart, your soul and your libido. Yet you may be wondering why you are so involved, and why it seems like you have so little influence over the course of events. I suggest rather than getting caught up in the mystery, that you think of your situation as walking down the street, or on a path. You cannot fly, but you can choose where to put your feet. You can walk slower and see the scenery and shop windows. You can walk quicker and move toward a certain location. You have options. It is true that you may feel like you’re in too deep, but that’s not necessarily true, and what you have is more pleasurable and meaningful than something that you could describe as ‘too shallow’. Your destination is water; when you get there, remember to swim.

Taurus Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Creative process often goes in fits and starts. There are days when you get everything done, and days when between the electric meter reading, your mom or your kid calling you three times and the monumental task of making lunch, you get very little done. The important thing is that you persist from day to day. More meaningful than that, go deeper, reach for the source of creativity rather than the results, and do your best to let appearances drop away. I suggest you be undeterred by delays, and return to your creative objective, whatever it may be, on a daily basis. Bear in mind, as well, that there is no creative process that is disconnected from a healing process. I suggest you keep both in your thoughts and your feelings, touching base with the deeper sense of history that you’re working to resolve, as you simultaneously create this next phase of your existence.

Gemini Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You may feel that you have more in the way of ideas than you have the tangible means to express them. That may be true for the moment, but it’s not true forever; in fact, it will hardly be true for long. Right now I suggest you appreciate and explore the abundance of your creativity. You also have something else going on, which is an odd angle of analysis, a particular slant in the way you see things that has the ability to reveal both hidden problems and, correspondingly, hidden solutions. This particular mental gift is something innate in you, but it’s particularly brilliant now. At times it’s thinly veiled by frustration. Don’t fall for that: anytime you sense that you are limited, or that you can’t see the issue, look closely, turn the paper upside down, or rearrange the steps in a process.

Cancer Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

You have something to say, so I suggest you say it. You may be terrified to, but this is the time to take some new, if tentative, steps in the art of self-expression. I am aware the depth of commitment involved in making any statement. I am aware that saying anything incurs the risk of being wrong. These are two things that you would do very well to face boldly. Trust your balanced perspective. Have faith that you see more to the picture than most people do, and that you know what stands on the other side. That is the perspective from which to speak — to reveal the hidden world behind the façade of existence. In doing this you would, of course, be revealing something beyond your own façade. You would be allowing a new depth of vulnerability. These will be steps toward freedom.

The Leo Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Leo and Leo rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Leo and Leo Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical birthday gift.

Wake up every day and wonder who you are. Ask the question. To do so would be to assume that you don’t know the answer, and that is precisely the point. You spend too much time convincing yourself that you are who you are, rather than asking boldly and letting the question stand. You’re likely to see that you put emphasis on being the same person from day to day or honoring your past goals. If you look at this directly, you may notice just how many have nothing to do with what you want now. So why are you still invested? You may not be; you may be falling prey to a quality of the human mind that is terrified that it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t know for sure. Cast that off. Embrace uncertainty and you will find your power.

You’re at a crucial tipping point in declaring your independence from your parents. I say that whether you’re 15 or 51; whether you live at home, or whether you’ve lived in China for the past 20 years. Most people aren’t truly free of their parents’ negative attachments. The most challenging situations occur when we think we’re free, but are still dragging around ‘unconscious’ feelings in the part of the mind we pretend doesn’t exist. For the next few weeks you can study the flow of events and trace backwards to what they say about your relationship to the past, to the people who once had so much authority over you, and to what you believe about authority today. To what extent do you have the freedom to structure your life? To that same extent you are free of your parents’ baggage.

Are you rebelling against your own sexual energy? Are you maintaining a kind of purity to give you a sense of safety? Or do you simply feel alone in the world? I propose that how you feel about sex describes how you feel about your whole life. You can in fact make a detailed description of your erotic existence and then read it as if you’re explaining your feelings about being on the planet. The sense of isolation you may be experiencing will help you break free of someone or something: an attitude, a relationship, an emotional pattern or a sense of being stuck. The planets are aligning in such a way that is promising you the experience of being anything but stuck, though it may seem daunting to make that first move. Gather your courage and do what it takes.

We live in a self-obsessed society that lacks self-knowledge. You are probably one of the illuminated. You have a vision, you are in contact with your creativity and you understand that there is such a thing as liberation. For you, liberation and knowledge are one, and as this autumn progresses you’re going to figure out that the only true knowledge is rooted in your emotional body. This is not true of everyone, though we would all benefit from this level of awareness. For you, it’s always true and yet this time in your life marks a special time in your growth, where you tap into the deepest inner sense of your senses and thoughts and confirm what is true by a purely emotional response. Some call this a gut response, and I would agree, except to say that it goes deeper: right down to your cells.

You have been through so much. You might want to rest, but now is your moment to shine. Long rehearsals always precede opening night. You need a few good nights sleep, a few good meals, and then it’s time to take on the world. Your goals have been long in coming to fruition, and you may have given up on some. I suggest you do nothing of the kind; your moment is just arriving. Events of the past few months may have come with hard lessons and seemingly impossible challenges. You may have spent so much time on deep inner work that you forgot about your desire to make your way in the world. Now is the time to remember. People around you are waiting for your ideas, your clarity, and your blessing. You’re not alone, but you are the one who must bring the initiative.

The Capricorn Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than an hour of astrology for Capricorn and Capricorn rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20-minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck. For instant access, order here for Capricorn and Capricorn Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical gift.

You seem to be experimenting with different approaches to having faith in yourself. I can tell you right away that holding yourself to a standard of perfection is not one that will work; an ongoing critique will not be so helpful; trying to live up to the expectations of others will not offer you much. What is likely to help is utter sincerity. Be aware of when you are putting up an appearance of any kind. More to the point, notice why you would conceal something behind a façade. While these things do not exactly represent faith in yourself, at least they won’t get in the way; they will help remove obstacles rather than add them. When the strong rays of faith arrive, they are likely to feel like an inner sense of devotion to a long-term vision. You may have your doubts, and they don’t matter.

Aquarius Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.

Though you may not understand why, over the net few weeks, you begin to make progress in places that it seemed impossible. There are many factors at work. Sticking to your basic requirements for what constitutes worthwhile, authentic or sincere have helped, and they will continue to help. Your willingness to be flexible has also contributed — this is called having standards and also the willingness to assess them continually. Yet there is one thing that is providing benefit above all the other factors, which is your innate sense of what is right for you. Trust that you can see through the fog; you can see to the quick of any issue, and you know how to put that information to work. Of course, this doesn’t always make you the flavor of the month, but you quit that assignment years ago.

Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information.