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Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s a bit challenging thinking about spring with the world iced over and temperatures staying below freezing for days on end. At least up here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is indeed on its way, and it will be commemorated by some rather spectacular astrological events.

The cold, combined with the astrology and the events of February, has given the feeling of a spiritual chill as well as a physical one. We just lived through an unusually powerful Mercury retrograde that is just starting to loosen its grip.

So, it’s cold out now, and still, the seasons change. Personally I appreciate the arrival of spring a little more every year. There were years when I hardly noticed, and many others when April really did feel like the cruelest month. Most discussions of seasonal affect issues involve the impact of the lack of sunlight, though there’s another population that struggles as the light increases and the warm weather approaches.

That said, I think most people will be happy to leave their houses without bundling up under 10 layers, or risking life and limb by taking a spill on their driveway. Right now people in Boston are dealing with more snow than they’ve ever experienced, so much that roofs are collapsing and the city must do omething environmentally unfriendly, which is dump snow in the harbor.

As for the weather on another level — that is, the movements in the environment of astrology — first let’s catch up with the past month. Mercury retrograde in Aquarius ended on Feb. 11, arriving with much loss and many shakeups in the television business.

Within days of the station-direct (the end of the retrograde), Jon Stewart announced his retirement from The Daily Show. For many, many people, Stewart has been a voice of sanity through one of the most insane eras in political life. He began hosting the program right after the Clinton impeachment, through 9/11 and its aftermath, through the rest of the Bush administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has provided a psychic refuge from the pain of the news, and at the same time, set a standard for honest coverage of events that the non-comedy shows had to start living up to. But more than that he contributed to a golden age of satire that was perhaps the sanest response to the agony of George Bush and Dick Cheney running the country into the ground.

But the real water-into-wine or perhaps wine-into-water miracle of Jon Stewart was turning comedy into one of the most dependable and honest platforms for the news. He was not perfect; nobody is. He never copped to the problems with the whole 9/11 story, but then, I can count the TV journalists who did on approximately three fingers. Yet he took on the issues of the aftermath of war and the hypocrisy of politics like few other journalists.

That same week, Brian Williams was suspended as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News. He got in trouble for making up war stories — or for letting on that TV news is often either fabricated or spun of little other than viewpoint.

The real loss here is not what a great journalist Williams was, but how much people liked, and even adored, him. People understood that he was an entertainer. TV news had a rare moment of its credibility suffering, though I think that these kinds of events often serve as prompts for other journalists to actually do the job.

The problem with that theory is, for example, that the authentic reporting job on the Iraq war was what we really needed in 2002 and 2003, when the media became a kind of spinning wheel for the whole-cloth lies being told by the Bush administration. I saw some contrition for that on several different channels, including on FOX, though in the end, the sacrifice of Brian Williams seems more of a cautionary tale and symbolic bloodletting than a sea-change for television.

The same week as Jon Stewart and Brian Williams were in the news, New York Times media columnist and modern titan of journalism David Carr collapsed in the Times‘ newsroom and died a little while later. Carr was considered by many to be a standout journalist but also a true pariah from the old school. He was lauded by the Times‘ management as one of the great writers to have ever passed through the newspaper.

Within those few days, longtime CBS News reporter Bob Simon died in a car accident in New York City. Simon had survived countless assignments in war zones, and even being held hostage. According to news reports, people had raised concern about the erratic driving of his town-car chauffeur.

In Los Angeles, Kyle Kraska, a popular CBS sports reporter and former TV anchor, was shot and critically injured outside his home in Scripps Ranch, San Diego. And finally, Stan Chambers, the KTLA reporter who broke the story on the beating of Rodney King, died after a long illness.

All of this happened within a window of a few days. It was a very strange ending to Mercury retrograde, with so much loss and shakeup among news reporters, nearly all of them well-known television presences. From the standpoint of research astrology, these events helped document the connection between Aquarius and television.

In some ways it seemed like an era of television itself was coming to a close, making way for the ever-rising tide of the digital environment. In recent months I have taken a deeper interest in the questions surrounding how our immersion in this environment is shaping our sense of self, our relationships and our communities.

These are questions that are largely taken for granted. For those interested, I will be hosting a conference call on March 18 looking into this topic. If you want to participate, write to me at dreams@planetwaves.net with “conference call” in the subject header.

And on Into Pisces

The Sun entered the last sign of the zodiac, Pisces, on Feb. 18, where it will be until March 20.

The sign change came with a truly unusual New Moon that spanned Aquarius and Pisces simultaneously. Said another way, the Moon and Sun ingressed Pisces within two minutes of one another, while in the midst of a conjunction. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.

The Moon and Sun joined many other planets in Pisces — Venus, Mars, Chiron, Nessus, Neptune and Borasisi.

Two of them are fast-movers, planets close to us — Venus and Mars, which moved into Aries soon after the Sun arrived; the rest of these planets stayed on in Pisces, where they will be for a while. One by one the Sun will make conjunctions to the last four of those. So we are now in a Pisces season with a whole lot of energy concentrated on that wavelength of thought.

The common thread of all these planets in Pisces is an approach to the invisible environment. That’s one way to think of Pisces — all that exists, but which you cannot normally perceive. You might think of this as the world of dreams, the spiritual dimensions (astral, etheric, etc.), and the realm of inspiration. Pisces is as close to ‘the other side’ as we get on Earth.

People with strong Pisces in their charts, or Pisces sensibilities, have the gift of seeing and feeling the invisible. What makes an artist or musician what they are is their ability to tap in and sense what others cannot normally detect, and then to offer that to us in the tangible form of what they create.

Planets gathering in Pisces make its vibration and its themes more tangible to everyone, and the Sun’s series of conjunctions will highlight that fact. This is a two-sided story; with Pisces there are always diverse viewpoints and the potential for things to get slippery. That calls for awareness and for points of reference, which we have in abundance.

Perhaps the most difficult to grasp is Neptune, the modern planet most closely associated with Pisces, now in its home sign. Neptune, the lord of waters, is refreshing the ocean of Pisces. It’s adding a mystical flavor, and creative inspiration, to those who can tune into it (note that the word ‘tune’ is inherent in Neptune, a hint that it helps to do just that). The thing with Neptune is that it typically operates below the level of normal perception. One must really be an artist, musician, poet or mystic, or apply that aspect of one’s mind, to experience Neptune as anything other than a form of fantasy. Fortunately we have help.

Two of the planets in Pisces are centaurs — Chiron and Nessus — edgy creatures that require walking on fire, inner confrontation, healing and often a good bit of the above in the context of relationships. Compared to Neptune, centaurs are grounding. They grab you and work on the level of practical necessity. You can think of them as very-long-period asteroids, which cross the orbits of the larger planets. They often function with greater potency than an official planet. It is not their size but rather the shape and length of their orbits that give them their power.

You might say the qualities of centaurs are deeply challenging and equally worth rising to the occasion. They can bring out the darkest and also the most vibrantly creative and transformational properties in people. They demand attention to real issues, especially ones that often go hidden. These might involve past injuries, ancestral legacies and most of all, claiming all of one’s experience and focusing it into commitment and strength.

We all have centaurs in our charts, sometimes speaking more loudly than others, though now, the Sun is highlighting them. The peak of this astrology centers on the Full Moon of March 5. This is the Virgo Full Moon. The effects will last for about a week on either side of the event, and due to the Neptune factor, they may take some time to spot.

There is one more planet in the mix, an interesting one, which lives just beyond the orbit of Pluto, taking 292 years to go around the Sun once.

Borasisi has themes that relate directly to environmental subjects, principally nuclear. But the metatheme of Borasisi involves the lies we believe and why, and the truth we don’t believe and why. There are many ways to phrase these themes, and many ways to unpack them, though they pretty much come down to that concept. As a scientific critique, the question seems to be about why it is that we mindlessly accept science on the level of religion, very much to our detriment.

March also comes with the last of seven Uranus-Pluto contacts. We reach a turning point in what I have been calling the “2012 era” this month. In many ways we have been living through what I call the Anti Sixties. I think that with the last of these squares, we are at a threshold of some kind; a point where something opens up, or perhaps cracks open and something new comes out. It’s unlikely to be immediate, though we may get a clue this month of any new direction or psychic space.

Finally, the big event of March is a total solar eclipse on the 20th. This is an unusual event in that the eclipse (which is also the Pisces New Moon) takes place in the very last degree of the zodiac. That hints strongly at some kind of wide transition — especially when you consider that the eclipse happens right before the very first degree of the zodiac, the Aries Point, where the Sun is on the spring equinox.

The Aries Point is where the personal and the collective intersect. In ’70s feminist language, it’s where “the personal is the political.” But with Pisces involved, we might also say that the mystical, the musical, the artistic, are political.

Lovingly,

Planet Waves (ISSN 1933-9135) is published each Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon in Kingston, New York by Planet Waves, Inc. Annual basic subscription rate: $97/year. Core community membership: $197/year. Editor and Publisher: Eric Francis Coppolino. Business Manager: Chelsea Bottinelli. Web Developer: Anatoly Ryzhenko. Astrology Editor: Amanda Painter. Copy Editor: Jessica Keet. Research, Writing and Editing: Planet Waves is produced by a team consisting of Fe Bongolan, Brendan Merritt, Amy Elliott, Judith Gayle, Kelly Janes, Amanda Moreno, Casey Smith, Carol van Strum, Len Wallick, Lizanne Webb and Chad Woodward.

For Wherever the Weekend Takes You

By Amanda Painter

One of the creative, physical pursuits favored by this weekend’s Venus-Mars conjunction in Aries is dance. But you don’t have to be a prima ballerina (or think yourself much of a dancer at all) to harness the astrology: passionate use of your body, however you define that, is the name of the game.

For some inspiration of either the artistic, athletic or erotic variety, give a look and a listen to director David LaChapelle’s video featuring former star of the British Royal Ballet Sergei Polunin, who currently dances in Russia. Polunin dances choreography by Jade Hale-Christofi to Irish pop star Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

The song, in which its protagonist compares his lover to religion, grew out of Hozier’s frustrations with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. In an interview with New York magazine, Hozier said, “The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love.”

Or, as he elaborated to The Irish Times, “I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment — if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes — everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.”

Last night we held the combined Capricorn-Sagittarius-Aquarius conference call, which even featured Planet Waves’ own Len Wallick (an Aquarian) calling in. The call was recorded, and anyone can listen to it here. Note: that link goes to an MP3 player, not a proper website.

Interview with the producer of The Seed — a film about GMOs

This week’s program covers Wednesday’s hybrid Aquarius-Pisces New Moon, and then continues with an interview with David Christopher, executive producer of a film called The Seed. This is the story of a family farm confronted by a Monsanto-like corporation. The interview provides a basic introduction to the issue of genetically-modified foods, and to Monsanto, and to the plight of farmers who are fraudulently sued by Monsanto for patent infringement.

You can “like” The Seed here. And here is the Facebook of the production company.

My musical guest is the West Coast-based folk ensemble Big Spoon.

Your Monthly Horoscopes — and our Publishing Schedule Notes

Your extended monthly horoscopes for March are published below in this issue. We published your extended monthly horoscopes for February  Thursday, Jan. 22. Inner Space horoscopes for February published Tuesday, Jan. 27. Moonshine horoscopes  for the Leo Full Moon published Tuesday, Feb. 3. Please note, we normally publish the extended monthly horoscope on the first Friday after the Sun has entered a new sign.

Planet Waves Monthly Horoscope for March 2015 #1037 | By Eric Francis

Aries (March 20-April 19) — There’s something unusually beautiful or momentous brewing, though you may not be able to focus on it well enough to predict. Plenty has been happening; you have been keeping busy and from the look of things, positive and involved with life. Yet there’s something beyond all that, as if hiding off to the side of another dimension. If you listen carefully you will hear the movement backstage. If you go backstage and look around, you will gain both insight and influence. The way to guide this event is to envision it. Imagine that you have been offered an opportunity to make one significant change in your life, yet something all-encompassing. You may know what you want to get away from, or what you want to replace, though the question is, with what? How would it look visually, and feel, viscerally? I know this is easier for some people than for others; and that most significantly, this involves giving yourself permission to exist in some form other than what you are now. That is the actual boundary that you stretch with a real experience of growth. You are not far from this now. There is some wild momentum moving in your life. The sensation is as if something you will thrive on is about to precipitate, seemingly out of nowhere. But it’s definitely coming from somewhere, or rather someone, and that would be you.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — Your charts are blaring out for physical activity, just in time for the weather to ease off a bit. So get physical. But that is not enough; this is a means to an end, and that objective would be tapping your mental agility and a new crop of ideas that has been growing in your heart and soul. You have an imagination that is so assertive and so potent that it can indeed infuse your body with energy. That, by the way, is part of what makes you into the lover that you are, the fusion of body-level with psychic level into one reality, which is you. Your creative process works the same way. In fact it’s the same process. At the moment, many desires and intentions are pushing their way through your consciousness, eagerly reaching for manifestation. There is so much brewing that you might find it slightly unsettling, which could, in turn, be an excuse to avoid it. I suggest you move toward yourself rather than away from yourself. Go in the direction of maximum heat. Follow your curiosity; that is the seed of passion. If you get to the point where you know you’re expressing passion, remember to follow the thread of your curiosity. The two are intimate and necessary elements of the same basic process.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — You have found a focus of devotion and I suggest you trust that. Devotion is profoundly important to human sanity. It may be the central organizing principle of consciousness, and you have it going on strong right now. It matters less what you are devoted to and more that you focus on that and experience it fully. It might be a person, a cause, a spiritual or religious concept or your creative fire. There’s a moving quality to whatever this is, as if the experience transports you somewhere, or summons you from far away — perhaps literally. Whatever it may be, focus the devotion and also the message that you’re receiving, or offering. Concentrate your power, as if in a circle, and tend to it from all sides — like a fire in a freestanding hearth. Look into the flames. There is a vision there, and I think it involves your life calling. True, you may have more than one of those, but this one stands above the others, its roots go deeper and it has withstood the tests of time. Gradually your vision will morph into an aspiration, and that may come to a peak with a long-awaited decision later in the month. Do not rush that. Allow the energy, your feelings and your reflections to percolate through your awareness. Do not wait; rather, tend your flame with care and patience.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Your visions of the future may be flooding you right now, though it’s essential that you work from the practical side of things. Stick to the matters at hand, and the methods you trust, and make progress in small ways. They are not as small as you think, because each gesture of progress will help you gather your momentum toward some much larger encounter. The key seems to be one thing at a time. One sentence, one line of code, one photograph, one conversation. Let each of these be born with the sensation of contributing to the next. Be especially attentive to details, even if that takes a while. Those details might include color, feeling tone, precision in mathematics and the quality of what you say. Use your senses. Look and listen, and treat everything you touch with the care of a craftsman. As you do this, you may discover that you are working under the guidance of inspiration. Seemingly unrelated activities will emerge as part of a larger constellation. But don’t look for the pattern! Let it reveal itself to you. You know you are edging in the direction of fulfilling some of your most significant goals, and embarking on some new ones. By its nature and the scenes depicted in the stars and planets, this is a mysterious process, and that is part of the fun.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — This is a fine time to consider the nature of your agreements and commitments. This applies to agreements that involve an exchange of money, sex or conscious energy. These must be clear. You must be clear. Once you are, you will feel like you’re under far less pressure, as will those you associate with. Begin with an inquiry. As you proceed with this, you’re likely to discover where that clarity is lacking. Pulling things into focus may take a few steps, which will be easy enough if you work through them consciously. Note where boundaries are lacking, but necessary. Notice where old agreements or things taken for granted need to be replaced by new understandings. Notice how your beliefs are influencing what you perceive as reality. There is an accountability factor that will inevitably arise, and that is never an all-or-nothing thing. Accountability is a much healthier concept than fault or blame. It’s subtler and easier to understand in specific ways. This will help you set the terms of your new agreements, which must be designed to accommodate a shared vision of the future. If that shared vision, and shared underlying values, are not present, then that particular encounter may be null. One last thing: having things in writing is the essence of being accountable, to yourself and to others, and them to you.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You possess the truth you seek. Yet you may also not quite feel that way, and be pursuing a course of finding it outside yourself. That is certainly compelling enough; ancient sites, quests and journeys over the sea have been undertaken for millennia, for the purpose of discovering something that is ultimately about oneself. There is an illusion at work in your chart, which may be blocking your sense of what you know, while at the same time projecting that very thing into your environment and onto the people in it. It’s not that the people around you lack worth, or beauty, or intrigue. It’s not that they don’t possess some element of what you want. The value they seem to have is only the value you put on them. The wisdom they have, if you recognize it, is something you match with your own vision and knowledge. Therefore, seek inwardly and you really will find what you’re after. You might discover that the whole realm of existence you see around you is a kind of explosion of your own mind. And thanks to that, you have the ability to go to the source. If you’re going to do one experiment with the world around you, let it be with cause and effect. Trace every effect you observe to its point of origin. Notice the results of every action taken. Those will reveal much that is currently hidden.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You are being gently tugged to keep your focus on yourself. I say gently, though there’s a persistence to this that has been present for a while; it’s coming into focus now in a new way. As there are currently fireworks exploding in your house of relationships, that may be a challenge, though it’s one that humans have faced persistently through the modern era. I would call this the ‘all or nothing’ issue. It involves an orientation on relating to others that results in a loss of inner focus. This creates the dual self — the illusion of the ‘relationship self’ and the ‘actual self’, which I believe is the cause of most misery and instability in relationships. I think the path out of this is to cultivate the mindfulness to be yourself at all times, attentive to your whole reality. If you find that your relationships dominate your existence to the point where you, or some central experience of yourself, is negated (rather than, say, enhanced), then I suggest you come back to yourself. You can do this before you have to break up with anyone or sign your life away. You can do this all the time, every minute, in the course of which you honor your reality and the reality that you share with someone else. It may feel awkward at first but it gets easier with practice.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — A Scorpio rising friend told me recently that men sniff her as she walks down the street, and that she finds this annoying. I just laughed and reminded her what a compliment this is — that she personally inspires people to be in spontaneous contact with their primal, visceral nature. That nature is overflowing in your charts right now, brimming and simmering and emanating all kinds of luscious, lusty steam. This influences everything. Whatever you do, whatever you create, you’re going to be doing it with more passion and devotion. It’s as if your very presence ignites the colors and sensations of the world within the minds of those who are near you. Whoever you touch will feel the heat of your soul penetrating their skin. I might say you can trust this, though really it’s just about the only thing you can trust. The dimension of you that is the most refined humanity and that which is the most elementally animal are fused into one right now. I suggest you perceive the world through all of your senses, and your instincts, and your intuition. This will, if you let it, allow you to try things you’ve never experienced; to take chances with people in ways you never have; to dare to touch the heart and soul of the art or artistry that is so essentially who you are.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You will go a long way to ease the internal pressure you’re feeling by rolling up your sleeves and attending to the practical matters of your life. That might mean sorting out your accounting records for the past year, it might be writing a song, and it might be charging up your camera and doing a photo project. By practical, I mean actually hands-on, doing something that you want or need to do. This, rather than thinking about whatever that might be, or getting frustrated by seemingly competing priorities. If you’re looking for a starting point, choose either the thing you want to do the most, or the thing you need to do the most. Then do it for a while, and reassess your priorities. I’ll remind you that as one born under a mutable sign, you are inherently a multi-tasker. So you will naturally shift from task to task, though what you can master is the art of focusing long enough to have a satisfying experience and move that particular project along. Then you can move onto other things, and return to the original project while it’s still warm. The key is never allowing anything you care about to go cold. Return to things often enough to keep the embers burning. Then when you’re moved to do so, cast all else aside and dive into something for as long as you want. Needing to keep your life interesting is an asset.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — This month brings a sublime shift in the momentum of your life, which looks a little like this. Your emotional confidence is beginning to exceed the many changes you’ve had to make over the past few years. It’s as if you’re finally catching up with yourself. The whole journey of improving, repairing, renovating and healing can be a distraction from actually taking the chance and living in some way that you want to live. The process of constant adjustment, evolution and enforced changes can come with setbacks in confidence, or delays. Now your confidence begins to pull ahead of the work that you’ve done. This will facilitate your taking bigger risks, greater spontaneity and overall a greater sense of freedom. Looked at one way, you’re becoming your own inner leader rather than your own inner follower. You’ve been working up to this for a long time. There was likely some event in 2010 or early 2011 that sparked the process, though this kind of psychic or emotional momentum can take a while to gather. You’ve now reached a point where you can no longer live on the same emotional or intellectual scale that you had for many years before. You are pressing open from the inside. In the most ordinary terms, you have the feeling that you know who you are, though this is more than a hunch. We’re talking about actual confidence.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Be sure you have identified the center of your life, then tend to that center. This may be something requiring you to offer yourself fully to the service of someone or something. It may seem to distract you from other goals, though those goals are alive and well and simmering along. There is a higher purpose involved to what you’re experiencing, and in that you can have faith. You ‘re likely to be feeling this on some level. It may be subtle, and you may go through having faith in this service you’re providing, then forgetting that you have it, then remembering again. That is natural enough, though you would benefit greatly from focusing on this thing, what I am calling your center-focus. The process you’re going through is putting you in contact with an aspect of your nature that has always been present, always been part of who you are, but which has not always been accessible in lived reality. The part of this experience that’s really serving your growth is precisely gaining that access to one of your most valuable inner resources. I can see from your chart that you have big plans that go beyond this particular scenario. Notice that you may actually have the space and time to nudge those along. There is a lot you can get done with little more than a notebook and pencil.

 

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Ultimately you can, must and will do what you want, and that may make some people around you nervous. You are naturally susceptible to the viewpoints and opinions of others, and you must not allow yourself to be blown off course by those with strong opinions. It is, however, in your self-interest to have others allied with you and in service of your goals — and self-interest is potentially a sticky topic for a Pisces. I suggest you wash that off and get real about what serves your agenda. The necessary second step is to figure out how to get others thinking on your frequency. I would remind you how persuasive you can be, which in part accounts for others feeling destabilized by your drive and your intensity. For some, persuasion will involve appealing to their altruism. For others, you may need to appeal to what would be profitable for them. Others will best understand the language of mutual benefit. You are blessed with the gift of insight, as long as you can get some distance on any situation or any person. You have this gift for a reason. Tune in and you will be guided what to do, what to say and how to make the best decisions. Your options remain wide open, and there are people who are eager to assist you.