Nightlight Astrology an Archetypal Astrology School offering local and online astrology courses, astrology readings, online astrology webinars, and daily horoscopes

Mercury's answer

2/6/2015

The Moon in Virgo is opposing Mars in Pisces but will be void of course again shortly...day two of organizing, relaxing, cleansing, reading, and revitalizing. Here in the mountains of WV where I proposed to my wife a little over a year ago.

A quick Merc RX story...

My wife's office computer at the studio has a bunch of bugs...yesterday I gave her this big puffed up lecture about keeping her computer clean to avoid viruses (which is like throwing an egg at Mercury's head and thinking he won't throw one back), and then this morning my computer wouldn't start properly, and I had to go through nearly two hours of tech support on the telephone to get a virus removed from MY computer. As I sat down to resolve the issue I said out loud, "Mercury I hope you have a sense of humor!" I was worried the computer was broken (didn't imagine a virus was even possible). When the tech guy found it was a virus and removed it for me, my wife and I both started laughing and then mocking/replaying my condescending speech about being clean with her computer. Then I realized we were really laughing hard, and I said, "I guess Mercury answered that question...he definitely has a sense of humor!"

Add to this, the tech guy says, "This is actually a major bug that's going around effecting many Dell, HP, Lenovo, users all over the world." Then my wife says, "Remember your dream last night?"

In my dream I had woken up in a random bedroom in some big city, looking up at the ceiling where small black bugs were appearing out of nowhere and morphing into larger and scarier looking robotic/multi-colored cyborg looking bugs. Then I left the house and the bugs were everywhere. Then a sand storm came, and then a tsunami and flooding. It was a really epic dream...biblical feeling. So my wife says, "the bugs are kind of like the virus," and I said, "I'm taking the day away from my computer now."

Just had to share this before I go off the grid, of course!

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Reaching the Limits of Our Limits

2/4/2015

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Void of course Moon today, just past full. Meanwhile, Mercury is beginning to slow down in its retrograde and will be making a long sextile to Saturn in Sagittarius over the next few weeks. Let’s take a deeper look at this transit.

First it’s important to look at the aspect itself along with the reception between the two planets. Though the sextile is a harmonious aspect (in the same family as the trine), sextiles still involve a bit more tension or stress than a trine and are generally thought to represent various opportunities for cohesion, heightened awareness, and positive change, though not without some doing. As the sextile is related to the number 6 there is generally thought to be a numerological connection with both hard work and productivity. So that gives us our first clue…over the next couple of weeks while Mercury stations in sextile to Saturn we will have plenty of opportunities to work and find productivity around whatever Mercury and Saturn are up to in their respective signs (we might look at our birth charts to get even more specific).

Next we need to look at the signs and the planetary dignities or relationships of the dignities to one another (this is often called looking at the planetary receptions..how the planets in their signs receive each other). In this case Mercury is in the sign of Saturn’s rulership (Aquarius), but Saturn is in the sign of Mercury’s detriment (Sagittarius). This could mean a variety of different things, but here are a few ideas that stand out:

* No matter how open, inventive, progressive, or revisionary our thoughts or ideas might feel right now, it’s possible that they are still being covertly ruled by a more polarizing or rigid view of truth…

* We may come to realize that there is no way out or around something…even our most inventive thoughts may only be leading us in circles…somehow this bleak and break down realization leads us to stop caring so much about certain problems or the need for their solutions, which creates an immediate gateway to something different

* Even though we are free or open thinkers something might be trying to establish a stronger sense of definition or importance in our lives…like someone whose usually fairly ambivalent about something (some issue or some idea) coming to realize they are actually quite convicted about it

As Saturn was traditionally the God of duality and opposites, his tendency is to frame things in terms of either “the problem of the opposites” as a whole, which is really a problem he has with himself (hence the brooding, isolating, melancholic, dark moods of Saturn as well as his polar opposite exalted Libran desire for balance or the perfect harmony between the opposites), or as the problem between one particular thing and its opposite (either the war for one thing over the other, or again the perfect balance or golden mean between them). Where can we go where Saturn is not? This is why Saturn rules that existential dread, that heavy sense of limitation and constriction, that feeling that there is no way out, Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Whenever we see a problem and it weighs on our imagination, calling us into careful measurements, revisions and precise decisions or commitments, negation and focus, and taking it all very “seriously,” very “concretely,” we’re in the land of Saturn. Though it’s tempting to see the problem as Saturn himself and our commitment to finding a creative solution or breakthrough something else, really the entire process is Saturnine. With more critical awareness of this a few things might happen…

* We might recognize the imaginal nature of both our problems and our solutions…this gives limits to our understanding of problems and solutions alike and hence changes our relationship to both.

* We might recognize the virtue of a problem as well as the limits of a solution, which can lead us into what the soul really wants…which is a deeper focusing on a problem itself…the isolating depths of the problem itself…until its reached its own limit

* We might give up for a while and then suddenly find something else is more interesting to us anyway

Whichever way we slice it, the idea of impenetrable problems as well as solutions that are actually still reflections of the same problem will likely be part of our lives for the next few weeks.

Prayer: take us into the blackening focus, the isolation that limits our limitations

Image by courtesy of Jeremy Keith, at creative commons image licensing

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Instagram and the Flow

2/1/2015

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The Moon is in Cancer today, now void of course until tomorrow. With Venus and Neptune conjoining and in square to Saturn, it's a good day to talk about leaky vessels, flow and flowing, wounds and wounded-healers.

There are so many cliches floating around about "flow" these days that the idea has become bland. Rather than bringing to mind the ceaseless variations and fast moving intricacies of a river, flow now means something more like "placid." A too long day spent near the never ending REI river. Sunburnt and drowned out by the white noise of "flow," we pack up our exhausting sports cars and instagram the shit out of that flow. More serious practitioners of flow lament..."people aren't mindful, they're just cruising along unconsciously," like so many pieces of flotsam and jetsam, all curiosity jettisoned, the serious practitioner of flow has no taste for this eco-diversity. He doesn't like fish; he's a vegetarian. Wants them out of his river. Builds a net called, "mindful eating."

The ideas of flow are many, and that's because the idea of flow itself reflects those fast moving variations, rapid changes, and countless diversities. When flow becomes a belief, a singularity, too much a concept rather than water moving here and there over boulders and logs, it becomes a manic defense against the mania of diversity, against multiplicity, and against the inherent dynamism between patterns and unpredictability. You see we don't want to have to do that kind of work. We don't want the "never the same river twice" kind of awareness that comes when we actually put our feet into the river, rather than taking pictures next to it and wearing the costume of a concept called "flow." We'd rather practice a sequence we can flow through from start to finish, perfectly. We'd rather the idea of flow bedazzle our lives with the aura of perfection. How did we come to think that the idea of flow is both all encompassing, natural, singular, and perfect? Sunburnt and asleep near "a" river that's how...a little too much wine and someone mumbled, "it's all ONE big river."

The laziness of flow thus become monotony...mono-toned...and we take up that ancient image of the suffering souls in Hades...endlessly pouring water into a bucket with holes.

I'm being hard on flow right now. Like putting my feet into the river. Trying to point out the boulders here and there. Watch out for that log, and do you see that strange debris? What is that?

With Saturn in square to the Pisces energy, from Sagittarius, we are reminded that the disruption of flow in our lives is a crucial part of how we learn to understand the nature of something particular. Saturn's interruptions of our dreams, of our innocence, of our reveries or bliss factories, isn't about cruelty or "reality," it's about particularity. The holes in our bucket of flow can't get sealed until we learn the importance of disruption.

When our bliss oriented lifestyle patterns, our mindfulness, our routines, our dreams, our fantasies, or even our pain and complaints are interrupted, when something interjects, we have to imagine that a leaky hole is being plugged just as readily as we might imagine that we're being, "blocked."

There's all this talk about blockage...removing blocks, working through blocks, etc, as if the goddess of the mighty, singular river, Jehovah as rushing river queen, has so totally dominated our imagination that all blocks are seen only in terms of enhancing a unified flow. But what if this manic defensiveness about blocks, what if this constant attention to blocks and clearing blockages or interpreting their karmic meaning, is nothing more than the image of those poor souls in Hades, endlessly pouring water into a bucket filled with more and more new holes?

What if blocks are invitations to particularize? Like that strange feeling you get when something dies or ends...you suddenly and instantly "know its nature." Rather than remove our blocks, maybe we're supposed to study them, reflect upon them, and try to see their faces. Grant them a little more autonomy, and chill out about removing them. By doing this maybe the leaks becomes plugs, and our psychic vessels becomes a little sturdier?

This brings us to the idea of wounds and woundedness or the wounded-healer, which have all somehow come to symbolize a person who has gotten really good at bailing water from their leaky barrel. "I've learned to work through my blocks...of course I'm still working through them, but I realize that it's all because I'm meant to heal and help the world." So we have these inflated team captains in Hades, constantly rallying our efforts to fill the barrel filled with holes, convincing the poor souls the effort is going to pay off eventually, "Faster. With a smile. Fake it until you make it gang. You're here because we're all team captains. We're all wounded healers!"

The problem is that as long as we see blockages IN TERMS of flow, as long as they are "obstacles" to flow, then boulders in the river become degraded and objectified rather than studied, reflected upon, learned about, cared for, related to, and allowed to exist in their own ways. When we reflect upon those logs and sandbars, here now there, we are soul making. We are creating psychic life. An ecosystem rather than a problem to be solved for the sake of the monotheistic river goddess. A barrel with plugged holes, rather than holes with a barrel.

This means that wounded healers aren't actually the people who are great at removing blocks. No. It means they are good at helping people reflect upon the diversity of objects that shape psychic life. Wounded healers plug holes and teach people how to stop bailing water. They bring us back to the imaginative capacity to experience flow rather than be flowed to death by it. The eddies and changes of speed, the jams and erosion patterns, the ten thousand year old boulders and the moving face of sandbars and deep pools...these become the terrain of psychic individuality. The wounded healer is like an eco tour-guide in this regard.

One last thought. This is not about balance, either. The obsession with balance is like the obsession with blockages. Imbalance is perhaps the most crucial element of psychic diversity and particularity. We are who we are because of the shape of our imbalance.

All of these thoughts are reflections of Saturn's current conversation with Neptune and Venus.

Prayer: The ecology of our problems. The flora and fauna of our pain. The bacteria of our strengths. Help us to reclaim the strangeness of the word "flow."

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Void of Course Moon Magic

1/23/2015

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The Moon is void of course today in Pisces and will stay void of course all the way until tomorrow morning, giving us a nice long break in the Moon’s action. This makes it a good day to look at the Moon, as well as the void of course period, in depth.

The primary reason many astrologers use the Moon as the daily anchor for our forecasting is because the Moon is the fastest moving “planet” in the sky, while also being the second brightest light in our sky. The Moon appears from our point of view to be the exact same size as the Sun, though they are radically different distances away from the earth, which gives us the sense of an inherent egalitarianism between the two luminaries (though getting into any conversation about which planet is bigger or more important, etc, is generally more solar than lunar from the get go). The Moon can sometimes eclipse the face of the Sun, and every month loses its light as it comes closer and closer to the Sun. Scientists speculate that the Moon may have originally been formed from the Earth and then split off. Others speculate that the evolution of life on our planet would not have been possible if not for the Moon’s initial closeness to the earth (much closer than it is now).

The idea is that the Moon’s initial orbital proximity to the Earth would have created an enormously violent tidal effect for hundreds of thousands of years, churning and mixing the elemental/mineral/chemical soup of the oceans and then gradually settling the ocean’s tidal cycles as the Moon drifted farther and father away from the earth toward the distance at which it now lies (approximately 239,000 miles away from us). Through this process its hypothesized that the evolution of life as we know it was made possible.

Additionally, as the Moon has drifted out farther and farther from the earth, as the theory goes, we’ve gradually grown into the cycle of time on our planet as we know it. Without the Moon’s presence our days would only be approximately six hours long. So the equal distribution of light and darkness, the waxing and waning, and the two realms of life as we know it (vital for most forms of life, including our own), wouldn’t be possible without the Moon. The entire process of life is intimately related to the Moon’s existence.

This is not to take anything away from the Sun. Obviously without the Sun’s light life also wouldn’t be possible. But far fewer people know how necessary the Moon is to the presence of life on our planet.

Archetypally speaking, the Sun and the Moon occupy vastly different territories, perhaps defined most precisely by how the Sun and the Moon tend to view each other. Whereas the Sun is at the center, all things orbiting around it, giving off light from its core, the Moon puts US at the center and circulates around US, reflecting not only the light of the sun but also reflecting a huge variety of different angles and phases of light, as well as reflecting the other heavenly lights through her constant aspects to the other planets. Whereas the Sun’s light drowns out most everything else in the sky, the Moon’s light allows more space for others. Practically speaking, this means that the Moon’s daily work in our lives is more relational. The Sun tends to integrate, dominate, or take the other planetary energies and infuse them into its own central agenda (the hero’s journey, personal destiny, a specific goal or focus, etc), whereas the Moon will tend to disseminate and relate, multiply and diversify. The Moon is the web-weaving spider of the heavens, always spinning the planetary rays into our lives through her moods and atmospheres, through our daily comings and goings, and through the labyrinthine symbols and thoughts of the unconscious that engage our lives for brief windows of time before passing away and onto the next.

Sun sign horoscopes are great for looking at things through the lens of “me.” Moon based horoscopes are better for “we.” Both are relevant and magical, though the tendency is for the “me” of the Sun to see itself as superior to the “we,” or to interpret anything about the “we” back into the terms of “me.” We can’t blame the Sun for doing this since it’s job is to be at the “center” of things. We just can’t forget that from the Moon’s point of view the idea of the “center” is relative, always changing, and relational. During the Moon’s nighttime hours we are exposed to the “many” stars and many lights…a reminder that there are trillions upon trillions of stars and planets out there, each individual and unique, never alone in a vacuum.

So when we start each day looking at the relationship of the daily Moon to the position of the Sun in its yearly cycle, along with the daily aspects of the Moon to the other planets, we get an impression of what things are looking like for the day. We get a sense of how the planetary energies will “stream” or “weave” into our lives.

Sometimes these energies come into our lives through moods or thought patterns, and other times they appear through people, events, and conversations. They are easy to spot in the headlines of our major news outlets, but far more subtly they are constantly becoming the perceptions we entertain. In fact, many of our thoughts and moods, the thoughts and moods we think we are having “personally,” are more often the planets speaking their languages through the subtler light quality of the Moon, which we’ll tend to reflect. It’s when we’re able to perceive the planets on this subtle level that we’re able to create a more intelligent dialogue with them. Learning how to dialogue with the planets, in my experience, is one of the most rewarding things in the world. By doing so we create a gradually deepening but still opaque sense of who we are…the oldest words for this twilight awareness are psyche and soul. Psyche and soul are ideas who point to that in-between world where all things, no matter how painful, strange, or complicated, feel like home…they have a sense of interiority, placement, depth, history, and multiplicity all at once.

So, all of this being said, what does a void of course Moon mean for us, specifically? What is it, and how should we understand it?

The first thing to know is that a void of course Moon means that the Moon is not going to make any more angles to any other planets before entering the next sign of the Zodiac. So the general consensus is that the planetary actions (at least those daily Moon interactions) are in a resting or dormant phase. There’s a break in the drama. So the simple advice ranges from “chill out” to “edit and revise” to “don’t start anything new” to “nothing much will happen” to “go inward.” However, in my experience, there are a few other important things to say about the void of course Moon. One of them is that it’s almost always a good time to stop trying to interpret or control the things happening around you. James Hillman used to do an exercise with his students where he would bring up the image of a snake from a dream, and he would ask his students to list the possibilities for what a dream snake typically “means.” The students would come up with all the typical answers: rebirth, the feminine, kundalini energy, transformation, the phallus, etc, etc. Then after hearing all of them, he would make the point that whenever we interpret a dream snake we are also possibly killing it. We’re eliminating the snake itself. We’re not allowing for the snake to relate with us. We’re not allowing the snake a life of its own. Once we interpret it, the snake itself is gone.

Hillman’s point (and it was a favorite of his) was that the translation of the dream into its “meaning” was something done on behalf of the solar side of consciousness…the sunny day world and all its heroic concerns. Rather than granting the dream life a reality of its own, in other words, we tend to read it, decode it, and analyze it, in terms of the rational, the conscious, and the controlling sense of “me,” whose life and purpose is seen as superior or more real, and whose dreams (note the personal possessive) are thus seen as a kind of bi-product to be mined or exploited. This would be to read the lunar world, in other words, in terms of the solar. Hillman believed this was a major problem..an objectification or degradation of the feminine, and an insult to the soul or the psyche. I believe void of course Moons, like Mercury retrogrades, tend to be similarly degraded by our typical explanations or “interpretations” of them.

When we say that a void of course Moon is only about “action being slowed” or “attention being turned inward,” then we’re still reading the Moon in terms of the sun…”action and attention.” What does it mean to read the Moon in terms of the Moon itself? Perhaps that’s the deeper question the void of course Moon is always asking us to consider.

Here’s an example that comes to mind…once during an ayahuasca ceremony when it was a void of course moon, I was struggling mightily within a visionary sequence that involved water and the feeling of drowning. I was lying down and trying to focus on my breathing, repeating mantras, trying to understand what was happening…really trying to be a good student in all phases of a terrifying experience. Still nothing was changing. Then, I heard a small voice, “Your hand. You just need to move your hand.” Suddenly it dawned on me that my hand was lying in a cold pool of water. I had knocked over a cup of water and my hand was resting in it. So I took my hand out of the water and dried it off and the entire visionary sequence went away. Then I heard the same voice, saying something like, “Sometimes its just about the water.”

My understanding of the void of course Moon is similar. When it’s not about us, not about our centrality, when “nothing much is happening,” we stand to recognize the reality of the dream a little bit more. Water becomes a little more watery if we pay attention…its presence a little more real to us, its effects a little more effectual, autonomous, and alive. The point isn’t “not to act,” but rather that there’s something about loud/solar actions that won’t be as effective, that will miss something, that aren’t quiet enough to hear the other presences presenting themselves. There is a subtle magic in the void of course Moon…these brief windows of time where the smallest things are nudging our fingers free from our ears.

Prayer: web weaver, dream spider, help us to hear the small voices…

Image by courtesy of SG, at creative commons image licensing

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How to Hide Ugliness

1/13/2015

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The last quarter Moon has just turned void of course and is traveling through the via combusta (also known as the “fiery road,” the via combusta represents a stretch of degrees from 15 Libra to 15 Scorpio that is thought of as a particularly difficult area of the zodiac for both the Sun and the Moon).
Meanwhile, Mars in Pisces is about to square Saturn in Sagittarius as it conjoins Neptune.

Themes and a few images to watch for:

* Irritability that leads to a dramatic inflammation
* Facing our deepest inadequacies and asking ourselves whether or not they are real, or how real, and if so what to do about them
* Confrontation with religious, spiritual, or philosophical authority figures
* The priest desires the disciple, the guru sleeps with the student, the student tempts the teacher
* Sexual scandal in institutions of higher learning or religion
* Fighting for an ideal that’s not your own, your fight benefits something you’re not truly concerned about
* Being used or using someone else for your own selfish gain
* Charity and false or secretly selfish charity
* A man with a skin rash
* Intoxication or Poisoning (CNN Image: A village in Mozambique loses 69 people to poisonous local alcohol drink)
* No method or tactic too low or out of the question
* The religiously motivated attack
* A statue of Mars, a ceremony at the temple of Mars
* Trying to start something new but feeling blocked, scattered, or overwhelmed
* “Slow and steady wins the race”
* A come from behind victory
* Withholding or limiting ourselves for religious or spiritual reasons
* Repression or unnecessary restrictions

With Mars/Neptune and Saturn/Neptune combinations there is also a subtle theme we might call “trying to hide our ugliness.” We can talk about this a few different ways…

First the word ugly comes from the words for “dread” as well as “misshapen.” The Greek roots of the word also have a relationship to the word “dyslexia,” which is a learning or reading disability that creates various reading/speaking and listening problems with words and sounds. One of the most common things we like to say about the attempt to hide our ugliness is that ugliness is nothing more than a kind of perceptual distortion…an aesthetic dyslexia that can be worked through just like people can learn to read or speak correctly though they hear and see words backwards or in reverse. With practice we can learn to see what is misshapen in a different light. The idea here being that ugliness (like beauty) is in the eye of the beholder, and that all things are beautiful when seen in the right way.

On the other hand, the heroic approach says that we need to confront our ugliness. Do the work to change it. A new workout program. A new attitude. An adjustment. A fixup. A project. A trophy. With the right attitude anything can be overcome. So we knuckle down and try to transform our deformities.

The heroic-spiritual approach says that we need to accept our ugliness. We need to change what we can and accept the rest. Decorate our fat rolls with magic markers. Flaunt our troubled pasts because they’ve made us into the shaman-wizards we are. Stick up relentlessly for all underdogs because we’re all destiny’s student of the week.

Finally, there’s the Jazz approach. And I think this is the least understood of the bunch. It’s the approach that lives with the complex recognition of the entire complex. We spend so much time trying to hide THAT we’re trying to hide the ugliness, that we forget that “trying to hide the ugliness” is a beautiful thing itself. Or at the very least it’s an interesting thing. It’s its own animal display. A unique pattern with its own dimensions. Take for example a Jazz improvisation on the trumpet. During a solo riff the player hits an awkward note. It’s clearly not the note he meant to hit. It’s clearly off. It doesn’t sound right. It’s not harmonious. It’s discordant. Grates the ears. Trying to hide the ugliness the poor improv player returns to the right notes and plays them even louder, and even faster, trying to make up for his mistake. The entire audience sees the pattern: embarrassed musician trying to make up for his miscue. On the other hand, the Jazz player when hitting the wrong note might simply choose to hit it again, and then again, until something new comes out of it, and the mistake is deliberately hidden, for everyone to hear and see. This is what I would call the Jazz approach to hiding our ugliness.

We don’t have to be above ugliness by trying to “accept it,” and we don’t have to be above ugliness by trying to “transform or overcome it.” We can overtly and clearly hide ugliness through a creative revisioning of its meaning, its juxtapositions, its rhythm, or any of its many other features. We’re so uncomfortable with ugliness that we’re more like the improv player who tries to play louder and faster to overcome his discordant note. We just can’t allow for ugliness to exist or be its own thing.

On a side note: It’s my opinion that overused, viral sarcasm memes are probably our single most societally cliched way of hiding ugliness…these sarcasm frequencies start off as excellent examples of the Jazz play on ugliness, but they too often end up as that “louder and faster overcomes the flaw” mindset. Sarcasm “channels” in the popular mind make the hiding of ugliness into a bland technique rather than an organic process of discovery that stays close to the uniqueness of whatever is ugly in the current moment. Without variation and diversity, specificity and attention, even ugliness can become objectified.

Prayer: real music takes an ear for the ugly…there’s no soul without some old-fashioned ugliness

Image by courtesy of lindapendant, at creative commons image licensing

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Mercury/Venus Conjunction

1/5/2015

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The Moon is void of course in Cancer today, just past full.

Meanwhile, Mercury has just entered Aquarius and is conjoining Venus in Aquarius, while both are closely sextile to Saturn in Sagittarius. Let’s look at some images that reflect this planetary alignment. Remember that working with archetypal images isn’t so much about decoding or translating what they mean in some literal sense, but rather allowing the layers of their meaning, and the imaginal worlds of the imagery to enter and relate to your own life and all of its own images in an open-ended way.

Here are some Images for our Mercury/Venus conjunction as it sextiles Saturn:

* A young woman speaks a new idea to a group of people, its taken more seriously than she imagined
* A new trend hits the marketplace, has the power to change conservative minds
* An architect lays his plans out on the table for everyone to see…excitement
* A new course of study, a young man makes a list of new things he would like to learn, wants to be in the know
* A young girl has just moved to New York, stands on the Empire State Building and looks into the future
* An old man wanders a busy museum, feels less lonely
* Structural changes to an old document are suggested, the group agrees
* A new idea about an old subject is presented through the media, enlightens many people

In other astrological news, the Sun is separating from Pluto in Capricorn…here are some images that reflect this alignment:

*Remodeling an office or workplace
*A maintenance man drilling a name plate into a new office door
*A man gazing up at a tall stone statue, paying his respect for the dead he admires
*A mountain climber meets his death…a group of fellow climbers hike to plant a flag on the side of a cliff
*A woman walking alone on the rocks near a dark ocean, nearly falls, sits down, knows now what she has to do

In both sets of images today we are seeing the planetary dynamics reflected, but we are working to stretch our vision of them beyond the mechanical archetypal language, which can become (like anything) stale and lifeless. Of course the archetypal dynamics are still there…we’re not just coming up with any image whatsoever. For example, in the Sun/Pluto in Capricorn imagery…in all the images we are seeing a combination of Capricornian coldness, ambition, determination, control, hard self-centeredness, and the concern with legacy, combining with the Solar qualities of radiant light, growth, rationality, excitement, joy and destiny, combining with the Plutonian qualities of depth, power, transformation, foreboding and death.

Most students of astrology are taught how to speak in the archetypal terms above before they are taught to honor the intuition’s ability to see/feel and sense these images when they look at charts. After nearly five years of practicing professionally, myself, I’m only recently realizing how important it is to honor the role that the visionary imagination plays in astrological interpretation. Of course, all of what I’m saying here is also a precise reflection of the Venus/Mercury and Saturn combination in the sky right now…a new idea that honors imagery first (Venus/Mercury) shared on a public blog (Aquarius), has the power to shift conservative or more mechanistic philosophies, or is being presented as a serious and weighty principle (Saturn in Sagittarius).

Prayer: “The soul is constituted of images.” (James Hillman)

Image by courtesy of George Smyth, at creative commons image licensing.

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Which normal?

1/3/2015

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With the void of course Moon in Gemini, let's reflect upon how many things we are...how many angles and sides there are to each of the labels and adjectives we use to describe ourselves, to describe each other, and the world we live in...

While corresponding with a student recently about this very subject, I used this example...

That guy says to me, "You're an ASTROLOGER?! That's so weird. So not normal."

I have a choice...I can respond from that overly simplified idea of his...or I can respond from my soul...the culture of my soul...where the word "astrologer" is a moving animal...an ancient color wheel...a peasant village, a stone temple, or public plaza...

So I say, "Which Astrologer?"

The milky way mustache child with glow in the dark stars on her ceiling?
Which astrologer?
Galileo fearing the catholic church?
Which astrologer?
The three wise men from the east, on their way to find a Jewish mystic?
Which astrologer?
The cheap fortune teller with cracked teeth and lies, who also manages to surprise?
Which astrologer?
The starry eyed 18 year old white rich girl reading her horoscope in Vogue magazine?
Which astrologer?
The 9 year old gay boy with his frightened telescope pointed at mars?
Which astrologer?
The indigenous man telling stories of the stars on some primitive night?
Which astrologer?
You say astrology isn't a normal job, but I say normal isn't even normal
Normal is so many different normals, until
by so many points of normal light
a constellation of normal is formed in the normal night
and normally it shines out but right now something isn't right
because normal's normal lights burned out long before they reached this highly normal fight

Exercise of the day: practice looking at yourself, and others, from a dozen more angles than you're used to...the point isn't to make something prettier...it's to make it deeper by the careful process of diversification. The particulars are many and their images bright...if we only take the time to interrupt our grasping certainties.

Prayer: normal is so many different normals, until by so many points of normal light...

Image by courtesy of Tobin, at creative commons image licensing.

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Forward>>

Mercury's answer

Reaching the Limits of Our Limits

Instagram and the Flow

Void of Course Moon Magic

How to Hide Ugliness

Mercury/Venus Conjunction

Which normal?

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Mercury/Venus Conjunction

Which normal?

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