PLANET WAVES By ERIC FRANCIS
August 2000Copyright ©2000 by Planet Waves Digital Media, all rights reserved. Permission for noncommercial forwarding, posting and quoting short passages is granted provided a link to our site is included. Our materials and archives are available at http://www.PlanetWaves.net/
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ARIES (March 21-April 19)
It has been said many times that religion is a fact of life, but only which religion we choose is a variable. Most who consider themselves atheists have deferred the matter of cosmology to science, which rivals the world's most corrupt religions for its dependence on blind hope, speculation, ignorance and surrender of critical thought. Religion, correctly defined, is the reconnection (re-ligios, as in ligament) of something that has been severed. Spiritualism is the recognition (re-cognition, or re-thinking) of a living Divine Source within us, which has never faltered but for our awareness of it. Which to you require? Which do you choose? Do you feel the living Source within, without, or some combination of both? I imagine that in the fortnights to come, you will have many opportunities to experiment and make your choices, though I suggest a simple test: follow that which points most clearly to love and life.TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
When Saturn entered Taurus in 1998, I had a lot to say on the theme of values, which in my view is the most meaningful keynote of your sign. Most of the time, values exist on an unconscious level: the deep motivations and intentions that drive us to do, desire, love and despise. I have noticed that people often draw a blank when I bring up the concept, as if it's all so down-in-the-basement that hardly anyone has even gotten a grasp on it, much less mulled it over. But experience is the best teacher, and though you may have not ascribed the word to your recent quests and challenges, I suggest that you do, for on one level, values are all that has really changed. Have you not come to terms with who you are in some very important ways? Have you not gotten a firmer grasp on the meaning of your existence, and come to terms with who you are, and who you must become? The work is not over, but you've done very well, and the path ahead will be much easier.GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
The imminent entry of Saturn into your birth sign is big news. For too long, or maybe just long enough, you have been compelled to play roles with titles like "victim of circumstance," or "person with inferior knowledge," or "student." Though these roles have in some way served you despite being incredibly annoying at times, they may have done so most importantly by pointing to your need for grounding, depth of thought and having the weight of authority behind you, not just confronting you. Help is on the way. On some level all of us will benefit from mighty Saturn's shift in energies, but most of all you: through what I see as a stabilizing of awareness and identity, and slowing down the lightning-fast speed of thought in which our culture is possessed, meaningless though that thought is most of the time. You might just have time to think, and change yourself and the world in the process.CANCER (June 21-July 22)
Commitments can be a serious drag. While much virtue is ascribed to our ability go fulfill commitments, my observation is that much of what we dedicate ourselves to is utterly meaningless at best, and at worst, responsible for all kinds of misery, delay and decay of progress. There is always so much we allegedly must do that a great many people complain they can't do what they want to do. Events in the coming weeks seem destined to teach you how to unload that which is not working for you. With any luck and the least cooperation on your part, stuck energy gives way, fortitude fills your heart, genuine belief in yourself takes center stage, and mysterious forces lighten all kinds of burdens that have served their purpose, or, more likely, their lack of purpose. This holds equally for professional and personal matters, but in either case: let freedom ring.LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
It has been a year since what? What changes, what developments, and what inevitabilities? Please take a few days or weeks in the season of your birth, and consider carefully. It would serve you well to write a synopsis of the events since August 1998, the year leading up to August 1999, and then the year following. Add some photographs or other artifacts -- letters, or copies of diary pages, for instance. Such a project will help you get some very necessary perspective on just what this most vital turning point in your life was really about. Many years of growth led up to it; many years of unusual growth will follow. But the epicenter, the fulcrum, the hinge on which so much turned, were the events and revelations of August 1999, when the very Earth herself shook. If you draw on the wisdom of those events, you will have the resources to create for yourself a new year of unparalleled success and adventure.VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Confusing events, developments and inner movements of many recent months may have stunned or overwhelmed you into silence and stillness, rare states of being for one as sharp-minded, clear-voiced and given to action as you are. But though you may feel you lack certain vital information, something solid you deem you must know or discover in order to be prepared for the next stage of progress, it is clear that you possess great resources of knowledge and wisdom that you are only beginning to get a grasp on. I also suspect you fear, on some level, that what resides in the future may be merely promise or hope, and not action or actual development, as past hopes have perhaps failed. But this is indeed no time to judge the future on the basis of the past, but rather a time to be vigilant with your creative power, and a rare moment in which to decide how you would have your world be if it could be any way you wanted.LIBRA (Sep. 23-Oct. 22)
If on some levels you feel that your freedom is constrained, or that you have lost a clear sense of yourself, I propose that these are just ways of slowing down reality enough to sort out the astonishing potentials that are rapidly opening up in your life. The full effects of this have yet to manifest, but will very shortly, and the will only grow. Meanwhile, your movement is not hindered, but your thought process is being directed into deeply introspective levels. Be with this. Be with yourself wherever you are. More than we need license to be free in the world -- and this you are surely being given -- we need license to be free within our own hearts and minds. We need to sort out the influences that, on the one hand, told us that anything is possible, and on the other, told us we had to live with all kinds of barriers. But this debate is a strictly internal issue now. Anything is possible, and your choices are all that matter.SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
You have endured a long period of enforced growth and limitation in your personal relationships, and it's clear to me that you both recognized the necessity for this, and that you are ready for a change. If I may propose a few possible shapes that change may take: For starters, the level of exchange (or mutual change) needs to increase in your relationships. You are now in a period where there are certain bottom limits established on what must go back and forth; what you must give, and what you must receive, in order to feel like a relationship is real. I suggest that you pay heed to both directions of your personal transactions. Second, your relationships must, and I know must is a strong word, but they must work in concert with your career, not against it, and your work must not fight against love. This you have no doubt figured out, though it may not be obvious that there are several important ways in which only you can facilitate this.SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21)
In the summer days ahead, I see you encountering a variety of unfamiliar influences which appear destined to provoke you to new states of mind and levels of awareness, and I mean in stunning ways, ways that you will never, ever forget. The effect is the potential to connect with a depth of devotion to life which has long lain in slumber. While it may feel like these influences are moving into your field of reality, you are in fact the moving object; your consciousness is shifting and your mind is awakening, far more than you realize, and more than in even the very strange five years that have passed. Indeed, it may seem like the lights are finally coming on, and how you could have missed certain key elements of your life, or overlooked certain necessities, or unbearable situations, will remain something of a mystery.
The challenges you now face are likely to require a depth of faith that you have long forsaken -- but faith, as the wise say, is its own reward. Yet the deepest essence of the learning, as I see it, is how much changes when only you change your mind.CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
Why can't work be play? Well, it can, and it depends on two things -- your ability to change your work so that it fits your definition of fun, and to change your mind so that whatever you do becomes a creative game. In fact, the whole thing, the whole adjustment, is a creative exercise: of creating possibilities, attitudes, and ways of communicating with people who are not quite running the same agenda you are (they are everywhere, right?) and teaming up in new and inventive ways with those who are. Recent and soon-to-occur shifts and changes of energies and circumstances all but assure that you will be able to abandon past structures and self-concepts that have long held you back in these areas, and will allow you to regain your focus on what is really important to you, and for sure, good work is. We all need to eat, and stay off the street, but you, little goat, need rocks to leap and dance around on as you make your way over the hills and dales of the enchanted mundane, and up the mountain of aspiration.AQUARIUS (Jan. 19-Feb. 18)
You are not deceived in yourself, and it would be unwise to put the council of others above the wisdom that is emerging from your own thoughts and dreams. At this point, you are only beginning to discern the motives of others, though some revelation in the context of a relationship that surfaces during the first half of the month will reveal the exact position of key people in your life in no uncertain terms. Leave yourself both an escape route, and some veil of invisibility or protection in the meanwhile. For now, it would serve you well to ask others to state their intentions clearly, and to judge them less by what they say and more by how they say it. In our world where so-called logic, reason and rationality seem to dominate the patterns of thought, and here, intuition can seem implausible, and subject to direct denial. But at the moment, it constitutes the majority of your resources; fail it not, and it will not fail you.PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)
You have now reached the limits of the conditions or frustrations that one particular situation of the distant past had laid upon you, and which it seems has long irritated you. But it is the nature of Pisces to adapt, even to constant struggle, in a way that the many other people know very little of. It may be obvious which past events or commitments that I'm speaking of, or you may need to figure it out. This may involve your parents, or it may involve other people who share what you could describe as an energetic relationship or resonance with your parents. In any case, something else has entered the picture of your life: the deep desire for a happy home, and the possibility that this can go from a hope to a solid reality as the next month or two progress. But it may not be where you now live -- literally, if your family is around you, or symbolically, if their definition of "success" has been dragging you down rather than lifting you up.Keyword MYSTIC on America Online
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