Tonight on Dan and Eric’s Music Appreciation Hour, called Introducing the Blues, we hear from Robert Johnson, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. This new Planet Waves program is available on iTunes.
Hopefully Friday’s Full Moon brought some relief to your life, released some of the polarized energy that was in the environment, and that you’ve spent the last couple of days decompressing.
Trust that you can make some headway in situations where progress felt unlikely last week. Today, though, you might notice a subtle sense of something unusual as the Sun makes its way through the last degree of Aquarius. This is a visionary degree — it has one of the most interesting Sabian symbols (degree images) of the lot.
It’s about emerging from a spiritual initiation into a new level of consciousness, which morphs directly into Pisces on Tuesday.
Pisces is the last sign of Northern Hemisphere winter and the last sign of the zodiac. In four weeks, spring will officially begin with the first day of Aries (believe it or not). Between now and then, however, our consciousness gets to swim collectively in the sensitive, creative, populist, empathetic waters of Pisces.
Waiting for the Sun in early Pisces is Neptune; closer to mid-Pisces now is Chiron. These are the two planets in Pisces for the long haul, coloring and shaping everything that contacts this sign. The Sun’s conjunctions to them will bring out different attributes of Pisces.
Eric wrote last year of Neptune that it, like the empathy and populism of Pisces, can be corrupted easily in our society: “Rather than being expressed, it’s far more often suppressed (by drugs, drink, denial, deception and delusion). Those suppressing elements can be so deeply intractable that it can seem impossible to get to the soulful level of creativity beneath them.”
This is one reason why it’s such a boon to have Chiron in Pisces along with Neptune: it acts as a counterbalance or foil, by bringing an element of intense focus to our experience of Pisces. This is the agent that, as uncomfortably or even painfully as it often does so, can bring your attention to any ways in which you struggle with faith in yourself. But Chiron does so expressly so that you can find your way back to it.
As Eric put it last year, “Chiron’s longterm presence in Pisces is accentuating the quest for your true passion, your deepest creativity and your faith both in yourself and something larger than yourself. Chiron is always looking for that connection point between micro and macro, between the element and the whole system; Chiron is always reaching for the holistic level of existence.”
Meanwhile, note that Mercury will be retrograde for about two more weeks. It stations direct on Friday, Feb. 28, and this is followed the next day by the beginning of a rare Mars retrograde. That ends in May and then we have another Mercury retrograde, which will take us clear through July 1.
Inner planet retrograde energy is the theme of the first half of 2014. You may need a little help working through these strange energies. Eric has has done a set of readings about how these influences affect you personally, which are all contained in The Mars Effect. These are detailed readings for your Sun sign and rising sign.
You can purchase individual signs here, or if you want to have access to all 12 (once you start listening and reading, you will want to keep going), call Chelsea at (877) 453-8265.
Thank you, “Planet Waves” for for giving us the moment of both presence and anticipation whilst perched on the edge of Pisces.