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Kim and two mirrors. Photo by Eric Francis for Book of Blue.

Friends, Cousins:

I’ve been allowing myself to disengage from the astrology for a while. I knew I had succeeded when I woke up this morning, checked the planetary position table on this page (right side, scroll down) and noticed that the Gemini New Moon had passed a few hours before.

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the United States, and incredibly quiet here in Kingston. I’ve spent most of my day doing as little as possible; all apropos of the New Moon. Since taking my Beltane trip at the beginning of the month I’ve guided my biocomputers to slow down — or they have guided me. By last week, I got some clear instructions to take a pause from writing about astrology; today I can offer you the following update.

Mercury will be retrograde until Saturday, when it will station direct in Taurus. Over the past few days, it backed into a square with the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction, where it will remain, pushing a confrontation with that era-defining aspect.

I know I’ve said this a lot of times. Astrological eras work internally and externally, as phases of growth and of events in the world. It’s easier to see them if you research your life and research history and see how the energy patterns run. The current conjunction is unusual, very unusual. Chiron and Neptune run in a cycle that varies based on how close Chiron is to the Sun. Iterations occurred in 1601-02; 1658, 1742-3, 1799, 1879-80, 1945, and 2009-2010.

The energy of Neptune is too ethereal for most people to grasp. It is that distinct ‘higher love’ that you feel but is impossible to demonstrate. It’s the sense that there is an extra dimension to spirituality, usually experienced without words. Not everyone can grasp Neptune, and Chiron is one thing that can assist us. Chiron focuses the often foggy light of Neptune into something practically applied; a direct blessing; the refusal to abide denial. Think of Neptune as the light in a movie projector and Chiron as the lens.

Jupiter adds an additional factor, of energy and rarity. It may have never shown up for Chiron-Neptune in recent centuries; I’ll find out. The effect is to magnify the contact of Chiron and Neptune, and to allocate a portion of the ‘global idea database’ to this purpose. Jupiter translates to accessible wisdom, and a sense of the world being a small place. I know that I am associating Jupiter with small, but on a cosmic scale it is. For us it’s big and the combination of big and small is making the world a local event. In fact it is. The whole world is as local as it gets. Getting to the Moon takes thousands of scientists and engineers. We are here; here is where we are; local on every side of the Earth.

The Internet helps. I can sit here on a sunny afternoon and you can be reading, right now, in the deep of night with the ocean whispering.

By Jeanne Treadway from Next World Stories, published in January 2009.

FOR MORE THAN 20 years I’ve relied on three musical traditions to carry me through the ferociously maniacal holidays. On Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree makes me laugh so hard I usually pee myself. Dec. 8, I mourn John Lennon’s death and celebrate Jim Morrison’s birth. I dervishly dance to Spanish Caravan, Waiting For the Sun, LA Woman and When the Music’s Over until I fall in a puddle of sweat and spent euphoria. Then I play a hodgepodge of John and Yoko and add my personal chorus to So This Is Christmas. I thank John and talk a bit to him about the state of Peace on Earth these days.

Image by Jude Valentine.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve, I play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Jessye Norman’s incredible soprano lifting Ode to Joy to the heavens. These personal rituals remind me of the essentials: ecstatically singing out loud, dancing long and hard, laughter, peace, love and joy. So often during the past 10 years, though, I felt as if I was just going through the motions during these sacred days. What the hell could I say to John Lennon about peace?

Since Nov. 5th, my mood has improved. I actually feel hope stealing around my heart and into my thoughts, that �audacity of hope’ thing. It’s not a gushy goofy hope either. I am all sunshine and daisies because Barack Hussein Obama got himself elected but I still simmer in an edgy stew of 10 outrageous and unholy years, which can suddenly boil up and choke me with fury. So, I’m cautiously happy. No matter how brilliant, well-mannered and beautiful he is, Obama is a politician and most of them are scoundrels, so he might be one too. But when I read that our soon-to-be-President called Nancy Reagan to apologize for making a joke about seances in the White House, my cheerfulness settled in for a while. This man just might have integrity. He might understand his power to wound and to heal. Imagine.

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By ERIC FRANCIS from Next World Stories, published in January 2009.

So here we are.

Where exactly? It seems like a few people have noticed that in the geography of time, we’ve arrived at a mountain pass in late autumn. On one side is what they are calling over in our Sci-Fi section the “Age of Denial” or maybe it’s the “Age of Fossil Fuel Folly.” On the other — if we get there — is something else.

Astrology and astrologers have their ways of describing the moment we’re in: Pluto in a new sign, two mighty planets are at opposition, and something weird called Chiron is making some big moves in Aquarius. Indeed, we are heading into the most impressive Aquarian alignment since 1962, when the world was at the cusp of another new era. Ours has been gradually forming since 1998, when Neptune arrived and started the process with a little anaesthesia.

The Mayan daykeepers tell us that we are just over 1,000 days from the end of the 13th baktun on Dec. 21, 2012.

Scientists observing the polar caps have their way to describe what time it is, as do geologists looking at oil reserves, the people selling the oil (over and over) and those measuring the carbon in the atmosphere. Politics has its way, too, and it would seem that most people are defining this as a political moment: a new president taking over, apparently very different than the old. That he’s African-American is no small part of this: this inauguration is one of the great moments in civil rights history. A black man will face hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC not to demand his place in society, but to take it as the chief executive of our nation. If you believe the polls, even half the people who voted against him feel good about that.

Barack Obama gets my attention for one reason the news hasn’t given a name: we are being presented with a different image of maleness than we’ve seen in quite a while. We are used to Tom Cruise and Arnie Schwarzenegger and guys with guns in both hands who run up the wall and do a flip.

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