I was at Rhino Records in New Paltz the other day, a very excellent independent record store, and I found something utterly rare — a 1970 recording of Elton John at the studios of A&R Records, with a small audience of about 125 people. This was for a special broadcast on what was then WABC-FM Radio, the precursor to WPLJ, for many years the heart and soul of rock in New York City.

Berine Taupin was already writing with Elton at that time, but there are no familiar hit songs on the recording. Yet the atmosphere and the sheer artistry of the performance are stunning; and man, can he play piano. Personally I always think it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of people the day before they become superstars. So this CD has been going around and around in my car as I’ve been tooling across the countryside the past week or so.

Then I woke up with the song “Philadelphia Freedom” in my mind this morning and voila, I found this recording on YouTube at the Royal Opera House.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

I always feel a touch of excitement when the Sun enters a new sign, and as of last night it’s in Gemini.

But as far as I’m concerned, Taurus never got old, not for a minute. I have to say this has been one of the most lush experiences of the Sun in Taurus that I ever remember; though we are currently aided and abetted by sitting in the cascade of the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction: a fountain of cosmic energy.

Now the Sun is in an air sign; the one mutable air sign, Gemini. Mutable signs show up right before one season is about to yield to the next; they hold what is called disseminating energy. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is spring turning to summer. In the Southern Hemisphere, this is autumn turning to winter, granted, in most places a scaled down version of winter than we are accustomed to places like New York or Chicago.

The energy of Gemini is light, breezy and if it’s contentious, there’s an element of sparring to the energy. Gemini is very much about the flirtatious play of opposites, polarities and contrasts. This sign drops all the moral baggage and attachment to the past that can show up with the darker shades of Taurus; it is more concerned with focusing on the moment than marauding the future, as we can sometimes get with Aries.

And who are these twins? Now that psychology has been added to astrology, we have many possibilities: such as ego or core self; anima and animus; one’s identity and one’s sense of shadow. If we follow mythology, we are taken back to an old story about Castor and Pollux. Here is Wikipedia’s summary:

In the myth the twins shared the same mother but had different fathers which meant that Pollux was immortal and Castor was mortal. When Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together and they were transformed into the Gemini constellation. The pair were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Elmo’s fire.

So, in Gemini we actually do get a deep question: the mortal and immortal aspects of consciousness, looking at one another in a mirror. This may indeed be the ultimate dualism we face as humans; the ultimate paradox of consciousness. While Gemini is not the first place that dualism begins in the zodiac (we begin with the horns of Aries and Taurus) it seems to be the place where that issue comes to consciousness, apropos of an air sign, a mental sign, and the first human sign.

I think we are here for a human experience. Part of that experience is about honoring the transience of our journey. Sometimes in order for tomorrow to have any meaning at all, we must live like it’s not even there.

Have you visited SpaceWeather.com lately? This nifty site not only has a bunch of interesting news about our solar system, it offers a great feature that allows backyard astronomers to show off their chops.

The SpaceWeather Sightings page features photos posted by astronomers from, quite literally, all over the world. Anyone with a telescope or camera (or both) pointed at the heavens who captures an interesting image can submit it to SpaceWeather. The Sightings page features a map of the world with a pin in it at each astronomer’s location; mouse over the pin to see a small image, and click on the image to get a larger one.

Currently, the Sightings page has images from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Many of them are time-lapse photos of the Space Station Freedom taken from people’s yards, although one Paco Bellido from Cordoba, Spain, used high-power equipment to capture a (comparatively) up-close image of the station in orbit.

The Moon and the Sun are also popular subjects on the Sightings page. If you have an image or three you’d like to share with other astronomy buffs, you can use the form SpaceWeather has posted on this page.

Good morning critters,

It was radio night last night — so I’m off to a late start; I will catch you a bit later in the day. In answer to readers asking whether the programs are recorded, they are all archived for free on the program’s homepage at Blog Talk Radio. That would include last night’s webcast, beginning with my 20 minute rant on the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I WENT through a phase early in my astrology career when I got into conversations with young tarot card readers. Maybe there were just two or three such conversations, but they seem to stand out as a distinct phase of gaining an understanding of life. Anyway, one of them would say to me, “I don’t feel right about charging for my work. It’s not right to charge people to help them.”

Planet Waves reader Deb Silverman of San Francisco dreamed for years of being an acupuncturist, and with much work achieved her goal.

One day I parsed the logic and replied: “Well, do you think it’s better to charge to hurt them?”

This pretty much obviated the issue. In truth, however, it usually works out that it’s easier, more efficient and more profitable to hurt people rather than to help them. A quick scan of the history of industrialization — including PCBs, asbestos, cigarettes and the Ford Pinto — establish this pretty quickly.

The question is not why people do it, but rather why we put up with it and even help them; and why we are, as a society, so resistant to investing our money where it’s going to make a positive difference. Notably, we are currently spending $230 million a day on a war in Iraq. Would it have been remotely possible to put that money to work for social causes, or is our only option with that much capital to create mayhem?

With this theme, we embark on the topic of values, which in my astrology is the core theme of Taurus.В Values embraces the question of what we would do with our money, collectively and individually, if we noticed that we have a choice in the matter. But it goes a lot further than that.

I was first acquainted with the term values in Philosophy 101 at SUNY Buffalo, taught by Prof. Paul Kurtz. It arrived in the title of a textbook called Ethics and the Search for Values. I know that, for this reason, I equate the idea values with that of ethics. It may actually be easier to think of values as a subset of ethics: one’s personal inventory of right or wrong. Values are the inner psychic elements by which we determine what is right or wrong for us, as individuals — if we take the time to stop and think.

In effect, a value is a contract with oneself by which one guides one’s life. It is a commitment to invest vital energy (of which money is one form) somewhere that we feel is right, and to divest it from where we think it’s wrong. That requires an ethical judgment, or it calls for one. Usually this pertains to a person, to some activity in the world and very often where we put our cash. Usually in the process of relating to the material world, the ethical assessment is overlooked entirely. What we want is determined externally, by how brilliant an advertising person is; by how manipulative a videographer is at morphing a Mercedes with a slinky young woman; or by what pre-established, conditioned appetite is acting up at the moment.

Meantime, we are taught by long conditioning and tradition to acquire what we are told we want and not worry about the consequences. The packaging industry is not helping. There is absolutely no way to avoid plastic in Western civ at this time. Look around and consider your life, and tell me if you think it’s possible. Continue Reading »