When I’m not traveling, I’m scheduled for astrology sessions most Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It’s not easy to do this work in the midst of writing what I do, the way I do, but it’s always worth the time and effort. I get a good fee for my work ($325 a session, which goes into the kitty at Planet Waves), and it would not be worth it for the money. This may sound odd, to be worth that much for 75 minutes of work, but the reason I can do it is because I learn so much. That’s what makes it worth every minute.

During my sessions these two days, the charts unfolded like another dimension opening up. In my working method, I do a LOT of listening: I’ll keep the client talking for the first hour if I have to, and work with the chart, listening on several different levels, barely mentioning the astrology, and then suddenly the chart, the client, the moment and my awareness align. This happens dependably; I have to be patient and have the experience. And each client, each chart, is like the experience of another world; another reality, spoken in that client’s unique language.

I’m getting ready to stop doing sessions, in preparation for Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves. As I go through this last dozen or so clients, I’m listening to their experiences, seeing how they align with their natal, transits and progressions, and filling pages with notes that are providing the foundation for the annual edition. As almost always happens in an astrology practice, the clients who arrive give me exactly the information that I need, to give them the information that they need, and to develop it into the public writing that I do. My clients have quite literally taught me astrology. I gave up on astrology books years ago. I learn from the process of listening, interpreting and writing; I teach by the process of listening, interpreting and writing.

The patterns and synchronicities can be very interesting. Today I worked with two clients who had suppressed their psychic abilities, and for whom those abilities (and much else) were beginning to re-emerge. Most of my clients this week were born very close to eclipses. Both clients today had Uranus in the ascendant. All had interesting Aries Point activity. All were on fire with the determination to grow and become — my favorite kind of client.

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I’m noticing that the Moon is in late Aquarius, having recently finished a conjunction to Neptune. Technically it’s void of course. Under the current rule, that means it’s not making any major aspects until it enters Pisces tonight at 7:26 pm EDT. A major aspect would be: conjunction (same place aspect), sextile (60 degree aspect), square (90 degree aspect), trine (120 degree aspect) or opposition (180 degree aspect).

For example, the Aquarius Moon is now applying to a quincunx (150 degree aspect) to Saturn in Virgo and in theory that doesn’t count because the quincunx is allegedly an “inconjunct” meaning (that by an older set of rules) it makes no aspect. The 30-degree aspect also has that name; it too is called an inconjunct. I guess some contemporary astrologers would count those as aspects, which gives you a clue to the individualistic (perhaps arbitrary) nature of interpretation. In the end it all comes down to how important the task you’re predicting for is.

The more meaningful part is that the Moon is building toward the full phase, which is exact in Aries overnight Saturday to Sunday. But the relative calm, aspect wise, of the current Moon is taking a little of that pressure off. We shall see how the Pisces Moon feels through the end of the week, as it trines Mars and opposes quite a few planets in Virgo.

I’ll have more to say about the world spinning off its axis in Friday’s edition of Astrology News, wherein I take up this weekend’s Full Moon in Aries and everything that it represents in our glorious moment of creative chaos.

By Carol Van Sturm

Dear Penpal, elephant

Thank you for your Ign message. I was so excited to receive it and at the next power outage when I can see the stars again I will look past Arcturus just to think of you out there somewhere. Now I will try to answer some of your questions.

Iвm sorry to say I have never seen an elephant. Not alive, that is. I have seen a preserved elephant in a museum. I will send you a picture from the time when there were live elephants, and also a picture of something called a bird that flew without a motor. I’m not sure I believe in birds. I wish I could have seen one fly.

My grandmother saw the last living elephant on our planet. It was in a pen called a zoo. My grandmother said it looked very sad and lonely with no others of its kind left. I don’t know which would be worse, to be the only one of your kind left, or to be crowded among billions of your kind with no space to get away. What do you think?

As you guessed, we have a different way of reproducing from yours, because we have two separate body forms, a male and a female. This is like the flower forms your probes observed on our Mars agriculture plantations, except in humans the male and female are completely separate bodies. The male inserts his genetic material into the female by a process called sex, which is very pleasurable to both male and female forms. It is so pleasurable that our species has completely over-run the planet, which is why there are no more birds or elephants and we have to grow our food on Mars.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Pisces – Daily of Aug 08, 2005

Photo by Danielle Voirin.

In this world it’s so difficult to sort out truth from lies that most people gave up a long time ago. But you can’t afford to live in that kind of chaos. You’ll go a long way toward establishing peace of mind by being honest with yourself which is the root of all sanity. Being direct clear and gentle with the people around you would make a good follow-up. Give them a chance to speak their piece offer the benefit of the doubt and then withhold judgment. There’s no rush and what you learn over the next few days will provide you with enormous insight into

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. The Oracle is a divination tool like tarot cards, and also can be used to research any horoscope for the past 10 years. It is available to subscribers of Planet Waves Astrology News in all its working glory. This is a brilliant piece of programming combined with a full decade of Eric’s writing — when you have a question, it really works (as long as you’re sincere), and we know that you’ll love it. Sign up to discover how and why. Or enjoy one selection free here every day.)

Gina, Dominick and Rita Vanacore at Dominick's Cafe in uptown Kingston, NY.

I’m aware that the world is spinning off of its axis at the moment, and that the United States Senate thinks it’s supposed to be the only entity that gets government-sponsored health insurance. Despite this, I’m here with a search engine seeding project. Anatoly, the Planet Waves web developer in the Ukraine, helped put up a little website for my friend Dominick Vanacore.

By the grace of what must have been an actual miracle, I acquired the domain DominicksCafe.com last week. I only checked about six times to make sure that I hadn’t misspelled it and that it was really available. Apart from the fact that I have kitchen privileges, this is an interesting place because it’s staffed almost entirely by an extended family with four generations still in the area. Everyone who works there is a cousin and nobody but me knows what kind; they just say they’re cousins while I do the math and determine that somebody is somebody’s second cousin once removed.

The cafe is next to Dream Weaver’s salon, which Rita started 30 years ago and which has taken up a number of residences. Dominick is now his mom’s business partner in this venture and it’s a thriving enterprise.

The site we’ve created for them is designed as a starter kit (only involving the restaurant, tho obviously the hair salon needs a web presence), till we get together the menus and other information, and set up a blog and a photo gallery and twitteleh. Please let me know how it looks on your iPhone and/or Blackberry, if you decide to turn it on. The audience we’re going for is tourists searching from their cars for someplace interesting and friendly to eat and hang out.

Friends, Readers:

Mercury stationed direct today at 9:13 am EDT (New York daylight savings time), with a surge of activity in the world. A typhoon devastated the Philippines, killing 240 people, and is now headed for Vietnam (thankfully, in reduced form). For that region it’s the worst flooding in a generation.

Apropos of Virgo — the sign most often associated with healing — Dr. Joe Mercola published an article this morning reporting data confirming that cell phone use is involved with brain cancer, something we’ve known for a while (as little as half an hour a day over 10 years can cause tumors; the new information is from a master study reviewing many other studies). Let’s see how many news organizations report this information.

To me the more meaningful issue is: if cellular phones cause brain tumors, what do they do before that happens? The human body is an electrical device; a subtle one. A cell phone must be capable of sending a microwave signal three miles in any direction, right through your brain and nervous system first. Years ago, I read an article wherein the author warned that we should carry cell phones like a loaded gun; leave them off when not in use; and suggesting many other precautions that now seem warranted. But really; leave your phone off? What about all those text messages that have to come in from moment to moment?

Another story likely to disappear into the mists of forgotten environmental news is an Associated Press article yesterday that indicated a ‘new’ source of PCBs in schools: window caulking. This is not actually a new source — it’s a very old one, extant in buildings built between 1950 and 1978 or so. PCBs were used in many industrial processes, particularly things that needed to be supple. I’ll come back to this, but in essence we have potentially a New Paltz-like problem in (taking a rough guess here) about half the schools in the United States. If you have a kid in the United States attending a school built during that timeframe, I suggest you call the principal and arrange to email him or her this article (the top link, on window caulking).

(Here is a link to an article on New Paltz taking you to an article in The Ecologist that I wrote this year. At the time, a Planet Waves subscriber was the editor, and she invited me to contribute this to the last print edition. Therefore it will be on the stacks of actual libraries, for anthropologists to find in a hundred years from now explaining why we are collectively such whack jobs when it comes to environmental issues.)

Here is the story that jumped out yesterday, on the theme of “the truth comes out.” Over the weekend, Facebook published a member-produced poll asking: “Should President Obama Be Killed?” The item was first reported Sunday by the blogger Gotta Laff, at the progressive website called The Political Carnival. The writer sent a screen shot of the poll to the Secret Service.

The item caught the attention of bloggers at other political websites Monday morning, including Pam’s House Blend, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. The item was up on Facebook for over twelve hours before it was taken down by site administrators. Facebook temporarily disabled its poll application at the site. The Secret Service called Gotta Laff to thank her for her tip, but could not divulge the next steps they plan in their investigation of the incident.

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That would be Saturn, the majestic sixth planet of our Solar System, whose rings have fascinated stargazers for centuries. Thanks to NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, in orbit around the gas giant for five years now, it is possible to appreciate those colossal rings in a whole new light.

Of the countless equinoxes Saturn has seen since the birth of the solar system, this one, captured here in a mosaic of light and dark, is the first witnessed up close by an emissary from Earth ... none other than our faithful robotic explorer, Cassini. Image credit: NASA.

The magnificent photos that NASA recently released provide the best view yet of Saturn’s rings, which is perhaps best viewed in this slideshow. But it wasn’t just spectacular photography that was reaped from this mission — scientists also picked up new information about the rings, themselves.

That’s because in August, Saturn reached its equinox, which happens twice during its 29.7-year orbit, just as it does during an Earth year. With the rings lit directly edge-on, the images taken by Cassini revealed that they are not as uniformly flat as previously expected; instead, they appear corrugated, like a tin roof.

Furthermore, scientists noted that there are some “bumps” along certain rings that cast long shadows over their neighbors when illuminated by the equatorial sun. If “bumps” is the right word for something that would have to be as tall as the Rocky Mountains, by NASA’s estimates.

“The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief above and below the otherwise paper-thin rings,” Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release on the JPL.gov website. “To understand what we are seeing will take more time, but the images and data will help develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be and how they are evolving.”

Added Carolyn Porco, a Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado: “We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we’ve come across walls more than 2 miles [3 kilometers] high. Isn’t that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction.”

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Sagittarius – Weekly of Jul 22, 2005

Photo by Danielle Voirin.

Long-term plans and ambitions come into focus now and you owe it to yourself to take these things a lot more seriously. You’re typically someone who has a lot of energy but in truth you only have so much. The way sensible people usually handle this is by prioritizing. There is one person’s advice and counsel which will be exceedingly helpful in getting this particular rather touchy discussion going. You know exactly who she is and you trust her because in addition to having your best interests at heart she has no interest at all in the outcome.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. The Oracle is a divination tool like tarot cards, and also can be used to research any horoscope for the past 10 years. It is available to subscribers of Planet Waves Astrology News in all its working glory. This is a brilliant piece of programming combined with a full decade of Eric’s writing — when you have a question, it really works (as long as you’re sincere), and we know that you’ll love it. Sign up to discover how and why. Or enjoy one selection free here every day.)

We are now in that sensitive moment where Mercury is slowing to a complete stop and reversing directions from retrograde to direct. The moment of the station (as it is called) is 9:13:28 am EDT on Tuesday. Mercury’s exact address at the time of the station is 21 Virgo 37. This is pretty close to a conjunction with Saturn in late Virgo, and Mercury will again pass through the Saturn-Uranus opposition (for the third time). That is next week. The degree of the station puts it into close aspect with Mars, Chiron and Eris; and close enough to call an aspect with Neptune, the lunar nodes, Jupiter and Ceres: that’s one busy Mercury in Virgo. Damn, stationing direct is busy enough for a planet.

Now as for what this “means.” This is a fragile, potent moment of events, ideas and mental processes changing directions. If you pause long enough to think, you will actually feel this happen.

Astrology is not merely a symbol; something actually occurs in real time and real space, and that something parallels (and influences) events in the actual world. Mercury is a magnet. If you put a magnet next to a disk drive you will wipe out the memory. If you put magnets on the skin outside a fractured bone, it will heal faster.

The big magnet known as Mercury is shifting its direction of motion relative to the Earth, and all its affairs will sway. That would be you and that would be me and indeed that would be us.

Without sounding too much like, “Monday is for washing, Tuesday is for ironing” (holy shit, I remembered that right – Aunt Josie told me that decades ago) in fact there is often a logical order of operations based on the movements of the planets. Mercury is still retrograde right now, though from moment to moment, its apparent hourly motion is slower and slower. The issues that it represents are beginning to unravel. The mental or creative processes that it has been guiding are about to change directions. Processes that have been directed inwardly may respond by becoming more outwardly oriented.

Now is the time to pay close attention to the movement of the subject matter and relationships involved. It’s a time to be extra clear and extra careful, and be on the lookout for things that need attention. It is NOT a time for making “final” commitments or decisions; but rather, guiding things gently in the direction you want them to go.

I strongly suggest not messing with your computer, not sending anything in for repair, and not making purchases above $25. Just sit and hang loose while this passes, and keep your emphasis on the mental plane: your thought process, communication, and idea creation.

And don’t forget to watch for that distinctly Mercury stationing direct property of: the truth comes out.