Samhain Star by Neisha Hirsch.

See more of Neisha’s work on her website, Sight Unseen.

La Catrina is the reigning queen of Dias de los Muertos, the Mexican fiesta honoring the dead. Finely dressed in an upper-class Victorian style, an oversized, feathered and flowered hat perched primly on her skull, elegant but skeletal, La Catrina was popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada in his political lampoons of the corrupt regime of Porfirio Díaz. Her role, then and now, is simple: She reminds us that rich or poor, famed or unknown, we all eventually become skeletons.

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Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

This morning, I asked my three-and-a-half year old son to pick a card for me for our weekend reading. I shuffled the cards, and while I was doing so a card flipped from the pack. The Ten of Swords. I usually take a card that jumps out like that seriously and include it in a reading; so I counted it as a lucky break that I wasn’t the one doing the picking this time, put it back, shuffled some more, and fanned the deck out in front of him.

The Ten of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck.

Of course, he picked the Ten of Swords again. He looked at it, looked up at me, face beaming, declared, “I love it!” and promptly ran off — probably to cause more mischief in the laundry.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do too, dear reader. Yes, today I’m going to run off (metaphorically speaking, of course), and leave you clutching the card to see what you make of it.

While I feel a little like I’m jumping out of the cockpit mid-flight, I’m rather relishing the idea of seeing what happens. The card seems a suitably ghoulish one for Halloween, which feels like we’re off to a pretty good start.

So, if you feel inspired to put fingers to keyboard, I would love to hear your thoughts about the Ten of Swords. And please know: all thoughts are welcome. There are no excluded thoughts. There are no wrong answers, either. Nothing is “stupid”. In the words of Max Ehrmann in his beautiful poem Desiderata: “You are a child of the universe, / no less than the trees and the stars; / you have a right to be here.”

To help you get started, here are some questions you might ponder:

• What do you see when you look at the card? What stands out for you?
• How does it make you feel?
• Does that feeling change when you step back and observe it from a distance?
• If you do look the meaning up elsewhere, what are your reactions to what you read? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Why?
• Finally, does the Ten of Swords have any personal meaning for you right now, either in your own life or in the events in the wider world?

And now it’s over to you …

Tea strainer with chef, Shakespeare & Co., Paris, 2005. Photo by Eric Francis.

A Halloween Article for the Brave Planet Waves Astrolonauts

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Aquarius weekly of Nov. 8, 2002

It may seem like you’re proceeding with very little support toward a certain professional goal, but you’re just going to need some faith that you stand on solid ground. Words that are spoken in the next few days may seem grossly exaggerated and will be impossible to take back, but if you look closely you may notice that they point very clearly to an idea whose time has come. That is your best and most promising foundation, what you might call alignment with the larger cosmic scheme. What more fitting cue for an Aquarian to kick into high gear? Of all people you know this life really isn’t about you, it’s about us, and you know that anything you suggest or invent always has that thought dancing around its nervous system. The world may not be ready for who you are, or might not know that it is. It’s worth taking a chance.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

by Judith Gayle | Political Waves

We should have pinned every problem of the last decade squarely on George Bush and his allies. Dubya was still eating pretzels in the White House when the revisionism began. It came along as McCain’s folly. Yes, before there was a Tea Party, there was a Palin. She was our first glimpse of repressive, regressive anti-intellectualism in this new century, and she represents a demographic that thinks her kind of naïve nativism is the will of the Founders, hence, real Americanism.

Although we’ve tried for over a year to ignore them, the Baggers won’t go away. They’re the train wreck we can’t turn away from, now that they’ve jumped the track into serious politics. Entrenched in a kind of existential despair, they represent nothing new, but the demographics of a changing nation and the economics of a failing empire make them newly worrisome. Why? Because they offer a natural home to everyone with a grievance, and they’re very well funded.

The shine is off the wing-nuts these days. Don’t get me wrong, I know everyone loves a circus, and if I were a humorist, this topic would still provide rich fare, or used to. Did you hear the one about the MoveOn activist that was thrown to the curb at a Rand Paul rally? No punch line here, just a Paul supporter stepping on her head. No joke and no apology until a day later, grudgingly, even as she was taken to the hospital. For these folks, politics is war, and the MoveOn member was in the wrong camp. One righty pundit complained that it was she who should apologize for provoking violence at the event, and now the stomper is demanding an apology from “the professional left.” If you can follow that line of reasoning, there’s a Tea Party calling your name.

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Many thanks to Fe for getting these remarks into the blog. More photos and a live blog chronology of the rally can be found here. Did any Planet Waves readers make to the event? – amanda

I can’t control what people think this was.  I can only tell you my intentions.   This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear.  They are and we do.  But we live now in hard times, not end times.  And we can have animus and not be enemies.

Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart at today's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Photo: Drew Angerer / The New York Times.

But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.  The country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder.  The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing.  There are terrorists and racists and Stalinist and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned.  You must have the resume.  Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.  Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more.  The press is our immune system.  If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker and perhaps eczema.

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THE bedroom door opened and a light went on, signaling an end to nap time. The toddler, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, clambered to a wobbly stand in his crib. He smiled, reached out to his father, and uttered what is fast becoming the cry of his generation: “iPhone!”

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