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Dear Friend and Reader:

Wednesday is our Q & A day. This week we have two questions and two comments from the Planet Waves audience. Instructions for participating in this feature are below. Please note that this is not a substitute for either therapy or astrological consulting. A written reply to a query maybe gives 1% of the power of astrology. I don’t get the chance to listen, to check transits or to engage in a dialog — and these are very much elements of the work that I do with people.

Also, this feature, which takes a good bit of work and which five people work on each week (no kidding) is sponsored by our very excellent twice-weekly news service, Planet Waves Astrology News. Every week you get the best of my writing, my rather unusual psychological-spiritual salty/sweet weekly horoscope, three (soon to be four) different monthly horoscopes (including the Eriscope, Inner Space and Planet Waves Monthly), and many other features. If you’re a longterm reader, a former subscriber or a would-be subscriber, please do sign up. If you just arrived today for the first time, give us a try, I think you’ll be very happy you did and wonder where we’ve been all your life.

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And now here are your questions for the week.

Oh! PS - I would really appreciate it if you enter our blog entries into Digg and other networking/sharing engines. This can be done by scrolling to the bottom of this entry, and clicking on the green icon next to “Share.” A list of networking websites will appear, and you can promote this blog by clicking on any of the sites where you have a username and password, or by registering. Google, Technorati and Digg would be particularly helpful.

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Shifting Sexual Orientation

Dear Eric,

I’ve been following Planet Waves now since Fall 2005, when the first step in my current process began to unfold.

I left a ten year relationship with a woman at the beginning of June after struggling since early December and am working with issues of dependence/independence, the rediscovery of my libido and shifting sexual orientation (which began, I think, in Fall 2005).

All of this has led to decisions driven by intense emotions (after priding myself on rationality for years), intermittent feelings of self-betrayal (I’m no longer who I thought I was, and I ask myself how I’ve destroyed my own life and how I will build it back up again) and, on the flip side, cautious optimism for a future I define on my own.

In the mix is a potential new relationship with a man to whom I am deeply attracted to and respect greatly — and now that something seems to be starting, we are separated by an ocean indefinitely. I seem to be going through some pretty serious Pluto squares, in addition to Saturn entering my sign, and I’m wondering where the light is at the end of the tunnel. I also wonder how my T-squares fit into all of this and influence the situation. How can I best negotiate these changes and stay sane?

– Shifting

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Dear Shifting:

I would say that your sexual orientation is not the only thing that’s shifting. Your entire identity resembles an earthquake simulator.

First I would like to take a sentence or two and debunk the myth of a fixed sexual orientation. You are personal evidence of this fact. There is no such thing, unless you’re a concrete yard ornament, and I’m not even sure about them. Every person has their own individual sexual orientation, and it is mutable. It changes as we change and grow. So to me it seems natural enough that you are orienting for what may be the second or third time. If you look at your life carefully, you may have gone through several more than that, even during the time that you were lesbian-identified. For example, I think that we (clearly) shift sexual orientations each time we change lovers.

Let’s be astrologers and look at your chart.

You have important planets in the 12th house (particularly the Sun), which is like saying your life is one long quest for identity. And you have a very late degree Mercury exactly rising, which is the image, in your own chart, of the kind of changing identity that you describe. You are always “on the line” and that line is an idea about yourself. But what I hear is that you’re taking this out on yourself. You describe “priding myself on rationality for years,” your “intermittent feelings of self-betrayal” and “how I’ve destroyed my own life.”

And all of this for no longer being who you thought you were? I think you’re exaggerating a little, even though it doesn’t feel that way: Mercury is exactly square Jupiter. This is a struggle between “realism” and “idealism” and hey it’s getting a big old Pluto transit.

Now, I recognize that I’m talking to someone with Mars, the Sun, Mercury and the ascendant in Virgo. You could go to the Post Office and change your name to Self Critical. In fact, they would probably deliver mail addressed that way right to you without even asking. I think that is the issue — not the details you describe. You do have a lot of ideas about yourself and, yes, a lot of them are based in rationality. And while many of your planets are in a mutable sign, the thing that mutable signs mutate between is fixed and cardinal. In other words, you have two modes: assertive/aggressive; and wedged in/just as you are. Currently you seem to be straddling the line (much like your Mercury on the Virgo/Libra cusp).

You may think of yourself as distinctly one thing. Actually, you are very much on the edge, nearly all the time. I could see wanting to be a little more one way or the other, given this. In other words, given that you’re so accustomed to being on the edge, I could see wanting to retreat into one way of being to the exclusion of another. It’s quite a trick for a human to learn how to integrate themselves.

At the moment (and a very long moment it is) you have outer planets working on your chart: Pluto is squaring your Sun/Mercury/ascendant, and has been for about 18 months. Uranus is opposing your Mars, and will soon oppose your Sun, Mercury and ascendant. If you don’t change now, you better hook up the ECG and check for cardiac activity.

Change is the purpose and theme of your life now, and the truth is you ain’t seen nothing yet. You, Miss, have just about every darned thing in your chart at or near 29+ degrees of the mutable signs. Okay I exaggerate — just about half of your chart, but half is plenty. At the moment, Pluto is doing them all. In just a few short generations of geckos, Uranus will show up in the last degrees of Pisces and it, too, will do them all.

So I suggest you hang loose. Like, really loose. The gods of change are upon you and I assure you, based on what you’re describing, it could be worse — a lot worse, and I’m going to cast a little spell and make sure it stays this way (unless you have some motive to indulge in some extra chaos). Chaos, however, is mostly about resisting what is obviously necessary; and what is obviously necessary is that you need some progress and some pick-up-and-go and some gitalong and (as you suggest) a man.

Oh that. There is such a thing as bisexual. I have heard that dyed-in-the-wool queers don’t think so, but a lot of other people think that they don’t exist. I understand that when one’s sexual orientation shifts, it can seem to take the rest of you with it. There are matters of pride involved, and the crisis can be far reaching. People have an odd way of feeling guilty when their sexual orientation changes, though many report feeling liberated. There is a kind of internal death; a letting go of a way of being. People who don’t think that sexuality is at the core of the psyche have not gone through the kind of change you are describing.

While I’m here, one last note. We are always our own lover first, if we are anyone’s. While there are definitely people who are more self-oriented erotically, I think that self-sexuality is the first and most meaningful sexual orientation and the one we need to hold at the core of existence. And as long as we’re loving and making love to ourselves, we’re always queer, because we’re always the same sex as who we are - physically, anyway.

So, cheers to life, love and sex with yourself and who you want, and when you want, if you can arrange it. And hey, remember - we’re all Queer.

Yours & truly,

===

Confessions of a Stressed Mom

Dear Eric,

Being a mother feels like some of the most important spiritual work I will do in this lifetime. I share custody of my child with my ex. We separated a year ago, and I am struggling to rebuild a life that had become very constrained, cold and soul-numbing.

At this difficult time in our family’s life, my child needs (I think) a mother who is stable, reliable, steady, and reassuring. Instead, what she has is me: stressed, emotionally maxed out, isolated (but working on it), weepy and inconveniently rediscovering her sexuality. My child, reasonably enough, is reacting to all this with lots of bossy demands, whining and annoying behavior. The dynamic between us is draining.

Rationally, I see before me a child who is desperately grasping for her mother, and I am grasping back, but it feels like we cannot reach each other, and that terrifies me, as if this might be the fork in the road where she begins to be one of the people who have lots of heavy-duty healing to do around childhood. Is there anything in my chart or our synastry that suggests what I need to be doing to reconnect to myself and my child right now? And is our situation as perilous as it feels?

Thank you,

Stressed Mom

===

Dear Mom:

First, a question - what was your life like in 1977? It will tell you a lot about your life in total.

Second, it’s great that you’re getting your concerns out onto the table. You are admitting that you have a situation that you need to address. This is a good start. In terms of assessing the damage or potential damage that one is doing to one’s kids, the main theme that divides the universe is awareness. If you are aware, you can address your situation.

Generally, the kinds of things you’re describing are usually passed from one generation to the next. Let’s take a look at your chart for clues. The first place to look is your 5th house, the house of children, childhood, taking risks and experiencing pleasure.

You have two planets here - Saturn and Chiron. Saturn in the 5th is not so much fun. Chiron in the 5th wants a lot: a lot of fun. This is the picture of a raging child that never got to have quite the fun that it wanted to have. This child, if not contacted and spoken to and in a sense raised consciously, will wreak havoc. You can pass this onto your own child if you don’t address it. So I think you need to remember that your child is a child, and you were not really able to be one of those.

Note that during the next year, Uranus is going to make contact with this conjunction; there will be a lot of Pisces activity in your 5th house. This whole theme needs to be front and center. Note also that the 5th house is the house of creativity, and you have plenty of that. Despite being a parent, you need to learn to express yourself and grow into the creative person that you are. In other words, don’t avoid living your life and doing your thing and blame it on your child.

Allow me to ask you an exceedingly personal question: who exactly taught you to be a mom? I mean it. Try to figure this out, and then ask yourself if they were qualified to be a mother, much less train you to be one. So you may want to get some training. Training usually comes in the form of therapy.

Once there was a guy named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and among his very good points was that if parents are concerned about their kids, get therapy. This is not so shocking of an idea - if you need to help the people around you, particularly if they need you to be emotionally available, and at peace with yourself, then you need to get a grip on your existence and basically grow up. I know you’ve been trying to do this for a while, though I think that we really do need help. Here is an article about someone born right around when you were who does work with young mothers (second section down).

Your chart says you have a lot of unmet relationship needs. I suggest you find a way to express those needs without creating a disruption in your kid’s life. That is to say, keep your boyfriends and romantic intrigues out of the way of your kid, until you have tested them and you are pretty sure the relationship is stable. In my opinion the most disturbing thing in a child’s life is the parent or parents not having a stable relationship(s). You obviously need to experiment, and you may need to get a little wild. So just figure out a way to keep that project separate from your parenting project.

One interesting thing in your chart is that you have the Moon in Cancer, but it’s conjunct Vesta. This speaks to both you as a lover, and you as a mother. That can combine the property of mothering with the property of sacrifice, and sexuality with the property of being a kind of sacred whore. First things first. I suggest you either go for it and give yourself totally to being a mom to the exclusion of everything else (unlikely) or work to process through and eliminate the notion of sacrifice. Can you really do this? Well, you can. But you need to get really serious about getting your needs met; at least some of them and, over time, hopefully more of them. This is doubly true with Vesta close to your Moon - your tendency will be to give to others erotically; Vesta is the one who bestows erotic gifts on others, and she can do a lot of doing without herself.

I know — this may be the last thing you think you can do, but it’s probably going to be the only thing that works. And I know I say this a lot, but find a cool therapist who is a lot smarter than you and get yourself together. You will never regret it.

Yours & truly,

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Reader Comments

Eric and Staff,

Thank you very much for your response to my question. A tip of the cap to all of you. I can’t express how much my eyes have opened to the world events through your writing and associated articles except to say I was a Bush lovin’, Iraq hatin’, Republican until I was turned on to your site by a friend.

Regards,

Gary Burris (Mr. Cardinal)

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Dear Planet Waves:

I thought Eric missed the point when responding to a reader question last week (the would-be artist who was also drawn to lead a cloistered life). On the one hand, the advice was good: do the work you are called to do and deal with the consequences as they come. But I thought it was a bit hard to say that this reluctance is the result of being too self-involved. Maybe it is in her case, I don’t know, but I do know more than one artist who has really struggled with this dilemma. In each case they have found a way to continue to work, while dodging the mainstream because they haven’t felt up to playing the games that are part of success. They know success isn’t guaranteed in any case but, if I understand them correctly, they also value the freedom that comes when you live a relatively obscure life: the privacy, the lack of pressure, the sense of being more grounded, more part of the everyday.

— K

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Readers may send their questions to questions -at- planetwaves.net with the word QUESTION in the subject header. Not all questions will be answered. Please keep them short, concise and most of all, relevant to our readers. Please include your full birth data written out, for example, Feb. 30, 1801, rather than 2/30/01. Also include your time of birth! This feature is sponsored by your subscriptions to Planet Waves Astrology News, so please sign up and if you’re already a subscriber, please sign up a friend.

Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today
Aha this kiss you give, its never ever gonna fade away…

-OMD (live) and studio version with archival footage. Interview with the crew of the Enola Gay.

Dear Friend and Reader:

TODAY WE COME to a somber point in the year — the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is one of our traditions at Planet Waves to acknowledge these events, which are typically treated as if they never happened. [Please see our cover photo here, of the Atomic Bomb Memorial in Hiroshima.] We Americans have good reason to ignore them: they are among the worst atrocities committed by human beings, and our nation was responsible. They were committed even as we were cleaning up from the Allies’ triumph over Hitler, whose crime was the mass extermination of populations.

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of Little Boy.

Scarcely three months after the last concentration camps in Germany and Poland were liberated, an airplane called the Enola Gay set across the Pacific with the first atomic bomb that would be used on a foreign population. Previous bombs were tested over the southwestern United States through the 1940s, and more than 100 in total over the US itself. Countless American civilians, GIs, small children, farm animals and vast swaths of land were exposed to radioactive fallout.

What happened on Aug. 6, 1945 was different. An American plane, codenamed Mother and piloted by Paul Tibbets, dropped a bomb, codenamed the Little Boy, on a “virgin target” — a city unscathed by the war between Japan and the US that had raged the past four years. He named the airplane after his own mother. This is an astonishing bit of history that we need to psychoanalyze a little more often.

From what I have read, we dropped the bomb on a fresh target rather than a damaged one for scientific purposes: to see precisely what the bomb could do to an actual civilization. Three days later, on Aug. 9, another plane delivered a bomb to the city of Nagasaki. I will not attempt to quote estimates of the dead. The number does not matter. What matters more is that to this day people are still suffering the effects of the radiation, mainly through multi-generational effects such as genetically-induced cancers. We may wonder if an injury like this inflicted to a society can ever really heal, to the victim or the attacker.

If you consider yourself a sensitive, intelligent person, I encourage you to gain (or at least attempt) an understanding of this for yourself. The easiest, most direct way to begin that process is to rent a documentary film called The Atomic Cafe. It was made, incidentally, by Michael Moore’s film mentor, Kevin Rafferty, a cousin of the Bush family. He collaborated with two other directors, Jayne Loader and his brother Pierce Rafferty, and the project took five years to complete. I suggest you watch this film sober. It is just too much to watch under the influence of any substance. It reveals the mass psychology, delusion and psychosis of the development of the bomb and the so-called Cold War era.

Let’s take a look at the chart. This chart is actually worth a book, but I will offer several observations on both the major planets and the small ones.

– Virgo is rising, suggesting the methodical nature of the attack. Years of research and development of the bomb preceded its first use. Mercury, the ruler of the ascendant, is in the 12th house of secret missions, secret enemies and the shadow side of human nature. The Bomb is the shadow side of Virgo: the opposite of service, and the dark interior of what we nonchalantly call “science.”

– The Moon is in Cancer, and it’s exactly conjunct Saturn. I consider this the thumb print of the chart. It is as cold as ice. The Moon and Saturn are near the North Node, which reflects and establishes the direction the world would take for the next untold number of decades. This is an almost ironic expression of the dark mother imagery depicted in the choice of code names for the project — Mother and Little Boy. Need I note that this is a parody on Christianity so sick one could vomit.

– Venus is square Chiron. A lot of people on the American side got really, really emotionally high off of this event. More people were killed in one instant than any time before in known history, and for a lot of so-called scientists and government bureaucrats it was like huffing shoe polish. The problem was they needed the next high, and that’s not usually as interesting — in this case it turned out to be Nagasaki and then the endless proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

– Eris is opposite Neptune. Like most Neptune aspects, I am having difficulty translating this into words. But there is something deeply delusional about this aspect, with the goddess of discord and the patron of the postmodern age facing into the haze of Neptune.

– The Nuclear Axis is taking important transits from Mars and Uranus. The axis, which stretches across early-to-mid Gemini/Sagittarius, was defined in the chart for the first atomic reaction, in December of 1942.

– The closest minor points to the ascendant are Amor, Cupido and Photographica — two that deal with love, and one that is typically involved with the making of images. We put a loving face on the mass incineration of a city; we committed murder and called it good. For the most part, we still do. Just ask around.

Yours and truly,

Today’s Oracle takes us to the Saggitarius weekly of Sept. 6, 2001

(The Oracle is a random daily selection from among 10,000 horoscopes written by Eric Francis)

It’s now time to get aggressive on a financial matter that is associated with a creative venture. The value of this project just went up. You may not have seen it on the stock market update, but it actually happened. Part of why its value increased is a matter of timing: You were forced by factors outside your control to wait, and you did, and now you become a kind of beneficiary of circumstance — and of your own patience, work and ideas.

Tuesday 05 August 2008

Sun (13+ Leo) semisquare Hades (28+ Gemini)
Apollo (29+ Leo) conjunct Orcus (29+ Leo)
Mercury (19+ Leo) conjunct Eros (19+ Leo)
Venus (28+ Leo) trine Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Amor (6+ Gemini) quincunx Hidalgo (6+ Scorpio)
Venus (29+ Leo) conjunct Orcus (29+ Leo)
Apollo (29+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Jupiter (14+ Capricorn Rx)
Venus (29+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Jupiter (14+ Capricorn Rx)
Venus (29+ Leo) conjunct Apollo (29+ Leo)
Arachne (14+ Libra) quintile Galactic Center (26+ Sagittarius)
Ceres (23+ Cancer) square 1992 QB1 (23+ Aries Rx)
Mars (21+ Virgo) trine Sedna (21+ Taurus)
Sisyphus (16+ Libra) quintile Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Atlantis (23+ Libra) trine Neptune (23+ Aquarius Rx)
Sun (13+ Leo) sesquiquadrate Pluto (28+ Sagittarius Rx)
Mercury (21+ Leo) square Sedna (21+ Taurus)

Dear Friend and Reader:

Today I have a small collection of some of my past writing on eclipses. I think I’ve covered about 50 different eclipses in my astrology career, more of them than meetings of the SUNY Board of Trustees, the American Medical Association and toxins disasters combined.

These articles manage to be pretty philosophical. The first is an article on the most recent solar eclipse, in Aquarius, back from Feb. 7, 2008. It is the kind of superior quality propaganda you expect in a subscriber edition. It’s called Notes from the Technosphere.

Let’s skitz back in time to June 2002. This article is proof that I was blogging before there was a blogosphere, and it’s a fun article which conveys the feeling of an eclipse. It has some fun stuff about Chiron as well.

Here is one from the Astrology Secrets Revealed archive. It’s simply called Solar Eclipse.

Here is a piece about a total lunar eclipse that had a name, called the Harmonic Concordance. This is a second article on the topic, called A Book About Women.

Finally, here is my favorite article that relates to an eclipse. It’s called Flashpoints: The Continuation of Burning Man. It is a snapshot of the summer of the Aug. 11, 1999 umbra over Europe - a memoir of the late 20th century. A background article in the same series is posted here.

Catch you with an extra update tonight, Thursday.

Bye for now,

Today’s Oracle takes us to May 06, 2005 - Cancer - Weekly

The past few weeks have presented quite a few challenges where dealing with others is concerned. Clashes in ideology sorting out fact from fiction and dealing with people who have some strong viewpoints have all been part of the game of life. That’s about to change. It’s as if you’ve passed a test to see whether you could withstand high energy and people who test your patience. If you can keep your cool for the next few days you may find that the territory of your life opens up and that you are experiencing the benefits of true self-confidence.

Thursday 31 July 2008

Mercury (9+ Leo) septile M87 (1+ Libra)
Atlantis (21+ Libra) quincunx Sedna (21+ Taurus)
Apollo (26+ Leo) trine Galactic Center (26+ Sagittarius)
Sun (8+ Leo) square Asbolus (8+ Taurus)
Mercury (10+ Leo) quintile Pallas (28+ Taurus)
Venus (23+ Leo) opposite Neptune (23+ Aquarius Rx)
Ceres (21+ Cancer) square Eris (21+ Aries Rx)
Mercury (11+ Leo) square Pandora (11+ Scorpio)
Eros (16+ Leo) semisquare M87 (1+ Libra)

PS, for those of you new to Planet Waves, I did a lot of astrology blogging between 2004 and 2006. Here is a complete archive of my older stuff.