Friday’s Planet Waves: Chilean Miner Rescue Chart

Hello Friends and Readers:

We’re about done with the Friday edition of Planet Waves. In the article I look in depth at the meaningful chart for the first miner rescued, and offer some ideas about what this event says about us. Later in the article, I also go into some depth on Venus retrograde, Mars and Vesta in Scorpio.

Here is a brief excerpt of the article:

We could fault the worldwide vigil around the rescue as a feel-good event, but I daresay that’s what the world needs now: to actually feel good about life and love rather than the stock market or American Idol. We do a lot of getting pissed off and most of that involves how little regard is afforded to the worth of life. Watching those guys come out of the rescue pod one by one, and embrace their families, it was impossible not to appreciate being alive, right then, on the spot.

Yes, we can even feel good about humanity’s ability to cooperate at doing something helpful. There was a time those men would have been left for dead, even if some effort might have saved them. Part of what did save them was publicity — you’re always safer near a TV camera. The drilling experts, engineers, submarine scientists, geologists and (actual) rocket scientists got the guys out. The doctors and psychologists on the surface actually seem to have offered some significant help.

Yet in reality it was the miners themselves who kept it together under some strange, extreme circumstances, rationing teaspoons of food and cups of milk for the first 17 days on the verge of starvation. They organized work tasks based on their specialties, keeping their living space clean, digging wells for fresh water and most of all, getting along. Or rather — getting along, eventually. Apparently the sanitized account of events has left out the at times intense conflict that they experienced, and their darker thoughts of waiting to die for during those first 17 days. In the end, he miners decided together that they were going to get out of that stuffy, 90-degree mine alive. For a more complete account of what happened, this article from The Guardian is worth reading.

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