Pisces, Chiron and Whole-System Thinking

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To celebrate Earth Day, I took Thursday morning off and went to the Grandmother Land, a place I’m friendly with that’s tucked away in the mountains of central Ulster County. My day-to-day work has me looking into glowing rectangles much of the time, they are hypnotic and I’m aware that part of my soul lives on the Internet. Grounding into the Earth discharges that energy and gradually brings me to my senses. Usually I hang out on top of the waterfall; this time I went to the lower part of the falls, got as close to the water as I could, and lay down on the cool rock. The Sun tucked in and out between the clouds.

One of the things I value about this spot is that it’s like a clock that moves only with the seasons. From year to year, the landscape is beautifully consistent; there’s nothing industrial around, it has no business purpose and at this time in history there are few visitors. In this place I can feel back to the end of the last ice age, a sensation which slows down the experience of time passing. The approximately 6,500 days since I arrived there for the first time are like a minute or two passing if you put things in the context of geological time.

I find this reassuring. Even astrology is not suited to handle such large passages of time, or at least Western astrology isn’t (Mayan astrology is much better suited for super-long timespans). Yet we do get the chance to witness changes, especially if we remember the holographic quality of astrology: the whole is contained in the parts. Movements in small cycles can signify movements in much larger ones. If you’re familiar with the concept of a fractal, consider that astrology is the original application of that concept. A fractal is like a sample of time that tells the whole story.

Chiron made an impressive show ingressing Pisces this week. Now that Chiron is moving slowly through the signs and living as an outer planet — at this point, it’s moving through the signs slower than Uranus — these sign changes are more significant. Each one comes with a revelation. I’m counting the immediate zone of the ingress as going back to the Aries New Moon last week, which coincided within a few hours with a chunk of an asteroid lighting up skies over the American Midwest. And as it happened, that was the day that Eyjafjallajokull went off for the second time in 2010. (By the way — I am equally impressed by these two events, though the meteor hardly got the attention it deserved. If you’re wondering what this might be about astrologically, think of it as a very, very precise conjunction.)

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 23, 2010, #813 – BY ERIC FRANCIS

Taurus Confidential	Have you considered that your lack of confidence is not authentic? I’m not saying you’re faking, rather that you have more reasons to be confident than you give yourself credit for, and more than enough experience to remind you what you’re capable of. So why exactly would you doubt yourself? If this points to something from the past, you’re about to get significant insight into its origins. Meanwhile, I have an idea for an art therapy project that might give you a visual image; your solar chart at the moment says seeing is believing. Using a webcam or a digital camera, photograph yourself when you’re feeling insecure. Who do you look like? Then photograph yourself when you’re feeling solid, strong and determined. Who do you look like then? As for a journaling project: going back as far as you can remember, what is your association between marriage and money?