Days of the Dead Covers; New Book of Blue series on rape

Dear Friend and Reader:

I’m here to tell you about two developing series’, one on Planet Waves and one on my other Web project, Book of Blue. The Sun is now in Scorpio, and that means we are in the Days of the Dead. This is the time when the veil between the psychic dimensions is thinnest. The two worlds, that of the supposedly living and that of the supposedly deceased, come the closest together. We are developing some new stuff, and we’ll also post some archive pieces here this week at 6 pm.

I would like to reach out to anyone who follows the Mexican tradition of Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos), anyone who knows what I mean by standing up for the dead, honoring our ancestors and any who have a conscious relationship with those who have passed.

This tradition has the same roots as our Halloween tradition; which in turn are rooted in the pagan high sabbat of Sahwen (properly spelled Samhain). This in turn seems to be so old that it goes back to ancient Egypt.

Regular Planet Waves readers know that we honor this tradition every year, and also the Beltane tradition — the May. These are the two anchor points of our lives: celebrating life, sexuality, sex, passion, planting and birth in the spring; and the harvest, transition, death and surrender in the autumn (both references to the Northern Hemisphere seasons). I believe that if we honor these two traditions, we can stay in tune with the flow of life and remain balanced and grounded in existence.

As part of this, Dani and I are dong a series of covers focusing on the theme of death, which will run through the weekend. These are on the cover page, with archives linked into the “prior cover” chain that is in each caption. If you would like to see the picture change daily, bookmark that page, or set it as your homepage and then click through to the blog.

Apropos of sex, death and Scorpio is a new series on Book of Blue that might be of interest to some of our readers here. It’s on the definition of rape (following a trend toward understanding the sex/violence nexus that runs through the whole series).

It started on its own and is now based loosely on two correspondences I am having, one with a reader and the other with one of my fellow bloggers here. As of now there are three articles posted (including “The Question of Rape” and The Fulcrum”; several more are in the hopper and will post in the next 24 hours. The gist is this: the definition of rape clearly needs to be expanded to include manipulation and coercion, but this puts women in a much higher level of responsibility for admitting to desire, acting on it and negotiating boundaries. If we’re going to address rape, the sexual discussion has to happen — and I think that violative sex is such a problem because the discussion has been shamed and moralized out of existence.

I welcome discussion of that series here.

We have a busy week planned, in these final days before the most important US election of our lifetimes. On Friday I plan to answer some of the darkest conspiracy theories surrounding Barack Obama, and explain in terms both astrological and practical why this is the most significant election of our collective lifetime.

Please stay tuned, and please send your friends.

Yours & truly,