Dear Friend and Reader:
Happy Equinox to you. The Sun has entered the tropical sign Aries and its rays are square the Equator. Today and for several days on either side of today, night and day are of equal length all over the world. This changes fast. It will soon be the land of the perpetual night down in South Africa and Antarcica, and the land of the Midnight Sun in Alaska and Yukon.
The new Planet Waves Astrology News is out. It’s called “Aries Equinox and the Crisis of Confidence.” The theme: the American people have lost their confidence; it may be all of us in the Western world who are feeling the drain. A constellation of the Sun, Pluto and several potent minor planets (Okyrhoe, Achilles and Kronos) are teaming up to say: pay attention. Get your mind on the job. Stop dreaming and wake the fuck up. This is life, and it’s not getting any different until you make it different.
At Planet Waves, astrology is not something that happens to you. Rather, it’s something we walk into like a kitchen and use to make dinner for a lot of people.
Today’s edition goes into the psychology of the Iraq war and how this was used as an excuse to gut the world economy. It talks about our endless litany of fears: connected with money, with sex, with intimacy, with abandonment, with being bored, with being creative, with being dead and with being alive — in short, if you look around, it’s possible to get the feeling that everyone is afraid of everything, and committed to it. This may not be entirely true, but we’re scared enough that the economy isn’t the only thing that’s frozen; it’s our collective sense of guts and daring, our desire to get our lives in gear and go somewhere interesting, and our sense that life is an experiment.
I’m here to suggest you stop worrying about the economy and put your heart and soul into something creative. I’m here to say it’s time to make contact with people who share your inner sense of potential — I know you have it. I know because I’ve read too many of your charts not to know, and I know because I know about myself.
Today’s edition also includes an expanded Equinox horoscope edition for all 12 signs, which looks closely at Venus retrograde in Aries. Venus will be backing into a square to Pluto in Capricorn, crossing the Aries Point and then dipping for 10 days into Pisces, when we find out what spirituality, love, sex and art all have in common; that is, if we want to know.
And for my readers here, I have one story that didn’t make it into the edition, one of those late-night production things. I’ve been running a day late all week, which is a long time if you have two deadlines a day. So this issue of Planet Waves stretched into the wee hours; and somewhere in there, I asked Anatoly, our webmaster in the Ukraine, to find me some pictures of pro-war protests for today’s edition, which gets into the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war.
He searched the Web for a few minutes and brought back a bunch of antiwar protest pictures. And I said, um, we need pictures of a pro-war protest. To which he replied, “A what?”
Right. I laughed so loud, I thought I woke up my neighbors. Fortunately a pro-war protest is a thing of the past. But not the distant past. Let’s stop the war, and the war against ourselves.
For Planet Waves at the vernal equinox, this is
I attended one of those (pre) War protest vigils the evening of March 16, 2003. Yes, there were dogs there and small children, and we all carried lit candles and signs saying “No War!” and “Peace”. I remember commenting that in the 60’s we called them peace rallies instead of anti-war rallies. ‘Course the war was already going on in the 60’s, so I guess that’s the difference. Most of the cars going by honked in agreement and waved and shouted encouragement. But not all.
A few days ago Eric spoke of the bucket pattern that the planets were forming. Right now if you want to see what that looks like, go to alabe dot com. All the major planets except Saturn are squeezed into less than 100 degrees of the chart. It looks like a big lollipop with Saturn as the handle, and will look that way until the moon moves past (way past) Venus.
Awesome call to action. Thank you. truly.
I meant to say that the book was written in A fury, not in fury. In fact, during the year of its making, the book came in fits and starts, and than poured out with intensity, but not so much with rage.
“I’m here to suggest you stop worrying about the economy and put your heart and soul into something creative. I’m here to say it’s time to make contact with people who share your inner sense of potential — I know you have it.”
That quote could have been lifted from the pages of my new book so it sounds like the perfect day to have a booksigning/reading of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, at the Vashon Bookshop, Vashon, WA at 7 pm. Since the book, written by some force beyond and in collaboration with the author, is primarily about using the arts for social change and healing, it sounds like just the right birthday. Part memoir, fable, history, theory and the stories of 33 other practitioners who have taught art for social change (some for over 3 decades) the book, although conjured up over 10 years ago, was written last year in fury, and it seems to have landed at exactly the right moment. The following is one of the last paragraphs in the book:
“I have had a sense of mission in writing this book, a sense that many activists own, that we are running out of time, and in this time that we have, we have to convert hundreds of thousands of other artists to this calling. This has to be a diverse movement of activist artists if it is going to work, and it will have to be sneaky, smart and effective. Artists will have to make work that helps their audiences overcome their learned fears about art, and empowers them to make their own stories emerge. With each unfolding of a person’s story, a life becomes less alienated; a person becomes more connected to the whole. We have to be persistent and patient, open hearted and ruthless in our risk-taking. We no longer have the luxury of waiting generations. Our window of opportunity is only open a small crack, and we need to stretch it as far open as possible. And remember that we don’t need to do this work with the painful intensity that will scare away potential joiners. We need to do it with a joyful sway of our hips, with the pleasure of knowing that we have given our all and our best shot.”
I remember all too well the day we started the war in Iraq. I thought it was evil genius to launch it on Spring Day, and everybody I knew was doubled over in pain all day long. (Then we stood up and started organizing.) To this day, I believe the American public was engaged in some kind of thought-control experiment.
Since then I’ve seen the data on ‘referred aggression’ and understand its application in that situation. What I learned and re-learned from the American people’s 2003 convulsion is that ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are less than a straw in the wind when it comes to limbic-system reactivity. Which is why lust/anger/fear have to, have to, *have to* be handled directly.
They are only toxic to the extent that they aren’t engaged and respected for the enzymatic energies that they are.
Breaking through on Spring Day 09.
M