Dear Friend and Reader,
The news for homeowners and auto industry employees this week has been troubling. On Thursday, The Home section of The New York Times reported that over one million homes have been lost in the past two years, and the Mortgage Bankers Association (who’s annual conference featured a near-citizen’s arrest on Karl Rove Tuesday) predicts 1.5 million more are in the process of foreclosure.
Thursday evening, I was listening to one of our more local radio stations, which interviews Newark, New Jersey’s Mayor Cory Booker once a month on the city’s most pressing issues. Hetakes this time to answer calls from Newark residents.
(Aside: Newark has one of the highest crime rates in the country, and is a true melting pot of ethnicities and religions, along with a high rate of poverty.)
On the program this month, Mayor Booker talked about the mortgage crisis, which has hit the impoverished city earlier than many others, and is sure to get worse.
Women called in that evening with stories about losing their homes, and about $4000 a month mortgages and low salaries. Mayor Booker pointed them to local organizations that can help.
Of course, besides the high cost of mortgages, people are losing their jobs. Chrysler just announced on Friday that it will be cutting 25 percent of its 18,500 white-collar workers in the next month.
And a larger overall problem is almost half of Americans have no savings, living paycheck to paycheck, and “48 percent of American households have less than $5,000 in liquid assets according to Edward Wolff, an economist specializing in the study of poverty and income distribution at New York University,” The Times reports.
While it’s easy to report numbers, the psychological impact of losing a home is a long-lasting trauma. Our homes are where we ground ourselves, our families, our possessions. It’s where we close our doors to the outside world and feel safe and secure. When that most essential space is taken from us, whether from missed payments or no fault of our own, it takes away the sense of control we have over our lives. And when I start thinking about control, I wonder where astrology plays a role. So I asked Genevieve Salerno which house is the one for houses.
The house for the house house…is the 4th house, which…interestingly enough, is directly opposite the 10th house, or the house of the president…suggesting our rulers have a direct influence over and under our home lives. Strangely enough, Bush is a Cancer, which is the 4th house sign, one associated with security.
Eric adds, “The 4th is the ancient house of fathers, the land, our heritage…it’s the roots. The 10th is where we can express ourselves if we are grounded in the 4th. What we’re experiencing now is really a redistribution of wealth, of the land.”
While this is, by all means, an unsettling time, it’s also a good moment to trust in the cycles of everything, of astrology, of upset leading to calm. “Astrology advises where we are in a cycle and what role we might play,” Eric replies, “this whole drama is largely about dismantling parental constructs in our minds. Every aspect, event, etc. has an external and internal set of manifestations. The archetypes work in the physical, social and psychological worlds.”
Change is coming in many ways: we’re seeing the end of a presidential era, and the opportunity for something different, a new direction in the economy and in the way the United States and the world is ordered. We’re told so often to “embrace change,” but when it affects us so close to the bone it’s harder to take: we want to change our president, not our homes.
Yours & truly,
