{"id":4951,"date":"2008-11-02T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=4951"},"modified":"2008-10-31T11:22:33","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T16:22:33","slug":"god-family-and-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/god-family-and-country\/","title":{"rendered":"God, Family and Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note:\u0412\u00a0There are people you meet with whom you can carry on a lively conversation for an hour and feel as though you’ve made a wonderful discovery for that moment in time. Then there are people you meet whose interests, philosophy, and open-wonderment about the world make you feel as though you’ve met long-lost family. That’s the feeling I got meeting Rahmana (pronounced “Rahk-mana”) Finney.\u0412\u00a0From politics to astrology, Rahmana’s got a lot of things covered, and its my pleasure to introduce her to our Planet Waves community.–Fe Bongolan.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n

YOU KNOW HOW IN HORROR MOVIES, the haunted house is always built on a mass grave of people who died horrible and unfair deaths? Our country is built on a foundation of slavery and genocide. As we have all this astrological activity in the sky with Pluto, the planet of change, moving into Capricorn, an earth sign\u0432\u0402\u201dfoundation\/structure\u0432\u0402\u201dit seems the cracks in the foundation are really showing now.<\/p>\n

\"Approaching<\/a>
Approaching the farmhouse on an October night in Normandy. Photo by Danielle Voirin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had this dream once based on a book I read by the late great Octavia Butler, an African-American science fiction novelist. It was called, Pattern Master. The lead character in the book was a woman who could literally see the connection between all humanity as this golden thread that went through everyone which connected us all to each other. It was a golden string that went through people’s middles into other people’s middles like an energy thread in a huge quilt. It felt like what ever sickness or suffering that came out of one person could somehow affect the next person their thread went into and so on and so on.<\/p>\n

I think what’s going on in America right now — the recession that no one will officially name and all the financial drowning related to it, the environmental woes & natural disasters, the wars — has a lot to do with the karma of this country. My grandmother taught me that there are three types of karma: individual, family and national. What you do comes back to you.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Even if you don’t believe in karma we can probably at least agree that you reap what you sow. There’s the family karma. I’d like to say first that I’ve noticed over the years (’cause I love doing people’s charts) that most families seem to be ruled by a cluster of signs. Because I’ve always felt like such an orphan, I’ve spent a lot of time with other people’s families, you know for holidays and such, and somehow I find a way to find out people’s birthdays and ages. I’ve done hundreds of basic charts, knowing at least people’s planet signs and often house placements or rising signs. And I’ve noticed that people in the same family tend to have a lot of planets in the same signs.<\/p>\n

Like me, my aunt and my cousin all have Venus in Scorpio. My grandmother has her Moon in Scorpio. I had a boyfriend once who had a lot of Aries and Scorpio family members. Fiery family \u0432\u0402\u201d lot’s of laughter, dancing and shouting; lots of tempers. My step-father’s family had a lot of fire; lots of Sagg, Leo and Aries people. And I mean isn’t everyone’s family MADLY dysfunctional? In a proverbial smorgasbord of ways? I just can’t imagine that we could go through some of the things we go through with our families if we didn’t have karma with them.<\/p>\n

Relationships with family are so complex. Full of anger, guilt, love, co-dependence, pity, miscommunication and angst. Such heavy bonds. Human beings have had a lot of evolving to do when it comes to parenting, which is why a show like The Sopranos<\/em> was so monstrously huge. The reality of the people you love the most being the ones who are hurting you the most is something that most people can relate to. We are just not getting along at all. It seems everyone’s deeper needs are clashing. Our values are so different, especially in response to this planet of ours that is in the eye of the storm as we begin the movement of changing from one age to the next.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A fast food oasis tries to coax you in from the chaotic light show in Times Square. Photo by Danielle Voirin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’m watching the alcoholic of the family get sicker with age. I’m watching people acquire more and more things and worry more and more about those things. I wonder why my lower back aches every time I leave dinner.<\/p>\n

I’m watching everyone get ill and over-weight from eating all this toxic American fast-food, becoming almost bipolar from the side-effects of their pharmaceuticals, and giving me the screw-face or odd silence anytime sex comes up and then retreating to the television \u0432\u0402\u201d which is doing just what George Clinton of Parliament\/Funkadelic said: “sucking their brains until their ability to think was amputated by pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny and strung out.”<\/p>\n

This is my five planets in Scorpio and Virgo rising talking. But sometimes my Mercury in Sagittarius says, maybe we are helplessly, and with much resistance, learning to love each other more and more, if we’re lucky.<\/em> Well, a country is just a really large family.<\/p>\n

I’m a little irritated by this undercurrent in the media, even by people who genuinely want things to get better, along the lines of “Let’s get this country back to what it used to be.” Hmmmmm. What it used to be? You mean the place where a whole other race of people lived before another race of people came and slowly exterminated them with war and disease? Pushing them further and further West until they stole the entire joint?<\/p>\n

Where our “founding fathers” wrote these amazing documents about freedom and equality while the descendants of another race of people were enslaved to perform free labor so that the new people could make more money to own a lot of stuff and buy say, a lot of guns and open banks? The country who after deciding to free the “slave labor” workers, continued to terrorize and harass them and deny them any type of real equality until they started getting real mad and bought some guns for themselves because they couldn’t take it any more? What is this old America that people are talking about?<\/p>\n

You know what I’m realizing about my family? That I never knew them at all. And that they never knew me. That we’ve both been frontin’ and just trying to deal with each other with a smile. There are all these secrets. There are all these painful things that no one ever talks about. Abusive relationships that haven’t even been identified as such. It’s the same reason John McCain can say he’s appalled at anyone making a comparison between him and Strom Thurmond and bombing six little girls in Sunday School.<\/p>\n

Yet most of us know that there are probably a bunch of straight-up racists voting for McCain\/Palin. Every time I listen to her speak, the word Nazi just pops in my head. Is that something I’m not supposed to say? Like how I’m never supposed to make an issue about what a freaking bully my large bossy cousin is. She is who she is. That’s the new phrase today. “It is what it is.” What the hell does THAT mean? Yeah, she IS mean, she IS a liar, she IS a verbally abusive person and I AM tired of it.<\/p>\n

I’m little. I was one of those kids who got bossed around a lot. I can relate in a very symbolic way to how the Korean kid at Virginia Tech and the Columbine boys felt. It is very difficult to endure physical and verbal abuse when you are a child. And it shapes who you are. And some-times people snap.<\/p>\n

When you have established in a family this pattern of behavior between the more aggressive, self-centered people and the more thoughtful, contemplative people who after a while get sick of the way they are treated, the family begins to dwindle. The Christmas dinners aren’t as full as they used to be, because who wants to come around for a side of abuse with their turkey?<\/p>\n

As far as I can see, America has never, ever been a place of total equality, justice and opportunity. But I think it will be one day. I think a large portion of our population is going in the right direction. If you’re even reading this. If you’re voting for Barack. Yeah I said it. And I ain’t saying he’s perfect. We surely need him though. If you try to turn off all your appliances at night; If you try to get your kids to watch less TV; If you’ve even had your chart done, you are going in the right direction.<\/p>\n

We’ve been fighting to make those words in the Constitution come true since they were written. I think it’s more like, we’re trying to get the world to where it should be.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,
\nRahmana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note:\u0412\u00a0There are people you meet with whom you can carry on a lively conversation for an hour and feel as though you’ve made a wonderful discovery for that moment in time. Then there are people you meet whose interests, philosophy, and open-wonderment about the world make you feel as though you’ve met long-lost family. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,52,117],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}