Dear Friend and Reader:
Days away from the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries, all you have to do is watch television for five minutes before you recognize that the world is in the midst of a worst-case scenario. The truth is, regarding the oil volcano in the Gulf, it’s now been six weeks and it remains out of control despite one failed effort after the next to contain the gusher. Most people are significantly underestimating the global scale of this crisis. Meanwhile there are significant issues on many other fronts, from banking to war, each of them threatening a major regional or global situation. It’s making me feel nostalgic for the simpler days when all we had to worry about was nuclear war.
The irony, or perhaps the deeper truth, is that the aspects we’re experiencing are some of the most mind-expanding and life-affirming astrology we’ve ever lived through, and yet the world seems to be in the midst of a constant disaster. In this, we face ecological and economic consequences; and we face an immediate human toll. Anyone who is paying attention feels the pain emotionally. And it seems to be the people the most emotionally sensitive to the world’s delicate balance, who feel the plight and pain of animals and the land, who understand how bad this is. We understand this is a permanent change in the shape of the world.
There may be a silver lining to this catastrophe, which is that these events seem destined to wake up enough people to the simple truth that as a society, we have run out of ideas about how to live, and we are now experiencing the consequences of that. What we are witnessing seems destined to stir people to make a difference — not necessarily a lot, but just enough. I’m not speaking from my unshakable faith in humanity to take care of itself, but rather the way the aspects develop as the next few weeks unwind, and as the next two years unfold.
Since Uranus entered Aries, it does seem the world has gone just a little extra mad — and it was doing quite well with that project before this week. You know things are weird when there’s a mass murder in England, where most cops don’t even have guns. With Jupiter arriving, many people will not be able to handle this energy comfortably; the more dense one’s level of awareness, the more challenging it is. If you can open up, it’s easier. This of course is counterintuitive. The natural response is to crawl into a hole and try to forget about the world. Yet that’s precisely how we got into this mess.
Yet what cannot be tuned out so easily is the personal influence that these aspects are having, and they are acting on each and every one of our charts. We all know what time it is. Many are feeling a sense of urgency within our personal development, profound restlessness, that sense of wanting to wake up and looking around for others to show signs of stirring to consciousness. I have a suggestion: don’t waste your time waiting for anyone else. This is about you. As soon as you accept that it’s about you, then it can become about us.
What we’re witnessing and experiencing with the many different crises the world is facing is a paradigm running out: an entire framework of reality that can no longer contain the problems it creates, nor can it solve them. A paradigm is a way of saying a shared idea about life, but it’s an idea with incredible momentum and many people trying to hold it up.
For example, it’s becoming obvious through the financial crisis, the healthcare crisis and this oil mess, that the profit motive is not the best thing to have running at the core of a civilization. Greed is not spiritual, it’s not sustainable and it’s not even useful; and we are feeling the devastating results of a culture based on this self-serving principle.
Similarly, attachment is not a sustainable basis for our relationships. It’s not a substitute for love or for trust, yet it’s the way we most often try to coexist. Our concept of our relationships does not contain the reality of our relationships, or our emotional needs, or our social needs.
The problem when an old paradigm runs out is that most people have no clue what’s happening, and don’t take a creative role in what happens next. If we know we’ve reached the end of this particular tether, we may not have any ideas for what to do next. We’re being called right now to do both: to notice, and to make adjustments to our thinking, behavior, economic patterns and relationships; and we will need to make new adjustments every day. If we’re being summoned by time and events to do anything, it is to live in a highly conscious way, aware of our relationship interactions and how we influence the world. And we are being summoned to stop being so passive about everything.
In fact, we are being called to respond together. One key attribute of the current Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is a calling of the tribes. It’s about individual awakening that leads to being drawn toward people with whom we are in affinity. Affinity means the sharing of common values, a worldview and a sense of purpose. Notice who you meet these very days. This conjunction, wherever it happens in the zodiac, is famous for meetings and the beginnings of relationships that turn out to be truly significant. For many reasons this effect may be amplified greatly now. We are at a convergence point, that is, a meeting point where we may meet our true identity and then gather with others with that knowledge.
A Look at the Planets
Let’s recap the astrology: powerful planets are lining up on this thing called the Aries Point, which is pushing self-awareness and a sense of connection. They are Jupiter and Uranus, together about 2,000 times the size of the Earth. This conjunction, exact this coming Tuesday for the one-and-only time in Aries, arrives with an ongoing jolt of wake-up energy, with the world crashing into one’s living room and with a healthy dose of everything all at once.
Pluto in early Capricorn (an Aries Point influence, square Jupiter and Uranus) is offering the feeling that the world’s infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. Corporations, governments, banks and personal relationships (all organized under Capricorn influences) seem particularly susceptible. Somewhere lurking in our minds is the notion that the old system has to collapse before the new one can emerge. The fops running the planet had better keep that trickle of electricity flowing into my computers while that happens.
The problem is that few of us have an idea of how to do something differently; we think we don’t know how to reinvent the world; we can barely make personal changes and shudder at the thought of moving to another city. Even with something as close to home as our relationships, few have any notion of what they want or what would work. It’s time to consider these things.
Saturn is about to enter Libra again (another Aries Point influence, opposite those Aries planets), another factor calling relationships into focus. We are being summoned to consider real ideas about what works and what does not work in our relationships. The keyword is equanimity.
There, Saturn will once again square Pluto and shake up the system even more, and challenge us to get out of our old concepts. Saturn will soon oppose Uranus for the fifth and last time this cycle. Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets, are at opposition to one another now, which is like living two lifetimes in one. In a sense, we are simultaneously incarnated as our past self and our future self.
Mars in Virgo and Chiron in Pisces are at opposition to one another, bringing male warrior energy into full expression. Both are in feminine signs; this is more like sacred warrior energy than a commando raid, but not everyone gets that. The Virgo-Pisces focus of this aspect wants to pour the warrior vibes into healing and service.
Ceres is retrograde in early Capricorn. This is a description of 2012, because Ceres (a dwarf planet and the largest asteroid) is an astrological stand-in for the Earth herself. It’s now in the position of the winter solstice Sun — which is precisely where the 2012 story is focused — and about to retrograde close to the Galactic Center (another focal point of 2012).
And finally, the sky is developing toward The Big One: the first exact Uranus-Pluto square in June 2012 (this happens the same month as the extremely rare Venus transit of the Sun). However, the Uranus-Pluto square comes within three degrees of exactitude this very month, with both planets in the signs of the square: Aries and Capricorn. It is cooking at near full strength right now, and amplified by many other planets.
The Worldly Factor
As this astrology heats up, we seem to have new reasons to freak out showing up at the rate of one every day. There’s allegedly been an act of open war by North Korea against South Korea. There was another Monday by Israel against an international supply flotilla (originating in Turkey) bringing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian ghetto. We are reaching the edge of the old paradigm, ‘Whoever Israel kills and whatever Israel does is okay’.
As global debt mounts, another financial crisis is lurking behind the scenes. We live in The World According to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that’s extremely lucky betting on future disasters. As society crumbles, they believe you can make more money on failure than on success; they are the Bank of Collapse and Catastrophe International (BCCI). History is starting to sound like a Spanish surrealist novel. So many things that are so absurd happen, we expect life to be that way. We’ve grown to expect people to be hypocrites and hardly bat an eye when they are.
We are now watching America’s coastal waters be taken over by evil people who risk the world for their own personal gain, screw up in the process and leave us with the mess. Because under the old paradigm we ‘believe in capitalism’ with religious fervor, anything anyone does for profit is allegedly holy, holy, holy, even when it blows up. So far, every method BP has tried to slow or stop the oil gusher into the Gulf of Mexico has failed, as an unknown quantity of thick red crude bursts into the Gulf every second of the day and night: as much as a barrel per second. However, even by a high estimate, this represents only a few days of petroleum consumption for the United States.
PS, hurricane season began this week: at the least threat of a storm (such as a tropical depression), the drilling rigs will be evacuated, ships collecting oil from the presumed Top Hat will be called into port, and we face the potential for all that loose crude oil getting churned up onto the shore. It has already reached the Loop Current and last I heard was a few miles from the Florida coast. Some say the oil is already in the Gulf Stream.
BP is potentially facing billions in criminal and civil fines, though we’re getting a look at how the world works: for example, that BP is banning the press from videotaping its mess, and using the Coast Guard to enforce its policies. This is the kind of thing that should be on top of your worry list, or your revolution list, every bit as troubling as the oil spill itself.
What’s being advertised as the ‘ultimate solution’, the relief well method (expected to be completed in August), is far riskier and less certain than we are being told. They’ve never dug one of these things so far under the sea floor. For it to work, the drillers have to intercept a dinner plate-sized borehole in the rock with another dinner plate-sized borehole in the rock, a mile below the surface and about three miles below the seabed. Then, if they hit the mark, they plug one hole from the other.
They are currently drilling two relief wells (the second one ordered by Pres. Obama), hoping to have the flow staunched by the Hurricane Katrina anniversary, but so far they can’t even slow down the flow. In other words, after six weeks, the situation remains totally out of control. We do not yet realize how serious this is, though some are starting to figure it out.
Cleanup workers are getting sick from toxic exposure. BP told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that, “The data shows that airborne toxins are well within safe limits.” The toxins include the mix of oil and dispersants. BP is spouting the same lies as GE, Westinghouse, Monsanto and Dow Chemical before it: we’re poisoning you but a little is okay, no matter how sick you get. Jon Stewart noted that BP had more than 700 recent safety violations at refineries in the same span of time that Exxon had just one violation. Is anyone consciously boycotting BP? Or is it business at usual at the pump?
The Issue is How We Live
As we acknowledge how serious this is, we will either have to admit how powerless we are, or take up our power and deal with the issue, or admit that we’re morally compromised. The ‘issue’ is the totality of how we live. The issue is being aware of what it means to live as we do, and consciously acknowledging what else is possible, and why we need to explore those possibilities. In support of this idea, let’s take a trip back in history.
On the eve of the shock and awe campaign — that is, the beginning of the current war against Iraq in early 2003 — I saw the band Audioslave play in Seattle. Tom Morello had a sign taped to his amplifier: “How many Iraqis per gallon?”
About six weeks earlier, I had participated in the F 15 protestsagainst the imminent war, the worldwide day of protest on Feb. 15, 2003. It was one of the most amazing protests I had ever been to, but it lasted a single day when it needed to last till it got results. I was stunned to disbelief at the utter silence that followed, even as Bush, Cheney and Blair went ahead with their illegal war based on nothing but lies and personal greed. Both Bush and Cheney had huge investments in the invasion, through their respective companies (Carlyle Group and Halliburton). I had a sick feeling about this: both the war and the lack of response (responsibility) by the American people. It was as if we were facing one of the biggest moral crises in history and all people wanted to do was drive a bigger SUV. Everyone knew the war, really a blatant, unprovoked assault on the people of a country, was wrong, and yet after that one glorious day of standing up with the world against it, there was hardly a response except by email, Cindy Sheehan and Women in Pink.
As of today, the documented civilian death toll of the war in Iraq stands between 96, 663 and 105,408 men, women and children murdered by the United States, with the participation and endorsement of the government of Great Britain. This was allegedly to “save” the Iraqis from a hobbled dictator and to protect the world from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. We all knew these lame excuses were lies, as was the attempt to blame Iraq for the Sept. 11 incident that was by all evidence a total fraud on the American public and the world: a false flag attack. We knew that Iraq was a war for oil and some of us knew that the war on Afghanistan involved an oil pipeline in neighboring Uzbekistan.
So as the first decade of the 21st century unfolded, Americans were confronted by repeated global-scale injustice committed by their government, including two stolen presidential elections, two wars and many other crimes (such as torture, acknowledged by George W. Bush personally on Wednesday night). Yet we fell mute as we persisted in our “way of life” — the one we were told whoever did Sept. 11 resented us for. There was no actual pushback against these sickening crimes against humanity. Americans never stood up for justice or for themselves, and no, I do not count email petitions. We never risked calling out our leaders for these moral outrages. Americans, as a society, were little children who wanted to be left alone with their toys.
Now that blood-colored crude oil has soaked the Gulf of Mexico and its irreparable wetlands, and threatens to wash up on every beach from Louisiana to Maine, people are traveling to their shores to say goodbye to the American landscape. We have some meditating to do, which will (if we are awake, and this is the test) be short, and be followed by a vocal response to both the government and the corporations that create oil dependency and kill alternative fuel and goad us into wars funded by our stupidity and lack of moral courage. We now have an opportunity to partially redeem our suffering hearts and sold-out souls by taking this disaster as an opportunity to right many wrongs.
Along the way, we need to make countless small changes, which will keep the pressure on the greater powers for the bigger changes. For example, if we cut back our fuel consumption by 10% or 20%, we can make the oil business unprofitable in this country. If we cut back on plastic, we can do the same thing to the companies that make those sickening containers that our so-called food comes in.
My sense is that the silver lining of this disgusting oil spill, that’s threatening to kill every aquatic creature in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, could be an actual environmental awakening. Not merely saying goodbye to the shores of Pensacola and Key West and Miami as we knew them, but an actual pushback. That awakening must be built, cell by cell, of individual choices, of coordinated community choices and of continual adjustments to how we live. We need to use less plastic and less fuel every week. We literally need to question everything. We need to dump a huge bag of household trash out onto the back porch and figure out what’s in there and how it got there and what we can do about it.
We all know there is a problem and many people feel that time is running out. We are going to be living with this sensation for a long time: maybe for as long as we live. To act would be in our own best interest, and that of the world. And within that sphere of pressure, we will still need to make choices, even if they seem hopeless. This will put some responsibility back into our hands, and put us into contact with the truth that we are part of the world in which we live, and that it is part of us.
Yours & truly,
Freedom’s Potential: A Remembrance
| Political Waves
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.Times They Are A Changing
–Bob Dylan
Saturn and Uranus oppose each another in a clash of Titans, reminding me that I wore flowers in my hair in Golden Gate Park long before the Summer of Love, feeling the energy dance on my skin like fireflies sparking off light. That was before the drugs went bad and the ghetto-fires raged, before the snipers loaded their rifles and St. Ronnie the Reagan told us that hippies looked and smelled like Cheetah, before the establishment decided that kids were the enemy, before the churches began to howl about taking back American values. Even when it all went viral, the air was electric with purpose and determination. And while this isn’t the Summer of Love, Part Deux, perhaps it’s the cynic’s version.
Those were days when we had supreme confidence both in ourselves and in our ability to impact the world. We believed in the vote, in the Constitution and the American system of checks and balances. We had respect for science that took us to the Moon, and medicine that gave us the first heart transplant. Television was benign, and news still showed actual pictures of war deaths and protests against them. We gave a slight nod to militarism at its leanest and meanest, but considered Vietnam an egregious example of exploitive empire building. We cracked open politics to get a good look at its dark underbelly. We marched through the haze of tear gas and threats of baton-wielding cops to make our voices heard. Our American Dream was more about freedom’s potential than its actuality, even as we took advantage of the liberty that citizenship provided us. We had no idea how good we had it.
A strong union movement protected worker rights, and America was still hard at work manufacturing goods in our mobile, industrialized society. Education was affordable, creditors didn’t own us yet, our roads and bridges were sound, and gas cost 35 cents a gallon. News of Dennis Hopper’s death this week brings with it memories of those free-wheeling days, before the interstates made Route 66 obsolete and adventure beckoned everywhere we looked. We couldn’t imagine a future ‘over 30,’ and had only the slightest understanding of the resources we depended upon. The West was increasing its energy use by 5% annually, oblivious to international issues that would quickly change the trajectory of politics for the foreseeable future. The late ’60s set in motion a series of events that seem uncomfortably familiar today, two in particular.
In 1967, Israel launched the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Ultimately, Israel — with American approval — expanded its territory, occupying the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In 1973, Egypt and Syria struck back in what was called the Yom Kippur War. Nixon came to the aid of the Israelis. The Arab oil organization known as OPEC found a new weapon with which to punish the West. They raised the price of crude by 70% and cut production to the U.S. in what quickly became an oil crisis. Tricky Dick responded by sending more emergency funds to Israel, triggering an oil embargo that escalated recession/inflation well into the 1980s and changed the nature of Western energy policy. We paid a very high price for our ‘democratic’ toe-hold and access to the Mideast; we still do. It’s taken 40 years to admit the truth and we still can’t decide how we feel about it.
Back then, we were busy pumping whatever oil the lower 48 had to offer, but the 1960s saw the decline of easily-produced domestic crude. We were already drilling off-shore, which brings us to what some consider the birth of the ecological movement: the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Union Oil was the culprit in that disaster, taking more than 11 days to cap a blowout six miles off the coastline. 200,000 gallons of crude spread into an 800-square-mile slick, driven by wind and rough seas well into Northern California waters. Dolphins and seals died grim deaths, and gray whales changed their migration route to Baja breeding grounds to avoid the dark waters. Seabirds took the brunt of the spill; early rehabbing efforts were inexact, and some species dwindled to a few hundred. The event made Earth Day a national movement in the year that followed, beginning America’s love/hate relationship with the oil industry.
The cause of the Santa Barbara blowout was — surprise! — inadequate equipment. Union Oil had been given permission by the U.S. Geological Survey to cut corners and bypass federal standards. A bit more steel sheeting would have prevented the rupture. Neither safety standards nor arrogance have changed much in 40 years. Said Fred Hartley, president of Union Oil at the time, “I don’t like to call it a disaster because there has been no loss of human life. I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.” After the hole was plugged with cement, residual amounts of gas continued to escape, and another leak was later discovered that fouled the waters for months.
Union Oil Company — now Conoco-Phillips — ranks 16th on current lists of companies by revenue, while BP ranks 4th, although its stock is dropping quickly. When we were only a few days into the current spill, the nation seemed pragmatic, willing to tolerate the disaster in order to meet future energy needs. But now the Drill, Baby, Drill mantra has become Spill, Baby, Spill. More than half of us have doubts about off-shore drilling, a number that will increase daily if researchers’ projections about the spill continuing until Christmas prove true. By then the undersea results of this tragedy will be even more apparent. Perhaps we will change our minds about petrochemicals now.
In the 40 years between the Santa Barbara spill and today, we’ve been sleepwalking. During the 1960s, we knew that big corporations had too much power over our lives. We fought Dow Chemical’s and Monsanto’s production of toxins like Agent Orange. We knew the military-industrial complex had grown too big for its britches, so we burned draft cards and refused to fight their war. We knew that energy problems were already dictating international adventurism and began exploring alternatives. And we knew, as Dylan reminds us, that Congress was blocking the doors and hallways. The assassinations, economy and years that followed wore us down and left us cynical and lethargic. We let the good times roll unexamined, and expected technology to save us. We bought the proposition that things outside of us were more important to civilization than the truths we carried within us.
But we knew, didn’t we? The piper would eventually need paying.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
In hindsight, the curse is obvious: the status quo is no longer affordable. Were the Tea Baggers the improbable equivalent of the hippies, this would be called the Summer of Hate. Their protests are less political than personal. It’s Obama they detest, not the darker powers that influence the establishment. Warming deniers and Republican outliers, they are uninterested in the wounds to the environment. It’s a supreme irony that their leaders are the same generation that viewed me and mine as godless little heathens who needed eradicating and did all they could, including a bogus war on drugs, to achieve that end. As it dawns on us that the established order is no longer sustainable, Tea Baggers become increasingly superfluous to mainstream solutions.
The next revolution will be fueled by realism. Uranus’s repressive sense of claustrophobia still bubbles under the surface, and the more Saturn pushes its old solutions, the more rebellion we’ll see. Change is a given now, and we don’t go though such a process unless it’s time to grow beyond our present structure. This shift is not new business, but follows generations of accrued awareness. It’s shaking the windows to our soul and rattling the walls of our consciousness, asking us to draw that line again. If we put away our fear, we’ll recognize familiar energy and feel the excitement and potential of the moment. What some see as a painful ending is actually a bright beginning, if we allow it to be. And isn’t it time, now, to finish what we started? Freedom’s potential still awaits.
Weekly Horoscope for Friday, June 4, 2010, #818 – BY ERIC FRANCIS
Are you ready for the changes that are emerging in your life? Maybe not. But probably so. I suggest you think of this as an experiment in becoming. Stretch into the new territory of Self. Remember how, just a few months ago, you were so eager to do this; what an urgent necessity it was, though that was driven by an external factor. Now the impulse is coming from within you, and there’s no denying this. The translation you’re experiencing is a little like going from fantasy to reality. We’ve all had this experience: what is hot and yummy in the imagination has a different quality when we manifest it in 3D. And as with erotic experimentation, it’s worth experimenting consciously, trying again, and giving yourself a chance to grow into the manifestation of your desires. We both know it will be worth it.
There are three key symbols that I associate with Taurus. One is that the horns of the bull represent the dilemma of your existence: the odd dualism that you live with, despite being so determined to be one unified person. Then those horns morph into the crescent Moon, representing the shared rulership of your sign by this body, and the many cycles of experience you go through; this, too, seems to contradict the stampeding nature ascribed to your sign. Finally there is the esoteric interpretation: that your conscious mind exists wrapped around a hot, churning core. Your personality is basically a response to your attempt to manage, or relate to, this molten lava at the center of your psyche. I suggest you stop trying to manage this, or control the uncontrollable tectonic movements that flow through your life. Instead, you are free to tap in and set some of that energy free.
So much is available now, you may have no clue how to embrace the possibilities. I suggest you begin with a goal; a single goal. Of the many profound transits now affecting your solar chart, the one thing that is the most distinct is your ability to focus on an objective. This is something new, something that has never quite happened to you: a new gift. I recognize that there are many crucial items on your agenda, all of them seeming to demand energy. Yet I am speaking of something on a higher order of reality, which is your ability to work your mind in a new way, take ownership of that skill, and then seeing where this leaves you. Focus on your highest priority; your single most meaningful and heartfelt desire. I think you’ll learn something that will provide an approach to everything else on your agenda.
You are so intimately related to what you achieve and your concept of accomplishment that your whole sense of identity is based on this. I know you have many humble goals, such as eating well every day, and taking care of your family and your immediate environment. Now other objectives are calling you: plans and ideas greater than you’ve ever considered. I suggest you tune into this and notice that your drive is coming from the inside — not as a lurch toward something outside yourself. In other words, your desire is to project something you are becoming into the world, rather than reaching for something you are not. This is a far more effective way to achieve your desires, because it’s based on a feeling of completion from the beginning. On the deepest level of learning, this is the skill you are now acquiring.
Finally, your self-critical nature is outdoing its use. It’s about time. Among the very few things that hold you back is the way you tend to not only judge yourself, but to obsess over those judgments, and now that quality, so unbecoming of your true nature, is rapidly giving way to something that feels new, but which is as old as the galaxy itself. The question is really about what you recognize and identify with, as a conscious choice. This is the piece that seems to be coming in the strongest: that you have a choice in who you are, how you feel about who you are, and how you express who you are. And right now you have quite an amazing option in front of you, one you may have never thought could possibly exist, and it looks a little like walking through the door to enlightenment and total awareness in one casual stride.
You may not have any idea just how innovative your commitments can be. While some Virgos will be seeking a total detonation of all standing agreements — and may well be correct in seeking that — I would propose that what the environment and your moment of growth call for is a reinvention of the whole concept of commitment. Under that idea, obligation would become passion. Need would become desire. Freedom would become the room to choose, and options to choose from. Relating to someone would be an experience reserved for your full self, not something you bring a fragment of yourself into. You would not enter any relationship with a feeling of compromise, but rather a sensation of expansion and embrace. You would choose to relate to the people who recognize your authentic being, and who say yes to your existence. It’s time you did as well.
You seem, at least, not to have your whole life be run by your petty anxieties. And those worries would usually have you worried that you might never break free of them — though now this seems ridiculous. You have no choice but to rise to the level of the challenges that are calling you; to meet the world with the energy it’s offering you, and to call yourself fully present in your relationships. As you evolve into this as a way of life, you may wonder once or twice where those cranky old fears went, though I propose you will forget them entirely soon enough. Your more authentic state of being is to project yourself fully and fearlessly into your environment and commit fully to everything that you encounter. How can you do that? By being fully devoted to yourself, and letting all good things grow from there.
I suggest you be thankful that you have such a full life. I suggest you be grateful that you have so much to do. What you also have is the opportunity to simplify your existence without giving up the feeling, or the truth, of being fully in the flow. The most mundane aspects of your world are coming under the revolutionary spotlight. Don’t worry about whether you have the energy to make these changes; trust that the changes themselves will energize your life, liberate the places you’re holding back creativity and help you pulse life force through your entire being. As this happens, you will notice that there are things in your existence that need to change; the old structure simply cannot withstand the energy that is pouring through you. There is likely to be an exchange involved: give up some of what does not work for a lot of what does. Do that once and you’ll want to do it again.
Well, it turns out that there is an artist in the Bible: a master artisan by the name of Bezalel. He instantly reminded me of Chiron because his primary task was to create a temple — the Tabernacle — and because he had many students and apprentices. Another Chirotic quality of Bezalel was that he was a master of many arts: engraving, wood carving, metal crafting and stonework. His skills and responsibilities also included the holy oils, incense and vestments. And his name means ‘under the protection of God’. So, this is a good example. He was a working artist; he had a lot on his hands, many people he was responsible for, and he was a teacher of his crafts. So, we have, at least, one example of what your current astrology looks like from our society’s oldest book.
Among many other developments in recent days, Saturn has returned to direct motion in Virgo, and is heading for Libra. There, it will make its third and final contact with the highly sensitive angle of your chart that addresses your role in the world, your level of responsibility and your reputation. They are all related, and you can be confident that that’s the best possible setup. You want your reputation to be based on your valid contributions and your identity to be based on the level of commitment you have to your own life and the world — a commitment, I might add, that’s based on a sense of beauty and justice. You are here not so much to fix the world but to embody the beauty of a world that is whole and balanced. You are not here to take on the burdens of life, but to lead yourself and others away from unnecessary ones. I assure you: you’re one of the strong and the trusted.
In the window of Blue Studio, I inscribed the adage, We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are. Our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality. Everything we see is totally, completely and entirely biased by the filter known as our mind. Right now your mind is undergoing the most thorough modernization that you’ve ever experienced. And as a result, so, too, is the world: and the truth is, it’s not just your perception that’s changing. Your environment is changing too, yet you now have the mental apparatus to perceive this evolution for what it is. There appears to be a deeply passionate influence coming in from the outside, someone you may care about deeply and in a highly specific way. Yes, you are receiving their expression of who they are — but it takes one to know one.
The choice is indeed yours, and this is what you need to keep reminding yourself: in your thoughts, and in your actions. You remind yourself by choosing, and then choosing again. Every decision you make stems from what you think you are, how you feel about yourself and what you allow yourself to believe is possible. Your ‘worth’ is beyond question. Your contribution to the world is potentially enormous, if you will grant yourself the privilege of feeling that potential and then, from day to day and hour to hour, expressing it tangibly. As you believe, so shall you achieve, though the best way to get belief onboard is to experience how influential it is. After a while you will look back with the most incredulous sense of disbelief about how you could have ever, for a moment, doubted yourself.