Month: March 2011

An Illuminating Weekend in March

For your information–some news about this weekend.

On Saturday the 19th of March, Gwendolyn Endicott-a local goddess and brilliant mythologist/storyteller, will once again provide a place to gather to celebrate and acknowledge the seasonal cycle–the Equinox–when the day and night are equal.  She does this at all four points every year. You don’t have to be there–it is just good to know it is happening.  It is a good thing.

AND—That night the full moon will be Very close to our home, the earth (that is called ‘perigee’ ).  It will be very bright–called a Supermoon–actually in this case it is called “An Extreme Supermoon” (see article below)

AND–not only that– just hours after the exact Equinox, Uranus and the Sun will be conjunct in the impetuous sign of Aries.

On Sunday, Carol Ferris and I will be conducting Seminar #1 in the Reach for the Horizon series for 2011.  We will be spending the day thinking about the lights–the sun and very close moon.  We will be navigating through art and stars and sacred sites, the luminaries in our lives.

We wish you well as you sail through these times.

 

This is indeed a Special Spring Equinox!

Balance is key.

Listen to Cayelin Castell speak to what she calls “a once in a lifetime spring equinox 2011”: Once in a lifetime spring equinox

a bit about that Supermoon:




From Sri Lanka News online: Colombo University Senior Lecturer in Physics Dr Chandana Jayaratne yesterday said there was no truth in internet reports that the March 19 full moon will cause earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and other extreme weather disasters.

“The March 19 full moon will be a special type of full moon since it will coincide with the moon’s perigee. The moon’s orbit around the Earth is not circular, but elliptical. When the moon is at its closest approach to Earth we say that the Moon is at perigee. The furthest point of this elliptical orbit is known as apogee. As such the Moon comes closer to the Earth once in about every month, but not every time the full moon too falls on the same day, Dr Jayaratne said in a release yesterday.

He said on March 19, 2011 not only will full moon and perigee coincide, but the Sun and Moon will be lined up with the Earth’s equator since it’s almost the time of the vernal equinox (where sun passes the equator Dr Jayaratne said on March 19, the moon lies only 356,575 kilometres away).

Earlier this month, the moon swung to apogee – its farthest point for the month – on March 6. At that time, the moon was 406, 583 kilometres distant. The moon comes much closer to the Earth during March 18-20 this month. March 19 won’t only feature the closest Full Moon of the year, but the Moon at its nearest and largest for all of 2011. When the moon reaches its absolute closest point to the Earth we called an “extreme supermoon”.  This is the first extreme super–moon occurs in nearly 19 years, he said.Closest full moons recur in cycles of 14 lunar months (413,428 days) and therefore this is not a very rare phenomenon to cause panic. (A lunar month refers to the time period between successive full moon,s a mean period of 29.53059 days).

This time period is equal to about one year, one month, and 18 days. Full moon and perigee will realign again on May 6, 2012, because the 14th full moon after March 19, 2011 full moon will fall on that date, Dr Jayaratne said. He said every perigee moon has not brought disaster and this one is no different.

A perigee moon will affect tides and even appear bit bigger. This extra-closeness of the full moon on March 19 will usher in somewhat larger tides along the ocean shorelines for the next several days, especially if these high tides are accompanied by strong onshore winds.

Fishermen are aware about these high tidies and the precautionary measures necessary to be taken.

Moon, Saturn and the bright star Spica are visible close to each other on Saturday night sky on March 19, 2011 creating a beautiful view to sky gazers, he said.

Be well and look up and light a candle or two.

more—–Uranus in Aries

Sending you on over to Adam Gainsburg’s blog for good read about Uranus in Aries which is rather VISIBLE  and palpable these days!

The Ordinary is the Extraordinary

Uranus into Aries

uranus-2011-03 The planet Uranus is now in Aries. For good. Permanently for the next 7 years. Done deal.

So what can we expect from this permanent and irrefutable fact, the likes of which we haven’t lived through since 1927-8. But that’s just it: Uranus is the unexpected, unpredictable outcome that blows your mind. It’s thoroughlyanti-expectable. “There’s no way anyone could have ever known that would happen!” is heard more often from the mouths of the Uranus-affected than any other. While Aries is the sign of explosions, speed and personal freedom. As the first sign, it signals beginnings.

Uranus’ move into Aries =
1. new, unexpected beginnings and forced start-overs – even if we don’t understand why;
2. fighting (Aries) for freedoms (Uranus);
3. breaking the norms; exploding the past (if the past is inhibiting betterment).

continue reading at Adam’s site: Soulsign.com

Revolution: as natural as breathing

from my colleague, Astrologer, Marcia Buchart

There’s a popular notion that our entire body replaces all its cells every seven years—just about (OMG!) the length of time Uranus spends in a sign. Well, the notion isn’t strictly true; some pieces of us replace more frequently (our skin and other epithelial tissue) some more slowly (fat cells fully replace every 10 years; heart muscle cells replace even slower, and some of the original ones remain to the end of life).

And one significant part—the neurons in the cerebral cortex, where we store all our memories, our ideas, our whole way of thinking about ourselves and where we fit into existence—not at all.

Does this fact of our physical existence offer a metaphor for why we find it so hard to “let go”?  And, at the same time, show us the way out?

As Uranus enters Aries lots of people are, in Tracy Chapman’s words,

“Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution”.

The internet is alive with the kind of cheerleading that arrived in my inbox today: “It is time to set yourself free and allow for personal awakenings…” while others plead for everyone to wake up and realize that we are all one.

And most of them contain either an overt or sub-theme that the whole process of either setting oneself free or joining in the fight to uplift the collective will hurt like hell.

Well, hell, no.

All you have to do to do things differently is get a clue from your own physical vessel.  Yup, the one you condemn, despise, complain about, deride; the one on which you lay the blame for so many of your failings.

Even the Bible proclaims: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  (Matthew 26:41)

Again, no.

The spirit is what is not willing to let go.

To the neurons in your cerebral cortex, you are now all the “you” that you have ever been.  But the rest of your body lets go with the greatest of ease.  Your skin, your gut, your hair and nails, molt with quiet grace and aplomb.  Invisibly.  Your lovely digestive tract carefully winnows out what can become You and what cannot, and sends what cannot on its way.  (The only time this system ever malfunctions is when you have done something to mess it up.)  Your lungs give out what would quickly kill you—carbon dioxide—to nourish and sustain the plant life around you.  Your kidneys engage in an exquisitely complex juggling act to ensure the health of your blood chemistry; your liver processes and disposes of pounds upon pounds of toxins throughout your lifetime.  And all these organs replace themselves completely, quietly, easily, on a regular basis.  The liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the skin, the eyes, the stomach…when cells within them do not accept their fate and allow themselves to die in the course of time, you have cancer.

So yes: except for your cerebral cortex neurons and some of your heart muscle, you are not the same person who saw Uranus enter Pisces (in 2003).  Almost all of you, as Uranus enters Aries (March 2011), is new.

This concept was shoved in my face as I read, with fascination, a 2010 interview with Aron Ralston in Outside magazine.

He was the mountaineer whose survival story was made into the movie “127 Hours”.  As he reflected on the process of watching a movie made of his ordeal he realized that filming was wrapping precisely during the anniversary week of that ordeal.  He said:

“If there’s any truth to the idea that our bodies replace their cells every seven years, this day finally marks the moment when I’m no longer the same person who walked into Blue John in 2003.  In a week, I’ll no longer be the person who walked out, either…”  and then mused that this profoundly subtle rebirth symbolized a time to let that chapter of his life close, while remembering its lesson for him: “…that relationships, not accomplishments, are what’s important in life.”

Way to use the cerebral cortex, dude!

So: what will Nearly-Completely-New-You do with your life now?

Well, what was going on seven years ago that might now be over and done with?

How can you live anew while remembering its lesson?

In what way are you reborn that you haven’t realized yet?

I offer a tip from the most profoundly masterful revolutionary I ever knew.  This man was a natural: born with Uranus conjunct his ascendant.  His revolutions were never accomplished by blowing things up and (supposedly) starting over; that’s one sure way to “meet the new boss / same as the old boss” (thank you, Pete Townshend).

Whatever venue of life he found himself in, he would study its incidents, its people, its culture—and read its “rule book”.  And when change was needed to help his community survive, he would force it—by following the rules.  By finding the one rule that, if enforced, would cause a cascade of change to occur.

This is not dissimilar to astrologer Bernadette Brady’s (you can listen to her lecture here: Chaotic Astrology-A Journey into the Complex) recommendation for courting change hinted at by your transits: change one small thing about your daily routine—the wrist on which you wear your watch, which foot you put into your pants first when dressing, the side on which you part your hair—and do it consistently.  Keep doing it.  And something will begin to change.

Perhaps one of the lessons of Japan, of Libya, of Wisconsin, of all the upheaval around us is that traumatic change occurs most frequently when we have hung on too long, when we have forced things to stay the same, despite the excellent example our physical vessels keep patiently providing us.  After all, catastrophic earthquakes occur when the shifts in Earth’s tectonic plates—always in motion—have been prevented from happening for too long.

So breathe out.

And then…breathe in.

seeing with the heart

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

Here is my secret.It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The following is an excellent post:

By Len Wallick  (at Planet Waves)

Transcendence is the order of the day. The dramatic events accompanying the last hours of Uranus in Pisces and its first days in Aries have transcended what anybody could have predicted. As individuals we face a choice of how to respond. We can hunker down and hope we will somehow be able to ignore what is going on, hoping we will somehow be passed over and unaffected. Or we can practice a little practical transcendence ourselves. If there is anything to synchronicity, the latter is what the astrology is asking us to do, especially now.

continued at Planet Waves


Is this enough

a piece from my friend Mark Alter:

Headlines say the catastrophic earthquake near Sendai has moved Japan eight feet closer to the U.S.  Is this enough for us to understand that we are all part of one fragile world…

In January we were all Egyptians with the people protesting for democracy in the streets of Cairo; in February all with Christchurch together in the New Zealand earthquake rubble; and now we’re all Japanese, where we’ve lost tens of thousands of kin, so far.  Is this enough…

Do you remember after 9/11 “the e-mail read around the world”…  It said that suffering and poverty were the reality in Afghanistan, not the revengeful idea of “bombing people back to the stone age,” because that had already been done by the Soviets in the last war.

That email was sent by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American writer from the Bay Area, and last night I went to hear him speak in Portland.  I also bought his book, Destiny Disrupted: A History of The World Through Islamic Eyes.

I did so because of something I’d read years ago called 80 Theses for a New Peace Camp, on the website of the Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom.  Number six of those 80 said that peace talks had failed because neither side embraced the historical narrative of the other.

Is this enough…

Do we need more…

Namaste, Mark Alter –

How shall the heart be reconciled To its feast of losses?

On a search for words this morning after watching more of the footage from Japan.  I raced to the poets — their words are guiding stars for me and they can say what I cannot–here is just one that struck me.

As my colleague, Carol Ferris said in her post

The premise that we are all one, that everything touches us, that we are now entering a period where we experience the connectedness of everything, is emerging as reality in our eyes, ears, hearts and minds.

Parabola Magazine Spring 2011: Suffering

THE WORLD IS ON FIRE

by Joshua Boettiger

Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers” is a midrash on suffering.

At the key juncture in the poem, Kunitz writes:

How shall the heart be reconciled

To its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

The manic dust of my friends,

Those who fell along the way,

Bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

Exulting somewhat,

With my will intact to go

Wherever I need to go,

And every stone on the road

Precious to me.

Listen to him read the whole poem:  Stanley Kunitz reading his poem “The Layers”

Wounded Waters—Neptune and Chiron in Pisces by Jessica Murray on March 1, 2011

Piscean transits will make it relentlessly clear to the obtuse human mind that we’re all in this together. This article at : DayKeepers Journal

The Great Flood

Every culture old enough to have legends has a version of the Great Flood story. It is a tale that resides deep in the collective unconscious, telling of a deluge (Neptune) whose purpose is to all-but-destroy an irremediably wounded (Chiron) human race, giving the few survivors a chance to start all over again. Since the opposition of Saturn (structures) and Neptune (melting) in 2006-7, the mass mind has been inundated with the latest iteration of the legend. We are awash in the imagery of breaking levees and flooded cities. Animals and birds are migrating away from the planet’s climate-compromised zones, seeking higher ground—just as they did in the story of Noah’s ark (see the Skywatch for March 2011 on MotherSky.com).

Myths exist in the human mass mind for a purpose. The Great Flood myth is experiencing a renaissance, in our era, in order to supply us with a coded multidimensional teaching. It is giving us an image of vengeful water, of gigantic floods that wash everything clean. We are being prompted to purify that which we have made toxic, and to take responsibility for the guardianship of our planetary home.

On a physical level, geological and meteorological water emergencies over the years ahead will force us to understand and revere the laws of water. At the same time, we will be absorbing this lesson on a trans-physical level. Our enhanced attention to water will show us the extent to which we are all psycho-spiritually bound together. Neptune and Chiron in Pisces will make it inescapably clear that all beings are drops of water in the same cosmic sea.

Pisces is astrology’s name for oceanic

This from colleague Portland Astrologer, Carol Ferris

Tsunami/Neptune in Pisces

Our eyes and ears are absorbed in news reports of the 8.3 earthquake in Japan, and the powerful tsunami generated by its force.  Our hearts and our bodies are absorbed, too.

Pisces is astrology’s name for oceanic.  In our planetary system, today, the Sun, Mars, Uranus and Chiron are traveling through Pisces, and the lord of the ocean, Neptune, is on the brink of re-entering his realm.   Look at this remarkable thermograph of the tsunami’s force through the entire Pacific Ocean.  Everything is moved by it, some places more than others.

The premise that we are all one, that everything touches us, that we are now entering a period where we experience the connectedness of everything, is emerging as reality in our eyes, ears, hearts and minds.

We can see Uranus from our house

please just for today pronounce that Ur-ah-nes 🙂

and yes-we live on the beautiful Oregon coast.

Yesterday, as Susan and I were returning from the vet (our greyhound hurt her skinny back leg), I said:  Ya know what? Tomorrow Uranus moves into Aries for the first time in 84 years–wonder what’ll happen. When the Tsunami warning sirens went off around 4am this morning — I was pretty impressed in addition to getting up and getting busy preparing to take care of folks, rescue cats and dogs, making sure our generator was ready, etc etc There is much to say about this Promethean passage–and I will gather quotes as the day goes on.  BUT–The Great Awakener? Whew–I’ll say.

Where ever in your chart the early degrees of Aries land–you might want to ask yourself–What sirens are you hearing?  Where might you want to stay awake?  Got any safety plans in place?  No?–well get busy. It is 8:30am and the northern seas are calm and no flooding is happening here (Nehalem, Oregon)–but we are still in a Tsunami Warning.  And the earthquake in Japan was/is MASSIVE. back soon couple of articles:

from Eric Francis—

Uranus in Aries Dear Friend and Reader: Later today (overnight Friday in some time zones), Uranus leaves Pisces and enters Aries to stay for the next seven years. As the astrology picture of 2012-2015 assembles, this is one of the biggest pieces — the presence of Uranus representing the energy surge; the impulse to enter the future. This has been warming up for a few years, but now is the moment we go into warp speed. In the words of Richard Tarnas, Uranus is Prometheus, the awakener.

Bringing Uranus into such a prominent place as the first degree of the zodiac amplifies its influence, and Uranus is already pretty hot: its characteristics include fast, surprising developments; future-oriented thinking; moments of revolution; and shocking surges of awareness. As Uranus approaches its first exact square to Pluto in June 2012, we’re only going to see this whole process accelerate, bring in more communities and wake up more people. In a phrase, 2012 is about everything, all at once.

to be continued

ok ok–I confess

I check my horoscope–it isn’t the ‘scholarly’ thing to do and I don’t like to admit it–but I sneak around the internet or check my mail to see what might be in store for me today.

Now I do this as a professional astrologer (ahem) and I know–yes, I know–that what is written is supposed to apply to zillions of people who were born during the same month all over the world!  But I still sneak a peek.  I’m thinking maybe you do too?

So here are just a couple of places you can go to to check out what’s happening for YOU.  (there are many!)  You can sign up at these sites to have it come to an e-mail box near you.  Enjoy.

Eric Francis does a good job with these, but you may have to pay something for an ongoing horoscope

check out Planet Waves.net (not .com)

or StarIq.com — a popular and all round solid site–out of Seattle.

or the extremely trustworthy, brilliant and revered in the astrology community site for Rob Hand and Liz Greene (and others) at Astro.com.

At this site you can enter birth data for yourself or others and produce a chart free and you can tell it to email you with those daily horoscopes.

There are many more–but I thought I’d tell you about a few that I would trust more than others.

Don’t tell anyone I told you 🙂 and um–have a good day?

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