Hubble Portrait of the "Double Planet" Pluto & Charon. Credit: Dr. R. Albrecht, ESA/ESO Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility; NASA.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I TRUST that the Leo New Moon has helped you turn a page of your life.
 
If you were born in the late 1940s and some of the 1950s, the New Moon was close to your natal Pluto, the planet of evolution, soul and moving your life from within. For those born in the mid- to late-1950s, the New Moon made contact with your natal Uranus, the planet of innovation and revolution. For those born in the mid- to late-1950s, the New Moon opposed Chiron.
 
For those born in the 1960s, the New Moon opposed many of the newer planets that were in Aquarius at the time of your birth, which depending on when you were born may include Pholus (the second Centaur) and 1992 QB1 (the first planet discovered beyond Pluto). For those born in the mid-1960s, the New Moon opposed Saturn. For nearly everyone born in our era, Leo is a crucial sign, being home to planets whose theme can all be summarized in one word, progress.
 
Personally, the current planetary turns have me in motion once again, and soon I'm headed for dioxin country: my project involving some contaminated dormitories in New Paltz, NY. For some reason I woke up this morning contemplating what dioxin and astrology have in common.
 
For those unfamiliar with the subject, dioxin is a synthetic contaminant created whenever chlorine is handled by industry. When we think of our lives, so dominated by plastic and chemicals, and wonder what the cost or realistically consider the consequences, dioxin is one of them. It is a trace contaminant usually found at parts per trillion level in food, in many products (in our era, it's been found in Lysol, lawn products, chemical weapons and plastics, among many others), and in our bodies. A part per trillion is like saying percent, only instead of being a fraction of 100, it's a fraction of 1,000,000,000,000.

Any honest history of our era would include dioxin as a primary issue that we face today. Unfortunately, history is written by the winners, and the winners so far are the plastics and chemical industries -- not common sense or scientific truth.
 
Anyone inclined to wonder how a bit of space debris orbiting at 50 times the Sun-Earth distance can influence our lives (such as many of the planets we talk about at Planet Waves) would do well to consider dioxin. Dioxin is on the molecular level what planets are on the cosmic level. Anyone who has experimented with LSD has felt the power of what a few molecules of a chemical in your brain can do. What dioxin is primarily shifting is the balance of hormones in the body. Hormones are the messengers that help us feel and also regulate our bodies, day to day and in the long run.
 
Dioxin jumps into this game and in some cases can cause very serious problems. But here is the strange thing. It is, by our currently accepted definition of life, inanimate. It is on one level a poison, created as a by-product with no constructive use. Yet when it enters our bodies, it functions as a living thing, a living poison.
 
If you ask me, it's much closer to a metaphysical issue than it to a scientific one. Something with "no life" slips between the cracks of reality and "becomes alive," and acts on life (multigenerationally) through a form of biological deception. We have a substance that blurs the line between what is alive and what is not.
 
It is interesting that when people get involved in dioxin and begin to raise the issue to awareness, they tend either to become radical truth-tellers driven by the quest for knowledge and justice, or bold deceivers motivated by power and profit [see related article]. Unfortunately with dioxin, there is very little middle ground (if there is, I have not seen it yet).
 
On all accounts we have some interesting similarities to the use of astrology. We have a contrast for how, in nature, something with nearly no physical substance, or so little we would think it hardly matters, can have so much impact. We see a field of life that is driven in one camp by knowledge and humanitarian impulses, and in another is often used as a means to deceive and con people. (In astrology there is, fortunately a wide area between the two extremes, where honest people can make a living or practice authentic scholarship.)
 
Perhaps the most significant thing they both have in common is that they relate to occult knowledge: the hidden domain beneath the smooth surface of rationality and common perception. The more you look, the more you see. The more clear your perception, the more clear the observations that come across.
 
I'll be doing my astrology reports from New Paltz for a while, as I engage the community and the New York State Health Department in one of my favorite games -- figuring out how we can all have a better life. The New York State Department of Health is something of the worldwide guru on indoor dioxin incidents, so this is a game with high stakes. If they have to change their policy on New Paltz, it will set precedent for anywhere there is an indoor contamination issue.
 
For those interested, I'll be blogging at the Dioxin Dorms blog for a while. From there, you can link to many other of my articles on dioxin and the associated "political science."
 
Catch you Friday with a bit of news about the Age of Aquarius and your weekly horoscope.
 
Yours & truly from Europa,

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