Across a Burning Bridge

I woke up Thursday dreaming that I had met John Kerry. He came into the bookstore that I hang out at, Shakespeare & Co., across the street from Notre Dame. Everyone started singing "Happy Birthday" when he walked in.
 
Upstairs, he had a bedroom, like a hotel room, and I had a few minutes with him, just one on one, as he cleared the space out after the campaign, gathering the last of his belongings.
 
I didn't hesitate to walk up to him and say hello. He was warm, friendly, and quite relaxed. And tall.
 
I thanked him for putting on such a strong campaign, and then said, "You know, this is not an easy time to be running for president. We're exactly between two paradigms." A paradigm is a reality-framework: a way of looking at life or the conceiving of a experience, and a set of concepts that help us define existence.
 
"The old paradigm hasn't quite given up and the new one isn't in place strongly enough to work with easily," I added.
 
Part of the old paradigm left the planet early Thursday morning with the death of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Anyone who can say, "We are fighting because we want to live in peace," is part of the old reality where opposites clash, or worse, where they trade places. In the long struggle between Israel and the PLO, lasting most or all of our lifetimes we have seen nonstop terrorist violence met with endless military aggression in a phase of the "holy war" that goes back to 1964 -- the year of the PLO's first raid on Israel.
 
One thing is certain, no matter what his personal legacy: thanks to him, the plight of the Palestinian people will never be forgotten. As I write, I am watching the arrival of Arafat's casket at his Ramallah headquarters amidst a vast surge of Palestinian humanity. This happens under the influence of the exact Scorpio New Moon, conjunct the centaur planet Hylonome. Scorpio is usually considered to be the sign of death and rebirth; Hylonome is a planet that is associated with grieving and the healing of grief. That this New Moon is taking place at the moment of Arafat's return to Ramallah is a positively stunning expression of astrological symbolism.

While it is taking place at the very end of the lunar cycle, this is also the seed moment in the history of the Palestinian tribe.

*     *     *

In our current season of history, we're seeing quite a bit of killing in the name of love, fear in the pursuit of liberty and chaos that passes for enlightenment. Within the States, there is a slow-motion civil war unfolding, violent and hateful rhetoric being spewed, and a war of ideology in the courts and legislatures. The negativity has quite a lot of momentum and there seems to be no force to counter it. Study the overall agenda and it's clear that there is no guiding principle. War is waged for its own sake, and no options are considered. The personal choices of people are legislated into oblivion, and as the old saying goes, might makes right.
 
What we're witnessing in American society is a retro movement, an attempt to bring back things that were long ago accepted as obsolete: the public derision of gay and lesbian people, for example, the abandonment of science in the name of faith, and the right of conquest. In most locales, sex education has been abandoned in place of an anti-sex propaganda campaign.
 
To put it simply, there is a widespread attempt to use religious ideology to make a complex world simple. None of it actually succeeds at doing anything except wreaking havoc. Progress is not something you can stop, though you can mess with it. And you can pretend it never happened, but that's just pretending.
 
It occurs to me, a little late but sometimes I'm pretty thick, that the kind of flare-ups of values we're seeing now may be a reaction to the fact that humanity is evolving. There are some folks who just seem to hate the whole concept of evolution, which in reality has nothing to do with monkeys or Darwin. It has to do with humanity now, and the changes of consciousness we're being compelled to make. The real theory of evolution is that people evolve.
 
Everyone evolves: but as the Grateful Dead put it, some rise, some fall and some climb to get to Terrapin (the state of realization).
 
The situation reminds me of skin candida, a fungal infection. You can struggle with it for months, and when you finally get the right medicine it initially blows out into a nasty red mess before suddenly resolving itself. But when the suddenly rash gets worse, you know you've got it. The entire field of homeopathic medicine includes this principle, where the right remedy can induce what's called a healing crisis. The effective treatment will, at first, result in a blowing out of the symptoms, particularly on the surface. This may seem like an overly optimistic view of what's happening in American society at the moment. However, after an experiment of watching the chaos of the world on television for a while, that's what it looks like to me.
 
 
Before yesterday's death of Yasser Arafat, my plan for today's essay was to look at some of the transits between now and 2012, a project I began this spring in London. That particular year is a focal point in what's called the "long count" of the Mayan calendar. Some astrologers and mystics are describing that as the end of time; one has called it the moment that we leaping beyond technology, and others describe it as a center point of time.
 
I experience it more as the center of a spiral that we're approaching in ever-tightening loops, but as we go into the spiral, it seems to open up from within. In more precise academic terms, it's described by some Mayan scholars as the end of the 13th Baktun, which concludes a time span of 5,125 years, or about 1.87 million days (a Baktun is 144,000 days). This particular fact does not seem to be disputed. The meaning and potential consequences, however, are open to interpretation.
 
Earlier this year, we experienced the Venus transit of the Sun. The planet Venus, as it passed between the Earth and the Sun, not only went by, but it actually crossed the disk of the Sun, appearing visible during the day for a few hours. This is something that last happened in the late 19th century -- just prior to quite a lot of change, which included the industrial revolution, the war-torn 20th century, the advent of mass media and communication technology like the telephone, the dawn of modern feminism and spiritualism, and the rise of civilization as we know it.
 
After about 112 years, Venus transits return in a pair separated by eight years; we have begun the cycle, and so the next one is in the summer of 2012. Whatever there is about 2004 that is special, distinctive, symbolic or energetically relevant, this something points us directly to 2012 both in time and in concept.
 
It happens that the Mayans were obsessed by the cycles of Venus, and their mathematicians intentionally aligned, or discovered, that the Venus transit cycle and the end-of-Baktun festivities occur within the same calendar year or solar cycle.
 
(It's worth noting that the whole 5,125 year 13 Baktun cycle was back-dated by early Mayan day-keepers by a few thousand years; it began Aug. 11, 3114 BCE (BC), long before they existed as a society. They started counting in the middle. The Mayans had a special talent for dealing with extremely long phases of time -- much longer than any conventional form of astrology can handle.)
 
News of a turning point in such a major cosmic cycle throws a bit of intuitive light on what we are seeing happen in the world today, such as the obsession by certain (let's call them) spiritual families with The End of Days. There are many, many people who are settling into their homes for what they call The End, what others call the Rapture, and what still others probably call a few other dozen names. Whether or not it is THE end, something is in truth ending and everyone can feel it; a millennium and century just ended, and it seems like a way of life is struggling with the reality that it, too, must end.
 
But before it does, we seem to be getting a show of "The Past Kicks Ass" bravado.
 
But the future is coming on fast.

There is one planetary transit that takes the world on the express train from 2005 to 2011, and that is Chiron in Aquarius. For the past three years we have experienced Chiron in Capricorn, and this transit has served -- to put it extremely mildly -- to stir the pot of Corporate America. The chronology begins with the dust still settling at Ground Zero and the whole anthrax episode unfolding, when Enron declared bankruptcy. It continues through a wide variety of scandals that involve everything that Capricorn represents in the public (rather than personal) sense of that sign: Corporate America and its accounting scandals, the leadership of the Catholic Church and their sex escapades, and a wide variety of scandals involving terrorism, war and politics.
 
These range from "Bush knew" to "there were no WMDs but that's okay."
 
One of the latest, the Vioxx scandal, is not only very Chiron in Capricorn styled (involving a corporation, and one of Chiron's domains, medicine), but is also being treated almost casually by the media. How exactly did the expensive and widely used arthritis drug that causes heart attacks and strokes make it onto the market in the first place? How long did the manufacturers, Merck & Co., know there was a problem? I would love to dive into those product safety memos and see what they were writing about it 10 years ago.
 
But what about the human angle? This is not something that just appears on a corporate balance sheet. This is something that has affected thousands of families.
 
Now, the interesting thing is that none of what we're seeing now is new. But the fact that we ARE seeing it is quite new. That is one function of Chiron: to raise things to awareness so they can be dealt with. And what we are seeing are the effects of the old paradigm, as its ideologies and impacts are exposed.
 
This old reality framework has a few distinct rules:
 
1. If it makes money, it's good. If you make money, you're holy. The more money, the holier you are.
 
2. If you kill a lot of people, we'll respect you.
 
3. Ignore it and it'll go away.
 
Gosh this is fun. I bet I can think of a few more.
 
4. If you're afraid to change, blame somebody else for all your problems.
 
5. And of course, if you don't like the truth, make up a few lies to cover it up; if people believe you, the lie becomes the truth and everything is cool. People tend to be scared, so they believe lies.
 
And this program it has a few distinct effects: mass-starvation, war and global warming being amongst the effects. And other effects like "prosperous" Americans needing to work three jobs to feed their kids. Like people being promised freedom and then having very few choices seem open to them.
 
My astrology client tonight was someone who deals with new-paradigm thinking: chaos theory, fractals, and related concepts in computer software, art and sociology. She also has her natal Chiron in the last degree of Capricorn. Because Chiron is about to change signs from Capricorn to Aquarius in the course of 2005, she's about to have her Chiron return. Our discussion was about how she can find her way from her personal past to her future, a process which is intimately involved with how we all experience and apprehend reality, since this is what she thinks and writes about.
 
Then in the middle of the conversation about her chart, I realized I was looking at a world horoscope.
 
I said to her that there is a bridge in her chart, from Capricorn to Aquarius, from her present to her future, and that she’s about to cross that bridge during the next 12 months.
 
The thing about bridges is that they take two piers to hold them up, and one is on the Capricorn side while the other is on the Aquarius side. The Aquarius side is the new paradigm. It is the future some people on the planet are consciously working to create, which involves the development of sustainable patterns of living, weaving community, embracing non-material reality, win-win thinking, taking a degree of personal responsibility sufficient to allow freedom, and models of thought that take us out of linear ideas and black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking.
 
Yet we need to hold up our current structures and traditions to some real and conscious extent in order to be able to have the bridge stand and bear weight and weather. We need to take care of the Capricorn side, and keep the integrity in our relationship to it. The problem we face as a society right now is not tradition itself, but rather that the people who are acting in the name of tradition are attempting to blow up this side of the span. We need to find a way to let them work out their healing crisis without threatening the whole process of our moving forward.
 
To put it in other terms, there are people taking advantage of the rapid changes by manipulating the historical process. We need to learn to notice this when we're looking right at it.
 
As much as many of us would like to abandon the entire old paradigm entirely, to some extent we need to work within the traditional structures of the corporate world, government, politics, medicine, religion and relationships in order to maintain what integrity we can there, while not losing sight of the fact that this is one tower of a bridge to the next world. We need to remember that there are long and time honored traditions of tolerance, of loving thy neighbor, of not bearing false witness that are appropriate today, and always will be. And we need to teach our neighbors and our children, if need be, a little at a time.

Next week I'll look more closely at Chiron in Aquarius and the conjunction likely to define our era in history, Chiron conjunct Nessus in Aquarius.

 
Scorpio Birthdays: After the New Moon

I am writing I the last hour before the Scorpio New Moon. If this birthday finds the world at genuinely tense moment, it's a the result of a deep-seated emotional sense of inevitable change. Yet for you personally, it seems that any tension you feel is about whether you really can leave behind the difficulties you have faced so bravely. I would not blame you for fearing that you carry some psychological scars from what you've experienced in recent years and in particular during the past couple of years.
 
Yet in consciously confronting your fears, you have taken away most of their power.
 
And that power comes back to you as strength, clarity, and a commitment to communication within your relationships.
 
Yet much of why you can afford to be honest and to dare to push others to do the same is because you're connecting with the extent to which you have developed a genuine measure of self-sufficiency. Scorpio is a sign that is intimately connected with relationship in all forms. It can exist, but without the direct addition of other energies into your life sphere -- most commonly experienced as sexual energy -- it can seem like you're really nobody. Yet for more than a decade (and this goes for small children) you have been involved in a process of reaching to your depths for autonomy, independence and an opinion of yourself that is not dependent upon other people for its substance or reality.
 
At this point in your life, you are able to draw directly from that stable center. It might help if I described a configuration in the New Moon chart that illustrates this. The New Moon occurs at the 21st degree of Scorpio. It happens a little more than one degree away from a planet called Hylonome, a Chiron-like planet dealing with the healing of grief. This is as much about the ultimate release of grief as it is about making a container for your emotions and holding them cocooned within you safely. This three-planet conjunction is the New Moon.
 
(As I write, the Moon is in an exact conjunction to Hylonome, approaching the Sun, and a massive crowd is gathered at Ramallah, where a collective grieving process is underway. Because Hylonome is a relatively new planet, these kinds of events providing confirmation of its theme are both helpful and beautiful expressions of symbolism to witness. The world is watching as the whole situation in the Palestinian territory is opening up and turning itself inside-out. There is the sense that things could go out of control, yet somehow the awareness that they probably will not.)
 
Thirty degrees away in Sagittarius, we find the modern ruler of Scorpio, Pluto. The New Moon in your sign is in an exact aspect to one of Scorpio's two ruling planets (I'll come to the other in a moment). Pluto in Sagittarius is the story of your long, slow path to self-consciousness and self-sufficiency. This process has been working itself out since the mid-90s for all Scorpios by the way and to some extent this aspect will be relevant to all of those born under your sign because that is the nature of a New Moon.
 
Now, 30 degrees away from that, in Capricorn, is the planet Chiron. Chiron in Capricorn, a transit that has lasted for the past three years, and Chiron is in an exact aspect to both Pluto and the Sun/Moon/Hylonome conjunction. Chiron is in your third solar house: the house of cognitive process. Incredibly, the Chiron/Juno conjunction is rising as I watch the current chart for Paris on my animation program.
 
Chiron and Pluto often work as a polarity, making Chiron a valuable planet for Scorpios to understand. This observation emerged in the early Chiron research; I first read it in the work of Barbara Hand Clow, and it's a truly helpful key to understanding Chiron. Chiron represents the conscious side of a process of which Pluto is the unconscious side. Chiron expresses the energy of Pluto consciously, tangibly and in a way that has documentable effects. What this tells me is that the most vital thing that has changed is your ideas of traditional relationship.
 
I am seeing this in the combination of Chiron (awareness, change), Juno (ideas about the legal or primary conjugal partner; jealousy and scorekeeping), and your 3rd solar house (which is in Capricorn). Capricorn on the 3rd speaks of a person with a deep thought process, a deep sense of tradition, and moreover, a need to do things right. My sense from reading this is that you have involved yourself -- probably of deep necessity -- to make every change you have lived through manifest in an idea about relationship that you can really live with honestly.

Remember that what unfolds has far less to do with what others want or think than what you know is true for you. You can, however, trust that the people closest to you are ready for change and will respond if you take the lead by responding to your own needs.
 
Much else within you has developed. You know this. It seems to have taken "forever and six Sundays" as one of my Scorpio friends used to say." But sometimes you get to that sixth Sunday and can begin your life in a new way, which for you means coming into your relationships with strength, clarity and integrity.
 
Yet as brilliantly as this New Moon is the symbol of all that you are beginning in your life, it is the symbol of all you are leaving behind. Go forward; leave it behind; but never forget.
 
--
 
In next week's Scorpio birthday report, I'll go over the astrology of professional matters for all those born under this sign.

Happy birthday, Scorpio.


Planet Waves by Eric Francis
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 (#532)

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Life on our planet requires people to depend upon one another, make demands on one another, and to disappoint one another. These are what you could call the facts of life. The deepest issues of living all come back to what we do with this fact of dependency. How do we use our power in sexuality, in business, and in all forms of partnership? Do we work for our mutual benefit, or use our advantage to exceed what is truly fair or gain an edge over others? This week's Scorpio New Moon presents miraculous opportunities for awareness, for sharing and for healing.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
Events of the past two weeks have, with any luck, led you to keep the focus on yourself. It's now time to turn your attention to an important situation involving a partner who would benefit from your attention. If you have a sticking point, it may be a matter of fairness. But I would ask you in earnest whether you have enough of what you need, and also to recognize the extent to which you've depended on the good graces of others through this time of extraordinary challenge and growth. Most of what people need is your comfort and wisdom. This you can surely offer.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
To keep the power and avoid the struggle, you need to be of one mind, that is, on your own team and in support of your own goals. This sounds obvious, but it's one of the most difficult ideas for most people to conceive of. You have an advantage. Gemini, unlike most other signs, is fully aware that it's usually of two often very different minds. You need to have a talk with each of these aspects of who you are and find out what needs to be done to get them on board. They have different concerns, requirements and ideas. Use a little of your down-home, back-room political skill and get them together.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
It may well seem that your relationship situation has felt like a long series of disasters in recent years. Even if it's been going well, there have been unusual challenges, and you've had to make many adjustments to compensate for the growth processes of others. As well, you've been having an unusual seizure of maturity and practicality where your most personal matters are concerned. Even given all this, you've been able to hold a deeply important vision for your relationships, one that's likely take a big step toward reality under the positive influences of the current Scorpio New Moon.

Leo (July 22-Aug 23)
There can be no denying what you feel; this will help you make friends with it. Feelings are all the more scary when we try to pretend they're not there. However, what's coming through is emerging with such clarity and perhaps force that it's possible to focus on little else. So, pay attention to what's calling on you respond, and begin a dialog. There are some old matters to clear up, there is something you're carrying that you can finally put down. The end result will be that you'll feel safer in your skin, in your home and on the planet. Don't believe what they say -- it is possible.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
If the phone rings and it's the relative you dislike the most, don't sink into an instant depression. Rather, take notes. Respond with the calm excitement of a police detective or journalist who's just got an important source on the phone. There is information you need and it's going to come from this person, such as your father's brother's son or his sister's husband or someone like that. You were raised with certain expectations; time went on and what you were expecting disappeared from view. This was the result of a deliberate cover-up. The whistle is about to be blown, but you have to listen carefully.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
You may me more attuned than usual to the relationship between sadness and joy; between your own personal sense of abundance and the lack and loss currently gripping the planet. We're now at the peak of Scorpio energy, which reminds us that all things must pass, and be reborn. Both processes are working within you at high energy: surrender and renewal. Yet in this deep, strange season, it's time to begin telling yourself new stories about the meaning of your life. It has changed considerably, and you have changed along with it. Even as the days shorten, darkness is giving way to light.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
There's a refreshing, stabilizing quality that this New Moon in your birth sign is offering. The somewhat stunning events of two weeks ago should be a distant memory, but you would still benefit from making a few conscious choices and changes that remind you that you really are living a new life. In fact, the one thing that's troubled you the most -- a crisis over being able to use your mind to consciously make a decision -- should now be the least of your worries. If that decision involves another person and a deeply committed situation, it's something you can trust.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
I suggest you not yield to the pressures of people whose judgment you may fear, or whose emotional betrayal you may wish to avoid. Most of what you feel is going on in your imagination, though even in that sphere the pressure is real. This week's New Moon will do a lot to take that pressure off and leave you with a more realistic assessment of your life, which by every indication is as good as it's been in many, many moons. If you don't agree, I promise you that you have the resources to make it so, with neither delay nor ordeal.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
There may be people who want you to yield to their will, kind of like a gang of smokers attempting to entice the one person in their midst who's recently quit to light up just one. Walk away if you must; wish them good night. This is a big moment for deciding who your friends are and, more to the point, who they are not. If recent lessons of your life have taught you anything, it's the value of individualism. That extends, more than anything, to your most cherished goals. If you can get distractions out of the way, you will see that what you want is within reach -- that is, if you reach.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
Someone once said that behind every great fortune lies a crime. I say that behind every success or substantial achievement there is a conspiracy. While others may laugh at the theories of how people work together, I suggest you put the process to work. There are those with whom you can discreetly work on developing certain goals and objectives; keep a low profile for the moment, but operate with a genuine depth of commitment. Know what you want, and seek out others who share your goal, or who support you unblinkingly. They are around you -- and they care.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
What most people think of as their darker aspect for you is your higher potential. The better friends you make with the shadow side of your personality, the easier your life becomes, and the more you're able to consider the better possibilities that exist for you. You've learned that you have no need to run from your own soul, and it's that very aspect of your being, the timeless, the eternal, the one not bound by place or physical limits, that you're beginning to express brilliantly now. I suggest you set aside your own agenda and listen carefully: some new instructions are coming in.

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