Dear Friend and Reader:

I WENT through a phase early in my astrology career when I got into conversations with young tarot card readers. Maybe there were just two or three such conversations, but they seem to stand out as a distinct phase of gaining an understanding of life. Anyway, one of them would say to me, "I don't feel right about charging for my work. It's not right to charge people to help them."

Planet Waves reader Deb Silverman of San Francisco dreamed for years of being an acupuncturist, and with much work achieved her goal.

One day I parsed the logic and replied: "Well, do you think it's better to charge to hurt them?"

This pretty much obviated the issue. In truth, however, it usually works out that it's easier, more efficient and more profitable to hurt people rather than to help them. A quick scan of the history of industrialization -- including PCBs, asbestos, cigarettes and the Ford Pinto -- establish this pretty quickly.

The question is not why people do it, but rather why we put up with it and even help them; and why we are, as a society, so resistant to investing our money where it's going to make a positive difference. Notably, we are currently spending $230 million a day on a war in Iraq. Would it have been remotely possible to put that money to work for social causes, or is our only option with that much capital to create mayhem?

With this theme, we embark on the topic of values, which in my astrology is the core theme of Taurus. Values embraces the question of what we would do with our money, collectively and individually, if we noticed that we have a choice in the matter. But it goes a lot further than that.

I was first acquainted with the term values in Philosophy 101 at SUNY Buffalo, taught by Prof. Paul Kurtz. It arrived in the title of a textbook called Ethics and the Search for Values. I know that, for this reason, I equate the idea values with that of ethics. It may actually be easier to think of values as a subset of ethics: one's personal inventory of right or wrong. Values are the inner psychic elements by which we determine what is right or wrong for us, as individuals -- if we take the time to stop and think.

In effect, a value is a contract with oneself by which one guides one's life. It is a commitment to invest vital energy (of which money is one form) somewhere that we feel is right, and to divest it from where we think it's wrong. That requires an ethical judgment, or it calls for one. Usually this pertains to a person, to some activity in the world and very often where we put our cash. Usually in the process of relating to the material world, the ethical assessment is overlooked entirely. What we want is determined externally, by how brilliant an advertising person is; by how manipulative a videographer is at morphing a Mercedes with a slinky young woman; or by what pre-established, conditioned appetite is acting up at the moment.

Meantime, we are taught by long conditioning and tradition to acquire what we are told we want and not worry about the consequences. The packaging industry is not helping. There is absolutely no way to avoid plastic in Western civ at this time. Look around and consider your life, and tell me if you think it's possible.

"If only 50 customers a day in every store were to use reusable mugs," says a company memo quoted by a West Coast newspaper, "Starbucks would save 150,000 disposable paper cups daily! This equals 1.7 million pounds of paper, 3.7 million pounds of solid waste, and 150,000 trees a year." But the company has fallen way short of this dream. And each one of these cups costs 22 cents.

Very, very slowly, we are starting to wake up. Starbucks sells quite a few of those permanent coffee cups, which is a reflection of a changing value on using disposable paper or plastic cups. This is a step in the right direction. Most people still buy that coffee on the way to working at jobs that don't reflect their values.
 
As an astrology consultant, the number one issue people come in with these days is the question of what to do with their lives so that they are more in accord with their gifts and mission. In the past couple of years, this has become a hot topic in my practice, hotter than ever, and I think it's really interesting. In the old days, people usually showed up in spiritual crisis. Now they want to be artists. I've taken to calling it the, "What do my clients want to be when they grow up?" phase of my work. Most of them are making this decision between the ages of 40 and 55.
 
How to live one's values can be an extremely challenging question in a society as mixed up and as economically stressed out as our own.

Despite working out of an art studio of my own lately, I am not immune. The discussion over the value of my work continues to the present day when occasionally a reader writes in and says that Planet Waves should not charge for its services. One person recently wrote from Australia, saying, "It's universal knowledge and it should be free." Forget all the people I have to pay; she should not have to pay. Yesterday I received another such letter, coincidentally also from Oz.
 
"Over the years, I have witnessed the way Planet Waves has evolved from a guy writing about things he was passionate about into a guy writing passionately about how he needs to be paid for it," my correspondent said, referring to my Saturday blog entry wherein I pitch my company's services each week.

"Eric, please read your earlier writing and try and pinpoint exactly when it was that you made the decision to sell out...have you lost sight of the fact that when you limit your readership through subscriptions, that limits your reach to other human beings?"

Here is the letter to which she was referring. If not passionately, how exactly should I encourage readers to subscribe? Would a boring letter work better, to describe a passionate astrology news service? Part of my reply included this excellent new video from The Onion, "Home Depot Honors Fallen Soldier By Giving His Mom Free Power Drill."

It is interesting that my Australian correspondent's definition of "selling out" meant making my work and that of my company available to the public, rather than scoring a $500K job writing ad copy for Pfizer. Or how about selling my company to Google? Hey, Burt's Bees did pretty good. The company started with a reclusive beekeeper and someone he picked up hitchhiking who took over as his bookkeeper. They worked their butts off for a couple of decades, made some good products and a name for themselves. Then it was purchased by Clorox -- yes, Clorox -- for just under $1 billion last year.
 

Not Bee Keepers. Haz-Mat workers train for a chlorine emergency. Clorox recently purchased Burt's Bees for nearly $1 billion.

This is to say, it's not necessarily easy embarking on a path of right livelihood and holding your integrity there, and if you really succeed you can always sell yourself to the chlorine industry at the end of your career.

Everyone who decides to do something they feel is useful to the world rather than provide something that people are addicted to) faces the same issue: how do you get the word out? How do you explain it? And moreover, how do you deal with the feeling of selling yourself, and not feel like those girls in the window in Amsterdam? Then, what do you do with all the people who need your help but who can't pay? Part of right livelihood means making conscious choices in these matters. Values and ethics are part of the same theme.

Trust me -- I would rather not have to invest so much time and energy creating materials designed to sell my "products." But we can't just pretend it doesn't have to happen. This is the typical denial trip that many people go into regarding money, particularly those who claim not to like the stuff: most never really take control of their resources or how they acquire them. As a result, the easiest way to support yourself is to work for a large company that is doing Goddess knows what to God knows whom.

Even when you do the thing in life that you feel is right, there are going to be plenty of people telling you it's wrong. Usually that's what happened in the first place, early in life. I hear it all the time. I know the tune from my own life, so when my clients show up with it, it's old hat.

My father, for example, sent me applications for the postal service examination well into my late twenties. He knew perfectly well that I'm as close to a born writer, and as far from a postal worker, as it gets. I was at the time getting my stories into The New York Times and the wire services; but he assured me menacingly that I could not make a living as a writer. A less determined person might well have given up. I did not.

Some years later in therapy, I was working on the issue of how I managed to be a world-famous investigative reporter making about $75 a week. My therapist and mentor Joe, a Taurus by the way, pointed out that I was attempting to maintain two conflicting values: loyalty to my father, and dedication to my work. In the process, I managed to do something difficult in America -- acquire fame and not fortune. I succeeded brilliantly as a writer, then failed at it financially.

Kit Brown of New York City and Paris lives and breathes his art. He is not suited to be a psychologist. Photo by Danielle Voirin, who is also not suited to be a psychologist.

We have all been through this on some level. You're really a photographer and your parents try to turn you into a psychologist. You're a photographer and you end up a photo editor -- that may be worse.

The stories go on and on, and to the present day there's still a respectable cultural value on trying to convince your kids to do something supposedly profitable rather than something they are passionate about. But what, exactly, gets people up in the morning? What is it that motivates us to do what we do? When we take our motivation from something other than true inner commitment and heart-level necessity, what is it that motivates us? What do we lose in the process of following that other thing?
 
In a direct way, much that we acquire or achieve on the outside is an attempt to compensate for what we have given up on the inside.
 
Here, we are holding in our hands one of the great questions of our era. What do we do for our money? How do we take the creative, productive, healing things that we are capable of and sustain them economically, or have them be profitable enough to thrive? How do we begin to wean ourselves away from the things that specifically do not support us, the Earth or our communities, and reinvest our energy elsewhere?
 
To some, this question may seem like a bourgeois luxury. We are privileged Westerners worried about how we're going to make money not working for an insurance company but rather by "having fun." Spoiled little shits, aren't we?
 
On a not-so-much-deeper level, the issue is about whether we connect our natural gifts and personal resources with the necessity we have to survive, and grow, in the physical world. Why is it that we have those gifts, anyway?

You could look at this as a spiritual issue. We have a soul and the soul has a purpose. We have a body and it has its needs and its desires. Do we have the faith that it's possible to put the two together? Are we willing to do the work to get there? Following your soul's calling is a lot of hard work. Who has time? Getting those different values to align takes intelligence, talent, persistence and luck.
 
To even try, you need to believe in yourself. And you don't need to believe in yourself just once. You need to believe in yourself every day, in particular when things are going badly: when you're losing money or when you just don't feel like doing it that day. And that takes having faith in who you are and the mission you were called upon to do.

Here we come to the core issue of Taurus in our current world, which is self-esteem. Taurus is represented by a cow or a bull. It is the first acquisition of the person who shows up in Aries and declares, "I am." Soon after that declaration, the person discovers they have to eat. And the thing that helps them eat is a cow or a bull. Then you have milk, and some help plowing the land, and maybe you get a second cow who helps you expand your potential.
 
In our day, that cow is self-esteem. This term is so overused as to verge on meaningless, but I'd like to see if I can sort it out. I am gradually becoming convinced that it's the most important issue in our society right now. Healthy self-esteem is so rare that it's a difficult concept to grasp, but it's easier in the context of its opposite: feeling worthless. Feeling worthless encompasses feeling like there is no place for your talents in the world (if you even think you have any), and feeling unworthy of love.
 
The two meet at a crux point -- most people feel emotionally, erotically and financially undernourished. There is a very close relationship between these things, and it comes back to Taurus. Remember, for example, that Taurus in pre-Christian tradition is the season of communal sex for the sake of creating abundance (i.e., enough food to eat for you, your family and your village).
 
How do we get to feel unworthy? It is tragically simple: we are made to feel that way. And if we don't deal with this, we spend our lives making other people feel that way or teaching them to do so by maintaining the belief that we are worthless.
 
We perpetuate these beliefs and the whole culture of worthlessness when, for example, we deny other people the help that could truly assist them; when we hold onto our personal gifts and talents rather than share them; when we get jealous at the success or happiness of others; and when we invest our time and money in things we know we don't support or value.

Perhaps the most profound way we do this is by surrounding ourselves with people who do not value who we are.

It is both unfortunate and unnecessary that as a society we have most often reduced this discussion down to cash. But in a lot of ways the dollar value of something can be a useful measure. There was a time when I doubted the value of my astrology consulting. I have always charged a healthy fee and there has, thankfully, been a steady stream of clients since 1996. Rob Brezsny referred me hundreds of clients; so did a shaman in Wyoming named Dawn Eagle Woman, who sent every one of her students.

One day I was working with an extremely successful insurance salesperson. She was a woman and she was getting the usual "62 cents on the dollar," (as feminists have so often pointed out) in the form of an agreement with her manager, who in that particular agency took half her commission because she was lower on the totem pole. Note, he was not getting an override on her commission -- he was getting a lot of her actual percentage.
 
It became obvious that she lacked the self-esteem to insist that she receive her whole paycheck, just like her male colleagues were getting. She could sell anyone insurance, but lacked the courage to stand up to her boss. She had no idea how to do it. First, I told her she was worth it. Never underestimate the value of this: if you tell someone they are worth it and you mean it, you may be the only person to have ever done so. Next, we analyzed what she had to lose. It turned out that she had nothing to lose: her clients loved her so much that it seemed highly unlikely that anybody would dare fire her. She could switch insurance companies and bring her millions of dollars of business somewhere else. We did what is called a power analysis. In this situation, she had the power.
 
Then, we rehearsed the conversation. She practiced saying the words, "I want and deserve my full commission." Given the extremely high value of that short sentence (in the tens of thousands of dollars a year) and the space I had created for her to practice saying it, it dawned on me that I was worth every cent I was being paid.

Over the years I've had this same conversation dozens of times. I was working with a Canadian artist last week and clicked on her website during the session. I noticed the low prices of her work. "Those don't look like $850 paintings, they look like $5,000 paintings," I said to her. I knew I was right. Then she replied, "In California that's about how much I get."

Yes, I know, price is not the only measure of value. We need to remember this every day. Some cheap things are extremely expensive in the end, and some things that are free (like a bit of information) can save your life. Most things fall somewhere in between.

But the real question of value comes down to this, if you ask me: What do you have to offer the world? And what are you doing about it?

I hope you're doing something. It may be hard, but most days it's fun.





By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

YESTERDAY, SEVERAL of the airlines announced that henceforth fliers would only be allowed a single piece of luggage: not two as has been standard for decades; now a second bag will cost extra. This follows several years of shake-up in the airline industry; most recently complicated by politicians no longer interested in appropriating funds for a bail out, the FAA's inability to oversee safety standards which has grounded thousands of flights and the sharp increase in fuel prices.
 

The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter was inspired by women during WWII who worked in factories; like the "Richmond Welders", seen above. The concept: We Can Do It! changed society’s perception of women in the workplace and with this; the home. Photo: Courtesy of the Family of Margaret Fong.

These are the kinds of events, I call them echoes, that tickle me; not because I'm pleased with that decision (in fact, it puts a real crimp in my yearly pattern of bringing must-have items to the Pea Patch from my yearly trips home.) No, it's the multidimensional properties of such an announcement that impress me, a kind of inner-outer linkage and "a-ha!" moment that comes from a soul level and works its way into materiality in interesting ways. I found this echo particularly delicious because we've been talking about this for a while now, haven't we?
 
It's time to ditch the baggage. We can't afford it anymore.
 
These kinds of multidimensional echoes are everywhere we look if we'll develop an eye to notice them, an ear to hear them. I recently attended a meeting of the Democrats Club, a small gathering of folk who represent what passes for Progressives in the Pea Patch; very small -- perhaps fifteen people in an overwhelmingly Republican county. I've gone to these monthly meetings occasionally over the years to see what they're up to, which isn't much. They hold raffles, they check in with larger organizations, they have a booth at the fair to sell bumper stickers and pins; but they accomplish little and their lethargy annoys me. I do my best to fade into the background, although that's unlikely in this Ozark culture; I don't look like them, talk like them or think as they do. I'm about as close to exotic as it comes in the Patch and I usually keep my own counsel. I didn't the other evening; because there were two candidates for local office attending and soliciting suggestions; I offered a modest proposal for improving the community.
 
That was when I hit the old boy wall. As I spoke, I noted a series of frowns forming on the faces of several elderly gents across the table. As soon as I finished, two of them weighed in on why nothing I'd proposed would work. A feisty little woman at the edge of the group piped up. "She said we can, you're saying we can't. I like the way she thinks." The men looked uncomfortable but determined, countering that "that's just the way it is in this community; the way it's always been." They were sitting smugly on a couple of hundred years worth of small-town baggage, a comfortable position that allowed them not to have to take any responsibility for change. The debate died when the moderator stepped in, indicating that the meeting was not the place for such a discussion (which seemed as absurd then as it does as I write this), and it should be noted that the people who came up to talk to me about the possibilities after the meeting were all, of course, women.

Mars is Calling Taurus What is it about Taurus men? Is it possible to get through that impeccable exterior to the inner core within? Sometimes it seems not. There are those days when many among them seem unreachable, or so determined to focus on their own way of seeing the world that there seems to be no other. Here is the secret: Taurus men don't do anything they don't want to do. If they're doing it, they want to do it. If they're not doing it, they don't want to do it. Mars calling explores the inner psyche of men born under the sign of the Bull. Pre-order just the Taurus edition, or all 12 signs here. Mars calling is being distributed one chapter at a time, as the Sun goes through that particular sign.The chapters are generous and cover the Sun and Moon for each sign. Aries was distributed about a week ago; Taurus is coming around May 8. We will introduce Venus Calling as a separate series starting with Libra in October.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 25, 2008, #711 - By ERIC FRANCIS