AstroCat!

Spike, fact-checking my work:

Harriet goes down.

Today, Harriet Miers withdrew from consideration for the Supreme Court. Miers, you will recall, was nominated on a Solar Eclipse with the asteroid Harriet (1744) only two degrees from the Solar Eclipse point. She issued her withdrawal with asteroid Harriet at 22.26 Libra - 2 degrees from the Oct. 17 Lunar Eclipse point.

Of course all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if Sandra Day O'Connor hadn't had a hissy fit about getting passed over for Chief Justice. (Edited to add: Well, perhaps that was a bit mean-spirited. I mean, that was the gossip, but the ostensible reason was to care for her sick husband, so I shouldn't be such a shit about it, I guess.) Interestingly, asteroid Sandra (1760) is currently at 20.52 Virgo, headed for a conjunction with the U.S. Neptune (Sibley chart). Pretty fitting, given her resignation from the court has placed the country on a path to a full scale ideological showdown.

Time for Bush to appoint a no-holds-barred, base-chumming ideologue to try to bolster support before the indictments come down? Yeah, probably. He'll need to act fast: Asteroid Fitzgerald (3665) is currently at 23.07 Libra, opposed asteroid George (3854) at 20.36 Aries - conjunct the U.S. Chiron.

Lunar eclipse article at website

In honor of this month's eclipses in Libra and Aries, I've posted a new article at my website entitled "You Were Asleep":

Eclipses simply tell you that a crisis has arisen, and something in your life must change. There are no guarantees that the changes will be permanent or positive, just that they must happen. And while the storm swirls around you and alters the landscape of your life, there you stand, motionless in the deceptively still eye of the hurricane. For you, my friend, are the constant. The eclipse is in your chart. All this turmoil has nothing to do with your boss, your mother, or the checker at the supermarket. You are the one who fell asleep at the wheel of your life; but bless you, you are trying to wake up...

"Fetch me more mead!"

I guess it's the Sun approaching that conjunction with Jupiter - picture a sort of Henry VIII figure sitting at a banquet table that's groaning with food and drink, waving a turkey leg and hollering "Fetch me more mead!" Well, Sun/Jupiter or whatever, we've got a busy weekend coming up. Friday night my buddy Natori is lecturing at SDAS about Mars retrograde, so we'll be going to that. It's weird...I've been a member of SDAS for something like ten years, have been a speaker (and will be speaking again in April 2006), designed their website and act as webmistress, but I don't think I've been to a meeting in three or four years. What can I say; nobody believes me, since I can be a fairly ... strenuous personality, but basically I'm shy.

On Saturday my brother and his wife are descending from the high desert for an overnight visit. We'll probably haul them off with us to our friend Claudia's art opening on Saturday night; she's in a four-woman show, a tribute to Frida Kahlo and celebration of the Day of the Dead. Claudia's paintings rule; I can't wait to see her tributes to Frida.

Then Sunday is Jonny's birthday, so we're having some friends over for dinner and cake and general revelry. This month's eclipses are really pounding him hard - conjuncting, opposing, and/or squaring his Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - and he's pretty stressed out. The guy could use some champagne, is all I'm sayin'... so we'll do our best to cheer him up.

Full Moon is on Monday, so look for a new article on my website this Saturday. This one's about eclipses (surprise, surprise). Speaking of which, I'm running a special on my eclipse reports: If you order one before the 17th you get a free "Sky Within" report, with text by Steven Forrest. Rush over now and buy a bushel!

Losing the seasonal groove.

Since 1992, come rain or shine, I've published a seasonal essay at each equinox and solstice. Through moves to San Diego (Kensington), Santee, Santa Cruz, San Diego (Hillcrest) and San Diego (Normal Heights); through deaths of brother, mother, aunt and uncle; through two junior colleges and a university, an associate's degree and a bachelors; through the most ghastly renovation ever visited on man, woman or child - through it all, I've written this newsletter. I think I missed publishing one winter essay in 2001 or 2002, and that's about it.

A couple of weeks ago the autumnal equinox came and went, and struggling with two other writing deadlines, I shrugged it off. "I'll get to the newsletter before the New Moon," I assured myself. The New Moon came and went. No essay. And now it's time to meet another deadline, and I'm trying to finish another big project by the end of the year. And I find I just don't have the energy or the inspiration left over to tackle another autumn essay.

Is it possible that after thirteen years, I've simply run out of things to say about the seasons? They've been a real mainstay, helping me keep a toehold in cyclical time, teaching me how to peel back the layers of basic astrology and peer deep inside. And in a place like San Diego, where physical reminders of the changing seasons are so subtle as to be nearly undetectable, it was nice to take that moment, every few months, to meditate on the seasonal changes that take place on the inside. I enjoy going back and reading those little essays; they remind me who I was and what I was doing all those seasons ago, and how my mind was working.

When I look back over all those years of essays, the ones written in autumn are not my favorites; strange, since autumn is far and away my favorite season. I seem to write pretty well in spring and especially summer, but autumn finds me adrift, trying to find some kind of hook that resonates. And the winter essays are worse, a lot of fairly repetitive whining about how grumpy and awful I am and how Scrooge had the right idea all along. Maybe I've worn a groove in the seasons, revisiting the same themes over and over until the seasons themselves are losing their meaning for me.

So I'm not writing an autumn essay, I guess. Maybe I'm letting go of that long, beautiful, contemplative era. Or maybe it's a one-time thing, a fluke, and I'll be back at it this winter, bitching about Christmas. I really don't know. Let's see what happens.

And in the meantime, there'll be an article at the full moon, cross-posted at my website and at MoonCircles. And other stuff too, eventually. Autumnal greetings to you all!

Fun with eclipses and asteroids

On Monday, a few hours after a solar eclipse in Libra, Bush announced his appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court - an appointment that seems to have pleased practically no one. Not surprising, really, given that the eclipse, at 10.19 Libra (the sign that rules judges), conjoined Saturn and squared the Sun in the (Sibley) chart for the U.S. What is pretty amazing, though, is that on Monday, asteroid Harriet (1744) was at 8.46 Libra, only 1.5 degrees from the eclipse point.



Look for interesting developments around the 17th, when a lunar eclipse at 24.13 Aries squares the U.S. Mercury Rx/Pluto opposition.