2005 January : Big Sky AstroBlog

Jan

28

After a couple of days of foreplay, Mars and Pluto had a rendezvous at 24 Sagittarius this morning at 9:44 am PST. The symbolism: nuclear (or nuc-u-lar, depending on how you vote) weapons (John Ashcroft exploited this theme only yesterday), transportation disasters, unbridled hostility and violence.

Among other things, of course. My friend Natori, with Mars marching across her Ascendant, experienced the Mars/Pluto/Sagittarius combination in the form of a couple of Mormons showing up on her doorstep, for the first time in the many years she’s lived in her house. Onward Christian soldiers (Mars in Sag) !

Thankfully, I’m experiencing this conjunction, so far, only in the realm of dreams. I don’t usually remember dreams or think much about them, but last night a graphic and completely uncharacteristic one grabbed my attention. I was chattering with some nice, if somewhat unkempt and eccentric, blonde man, when suddenly he slumped against a wall. I thought he was just tired. Then another guy (who, I swear, was Al Swearengen from Deadwood) appeared and told the blonde man, in a calm, menacing voice, “In a few minutes you will realize that I’ve sliced the back of your head open and that you are dying.”

Ack! Murder! Menace! Horror! Not my kind of thing at all. But if you are, in fact, every person in your dream (true? where have I heard/read that?), I am the victim, the murderer, and the horrified onlooker. So at some level, anyway, I guess I’m pissed off, afraid, and freaked out. And John Ashcroft is the terrorized, the terrorist, and the terror.

Today, the unholy alliance of Mars and Pluto signals high noon in Deadwood, and all of us have itchy trigger fingers. We are all ready to shoot, all about to be shot, and all standing on the sidelines, fascinated and horrified.

Either that, or it’s something I ate before bedtime.

January 28, 2005 | Comments Off

Jan

23

Johnny Carson

Johnny Carson has died.

From Salon:

Carson choose to let ‘Tonight’ stand as his career zenith and his finale, withdrawing into a quiet retirement that suited his private nature and refusing involvement in other show business projects.

Johnny was a Libra, the acme of cool Libran charm. But with the sun in the twelfth house and a Scorpio ascendant, he was notoriously private offscreen. That didn’t matter to us; our experience of Johnny’s twelfth house/Scorpio energy was that he always felt just right late at night, in the dark, in the privacy of your bedroom. You’d be lying there in bed, half-asleep, or wishing you could be. And there Johnny would be, flickering away on the TV, graceful and deadpan and … comforting. It wasn’t a Mr. Rogers kind of comforting, or a Walter Cronkite kind. Johnny was not avuncular or warm; he was Mr. Cool, with Mercury/Saturn rising in Scorpio. Yet considering he was such a smart-ass, Johnny inspired tremendous warmth.

It’s been years since he left the Tonight Show, and it’s surprising that the news of his death should hurt so much. I suppose losing the icons of our youth is wounding because they take little bits of our youthful selves with them as they go. At least with Johnny, you get the sense those youthful fragments are in good hands. Vaya con dios, Johnny.

January 23, 2005 | Comments Off

Jan

19

Look for me tomorrow - I’ll be the one dressed in black and buying nothing.

Still, look to the day of an event and by observing the aspects the Moon will make before leaving its sign, you can get a pretty good picture of how that event will wash out in the end. For example, I’m just bitter and vindictive enough to be comforted by the absolutely retched aspects of tomorrow’s Moon in Gemini. Oh, there are trines to Neptune (pretty fitting for the ultimate Wizard of Oz presidency) and Jupiter (plenty of hot air and overoptimism), but I prefer to focus on the oppositions to Mars and Pluto (the last aspect, representing “the end of the matter”). I feel confident that in the fullness of time, the Chimperor will get his comeuppance.

Here’s something completely unrelated to that, and kind of funny. Last night, between the Sun entering Aquarius at 3:22 pm and the Moon square Uranus at 11:55 pm, our electricity went out. (For those who don’t get the joke, Aquarius/Uranus rule electricity.) It was sort of fun staggering around looking for candles, cooking on the gas stove by candlelight… I felt like I was on one of those PBS programs where they put a 21st century family in a 19th century situation and let them see just how tough life was back then. Except, you know, I didn’t have to make my own soap or anything.

January 19, 2005 | Comments Off

Jan

12

I wrote a rather cranky and marginally self-serving article about how so much astrology writing is kind of boring (I don’t put it that way, exactly; but there really is no nice way to put it, is there?), and how taking an ethnographic approach might spice up our astrology writing. Said article has, surprisingly, been accepted for publication in the April/May issue of The Mountain Astrologer.

This article was the direct descendant of a testy email exchange I had with a reader of my website last spring. I’d been feeling vaguely guilty for writing so much from a personal point of view, often using very little explicit astrology at all in my articles. All it took was for someone else to complain about it, though, to get my back up and make me fight for the right to be reflective. So in a way, she did me a favor.

Or did she? We’ll see once it’s published. Something tells me it’s liable to rub some people the wrong way. What’s a nice girl like me, with a seventh-house moon, doing pissing people off all the time?

January 12, 2005 | Comments Off

keep looking »

Sign of Leo

Moon sextiles Mercury at
4:20 pm on Jul.5, 2008

Moon opposes Neptune at
5:22 pm on Jul.5, 2008

Moon trines Pluto at
3:05 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon goes void of course at
3:05 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon enters Virgo at
4:04 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon conjuncts Mars at
9:19 am on Jul.6, 2008