Think fondly of today. You might recall this as the last date where the world as you knew it was like the world that you always knew. “That chef made my eggs just the way I like them.” Happy day!

Tomorrow opens a crack in time. Wild card days. The optometrist advising for the removal of the cataracts. The bank is now closed (again) on Saturdays (and maybe Fridays too). Oh, and dad died suddenly, while getting out of the shower, and you never got to say goodbye.

Tomorrow heralds the exact opposition between Saturn and Uranus, the start of a long two-year match between titans. Father Sky trounces Father Time. But this is also a mirroring dance, a commingling of their seed and shadows. They’re the oddest of lovers, the harshest of enemies (what father and son are not?) Yes, people — it’s the birth of a new world order.

Or put another way, as the gadfly historian Gore Vidal recently commented: “This country is finished. But, with a new republic like this, if you missed being here at the beginning, the next best thing is to be here at the end.”

So, consider your life at this moment. Your soul feels distinctly divided into dueling factions. Do you notice a grip in the gut? The fist down there, the one you’ve been carrying about on your rounds for the last couple of months. That’s the rub! The big sky fight. Saturn dutifully pressing your feet into the earth (just one more day of working hard and praying everything is “OK”!) while Uranus takes off the top and attempts to fill your head with vivid images of your unlived life, narratives that well-up while you sleep but then, often, mist-out during the grind of Saturn’s day-to-day tasks of acquiring.

Uranus, as Promethean awakener, reminds the individual that reality is teeming with the dynamism of change; a flow that can’t be tethered to the movement of consensual time — for that would be too slow a representation. But, killjoy Saturn declares that we come to the lip of change like the Ghost of Christmas Past, dragging a ball and chain. Breathing barely. This does not make for an easy jumping.

This stalemate and ambivalent torsion is the blur of the moment, the atmosphere we’re all breathing right now. But as Rumi puts it, there is “another way of expiring.” Exhaling consciously. Letting go, consciously. And yes, a little bit of dying, too. So, what are we willing to sacrifice or, worse, have wrestled away from us to connect with our unlived life? The poet Mary Oliver asks this too:

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

Saturn gives us time, to keep it all together by — to do our scrapbooking and build our portfolios. That’s good. And bones so that we aren’t just flesh sacks glopping about. Need bones, good. Discipline too, and melancholy so we don’t get too preposterous about this life. Balance makes sense. But Saturn also keeps disruption at bay. And that’s problematic. In mythology Saturn was always blocking or hindering — forever eating his progeny lest any of them disturb his hegemony at the edge of the known world — the solar system’s demarcation, before the discovery of the trans-Saturn planets: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Read more

Today I visited the Japanese maple that is in my front yard. I stood alongside it for a good ten minutes. I wanted the tree to sense how much I appreciated its radiance, the incendiary tinge of the red and orange leaves. And with a clear sky, like today’s, the backdrop set the tree’s beauty into high relief.

Earlier I’d been with sheeny black creatures. Coming home from a walk I spied on a gathering of crows, about eight of them, swooping from their spot on a pine branch to take prime pickings from the neighbor’s recycling pile. One of the birds was so huge it resembled an infant, in a way — pitch black and hopping on all fours — with wings. Very disconcerting.

The crow’s coloring is so deep, it’s slightly metallic black and hypnotic. The blackness is as deep as their persistence. And I thought of a poem by the Hindi poet Mirabai that talks about her love for the Beloved’s black hair. She’s always writing about his hair. The vivid blackness — the sheen of it, and her getting lost in it.

The birds would argue about who got the choice bits from the bin, with the victor flying off to stash the picking in her nest. Eventually they got angry at my staring and started cawing aggressively. I laughed and walked down to see my maple and snapped the photo above. I hadn’t dressed warm enough so I finally went back into the house.

Perhaps because Pluto sits near my ascendant and with the moon and Saturn in Scorpio in my natal chart, I become vitalized as the season shifts towards the death space that typifies mid-Autumn. The Sun’s ingress into Scorpio.

Summer for me was like fathoms of void. Was there sun? And when the equinox came in September I hardly took notice. My heart was burgled and cut in June — and when the heart’s sore and shuttered there can be such an eerie disconnect from beauty. Dry. I could lean towards beauty, but beauty didn’t, wouldn’t, lean towards me. I think beauty could sense the veil and felt unwelcome. Or so the mind says — in reality when the heart, the eye of beauty is shut, beauty simply is not. Is asleep.

There’s a great Leonard Cohen song that tells about the frustration of trying to contrive one’s way towards beauty. Making beauty an object rather than seeing it as an essential expression of the Self.

I came so far for beauty.
I left so much behind.
My patience and my family.
My masterpiece unsigned.
I thought I’d be rewarded.
For such a lonely choice.
And surely she would answer
To such a very hopeless voice.
I practiced all my sainthood.
I gave to one and all.
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all.

The Sufis talk about reaching a place, after long pining and making efforts toward the Beloved, where the Beloved actually makes a turning — and suddenly the seeker becomes the sought. The notion is lovely except this process, where the Beloved comes after the seeker, is painful. Barren. Disorienting. One is dropped into a wasteland. The Sufis’ term for this phase, this displacement is called: constraint. Read more

“Midsummer is the sexiest time of year. The word itself conjures images of luscious fruit, eternal twilight, warm nights dotted with the firefly’s peridot lights and feverish days punctuated by bursts of thunder and warm rain. It is a time when romance wanders freely in the mind, and when the bounties of earth are so plentiful, they are intoxicating. Life seems to spring eternal.”

“The green of the trees begins to take on a darker, more exhausted verdancy, animals go about the business of rearing their growing young, instead of birthing them and the nights and hottest days are filled with the gnawing presence of insects. Lammas, or Lughnasadh (pronounced: loo-NAH-sah), the sabbath which celebrates the beginning of the harvest year, is a time of maturity and of age. It is also a surreal moment in the year when death and life coexist in physical manifestation.”

A vibrant tribute to this verdant time of the season over on Planet Waves, by guest writer Genevieve Salerno. Beautiful! Thanks Genevieve.

The new moon on August 1, 2008 is a solar eclipse. Eclipses have a bad reputation. This is related to the days when only kings and queens had their horoscopes prepared — and what might befall a ruler meant the entire village was going to catch hell in some way.

The fact that an eclipse involves an astronomical exactitude can, for humans, translate into a feeling of pressure or force that impacts our ascending or descending alignment, the toggle between sleep and consciousness.

In astrology, how things appear is just as important as how things actually are situated in the sky. So the appearance of the moon moving across the sun’s face, darkening him in the process, has a particular effect on us, especially for those able to physically witness the eclipse.

The eclipse event is anachronistic. It tweaks our cellular memory — the reptilian/mammalian part of the brain which has sensed the darkening from eclipses for eons. Imagine animals experiencing an eclipse. The oddness about the light waning. The eerie stillness. Things slow down externally, and a kind of wary watchfulness predominates. Think of the Moon card in the Tarot. Dreams confound, longings and desires feel jammed. Visions, imaginings intensify. It’s all about amplification and then movement — either backwards or forwards; decay or growth. Read more

The new moon is a conjunction between the sun and moon, a marriage and co-mergence of the masculine solar principle and the feminine lunar principle. A conjunction corresponds to the alchemical phase of coniunctio — the end result of the alchemical procedure when the opposites are successfully united. This blending releases a third force or condition — something unique, not experienced before. This nexus between the solar and lunar function sets the vibrational tenor for the entire 28 days that follow the new moon phase.

At full moon the secret of the sun moon marriage is revealed. The July 2008 new moon took place on July 3 at 12 degrees of Cancer. The July full moon is Friday, July 18. Tonight marks the first facet of the full moon’s dissemination. What are you sensing?

A Cancer new moon shifts our attention to issues of nourishment and sustainment. How and where our soul finds solace and harbor. Generally we think of Cancerian nourishment as it relates to food and being mothered (or mothering) — a quality of emotional support that allows us to relax and feel a quality of love that is abiding. Read more