Established astrologers — those that make some sort of living from the subject — are decidedly divided when it comes to the issue of Sun-sign columns. To some, Sun-sign astrology is a disgrace to the profundity and subtleties of the art. While others, myself included, see horoscope columns as good lure. If it weren’t for those tiny Dell Sun Sign booklets that I hoarded as a kid, I’d never have dedicated myself so determinedly to deeper study.

To pugnacious scientists like Richard Dawkins‘ dismay, it’s a dazzling testament to astrology’s oracular power that nearly every periodical in the world carries a horoscope section. Most of the Sun-sign columns read like fortune cookie banalities — and this might be the secret to their appeal (their association with eating dessert). But occasionally, amidst the riffraff and dross, a column appears that is both astrologically erudite and pop-culturally savvy — written in a manner that speaks to the urban poet (and astrology lover) within each of us.

Rockie Gardiner‘s astrology column for the L.A. Weekly, The Rockie Horoscope was just such a creation. Read more

The irony of this spoof video from The Onion wasn’t lost on me when I came across it the other day, just weeks before Pluto made entry into Capricorn.

Take it apart for yourself and you can revel in the loopy literalism of what we’re actually living through as a country right now. Let’s see, a big gaping hole in the earth — that’s easily one of Pluto’s most literal motifs. I always wonder about the horoscopes of those folks you read about in the news where, during harsh weather, giant sinkholes suddenly open up beneath their car (or house) and swallow the thing down completely. You just know they’ve got a heavy Pluto transit going on somewhere in their chart.

And then the Capricorn part of our equation, actually it’s more like Capricorn on Viagra: The government’s absurd notion of a 400 billion dollar “stimulus package” to salvage the US’s economy. This is Capricorn at its most deranged and disassociated from the sign’s ruler — pragmatic Saturn. “Let’s print up a bunch of new money and then we’ll just, well, throw it into a giant hole.” And, as one woman notes in the Onion video, “set it on fire.” Very Pluto. Very nuts. Very now.

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. 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.”

—Genevieve Salerno.