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Kim Marie, director of the Evolutionary Astrology Network is offering a free webinar on the upcoming Mercury Retrograde on Monday September 29, 6-8 pm MDT.
While it is free, you have to register to get the link and later the sound file. https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7462967420292376066
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 It is perfect that the New Moon in Libra is so close to the Equinox because Libra represents balance and during the equinoxes, the day and night are of the equal duration. The light and the darkness are balanced. The Fall Equinox is on Monday, the New Moon on Tuesday and Wednesday. The power potential for this period is increased with Pluto stationing direct on Monday. Whatever has been brewing is ready to come forth. Today on KPFA two of the hosts on separate programs, interviewed people who had pursued their dreams despite hardship and ridicule for the past 40 years plus. One, Malcolm Margolin author, publisher and founder of Heyday Books in Berkeley, CA and the other Chris Strachwitz founder of Arhoolie Records. Both these guys became fascinated and obsessed with cultures other than their own and dedicated their life’s work to bringing forth those cultures. Malcolm’s fascination was California Indians, while for Chris it was African American music especially blues. Through their efforts the rest of us came to know and appreciate the accomplishments of these two groups which were in turn benefited. Since I am an Evolutionary Astrologer, I will start with Pluto. Pluto went retrograde on Tax Day in the US, April 15 and now it will go direct the day after the People’s Climate March in New York, September 21. Over 100,000 people and are expected to march in support of the environment on that day. Let us use these two events (tax day and the climate march) as the bookends of this Pluto retrograde period. Listening to the two shows on the radio brought me back to a recurrent thought I have been having for the past several months. What I have done for the past 40+ years? This thought has been coming up a lot for me now that I am in the Fall of my own life and possibly motivated by the Pluto retrograde which opposes my natal Venus in the 11th house. There have been many death during this past 5 months, of famous people and of loved ones. One thing I have done for the past 40+ plus years is to be aware of my own impact on the planet. An undercurrent of fear related to the environment, has always been present in my life. I decided while still a child that I would not have children as I feared cataclysms and collapse that I felt were inevitable. I did not want to see my children or grandchildren suffering. I didn’t think we would last this long. Forty years ago, I knew we were on a collision course. I couldn’t and still can’t believe anyone is surprised by climate change, rising sea level, melting ice caps, etc. Hello where have you been? Human life on this planet is a cancer. It destroys everything in its path. It grows and grows eating everything in its path. Someone said the other day, “the planet will survive, but we might not.” I have lived the past 40 years knowing that. Thus, it is not surprising that I have felt the impermanence of the things. I have not accepted the myths of consensus society. I did not believe I was here to get a job, get married have children. My life has been about the search for meaning and wisdom. As I have said before, I got the final piece of that from a movie years ago (I don’t remember what it was). “Meaning is not something you find, but something you give.” This changed everything (to paraphrase the title of Naomi Kline’s latest book…This Changes Everything). Nothing has meaning intrinsically. All the laws, rules and guidelines….are all man-made. The only laws that matter are the laws of Nature. The hubris of human beings has brought us to our current state of affairs. We will be humbled. I think we have already gone too far. Cascading effects are now in motion. Even if we never manufactured another plastic bag, ‘clamshell’ or shampoo bottle…we have already produced enough plastic (floating in five huge garbage patches in the ocean), to destroy all life in the ocean and thus the planet. This stuff will never be gone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch I could go on….but I won’t. I’m sure if you are reading this blog post, you are aware of what’s going on. So now what? This is the big question. All my life I have felt like I was waiting for something, like sitting at a bus stop. What to do while we wait. Kind of like: “how will you spend the time between the cradle and the grave.” What I have chosen is related to a poem I read while living in a Gurdjieff community. I am a witness to the Creation. Libra….love, harmony and beauty. Find something that sparkles and follow it where ever it takes you. The Ninth Elegy Rainer Maria Rilke Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then have to be human–and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . . Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too. . . . . But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart. Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the stars, what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable. For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window– at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy? Threshold: what it means for two lovers to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door– they too, after the many who came before them and before those to come. . . . ., lightly. Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act. An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits. Between the hammers our heart endures, just as the tongue does between the teeth and, despite that, still is able to praise. Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze. Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile. Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form, serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last. Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over–one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death. Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being wells up in my heart.
 The other morning I was listening to Richard D. Wolff on KPFA “Economic Update”. He spoke about some guy who just purchased a second home in Manhattan for 71.5 million dollars. My first thought was about a woman I encountered in a parking lot the day before. I had seen her sitting in her car before in the same spot and suspected that she, like many seniors these days, lives in her car. I had been to the Food Bank that morning and was given 3 loaves of whole wheat bread. I can’t eat that much bread before it goes bad, so I approached her car and asked her if she lived in it and if she would like some of this bread. “Yes, I live in my car with my three dogs. No, I don’t want the bread because I don’t want the extra weight. If I stay thin, I have less trouble with my back.” She was entirely toothless and appeared to be at least 75. One of the dogs was a huge Dobberman, almost as big as she was. Two smaller dogs were in cages in the back seat. The SUV was packed solid with her belongings. It appears that she slept sitting in the driver’s seat.
I wondered what her life had been. How had she ‘ended up’ like this? She had a pretty nice SUV and it was in good condition. I thought of my own life and various choices I have made that brought me to my present circumstances. One thing is true. In the world today, a woman on her own still has a much harder time ‘making it’. I see women selling their crafts at the farmer’s markets all over the county. I can tell which ones are married. Husbands come with their trucks loaded, help set up the canopy and unload all the bins. Husbands run back and forth responding to cell phone calls bringing that important thing she forgot. Husbands bring food and beverage. The wives sit surrounded by their ‘art’. I wonder if they realize that without the support of their husbands they couldn’t afford to follow their bliss? Meanwhile, I, and many others, do it all myself. Then after a hard day sitting outside at a market, I come home and cook myself dinner from the food I either bought with foodstamps or got at the foodbank. I am not ashamed of this. I feel it is part of my ‘retirement package’. The line grows longer each month as more and more people are forced to rely on this food, while, what we get dwindles each month. When I get an excess of certain items, I try to give it to homeless people. I have spent a lot of time reviewing my life to see ‘where I went wrong’, so to speak. I followed my heart a good deal of the time. I refused to make myself sick for a job. When I worked at the Copyright Office, Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. the stress of commuting 2 hours each way, finding parking and dealing with my ex-marine sargent boss, not to mention the job itself, was so great my doctor said I needed to take Valium. His advice: “Drive to work, pop a pill. This will get you to lunch time. Pop another pill that will get you to 5 o’clock, then you can drive home.” “Really?” I did it one day. I was so out of it I couldn’t work. So instead of becoming a Valium addict, I quit the job to do something I liked. That was a high paying job for those days, but…guess what, the government does not pay into social security. WHAT???? So, I never got credit for those years when my hair was falling out from stress. So what does all this have to do with Full Moon in Pisces you might be asking. Well this Full Moon is exactly conjunct my natal moon almost to the minute. So, I thought you might be interested in knowing how that plays out in a person’s real life. It turns out I am very sensitive to energy and that it is very important that I get a lot of unscheduled time in nature. I am highly intuitive and when I take care of my emotional and energy needs, it gets even better. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. It has taken me a long time to understand my Pisces Moon, with a lot of pain, loss and suffering to go along with it. But, now, people say I am an incredible astrologer No one told me I could grow up to be an astrologer. It was not on the list of careers my parents planned for me. Nor any that I planned for myself. This is important. Sometimes we just need to take the time to live without a plan; to learn to listen; to learn to follow the crumbs that light our path. I had to follow the crumbs into the woods so to speak. Now, I am the ‘witch in the woods’ and l love helping people see and follow the ‘crumbs’ that lead to their right path - assisting them in recognizing signs. Despite the freedoms this modern American culture offers, it does not help us to learn how ‘to be.’ I learned that in Zaire (Congo) while in the Peace Corps. My life is very much like that of Fatima the Spinner and the Tent, a story I heard in 1996 on the Visionary Activist show by Caroline Casey on KPFA. It happened to be my Jupiter return and I was open. Each of us has a story or there is a story that we can connect to. My story used to be “The Ugly Duckling”. It took me a long time to find my tribe, but when I found it, I was no longer considered weird. For me it happened around the time of my second Saturn return but I know it was set in motion at my first Saturn return…when I worked in Washington, D.C. and was so miserable with my ‘great job with so much potential’. I knew my destiny lay somewhere else. This is the time to find your story or better yet, write your story. Today on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, she interview Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist. They talked about how each person has a personal legend. I am going to read that book again. It’s been years since I read it. I’d like to recommend the upcoming webinar with Mark Jones. I have been fortunate to attend many of his lectures, read his book and gotten a reading from him. I know this webinar will be valuable. https://www.astrologyuniversity.com/audio#!/~/product/category=6766051&id=40102437 Link to Fatima the Spinner and the Tent |
AuthorHamida Judith Dides, M.A. is an evolutionary astrologer living in Northern California. Archives
March 2023
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