I speak of love that comes to mind,
The Moon is faithful, although blind.
She moves in thought she cannot speak
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The Earth so dark, so long my sleep.
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.

-- Allen Ginsberg

ARIES (March 21-April 19)
There's this stuff in gasoline called octane, which controls the speed of the burn.  The idea in getting the most out of fuel is to create a slow, even, thorough burn.  The celestial setup is perfect to lend you the optimum blend of fire, for creativity, heat and passion, plus earth, which will grant you stability, grounding, a sense of balance and a long-term vision.  But the stars in their course only suggest what is possible rather than dictating what will be so.  You must add the final ingredients: awareness, decision and sustained action.  Tune into a more subtle level than the one this world is usually obsessed over and you'll tap an endless well of innovations and alternative viewpoints.  Just bring them in slowly, evenly and thoroughly -- high octane.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
This is, in so many respects, the moment you've been awaiting for so long. No time is perfect; there are no "golden ages" that match the selective memory of history, and from a dog's eye view, it's all pretty much the same, anyway.  At all points along the web of time, we must face adversity, weaknesses and shortcomings; and if we have an open heart, we are sensitive to those in struggle.  But please don't let any of this stop you from taking advantage of one of the most auspicious moments in a great many years.  There is a great wave of energy, potential and possibility heading straight your way.  The stage is set for you to blow your possibilities wide open, to choose one or two that ring like silver, and to show yourself and the world that simple, brilliant ideas do pretty much do grow on trees -- and can make life easier and far more fun, for you and everyone.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
People have a very hard time with the idea of power.  Give somebody a little power and the first thing they do with it most of the time is show their most sadistic colors.  Then they are inclined to "have fun," which is another way of saying abuse their authority.  In these weeks, you're in an extraordinary position to both take authority and make a vivid point of what you know is the right way to be in this world, where so much work needs attending to, where there is such a need for fairness and generosity, and where there is so much begging to be set to rights.  Your most effective plan will include some combination of creativity, shrewdness, charity and camouflage, but under cover of these common sense elements of protection, you can accomplish a tremendous amount over the next four or five weeks, and considerably beyond.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
As you reach this next turning point in your working life, it's vital that you focus on both real transitions and authentic new horizons.  The lure of the old and familiar is potent, and perhaps filled with visions of what was not realized or accomplished.  And it seems that your attraction to what is possible still seems a bit ethereal or unreal.  It is up to you to make it real.  It is up to you to take concrete, decisive steps to scope out the wide vista of possibilities, to remember the ones you have both long-treasured and long-forsaken, and make choices based on what works on many levels, not just one or two.  And while you're at it, rewrite some version your resume, not for "the man," but as a way of privately marking your many significant accomplishments, lots of which you've already forgotten about.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
Making commitments with Mercury retrograde is always risky business. Believe it or not, I'm not such a big believer in astrology, but Mercury retrograde is one thing I've seen is an effect so clear that it commands the same respect as rain, lightning, the tides or direct sunlight -- all good metaphors for the variety of weather conditions you're now negotiating, in no special order.  This is a great retrograde phase to get yourself out of commitments rather than get into them.  If you're offered anything too good to be true, then press for information; if you have questions, press for answers.  If you have something to sell or offer, remember the old expression "cash on the barrel head."  With this in mind, keep your eyes open for some very interesting proposals.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Recent activity -- perhaps wild activity -- in your outer life now yields to new data pouring up from the inner spheres, from the past, from your emotional worlds and from your family and close circles.  These phases will come and go for the next few years, in a variety of colors and with a variety of seeming outcomes.  But the cosmic intent is always the same: for you to be free of the past, and of the notion that you must in some way escape your feelings in order to do so.  Avoiding the emotional world, or viewing it in analytical terms, will only delay you.  Remember, the deeper lesson is that the universe is at once more chaotic and yet far better orchestrated than our small efforts at control could ever make it be.

LIBRA (Sep. 23-Oct. 22)
Inheritances take time to work out, and we often need to be patient when something is due to us while the machinery of the universe, or its parody, society, crunches, glides or slides along toward the moment of the contact point.  But make no mistake: you are due what you are due.  A delay is not a denial of any kind, and delay is certainly in the air.  Meanwhile, you have plenty of opportunities to enjoy life in rather offbeat ways, and my sense is that the more you tune your antennas and your life-patterns to the idea of 'eccentric pleasure', taking risks with your ideas, and experimenting with creative modes you've never encountered before, the better you'll do when the big bonuses come your way.  So yes, sitting around painting (or writing or playing your guitar) naked would be great for business.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
The fact of it is, most people already think you're kinda weird, so if you invest your energy in to trying to convince anyone you're normal, it's only going to backfire, making you seem both weird and insecure about it.  It's far better to be unique and self-confident about it, mysterious and aware of it, and powerful and subtle about it.  Though these, of course, may seem like an awfully remote prospects at the moment, and for reasons you may suspect the people around you will never understand.  Yet we're all in a strange season of an even stranger era.  Rather than spending a lot of effort explaining yourself, it would be far more productive to ask other people to unravel their truths.  They admire you and feel a far greater rapport with your unique qualities than you now imagine.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21)
Pay attention to what you are doing with your hands.  If it's true that all wealth comes from the Earth, then it's also true that all our acts of creation are essentially the works of our hands.  These most human expressions of life, with which we interface with most of outer reality (from typing to touching one another), will not lie to you about the value of your current endeavors.  I suggest you think of value as lasting value, rather that which fleets, changes or disappears (money being a good example of this).  What is the purpose of the work you are doing right now?  Who is it really serving?  What is its net effect on your life, your well-being, and what is its theme or message in the context of everything else you know?  Have you got any better ideas? What are you doing with your hands?

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
The balance in which you find yourself hanging seems to be between reviewing what is familiar, and contemplating the possibility that there may be other ways of living.  If you are obsessed over the past, please don't chastise yourself for it, because my sense is that you really do have important information to review, information which will ultimately serve to provide the foundation you need to work your way into the present. And the present is a very elusive space of reality; the world lives as if it doesn't even exist; yet often, it must be searched for and entered in just the right frame of mind, like going into a magic dimension of reality.  Magic, no.  Miraculous?  Most definitely. Seek carefully, and you'll find your way here, and find your way from here.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 19-Feb. 18)
You now have the potential to express far greater impact on the world than it does to have an impact on you.  There are those phases in life, and they don't last forever.  This works well, because you have more to offer than most of the people and circumstances that presently surround you.  So keep putting forth your energy, keep teaching and keep setting an example.  But pay attention.  There are, I gather, two people in your life who have important messages for you.  One of them is helping you readjust your course, leading you very slowly in a direction you've been reluctant to head in for some time, and that direction may seem like backwards.  But it's not, and this person has the wisdom to know.  The other person is some version of a well-established, well-fed creative type, probably living in another country.  Listen up.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)
Let's just say you are retrograding into the future, and that nothing is quite what it seems.  Astrology promises all kinds of potential as a predictive art, but it's important to remember that no astrologer has ever lived through today's planetary configurations.  Though some cycles are redundant, they are always surrounded by entirely new factors which have never been seen or documented. It's this factor that's vital to your development -- let's call it the first-time-ever factor.  Though many things may seem to repeat themselves in your life, so much is so new in this particular moment of your history, and before long, there will be more innovation than you can imagine: but please, imagine.

For The Faithful

Bekka,

what i'm saying here is that the whole phenomenon IS consciousness. when consciousness (root = SCI = knowledge) shifts, then the whole illusion of physical reality shifts, even if the shift occurs first in one member of the species (e.g., Einstein) and then radiates out from there and all the lunk- heads take 100 years to catch up (if they ever do).

Consciousness is the activating agency of the whole "material" plane. the material plane cannot be felt or seen BUT FOR consciousness; the whole thing is an effect of the filter through which we are looking. Through a different filter it would all be different.

so as far as i am concerned, all of the seemingly outer realities we study are merely gazing into a huge reflection called awareness. and it is all the *product* of our awareness as demonstrated by the fact that when awareness shifts, "reality" shifts, so the Big Relativity, the Unified Theory, is that [Reality = Relative to Awareness].

astrology grabs this imminently, taking the cosmos and looking at it and saying "this is me!" we look at a map of the universe and take it personally! we know that that's the purpose, the focus: that the only thing moving, evolving, changing is awareness itself, and that awareness as we know of it originates with us, here, now -- not "out there." and anything we work out "out there" is at best a direct parallel to an inner working out, or the field of play upon which that inner working out is worked out.

now the "humble" scientists* say no no that's too EGOcentric (GEOcentric), the truth is OUT THERE. Wee little people can't be the center of it all, but we are because without consciousness none of this would be of any consequence, and the central question will always come back to, "Where did we come from and where are we going?"   "What is the truth about birth and death?"

and what we are aware of takes on life and being, and we live in the limits   of what our awareness can contain. so in a strange way, all of reality is EGO/GEOcentric, with the earth/I being the central relationship, the central field of relationship, in/on which the whole game of consciousness is played,for the moment -- until awareness expands to the other planes of reality we contain, and until we see and feel our total interdependence on all life.

and that is the real quantum shift; seeing all life as relationship to all life.

e
=

_________________________________

*...scientists who are too smart to study astrology as a phenomenon because it "can't be true," an a priori assertion nobody has ever successfully proven.....