a bitch about the weather and an astro-rant: call me a fake, willya?
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008Well I’ve webbled until I’m boggled and my eyeballs have that cartoon character spiral thing happening. So I’m going to take a break and just write for a bit, give my brain a rest. See, just because I’m getting oh so organized, writing actual articles and tonifying the look of my webly home here doesn’t mean I’ll stop spewing forth my crazy poetnesses. It’s my catharsis, my mental hygiene, my truth, my Way!
Okay, so I got a bit carried away. That’s what happens when I don’t write for a long time. I get backed up and what comes out is, shall we say, a little brown. False start. Here I go again.
It’s March. Last month, February was my excuse, but every year March smacks me fresh with drab, grey blotchiness, forcibly reminding me that the golden spring promise of February with its crocii and spring tree-buds bursting loose was, alas, merely a preview of spring and not the real thing. Not yet. March reels us back to the season still in progress, namely winter. It’s a thudding descent into dreary grey one-day-after-the-otherness, cold and wet and threatening snow, with the sunshine a Februarian memory. This happens every year, and what is that about, I want to know? February seems to be a month out of sequence. March is supposed to come after January, with February the lighter and brighter time segueing more naturally into the sweetly scented April world of blossoms and blue skies.
It happens in May too. May will be sunny, count on it. Then June will rain, but July and thereafter will, unless global warming has completely screwed with the program, brighten up again. I counted on it last year too, but it didn’t happen. Damn this climate change!
Still, I remember extreme weather from my childhood, and tales by the oldsters of seasons long past that surpassed the current climes for extreme weirdness. They loved to one-up each other with sample stories of houses buried in snow so you couldn’t see out the windows anymore, cold so cold that your breath would freeze and fall to the ground. And then it would veer into tall tale territory of the Paul Bunyan variety, but still, there were germs and grains of fact in the fancy, which is to say, weather is weird. Always has been, always will be. And people always try to make it mean things.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that the climate isn’t changing. Polar bears forced to swim where they once reclined on ice floes and dined through the holes, and pine beetles surviving no-longer-cold winters to devastate the northern forests are evidence enough for the doubter in me. But. Weirdness happens. Right now (did I mention my brain is turned off?) I’m just dazzled by the mystree of it all. Yeah, it’s weird. But science doesn’t know everything. Oh, the rationalists loooove to declaim about us weirdness-mongers and how flaky we are compared to their oh-so-logical and reasoned approach to life.
Still, just how logical and reasoned are they? They have their own prejudices and assumptions, and the freakishness/weirdness of astrology (which this post from WiredScience shows–especially interesting are the comments) falls squarely into their own blind spot. It’s chock full of unquestioned assumptions and ‘everybody knows’. It’s depressing, mainly because I’m about half inclined toward a science geek perspective, reading science books (by scientists with poetry in their souls; yes, they exist) for pleasure, and I’d like to imagine I could carry on a conversation with one of these folks without having to hide from them what I do for a living for fear that it would discredit me utterly. Am I not a human? Have I not skills of observation and a functioning brain? Not according to these know-it-alls.
But, ah well. If that astrologer hadn’t done that reading for me lo those many years ago, thereby grabbing me by the cortex repeatedly with the question ‘How did she KNOW that??’ and if I hadn’t begun to actually research the topic, which led me down the primrose path into the gloomy cobwebbed depths of the superstitious brain-dungeon, I might still be qualified to carry on an intelligent conversation.
But no. According to them, I must surrender any pretensions to brainiosity, despite my considerable geekery.
The funny thing is, all the skeptics like James Randi who go to such lengths to disprove astrology to the masses are never well researched. They learn just enough to figure out ways to make it look ad fake as they already believe it to be. Like the famous experiment where a so-called ‘thorough horoscope’ is given to a group of people, and they are asked to rate its accuracy. Of course, everybody finds it ‘extremely accurate’, only to have the debunker triumphantly reveal that everybody actually received the same horoscope (collective gasp). This absolutely beyond the shadow of a doubt proves the nonsensical brain-tricksiness of astrology (which is always lumped in with all other forms of prognostication, such as palmistry and psychic divination).
And this experiment is endlessly repeated. The same damn thing, over and over.
The mind tricks we astro-fakers are supposed to be pulling apparently involves always using language that could apply to anybody. According to the debunkers, we merely appeal to the natural human desire to be seen and known, so we use vague, globally-applicable statements like, “You have a great deal of unused potential” and “You are recovering from a recent disappointment”. This is our dirty little secret.
But can something like the following really apply to everyone?
With Earth in Aries, you have a strong need for physical action. Your body has a lot of energy, a lot of life force, a lot of drive, but in Aries, there’s no real need to have a focus for it. You could get just as much reward from running on a treadmill as from building something beautiful. The point, with Earth in Aries, is that you sweat, that you get your heart rate up, that you act, that you do. And this is a really solid way for you to nurture your body, to meet your physical needs.
Your body needs to be starting things, to be doing things, in order to be grounded. That’s Aries. But you need to be aware of your primal physical experience (not ‘what you are doing’ but ‘that you are the body doing it’) as much as possible. Feel your breath, breathing and focusing, not with the intent of doing it better, but just to be present in the actions of your body… to feel your muscles moving, the breath expanding your chest and your diaphragm, to feel your skin from the inside, feel the air and any pressure on your skin from your clothing and feel your weight shifting. Really be focusing on feeling your body as you’re moving, as you’re working up a sweat. You’ll find that you glory in that feeling, so let it nourish you. The primal joy of extreme exertion, the endorphins and the whole rush, can be very thrilling to you, with the Earth in Aries.
Well, it would appeal to a lot of people. Exercise is good. But not everybody–some people are couch potatoes, or need to ground through other means, or just don’t find that extreme pleasure in working out.
And how about this bit?
Your Sun-Uranus conjunction and your Earth-Chiron conjunction both square your Ascendant. This is strongly indicative of a crisis around your birth–possibly you or your mother came close to death during the course of your being born. In any case, you were faced with a choice of whether you wanted to live or not. On a personality level this results in a sense of instability in your self-identity. Are you a daring adventurer in love with the universe, trustingly risking it all, or are you more the careful, reserved, practical, business-oriented sort?
Ultimately both are true, and your path to balance will involve finding a way to integrate these disparate styles and needs within the wholeness of your greater Self. Because the transformative and transmutative forces Uranus and Chiron are present in this configuration, you will not necessarily be free to unfold your own sense of timing around your personal growth. Crises and shocks may jolt you out of your comfort zone and into a period of forced healing, whether you like it or not.
Your Capricorn Ascendant has predisposed you to a certain amount of pessimism and misanthropy. You hold certain ingrained attitudes and opinions about yourself and others that are quite untrusting and even unloving. This part of yourself will likely grate on the part of you symbolized by your 9th house Libra Sun, which wants nothing more than to dance joyfully through life following the will-o-the-wisp of love, accepting the gifts of abundance offered by the universe as you go. To your Capricorn Ascendant, this attitude is ridiculously impractical and not even to be considered! This Capricornian part of you keeps the reins firmly drawn.
These examples are just random excerpts that I drew just now from one of my own transcribed readings. I’m too tired and annoyed by life and March right now to bother sifting through everything to find a really great example of how specific and personal these analyses can be, and of course there will be many people who’ll read those two bits and recognize themselves in it, but by the time the pieces are all put together into a full reading and synthesized (which is the true art of the astrologer) into a unified picture, most likely only the person the reading is intended for is going to be able relate to it.
I’ve done readings in the past for people mistakenly using the wrong birth time, and they had no problem letting me know they didn’t think it was right. And the problem always turned out to be a wrong birth time. Quite recently I did a reading for someone who said they couldn’t relate to what I was saying, so I asked them to double check their birth time. Sure enough, it was twelve hours out.
I’m just tired of being lumped into the charlatan faker box. I work hard at what I do, I’m damn good at it, and I give excellent value to those who want help understanding their own workings and the meanings behind their crises and passages. I can help. So frickin there.
End of rant. I’ve just sat through several videos of these wannabe debunkers all focused on proving me to be a fake, a fraud who deliberately fools poor gullible souls into giving me their money for nothing, and it pissed me off.
Time to toddle off to my lonely March bed. This too shall pass. Thanks for listening.
