Astrology is a circuit diagram of the human brain. No matter what astrological system is used, it can be seen to work; this is why virtually every culture has developed its own symbolic system relating to the movement of the planets relative to the Earth and relevant to humanity. Astrology is a complex and powerful system for understanding the nature of reality.

The different systems of astrology (ie Vedic, Mayan, Chinese astrology and more) use the same basic circuits, but with different software and pathway construction. Those physicists who examine astrology with an open and inquiring mind (articles in astrological journals written by former physicists tell the tale) tend to become astrologers themselves. They must write about their findings in astrological rather than scientific journals because by embracing astrology they discredit themselves and lose the respect of their scientific peers.

It’s a sad and strange schism because astrology is a fascinating study. The system has a depth of complexity that can lead to great discoveries, profound epiphanies as to the nature of this grand creation.

Here’s a Big Thought for you:

The earth invented computers before humans did. Those computers are our brains. All creatures have these complex computer brains, but ours happen to be bestest, fastest.

The question ‘is the planet Earth a living, self-aware, sentient organism’ can have only one answer, and that is ‘of course’. This explains so many mysteries of biology and evolution. The Earth is itself an enormous computer, as much vaster than our individual capacities as the relative physical scales would suggest.

If we are sentient and self-aware, it can only be a combination of massive hubris and puny vision to imagine that this great interconnected linked-up complex whole system would be somehow less intelligent, less sentient, less anything than we.

So, Earth is sentient, let’s accept that. Evolution can therefore be seen to purposeful and guided, though the motivations and consciousness of a planetary intelligence cannot possibly be compared to that of an individual mind. It is far too vast. It’s like trying to compare one of the original Apple computers to the World Wide Web and all of the individual servers and information flow that is included it, always changing and full of apparent chaotic flux yet still moving forward.

So, why astrology? I postulate that Earth (I use ‘she’, but She has no preference) needed a way to communicate to these new artificial intelligences she created from her own substance. She is our Mother in the most literal way. The human species has been intelligently designed by the planet herself, and the planet herself has designed, also intelligently, a way to communicate with us.

Our stories, archetypes, myths, beliefs, reactions, actions, translations, interpretations, thoughts, emotions, are all impulses moving through the circuitry of the greatest computer network of them all. An astrology chart is a map of space from the point of view of the Earth. Our human systems of understanding this map developed as they did because that’s the way they were meant to develop, as intended by the vast intelligence which physically contains us.

Really think about it, and your mind will blow.

Who designed the computer that is Earth? Well, perhaps We did, and by ‘We’ I mean a collective entity which is the sum of all points of view anywhere and anywhen, potential or actual, including planetary intelligence, solar intelligence, galactic, cosmic intelligence. We are Us, the great collective symphony of “I Am.”

Intelligence is a feature of life; all matter is predisposed toward the development of intelligence. It’s so simple.

Everything balances. It’s a giant mystery that works, a dance of intelligence, a grand creative inbreath and outbreath, a donut shaped choreographed unfolding in which the inner becomes the outer, which becomes the inner, over and over again in grand cycles. Live long enough, and you will see it clearly.

Collectively, this We/Us entity must be the greatest self-aware computer ever or even possible (since it comprises the substance of everything.)

It stands to reason that intelligence would seek to know itself, and that it would also seek to reach out to other copies of itself, to exchange information. That’s what computers do, or their users (who are also us); they exchange information.

The system of astrology that I use (and designed, in some part) aspires to obey mathematical laws of symmetry and logic. For example, all equations must balance. Everything in astrology has an equal and an opposite, which represent two sides of one coin.

Everything balances, everything exists in relationship to everything. Different sets of opposites are structured to relate to each other through dynamic and passive linkages called aspects.

Perhaps the most fascinating and useful thing of all about astrology is, it has the scope to provide answers to our personal Great Questions, such as this one:

Who am I?

One answer to that, for myself, is this:

I am a speaker of truth with a job of teaching to do. This is shown by my Gemini Midheaven Mars opposite Saturn in Sagittarius at the nadir. There is a lot more to that particular question, though: the answer is both simple and complex. I can say, I am a daring explorer and pioneer of love (8th house Sun conjunct Venus in Aries), and I can also also say I am profoundly shy and fearful (Virgo rising, 8th house Sun, Scorpio North Node, Moon widely conjunct Pluto and opposed by Chiron).

Understanding the reasons for my internal contradictions and how to accept and resolve them has brought me the comfort of self-love and helped me to release myself from the programming I’ve received from a homogenized society that seeks to reduce everything to a formula, that expects people to be, act and desire pretty much the same things. Well, Uranus moving into Aries next month is going to change that up pretty fast.

The truth is, we are not at all the same; each human is a unique expression of Self, and our primary work is to discover what it is we came here to express and then to begin to express it in our own best way. This alone makes astrology worth learning.

Beyond the personal, though, astrology is equally useful in understanding and predicting the grand unfolding of human history. Any astrologer worth her salt knew exactly when the economy would crash. I called it years ago, but like most astrologers, I live under the radar on the fringes of society. My chosen profession is universally condemned by the established order as a fraudulent means of bilking gullible fools for their cash. I am routinely annoyed by how often intelligent thinkers whose opinions I otherwise respect will casually say things like, “it’s as obviously fake as astrology.”

I’m annoyed because the comments are based in ignorance, and I have Mars in Gemini on the Midheaven, and professional thinkers have no business being so intellectually lazy. Science has spared no venom in painting these giant damning letters over the collective foreheads of astrologers, but when one examines what it is that they are condemning, it is clear that they are speaking about horoscope columns, not actual astrology.

It’s true that I write horoscope columns, and in oracular fashion they are often relevant and meaningful to certain people. I write them because I am asked to, and I have fun writing them, and I do try to be accurate. Still, there are not twelve categories of people, there about six billion, give or take, and each one has a unique circuit diagram.

I advise that you take horoscope columns, including my own, with a sense of lightness and humour; they are meant to entertain, not to guide. Still, the newspaper horoscope is all that most people know about astrology, hence the general scarcity of astrological students and clientele.

It’s a rare astrologer who can earn a living from his work, and those who do are, on the whole, more than a bit hesitant to specify how they make their living at cocktail parties. I don’t hesitate, but I do have that Midheaven Mars; perhaps that’s why I don’t get invited to cocktail parties!

The economic crash was predictable because last year, Pluto moved into Capricorn, and that is one serious reality check, a time when the ground rises up to smack us in the bare feet and the piper demands payback for all the un-reality cheques we wrote during Pluto’s turn through wasteful, expansive Sagittarius just past.

Global warming and the environment moved front and center in the public view at that time as well, all of which is perfectly congruent with the meaning of Pluto (fixed water, the force of deep hidden truth, denied power, where we try to hide how we feel about what we are really doing) in Capricorn (cardinal earth, reality, struggle, no short cuts, hard work and discipline, taking responsibility, doing what is necessary).

The cycles of the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) in combination with the faster moving bodies, when examined in depth, describe in great detail what we are collectively working on, struggling with, learning and benefiting from right now.

Unlike the physical and conceptual sciences, astrology is holistic, which means that in addition to mental concepts (the air element) and practical realities (the earth element), it describes emotions (the water element) and the creative impulse, or spirit (the fire element).

Because of this, the mechanics of astrology cannot simply be mentally studied, they must be experienced to be fully understood and utilized for growth. The best to teach this is in person. I’ve been offering classes in Courtenay since last fall, but generating students has been a hard slog, and currently my classes number zero.

It’s not anybody’s fault, though, not even science’s. Astrology’s lack of acceptance up until now has also been described by the movement of these great forces. Astrology, because it is associated with Uranus/Aquarius/fixed air, belongs in our collective blind spot, the place we can’t seem to notice until it strikes us with lightning out of the blue. Surprise!

This blind spot is described by the force or planet Uranus, which is about to move into the cardinal fire sign Aries. This is the beginning point, the first sign of the zodiac, and this ingress will signify a rebirth of consciousness regarding how astrology is regarded, for such transits tend to speak to great collective trends.

Pluto and Saturn are also involved; the three forces, Uranus, Pluto and Saturn form over the next year or so what is being called by astrologers ‘The Cardinal Climax’, and with the wild card Uranus involved, how it will resolve can’t easily be predicted.

It could range from global disaster to a grand renaissance of the heart; the real key will be how we as individuals respond and communicate with each other during this time.

Understanding and correctly applying Astrology is the key to not only surviving hard times to come but transforming the human paradigm on a mass scale and thereby possibly avoiding the looming global disaster by teaching us all how to ‘just get along already!’

I welcome lucid discussion with astrological haters (members of the science religion). Why fight? Let’s see what the two systems can offer each other. Science has provided me with astonishing astrological insights. Why shouldn’t the reverse be true?

Fire: creativity, inspiration, excitement, energy, motivation, expansion
Earth: usefulness, substance, beauty, organization, containment
Water: flow, changeability, impressionability, mystery, solubility
Air: information, communication, ideation, abstraction, relation

To understand a sign or a planet or a house, look at its elemental rulership or association.

From this we can know that Uranus, ruler of Aquarius, has a fundamentally abstract / mental nature. It isn’t a ‘thing’ in itself; it is the idea of a thing, such as the abstraction of freedom. Aquarius’ nature is expressed in symbols, abstractions, representations. The sudden changes and revolution it famously brings are generated by ideals and ideas of a new and better way. There is always a new and better way.

Aquarius is the fixed phase of the air element:
Fixed: stable, unchanging, pure, timeless

Therefore, the ideals represented by Aquarius are the ones we would recognize as timeless, universal ‘truths held to be self-evident’. Ideals like ‘freedom and justice for all’ are Aquarian. Love is an Aquarian ideal. The great love stories, grand epics, archetypal symbolism, the old tales oft repeated all are Aquarian.

Violence and war (in the name of belief) is an unfortunate and too common side effect of Aquarian revolutionary idealism.

Aries is the cardinal phase of the fire element:

Cardinal: beginning, birth, emergence, initiation

Aries is the sign of self; that which is born into awareness, that we think of as ‘me’.  Anything that bears the Aries signature shoves its way into reality in a heedless rush. Its imperative is to exist, no matter what, and it will brook no opposition.

Yet it’s truly innocent in the manner of all brand new things; from its point of view it is simply bursting forth into life from what it perceives to be a void. From nothing emerges something, but the reality into which it emerges is crowded with pre-existing life.

Competition and struggle is the Aries way because there are about a billion things trying to come into existence in any given moment. Life is profligate. Competition doesn’t have to mean war or battle, though; it is most simply the drive to happen, to surpass one’s limitations, to succeed in existing and creating a space for this new self.

Uranus’ ingress into Aries in late May is going to bring about some very unexpected (and quite likely frightening to many) and radical changes; Uranus will be squaring Pluto over the next couple of years, and it’s in a brand new cycle. Great changes are afoot.

We each are the possessor of a unique, great big smart brain full of ideas. We have the power and the choice to choose which ideas we apply the power of our desire (Aries) to. What do we want to believe in? The inevitability of war and conflict, or the power of love to transform the universe?

Fact: the last ingress of Uranus into Aries was at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Fact: Uranus and Pluto were in square to each other then, too

There is a battle underway, all right. It’s happening primarily in our collective heads; there are no possible winners, and the losers are everybody as long as we keep up the fight. The only possible path through this crisis that doesn’t involve more of the same old boring bloodshed is this: that we each, and all, drop our arms and surrender our defenses, make a choice to open our hearts to the grand ideal of Love and learn to listen to the planet. She’s talking to us now.

Tonight, there is an event on Hornby I’d love to be at, and if I still lived there, I’d be all over it. But instead, I am here, home alone (I did receive an invitation to read today at an event on Mount Washington, but my car isn’t mountain-worthy and I was unable to hook up with anybody else going, not knowing any of them and all.

I miss my island! I miss my community. That’s the truth. Still, I feel so many exciting openings beckoning in this community, I don’t imagine I will be lacking for opportunities. But. It’s not Hornby.

So, ain’t I a woman? On this day of days, let me speak for me and for all the women, as I have not for so long. I go dormant sometimes. It seems to be a necessary part of my creative (ie, life) process that certain inner spaces shut down for maintenance while others are focused on, then re-open sometimes months or years later richer and fuller and more productive than other.

I suffer from a surfeit of creativity. That’s a problem when you don’t have enough outlets through which to express, as has been my lifelong issue. I created this blog (in its original form) to give my writing / poet / activist / teacher / storyteller voice an outlet, but it’s expanded to become the place I exhibit my art and music as well.

So yes, here is my blah blah place, and I have held back because I don’t want to look too weird in case potential clients and listeners come shopping to see what I have to offer.

What I have to offer is me, and this is the place I let me hang it all out.

Well okay. One of the places. There’s Facebook too, and Flckr, and Tribe, and Twitter (though I don’t bother much there, which would change if I had followers, and yes, that’s a hint for ya) because it happens I have a lot to hang out.

I’m done being ashamed of that. I was the kid who tried to hide my ‘too-many-A’s’ report card from my parents. It wasn’t okay to be ‘smart’ or play the game of school too well. But I couldn’t help it. I suppose I was ‘smart’ in that kind of way, though virtually oblivious in others.

I have a lot to say and a lot of ways to say it, and that’s the way it is. That’s just how I roll, as the whippersnappers say these days.

It’s scary to say something like that and to realize that I’m old enough to. That it might not actually be a joke to somebody who thinks I am my number. Actually I’m pretty much a whippersnapper myself.

I’m having too much fun rolling with the times and keeping up with who I am now to be old, you see. How could I be old? How could anybody? I still feel as far away from old as I ever have.

It’s true, I’m doing that ‘men’ thing that my mother hates for me to talk about. (Menopause! There! I said it!)

But does that make me old? What is old, for a woman? It seems to be tied into our reproductive capacity. I am no longer in a position to conceive a child, and this in the collective belief system indicates that I’m past my sell-by date. It’s all downhill from here, they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.

I didn’t get heavily influenced by ‘them’ in childhood, which makes it easier to unplug now. I am from the North. I grew up without electricity, a television or a particular community to define myself by (though we always returned to Fraser Lake).

We always lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and I was always the new weird kid. I was the new weird kid in Fraser Lake several times, in fact, because we kept moving away, then coming back a few years later.

I’m once again the new weird kid. I liked this position because it meant I was outside the social hierarchy, though it terrified me too, because of what happened to Melody.

Melody was a beautiful blond girl who moved to the town I moved to at the same time Imoved there. She was stunningly gorgeous, I mean it hurt to look at this girl. Nobody had ever seen a girl that beautiful.

I was very pretty (at the time I believed I was hideous), but I was not in Melody’s league. The boys went mad for Melody. Even the ones with girlfriends. And one day, I saw a circle of girls, with Melody in the middle, and the girls were throwing rocks at Melody and yelling at her to get the hell out of their town.

And Melody went. Her family moved away shortly after. I don’t know how badly Melody was hurt, but they obviously took it seriously. And that was the power of women, to me. The circle of girls made up the social hierarchy at every school I went to, but because I was always new, I never belonged to it.

The circle of women in my family was my social net, one that followed us from town to town, as there was always a relative nearby, an aunt, an uncle, cousins. The men swapped hunting and fishing stories while the women gathered in the kitchen, and that’s where the life was. The laughter, the wit, the magnetic centre of life was with the women.

Men had their own magnetism, for they were the ones who played the music at parties, which drew me equally strongly (not to mention the other thing), and so I perched on the thread that connected the men to the women in my world. Neither one nor the other, I have always felt like the outsider no matter where I was.

The weird new kid, in other words. Which can be fun some of the time.

The world of people outside my family circle was a chaotic swirl of strange events, for everything was changing, my context kept shifting, it was like living in a kaleidoscope. Moving that often was profoundly disorienting to a child of my disposition. I often had fugues where I didn’t know where or who I was. I imagine I could have benefited from counseling, but alas. It was the North.

And so, to age. It’s taken me this long to begin to feel myself poking my eyes outside the inner coils of my own mystery. The feeling is one of youngness, of unfolding potential. I know I have only begun to become who I am, and I expect to live a good long time. I am living as if I will live a good long time. Longer than most people would imagine possible.

I challenge the beliefs of my time, for I know just how malleable reality is and how temporary most laws, even the apparently immutable physical ones (like the law that humans couldn’t fly) turn out to be.

I believe I can alter my life expectancy by altering how I live, what I believe, what I eat, what I do and how I relate to myself, the earth, the ones I love and the ones I am coming to know. Astrology opens the door to learning how to live better, in order to live longer, but not for the sake of being old for a longer time.

If we are to increase life expectancy, we must increase the proportion of our lives that we spend growing. As long as I am growing, I don’t have to be dying. I prefer the feeling of growing to dying.

Growing does not have to occupy more physical space. I don’t need to live in a mansion or have a big footprint on the land. I am growing in my creative potential. Yet I don’t need to produce anything until I am ready, and the longer I wait to become ready, the better. I don’t believe I will die anytime soon, and I see no reason to behave as if I am on the decline in any way.

I expect to be dancing in my nineties. I expect to be reading slam poetry and speaking the word and singing and following my faerie path into greater and greater life right up until the day I die (assuming that happens, which I refuse to do).

What have I got to lose?

So that’s the current status of me. I’m turning fifty-three in a month, and I used to think that was old. The wrinkles in my face do show that I’ve been around a while, but I can’t really see those lines as being about anything except how I look right now. I can see beauty in those lines. I feel I’ve earned them. And I care less and less about my packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts, and the world is going to find out more, when the time is right.

I am officially coming out of denial about my personal confidence and power. I watch myself on video and I radiate a confidence, an angry power that has very difficult for me to own. My mother is a very nice lady. She is sweet as all get out, in a self-effacing, kindly way. You’d like her.

I am nothing like my mother, but not because I haven’t tried to be. Most of my life I believed that I was. Just like her, I mean. I’m not, though, and that’s the way it needs to be. Because this is who I am; I am an Aries, as she is a Cancer. We’re very different people. I have six planets in the fire element, and two fire planets on angles. That adds up to a lot of life force.

If anybody can do this, I can. And my body self has always been confident and self possessed, even when my emotional, mental and spiritual selves have been insane.

Oh yes, didn’t I mention that? I have journeyed through that dim mirrored halls of insanity; you might say it runs in my family.

I have learned how to be sane, and that is to align myself with my body. My body is the part that knows what is best for me. My body is the wisest part of my being. My body is my most loving self.

My emotional self, when aligned with my body, has no pride, is all puppyish desire for petting.

My mind and spirit, on the other hand, have been holding back from this shameful pleasure, for aren’t we here to work and struggle and pay the debt incurred by Adam and Eve who were evicted from that play place? Weren’t we all born in sin, and all that blah blah? This kind of religious guilt feels positively genetic, for even though I was raised an atheist, I come from a long line of religious fanatics.

Um, I mean ‘good Christians.’

Well, what if the debt has been paid already, a thousand times over? What if God has forgiven the debt as He has realized what a fucked up thing that was to do to His children, what if He’s much smarter now, what if He’s learned a thing or two?

Or what if that story is just something somebody made up in order to justify their own bone-deep fear of pleasure? What if our path to consciousness from our prior existence as bipedal animals took us into some kind of a profound species neurosis that has grown to plague the planet?

Or! Or what if we are doing exactly and precisely the right thing to express what the Earth herself is feeling? What if?

Oh such a question is this. I can only answer from my own perspective, and because the title of my blog is ‘Spreading the Gaia Word,’ I will presume on my mandate as translator here.

My body is a part of the Earth, in fact, is made of Earth’s stuff. So in listening to my wisest self, I can also hear the voice of the living planet.

Earth is an entity. She is a woman, to be precise. She is a fat, wrinkled, ancient child-woman, and everything we are doing is Herself doing it. If we suffer from a plague as a species, it is one of hubris, which is a sin (or sickness) of believing ourselves to be separate from our context.

We think that people are the cause of what we see around us, when the truth is, what we see around us, and we ourselves, are simply what is happening now. We cannot, as individuals, control what we do as a species.

Regardless of our political system, we always end up ruled by the few, and these few make up the patriarchy. The patriarchal system and its relationship to the Earth reflects on Earths own crisis of evolution. It’s a crisis. We’re in trouble all right, but it’s the trouble of a changing organism. Earth is in upheaval. She is becoming conscious now.

This craziness can’t last; change is coming, but who knows when? She’s got her own timetable, and we don’t have input, no matter how important we want to think we are.

How do I know this? I just do. I am her, in a way, I think her thoughts. This is a bold claim, but really, I don’t think I am alone in this. I believe many think her thoughts, but most people don’t know that is what they are thinking.

Here is my theory: Earth is still very young, and she is just learning to think coherently. We as a species, along with our inventions (which are really Her inventions), create the structure through which her thoughts flow, as our own synaptic systems form the structure through which our own thoughts flow. We are infinitesimal holographic models of Earth, but we are at best tiny parts of an unimaginably vast whole, and our brilliance is beggared by her potential.

But she’s young. She’s still growing. She’s confused and in a crisis. And we can help her by learning to think ourselves. By harmonizing with our bodies, with our feminine selves. Everyone, men and women alike, is half feminine. We all got half of our chromosomes from our mothers. Half of what we are is her essence.

We can help the earth by helping ourselves. By pulling out of the insanity of the patriarchy, which is going to go down just as the dinosaurs did, and for the same reasons: they were not sustainable–their behavior did not honour the balances of nature. So they had to go.

That’s what I think. And ain’t I a woman? It’s my day, you know.

This could be the beginning of something utterly unprecedented in my own life and in human history. Then again, it might be more of the same old, same old stuff on a greater scale. It’s entirely up to me and up to us on a macro / world / political level.

There is something coming up this year that astrologers have been calling the ‘Cardinal Climax’ and I’ve been talking about it to my astrology students for a few months now. It’s an opportunity for a profound new awakening, or perhaps disaster of epic proportions. Yikes!

The Cardinal Climax is a long-term cycle that began with Pluto’s entry into the cardinal earth sign Capricorn, back in 2008, and that signaled a global economic crisis and a collective wake-up around the planetary ecological / climate crisis. Capricorn represents the reality check, the place where the ground meets the falling object, the real bottom line. We’ve been struggling with that one for a while.

Most recently, Saturn (which, with an approximate 30-year cycle, moves much more quickly than creepy-crawly Pluto’s 240 years around the sun) moved into cardinal air Libra this autumn, squaring Pluto. Truth, justice, balance, retribution, struggle, and death and endings are the theme of the day. We are collectively immersed in this particular transit right now, and it’s a harsh one.

But the real kicker waits for late spring when Uranus (with an 80 year cycle) moves into cardinal fire, Aries. Aries is the first sign of the cycle and represents new beginnings, birth, and explosive emergence of life from the void. Uranus has been dissolved in the final stages of Pisces for a while now, and as it is the Awakener, the principle of sudden, shocking, unexpected change, its transit into Aries is bound to rock and roll us all.

The ruler of Aquarius, Uranus holds the potential for a rebirth of true loving global Heart, a new consciousness of connectedness and kinship among all life forms. It also holds the potential for global conflict of unprecedented proportions—a revolution that explodes in violence, an uprising against oppression and global tyranny.

We each have personal responsibility, which (hey, I’m an Aries ya know) means me. That’s right; I’m the one who can change the world. And so are you. We are each and all the one and only being responsible for our personal reality. Even if we feel powerless and victimized by all the Big Deals going on behind the scenes, somewhere in the back rooms of our own heads, our own personal sordid compromises and deals with the devil are our own place to start.

Until we clean up our own basements and back rooms and call on our own corporate leaders to clean up their acts (you know, stuff like health and finances and dietary / exercise change, walking our talk, being in integrity with ourselves, crying our tears and feeling our fears, facing our demons and recognizing their faces in our own mirrors, all that boring yet critically important crap), we don’t have a single leg to stand on when it comes to finger pointing ‘out there’.

We’re all living in a glass house this year, and it’s time to pull back the pointing finger and breathe our own breath, keep our own feet on the ground and stand up for what we personally require, giving what we are personally empowered to give, and see what changes from there.

We might be very, very surprised. Strike that: we are guaranteed a surprise, with Uranus’ movement into Aries, but the more personal responsibility we take for our own situations, the more we’re going to like the surprises we receive. The world is becoming ever more fractally complex, new and exciting, and who knows what waits down this shining highway?

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling positively upbeat about this coming climax. Oh yeah. It all starts with this breath, inhale, exhale, this body, muscles shifting and moving, this skin, sensing, touching, this heart, beating.

Nice. Happy New Year, new decade, new life to us all. And bright, grateful blessings to the year we have just been through. What a ride it was, with the full range of joy and trauma, as Saturn’s square to Pluto manifested in the death of our dear TemPeSt Gale. My photos in this article are from that terrible time, showing just how far behind I’ve gotten in blogging. That will change, or so I intend.

TemPeSt was killed on the day the Saturn-Pluto square was exact, providing Hornby Island (and possibly the world, for who knows what she could have become had she been allowed to blossom unplucked?) with a crisis of 9/11 proportions.

In fact, the last contact between Saturn and Pluto was back in 2001 when the opposition between Saturn in Gemini (the planet of buildings and financial authority in the sign of the twins) and Pluto in Sagittarius (the planet of deep, compressed emotions such as rage and terror in the sign of religious fanaticism and dogma) blew a hole in the world as we knew it.

It was a dark and terrible time, as the photos above illustrate, but as dark times do, it passed. The memories remain along with all the footage of her music and poetry, performance and vitality. In a sense, TemPeSt lives on in more than mere memory, for the internet and the technology of audio and video recordings keeps her alive and in our eyes and ears, as well as the she that will always live in our hearts.

2009 was a beautiful and potently positive year for me personally, aside from that hole blown in it in November. So many of my dreams and desires have come true, so many openings are flowering, I am deeply grateful for my life now.

Blessings to you all in this new year, new decade, new life. Blessed be to us all.

This is one of those channeled, deep, talking-to-me-as-much-as-anybody-else type pieces that tend to baffle the part of me that just isn’t that smart yet (partly why they get filed away for so long). As much puzzle as poetry, it can take me years to own a particular piece. When I do get it, though, they tend to make a profound kind of sense.

While there are a lot of levels, verse 2 of seems appropriate for this global warming conference in Copenhagen.

Your Suffering Savior

Feel your feelings,
live the tale as it unfolds inside,
find the powers that can heal and help
you and yours to open the doors,
and find the locked one
Go patient and slow for she is shy
and terrified of sensory input
and she delicate beyond belief.
She needs that you go slow
That’s the only speed she can sustain
as she clambers gravid
from her scattered tombs,
graves, barrows and
watery deeps
so cold,
stone
bone
alone

I was in a Pluto square at the time and in a big rage at God (or whatever masquerades as God in most organized religion), pumped up, feeling like death couldn’t hurt me.

“Come and get me! Yeah I said YOU, chickeenn…’ the poem said.

Then, I got scared, put the thing away and never did anything with it. I know, I know.

Personally, I feel sure that if I die, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here, enjoy my body as it melts into the earth, still aware but slowly expanding to become one with her.

It’s happened to me before. Every past life regression I’ve done (three, with three different hypnotherapists) has taken me back to that same experience. I’ve *never* ‘gone to the light’, whatever that means. It feels alien to me.

It’s probably because I’m fey. The Church used to claim that the fey folk have no souls, which just means they don’t separate from their bodies and go off to some other place, they stay and change form until they reconvene in another time and place.

I know, for me, it took a very long time to return, but I didn’t find it hellish. Quite the contrary.

Many years ago on a psychedelic journey I felt consumed by a longing, so powerful I’d call it lust, to melt back into that vast embrace, to just let go and sink down. Remembering the power of that desire still gives me chills. I think maybe I’m a piece of this Earth, that my essence belongs with her, and when (if? all bets are off) I die, that’s where I’m going.

I suspect Jesus did the same thing, at least the part of him that I relate to. Tempest too, and maybe that’s why we’ve all felt such a powerful rocking resonance with her death. Hell, maybe we all do that, and the whole afterlife is a bill of goods we’ve been sold.

I don’t feel she’s gone anywhere, but she’s in shock and rage. She didn’t get to choose, her life was stolen, and that is so profoundly wrong it appalls, harrows, shorns.

And that’s what made me think of this poem, the bit at the end. Somehow it comforts me to imagine that death can be (can be, not ‘is’) a simple form change.

The violence is what I can’t wrap myself around. The murder. In my fear’s reaction, I find myself wondering if she was just too big, too much, too alive for whatever opposing forces there are that keep us down. Of all the people on the island, why her? It has to mean something… and so I go, around and around in my heart, seeking solace and solutions.

She was calling us out… her song ‘Calling All the People‘ is one of the most powerful calls to revolution I’ve ever heard.

I do feel called out by her death… I feel called to stop dithering… to get my fears moving so I can do what I’m naturally am inclined to do, the creative, courageous stuff I stop myself doing because I’m still so afraid of my own fear.

Yes, I’m terrified of Them ‘out there’, the invisible, unknown stalkers who target us from a distance and snuff out the best, brightest and most vividly alive among us. It happens. This is the lesson of Tempest. Be afraid, yet do it anyway.

We don’t have to choose between fear and love. We can choose, instead, to love our fear, embrace it, quiver and quake and shiver and shake and wake the hell up to our own power (which is what we’re really afraid of, come on, isn’t it?).

This poem scares me a lot. Still, somehow it seems like maybe time…. [shiver].

Be warned… if you are sensitive about God and easily offended, don’t read.

I’d Rather Worship the Wind

You call yourself God but you just feel hard to me.
you call yourself God but you don’t even know me.
you claimed you created everything you saw.
and every trend you turned into a law

You allowed nothing in from the collective organism
you heard not a word but what you taught us to say.
You forced us to kneel so you’d hear when we prayed.
You are not a nice god, and you are not kind
and what you call your Light has burned out your heart
and left you blind.

You are dead – God is dead – but the Universe is alive
He is dead – God is dead – and the world will survive.
We’ve got a message for you on the Internet
too bad you don’t have an e-mail address.
you always were a techno-phobe
but you hired the best and every theory you had
you put directly to the test.

While you’ve been breaking your toys
and tearing them in pieces we’ve been multiplying -
we’re all mixed up, so we’re all related
If you don’t like it here, then leave.
Earth is the only place we can breathe.

Gaia is on our side and Jesus is too
Or did you think He would die for you again
Now that he knows what you did with his death?
Christ is right here – I can feel his breath.

So listen, God, whatever you call yourself:
Space is infinite in directions you’ve never measured.
We’ve got work to do, we’ve got rocks to move now
stones piled over bones of all your ancient enemies.
All the old gods and the powers that you hoard
sitting on a throne of bones, calling yourself the Lord.

Maybe you didn’t know and it isn’t your fault
It isn’t too late; bring the thing to a halt!
Just drop your arms, stop the cockfight
cash in your chips, resign your membership
to the Ku Klux Klan and the Old Boys Club
dismantle your bombs, clean up your waste
get a job, meditate.

Or perhaps You still have the power to fire up
some simple supporter without too strong a grip
with access to an Uzi who might choose to use it
maybe these words will cost my life.

Well, really, what can you do?
If you bend me, I’ll bend
If you break me, I’ll break
If you drown me, I’ll drown
then I’ll become the lake.

What can you do? Your days
of power are through.
I’d rather worship the wind.

I had a sweet plan in place to travel down to Seattle this week, pick my sweetie up on the plane, spend some time visiting with a friend… but disaster befell the friend’s son (at whose home we were meant to stay). So, the plan has been ditched and it’s back to business as usual, me at home, he on the bus to find his own winding way, calloo, callay.

Business as usual is a jog in the path, when you are expecting the unexpected. Still, I’m partly relieved to be relieved of the task of all that packing and driving long miles in predicted heavy weather.

***

My new classes are proving to be just as much fun as I had hoped; the bright eyes and willing hearts of my students inspire me and re-ignite my passion for this work. All right!

Astrology is so much more than a belief system; in point of fact, belief is not required. One stunned soul said to me after I did an in-depth reading for him as a gift, “I want you to know, I don’t believe in astrology, and that hasn’t changed. But [long pause] I have to admit it was right on.”

Astrology is a well-equipped tool kit, a blueprint, a multidimensional map to an infinitely expandable experience of reality. How could that not be fun?

This next class (which had been meant to be cancelled due to aforesaid thwarted plans) takes place on the Taurus Full Moon, on the Day of the Dead which follows Samhain (pronounced “sah’-win”) aka Halloween.

What a fruitful topic that will be; in fact, Taurus is the sign of fruitfulness, bounty of the senses, abundance of comfort and pleasure. The balance between Taurus and Scorpio shall be the theme of the evening, so do come if you like comfort and want to learn how to manifest more of it.

Taurus is also the sign of music, so I will be taking the opportunity to break out the guitar and inflict song upon my captive audience. I, as you might guess, have many songs to suit the theme of dear old Earth-ruled, fixed-earth Taurus.

Taurus is my area, you might say, so I’m really looking forward to this one. Everything else funnels through the body, the senses, the physical manifestion of self.

Sample Taurus lyric: “She is the stars in the heavens, for she is the eyes I see with” (the Gaia Song).

***

I’ve just come off my first trial run of triple horse care, four days of looking after all three horses full time, and this is a first, as so far I’ve only had the full care of the stallion, Dancer. It was an enlightening experience! I know now, much more about horses than I did before.

For example, they are positive geniuses (genii?) when it comes to getting at food. If I let them out the front door of the barn, but leave the back door open enough for them to get through, they’ll circle the barn in no time flat, slip through the crack and be munching hay behind my back.

If there is a wall thin enough to chew through, behind which hides lush green hay, then they’ll rip it right out of there, as Royal did on Friday. I wet to let him out in the morning and his sides were sticking out so far it seemed he’d swallowed a whole haystack.

Terrified that he was going to die (since I’d heard that horses can, literally, eat themselves to death), I called John, and was reassured that too much hay wouldn’t hurt him. But he ate himself a sizable hole in the wall of hay that had formerly been blocked by a plywood wall. He slept in a different stable the next night.

Poor Royal was cursed at birth to be what is called a ‘good keeper’. I myself am a good keeper, and I feel his pain.

He thinks he’s starving because he is given much less food than the other horses, who are not good keepers. They need to be fed more to keep their weight up. Royal cannot see the blessing in this and his life is a constant search for more food.

And he’s smart. A horse genius, in fact. I’m impressed. This guy, Royal, is a character. He can’t be locked into a stall and a fenced-in run like the other horses. If he is, he’ll go nuts trying to dig his way out under the fence, endangering himself in the process. So he gets access to the big run outside. He needs the space; he demands it.

Sadly for Royal, he is low horse in the hierarchy. Top gun is Dancer, the stallion, who never lets anyone forget that he is the King of Horses. Then comes Mystic, who is pushier and more dominant than Royal.

But Royal gets his own back in many small ways; he suspects himself to be secret royalty (perhaps because of the name). He often forgets to behave submissively, getting in trouble (and bitten) in the process. I feel for him.

Starting mid-November, I will have sole care of these three eccentric and very large beings, and I expect to learn a good deal more.

I sleep in a suite within a workshop; I like to keep the outside door open so that my inner door opens directly outside rather than into the cavernous workshop. Better feng shui that way.

The other night Mystic and Royal came to visit me at the workshop door, seeking strokes and nuzzles, and when I bade them goodnight, they made as if to follow me in. Horse hazards abound in the shop, so I reluctantly closed the door.

I felt honoured. It was a visitation, an affirmation that they like me.

Aww! They like me!

And now, assuming all goes well (yes, let’s), my sweetie returns from his journeys this Saturday in time for Samhain snuggles, and that is a Very Good Thing indeed.

Life is exceedingly lovely when it isn’t strange and frightening, and it’s strange and frightening when it’s isn’t exceedingly lovely.

Bah. This is just me, plain and simple.

Today (when I made this post; had problems so it was delayed) is Canadian Thanksgiving, and I’m looking back with gratitude at the so-called bombing of the Moon, President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and Guy Laliberte’s Poetic Social Mission (http://broadcast.onedrop.org/). What a day that was! It changed me, and I think it changed the world.

This is my first video blog, but it won’t be my last. It’s so much easier than typing everything out one letter at a time. On the down side, I’m stuck with the words as they came out of my mouth, painful for nitpicky me. Still, the spontaneity of the thing is part of the charm. I hope.

It’s in two parts, since Youtube won’t accept videos longer than ten minutes, though in total it was under twelve. Picky, picky.

Mom, I guess you’re going to have to get high speed internet or watch at the library. Sorry.

part 1:

>

part 2:

I’m working on that, folks, my apologies for any befuzzlement. Like a Phoenix from the ashes, this website will be reborn, surprisingly, when the time is right (ie, when I have the time and some freedom from the beautiful heat).

What I do is unique, and it’s about who I am as much as it is what I do. I am a passionate devotee of Gaia, Earth Mama, this blessed bountiful bowl of pleasure which gives us source and sustenance, herself product of the marriage of Spirit and Mat(t)er. It’s why I call this page ‘Spreading the Gaia Word.’ I speak the Word for Gaia, as best as I am able.

And this page is about more than that too. I will have more to say about it as soon as I can get a break from the daily business of my life to sit down and decide what it is.

What is it that I do? I read cards. I painted them. They’re cool. I pair them up with a very special deck of other cards. They go really wonderfully together.

It’s loads of fun, informative and fascinating too. And sometimes tears flow (normally not mine), which is to be expected and in my books, a very good thing. Tears want to flow! Celebrate the sacred tear! It waters the tree of life.

I read astrology charts. I’m good at it. I’ve done it for a long time, longer than I’ve been Phoenix.

I teach and study astrology, the language of the spheres, the music of the collective psyche. I love it. I’m passionate about it. I write songs. I sing them. And I take pictures of myself and everything else and I mix them up to make art, some of the results of which can be seen here (and, as always, click on any image to be taken to a larger version on my flickr page, where you can read the commentary). And you can even buy prints, imagine that!

I am love. I live love. I love life.

I want to do it all, to have a career that includes all the facets of my giftieness. That’s what makes me enflamed. I sink a bit when I don’t do it. That’s why I want to sell what I do. I have a living to make. But I’d do it anyway.

If I could afford to, I’d pay to get to do what I charge to do, and that doesn’t seem quite fair, but so far, the truth is, I’m just getting by.

Oh, and I’m not quite exactly human; my friends tell me that. They mean it in the best way, I’m sure. I grew up in the wilderness; I have fae blood, and I suppose it shows.

I’m so pleased to meet you! Sit down, browse the archives, click on the pictures. We’ll talk more soon. Thank you for coming!