My First Post!

          Ok, wow!  Let’s say first off, I don’t know didly about blogging.  It took like six months for me to figure out how to leave a comment on friends’ blogs.  So what possessed me today to start this blog?  NO IDEA!  So far I’ve managed to put a band of green at the top of the blog and to get the title lined up.  And that took hours.  Oh-oh!

          My original plan was to do a video blog about transiting energy.  That could still happen.  If the stars—we are talking astrology here of course—align perfectly and one day I manage to have makeup on, the videocam works, and what’s behind me isn’t an eyesore, that could be THE day.  Then it would take maybe sixty hours for me to figure out how to post the vlog on the blog.  The energy could change by then.

          So maybe today let’s take it one step at a time and talk a little about astrology. Or I should say type a little about astrology.  There’s a moderately good chance I can upload this text to the blog.  What?  I could be writing it directly ON the blog?  Did Michelangelo carve directly on the marble?  Of course not.  He first carved into a very large slab of cream cheese or maybe it was ricotta salata.  So I’m scribbling this into Word, something I can use with a fair level of expertise.

          I can’t tell you the many times uninitiated heathens have said to me that astrology is nonsense.  “Look up at the sky,” they’d sneer, “It’s far far away.  No way a distant planet—or a super distant planet—could affect me at all.”  You know what?  I agree.  Venus isn’t out there sending little Venus beams at you.  Mars isn’t shooting a beam of lust at your sleeping genitals.  Jupiter isn’t blowing a winning lottery ticket into your pocket.  It doesn’t work that way.

          Once in response to just such a sneer, I calmly replied, yes, it’s like believing in cloning.  How absurd to think they could snatch a teeny little cell from your body and from it produce some other part of you.  C’mon, who believes that.  Well, the patient reply I got was that within the little is the message of the whole.  There’s a system of encodement.  Blah blah blah.

          But wait, could it be we’re onto something here?  That thing about the whole, that bears some thought.  If instead of thinking of yourself as a disconnected dot on a disconnected orb hurtling through an unconnected infinity, think of the whole.  Beyond our planet and beyond our galaxy is the whole—the infinite, the sum and total of all there is.  Ok well, wait a second, because astrology as it’s mostly practiced in the Western world takes into account mainly our solar system, which is smaller than all that is.  So let’s just move our focus inward a little bit.  Let’s reduce all that is to our solar system, which though pretty big is still a dot somewhere in the middle of all that really is.

          We are all part of this pulsating, breathing, moving, ever-changing whole.  And the movement of the planets is what I call a system of encodement for all the energy in the universe.  Each planet, while also a body made of rock and gases, is also a symbol of certain qualities.  Each planet can be defined as an essence, a vibration, a set of inclinations, and that creates the shorthand that is the basis for astrology.  If you think about a chess game, you have some sense of what I’m saying.  Each piece has its qualities, its unique shape, and can move in only certain directions.  They each have a role as part of the team and they interact in a certain way to produce success—or checkmate.  And yet they're also carved hunks of wood or stone.

          Once upon a time, on a wonderful day, at a propitious moment, you were born.  And if we took a snapshot of the sky at the moment of your birth, that would be your horoscope.  I’m not being fanciful here, for that is precisely what a horoscope is.  And when an astrologer looks at your horoscope and says gee, you have issues with Dad, you’re a good writer and you’re too attached to sugar, that reader is translating symbols into reality—your reality, the reality that adds up to the sum and total that is you.  Your horoscope shows the person you are, the challenges you will face throughout your life, and the talents you possess to meet the world head on.

          Challenges, did I say challenges?  That’s a word nobody wants to hear.  Challenges—or shall we say events and opportunities—come along in your life, and you deal with them.  I liken this to a tennis machine.  You set the machine (choose when to be born when you’re in spirit before incarnating) and then you stand opposite it and it lobs the balls at you.  Where you stand, the angle, and your own personal whacking abilities determine how well you manage to lob those balls back at the universe.  This is life, metaphor though it is.

          So where do all those hurtling balls flying at you come from?  From transiting energy.  Now I’m not saying Saturn is hurling nasty little time bombs at you.  I’m saying that as geometric connections are made in the sky between where planets were at the time of your birth to where they are right now, today, energy happens.  It is the breath of the universe.  As we are all part of a living, breathing, dynamic system, we feel the energy just as a cat’s head feels its tail flicking.  And the planetary action describes all the energy in the universe, including that which flicks your tail.

          Do you really have to know all this to believe in astrology?  I dunno.  It’s just a little piece of my philosophy.  A way to look at it all that makes more sense than that the planets are plaguing—or blessing—you. 

          In future posts I’ll look at the transiting energy and talk a little about what’s happening in the sky and how it will affect us all.  I’ll be translating symbols into reality.  And that’s the thing I like doing most of all because there are so many choices and it’s fun to imagine what could result from stellar combinations.  Astrology isn’t off in the distance, it’s right here, a secret code about everything going on all around us.  Except once you learn it, there’s more insight and fewer secrets.  Bring it on!