Venus

Venus is love. She represents all things that please us, one of those things is money. What jewelry we like, whether we openly hug and kiss or save affection until we have privacy, if we love forever or just for a season, all these things are under the kind rulership of Venus. I chuckle when I read these things assigned to Sun signs, silly people, you need to know what sign your Venus is in.

Venus in Aries will be instant action without thinking about it, very living in the moment and probably very physical. Venus in Taurus is very sensual as Taurus is an earth sign and will have a love nature that is constant and long lasting. Venus in Gemini will love to talk, Gemini is all about communication, they love with their minds first. Venus in Scorpio will sometimes be very jealous and want to know everything about who they love and will love deeply. Venus in Leo brings drama to any romance and Venus in Virgo will have a love that longs to serve, a clean crisp love with any eye for details. Venus in Sagittarius wants friendship with love and freedom in relationships. Venus in Capricorn has great pride and their big secret is that love is as important to them as it is to anyone else. Venus in Libra wants soft lighting and going out socially and talking only about pleasant subjects and forget arguing-who wants to do that? Aquarian Venetians want a partner who is unusual, and can easily do a relationship in which you don't see each other very often. Venus in Pisces can sacrifice a lot for love and may pick a partner who is beneath them and do everything for them. Venus in Cancer is one who wants to cook for you and do everything for you just like your mom. They mother those they love. Venus in Cancer likes to be at home, and making that home warm, safe, and comfortable.

Venus was a goddess who could be jealous if she was not worshipped. She was beautiful, and flowers grew where she walked. Venus is all about beauty and how we love. My Venus is in the 12th house, which means I enjoy doing things in solitude. I think this a perfect placement for a writer.

Jupiter in good aspect to Venus brings money luck, we do know that. Venus is about pleasure too and what pleases us. As a Venus in Scorpio I go for vivid colors and all things gothic and things that have a meaning attached to them. Never mind that my Sun sign is Sagittarius, that doesn't matter. This does mean that the intense jealousy that usually goes with Venus in Scorpio is not as bad for me as it would be if say, my Sun sign was Scorpio also. Scorpio can also be the most loving of signs to have a placement in once Scorpio feel secure and loved, and all that intensity that Scorpio has can then go into more productive channels. Scorpios can overcome challenges that would kill other people and can be the most loving and giving people, this sign has been talked about very badly. Scorpio just feel things very intensely and it scares people. Love is serious business to a Scorpio, believe me I know.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson has passed away and all the music he might have made is gone too. I hate it when people say bad things about him, and also that he was not normal. There was little about his childhood that was normal, so why should he have been normal? He talked so openly about himself and that bothered me. People don't do that. I think that he was surrounded by people who never told him when he did something wrong or out of the ordinary and so he didn't know his limits. A child must be taught things, but poor Michael was always working. As he said, once your childhood is gone it is gone forever.

He called his father a sort of genius because he found success for his sons, I think maybe the success came because of the talent of these guys. They said they put Michael out front 'cause he was the little guy. That is just so cute, they loved their little brother and recognized the talent that he had. I was very sad when I heard that he had passed away because of a heart attack and I hope that, wherever he is now, that he is happy.

Scout Planet

I was intrigued to find out that the order of the planets is the order in which we think! What an idea!

The planet that rises before the Sun is our Scout planet.

The Sun represents you, your will, what you decide to do.

The planets in a chart move in a clockwise direction and the planet rising next to your Sun is your Scout planet. For instance, if that planet is Mars then you do things before you think about it, almost reflexively. If that planet is the Moon then you feel things before you act and you tend to react in an emotional way to everything. Like bases in a baseball game, our reactions touch base with each planet. So Sun, Mars, Moon would be an instant angry reaction and then immediately feeling sorry for your angry outburst. (Mars is assertiveness and we often protect ourselves with our anger)

Our Scout planet is our first reaction to the world and lends itself to our understanding of the world better than any other, and I want an orderly world and I want the rules followed. My Scout planet is Saturn. Of course the world is very messy and people seldom follow the rules and I ignore that. I concentrate on things that I can put into order but it is those things that I choose. My house, for instance, is very messy! My cluttered house can be blamed on Lilith in the 3rd house so I've been told! Myself is at war with myself because I am unhappy with my messy house and yet I cannot change. We are a bundle of contradictions and we have these internal wars with ourselves. I was a source of amusement for my roommate once years ago when I concentrated on cleaning the floor! I could not change the huge amount of clutter that the people I lived with brought in, it wasn't my stuff and I couldn't touch it, so I was mopping our wooden varnished floor every day trying to remove every speck of dust off of it! I put these blinders on so I only see this one thing I want to be exactly right otherwise I would go insane very quickly. She couldn't understand why I was always mopping the floor. Me either! I didn't know myself as I was very young then, I just did it.

I see the effects of Saturn when I write too. Creativity is also messy but my Saturn wants each post I blog to be perfect and it should only be about the topic in the title and not wander off to subjects not covered. My Saturn and my Sun are together in my first house, so the object that I want to be in order is myself. Saturn is a hard taskmaster, and the only way to live with Saturn is to go to work. Saturn is all about work and as long as Saturn is working at something then you do not feel so guilty. I am feeling guilty if, at the end of the day, I have not accomplished anything. I only try to make that work that I have to do be something that I enjoy doing, and I am lucky that I do enjoy writing. It is something you can do anytime, anywhere so that is easy to do.

Saturn is the planet of delay, we can only feel very sorry for those people whose Saturn is in the 6th house. I am told that the 6th house, the house of work and what we do for a living, is the house of survival. People with Saturn here have difficulty just getting a job and then holding on to that job. Astrologers often list famous people with each aspect, they couldn't find 5 famous people who had Saturn in the 6th how awful is that! With me with Saturn in the 1st it is myself I find fault with, that is how the stars are in my sky.

For people who have intense Saturn problems such as I, take heart, for Saturn rules older people and as you grow older Saturn becomes much nicer to you. Saturn is sometimes called Father Time for it represents karma and receiving what is your due. Saturn is hard on you when you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, true, but Saturn also gives you your just reward that you've earned that you can enjoy knowing that you absolutely deserve it.

Pluto in astrology

This is a Hubble image of Pluto and moons. Edgar Cayce predicted that Pluto would become more & more powerful and indeed it has. Astrologers say they can't imagine doing a chart without Pluto. Pluto has to do with our deepest desires, isn't it so right that my Pluto is in the 9th house that rules publishing? My deep wish is to become a writer. Pluto also says where we want to dominate others or where other people may dominate us.

This is funny. My father was constantly giving me these lectures about what to believe. He was truly trying to dominate me when it came to my philosophy. Your belief systems are ruled by the 9th house. He would say, "Now do you believe it?" He wanted me to believe that people were evil and bad. I should add that my father was abusive & not a normal father. Weary and tired of the argument I would agree with him. This is not lying I've come to believe. This is saying what you have to say to survive. Pluto is about these kind of dark things that you have to do to get by.

Pluto tears things down and wipes the slate clean and you have to start over. Pluto is now transiting Capricorn which means my 2nd house. Since this house is about your possessions then perhaps I will lose everything I own, maybe but maybe not. The transits of the planets sometimes only make sense after they are over and months from now I may understand that instead I've come to regard my possessions in a totally different way. I'm trying to say that astrology is not what it seems in many cases, but that doesn't make it wrong. Since Pluto is in a weak place in my horoscope perhaps, Pluto is not as powerful perhaps. I just don't know.

As we walk in this mystery that is life, we feel that there are patterns we can see. I see that every man I run into is a sort of "macho" type who thinks women are there to serve him. This is a pattern. We know that some of us succeed and some of us seem to fail at every thing we try to do. We know that others have blind spots but we can't see our own. Some of us are constantly misunderstood and we can't explain ourselves so in the end we just say nothing. Some of us are silent and unknown for the majority of our lives, some of us push others out of the way just to get on the stage and into the spotlight. We have children and discover they already have a personality when they are born and we don't know why. Few of us can see ourselves as we truly are, and many of us do things and then wonder why we did them. Astrology is about everything and it is about finding out stuff out we would never have stopped to think about otherwise.

We can publish things

I was raised in the 60's, a naive time when we thought we might change the world. We would've been quite giddy with excitement of the thought of blogs & blogging. What fun we would've had! My father would get so angry every time he saw a man with long hair, I realized then the basis of all this anger was fear. Older people feared that we really would change the world.

All this fear was for nothing. I was quite overcome with giggles when my father asked me recently if I wanted to overthrow the "establishment". Where does my father get these ideas? It wasn't me I promise, rather I guess the media. My friends insisted on being hippies, and I wonder about that. It was the thing to do. I don't think we had a single idea in our heads what a hippie was, we were imitating what we had seen others do. My father seemed to think we had ideas, but I promise we didn't have a single idea in our heads. How can my parents live with me in the same house, know me since I was an infant, and still not know me?

If there is one belief I have it has to do with religion and not governments. Politics makes me yawn. I rather think that these structures of government will be there until they are absolutely forced to change, and I think that change will be the economy. When people can no longer afford to go to the doctor they will have to bring costs down, it just makes sense. People will of course suffer in the process I think. Poor people just go to the emergency room, I got a lecture from a doctor who told me unless I was bleeding don't come there. It's the standard lecture. It's not going to work. If you have a sick baby you go get some medical care for that baby and you listen to the lecture. That's because it's the right thing to do. Poor people are not going to just lay down and die because they can't afford medical care. I've heard nurses say that I do not look like I am missing any meals so I can't be so poor. Poor people eat a lot of things that cost very little, they fill up on carbs and it tends to make one fat. I listen and then I go home. My child gets her medicine and she gets to see a doctor, that is the important thing after all.

Now I know I cannot change the world and I cannot even win an argument with an angry nurse. Many of my beliefs I just keep to myself. I've been blasted more than once 'cause my beliefs are "crazy".

So what is a passive rebel to do? Blog maybe?

The F word

There is always a big discussion everywhere I go about the f word and whether it should be in books and whether people shouldn't be instructed not to say it. I say "Yes".
I know that people do say this word, I can't help but knowing it but it is always someone who seems to need a visit from Dear Abby and her common sense advice about manners. I instantly give people who use this word a lot of room and no, I don't want to know them any better than I have to.
A word is always changing as the world uses it, new words are added to the dictionary every year but this word's meaning has the rank smell of the gutter. I am lower middle-class, and if I drop a cast iron skillet on my toe the word that instantly comes to my mind is shit, sorry, that's just the way it is. This is because of the way I was raised and the word itself is never, ever visualized. I don't object to the word, I object to the word's meaning. If I did pick up a book with this word in it then I would know that at least one of the characters would be particularly virulent, like some viruses. I might still read the book, but with a sense of disappointment perhaps that I didn't have a better book,
I remember reading Fear of Flying with a sense all through it that it could've been much, much better. It is by no means a bad book or an evil book or anything like that. I feel instead that it could have been better, but maybe that's just me. It seems to me that the character in these books constantly complain about who she is married to, like perfect husband or even acceptable mate eludes her. This is a book with a lot of the f word I think, or maybe I'm remembering wrong. I do remember there was a lot of hum, passion in her books, she even wrote one about Shakespeare. I am of course speaking about Erica Jong.
Asmiov said once that he didn't understand why people bought his books because they didn't have any "fooling around" in them. I found that amusing. He said that he didn't want to write anything that he would be ashamed for his mom and dad to read, as they wanted to read everything their talented son wrote. So that was why his books were without um, passion, I just figured it was his natural writing personality. Asmiov was one writer who enjoyed the process of writing itself, I am told that most don't.
Anyway that is just my opinion.

Why Aren't There Seatbelts on Schoolbuses?

Small Towns

You've got to love, or hate, small towns.

Everyone knows, or likes to think they know, what everyone else is doing. My daughter joked that if she forgets what she is doing she can always ask someone else and they can tell her.

When people tell you something and ask you not to tell anyone it is always a bit of a joke I'm afraid, 'cause it seems even the walls are listening and repeating what they hear. I've become quite paranoid living here I suppose because I came here from the big city, Ha! and wanting to keep some things to myself. There is this perverse satisfaction of actually knowing something no one else knows which I suppose is incredibly stupid really. There is only one way to do that and that is to tell no one what you are doing, yeah, drive 'em crazy!!! It really does!

I had tried and tried a few years ago to succeed at publishing something and everyone found that like totally out of this world. There is this respect by these people who are not maybe so good at reading and so isolated from the rest of the world for the printed word. The idea that I, who is and always has been so much a nobody might have my words in print was laughable. So when I started receiving checks and cashing them at the local bank there was this curiousity that got bigger and bigger along with the checks. I was so ridiculously amused by this that I would actually be chuckling as I drove away. Okay, so perhaps it is stupid of me but really quite satisfying. The bank clerk was torn by the two laws in this town:

Mind your own business

Know everyone's business

You can imagine the quandry the poor bank teller was in when presented with these checks with only the name of a big conglomerate on the check and my own name. What was I getting paid for? Had I perhaps inherited some money or was I moonlighting? If they hadn't known me so well they would have thought them counterfeit.

I am nobody. Once I loved to romp through the embroidery thread at the store, amazed by the beautiful colors and the endless possibilities. The silky thread was stacked in tiny drawers in the fabric department. I was suprised one day to see a store clerk watching me and suddenly realized that they were afraid I was stealing some of it. I stopped buying thread and didn't cross stitch anymore after that which is perhaps stupid but I didn't like to think that they had thought I was shoplifting. Stupid, I know. There are shoplifters and thread is easy to stick in your pocket but it still hurt my feelings, I can't help but feel that way.

It is the same way with my writing, once I told everyone that I wrote stuff and now I don't tell anyone. They laughed at me when I told them I might be published, they asked who would want to write a sleazy romance novel. When I finally did publish something I told no one except for my daughters and my husband, who can blame me? This is yet another thing I keep to myself living in a small town.

I really am no one at all.

Interconnected

There once was an island where a group of sailors had been marooned. They found a small animal to hunt and they lived that way and also on coconuts. The Spainish who stopped at the island to clean the hulls of their ships were quite annoyed by this group, they were always ready to steal something from the ship or begging for whatever they could get. This situation went on for some time and the Spainish became increasingly annoyed. One day it was decided that since they lived on this animal that they could shoot all these animals and the people would die because there would be nothing for them to eat. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. It turned out that the people didn't want to just lay down and die. They, quite unreasonably, wanted to live and they would do anything to do so. They swarmed a Spanish ship and some of them died but there were enough of them to overcome the Spainards and take over the ship.

This is the origin of pirates and how they came to be.

You think that what other people's problems are do not effect you, but in fact if you think very hard about it we are all interconnected. You think that if your next door neighbor loses his job and has nothing to eat that it has nothing to do with you, that you have a job and you're just glad that you're not him. People will accept a great amount of deprivation as long as they can live. However, when you are faced with dying you will do anything not to die. It is in our genes this command that we, no matter what it takes, survive. Pirates went on to be the scourge of the Spainish Main and why not? The Spainish had meant for them to die and actually took away their means to survive.

So it is with some horror that I see our population growing by leaps and bounds, and I wonder how long we can sustain so many. Still, there is nothing I myself can do about it. They say we will soon see a change at our supermarkets, that the most popular foods will be planted and the stuff that is maybe a bit unusual and not eaten so often will disappear from the shelves. Corn they say may be the crop that will feed the world, no other plant brings so much to eat per acre. Experts say that future generations may be sustained by corn.

Oh well, I always did like corn.