Confessions

computers and Dolly Parton

2012-01-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

I think there should be an easy way to get answers, like how do you UNfriend someone on Google after you've made a mistake and made a friend of them? Plenty on how to do, not so much on how to undo. Like what if I wanted to delete this blog? Abandoned blogs litter the landscape of the internet and maybe we need to know how to delete them. Just sayin....
Anyway I saw Dolly Parton on a morning show who cheerfully admitted to being 65 years old and wow if she doesn't look like she always has to me, who has followed her career from the times when singles were those little 45's and I had stacks of them all the way to the ceiling. (Which my mom threw away along with all my Barbie Dolls, some of these records are worth money now) She still has many secrets, but not one is her burning ambition. She always wanted her career so much. My sister-in-law still has her album with "Two Doors Down" on it on which she is dancing in blue jeans with a red and white checkered shirt, so Beverly Hillbillies, and loves it more than any other. She also loves the movie "Tammy". I think Dolly's voice, which is like no other should have been what kept her famous, but instead she is an actress which I think she is not very good at. One thing anyway, she is an original whatever she is!

Noble Romance

2011-12-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

This publisher is offering advances and asking for anything, literally anything. Click submissions once you get there if you are writing romances, and us women if we are not writing them, we are reading them.
I gave some thought to the idea that we have to support our authors by buying books. I usually get my books at the library but I bought Dean Koontz's new book, Shadow Street. The book was the usual from the master of disaster and murder however after reading his newsletter and his website I think sometimes he should write comedy. An author who always works hard, this book still reminded me of someone else, Stephen King. Harlequin sent me some books but I found the language stumbling and the heroines a bit stupid. I am wanting a heroine who is smart and can make things happen! Those are the ones I love. Happy reading.

Preston and Child

2011-10-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

I have read every book by these 2 authors I can get my hands on. I've always been interested in science and these guys are up to the task in their writing. I, who have perhaps read too many books, have grown bored with books in which I know what is going to happen. With these guys you can't guess usually anyway.
They created a sort of James Bond character named Pendergast, but he really isn't like Bond. He reminds you of Bond with his abilities and the fact that he is wealthy and an F.B.I. agent. He is not handsome for one thing and young women don't fall all over his path. What he does is bring the quality of brains to the story.
In one story he meets a girl in a hick town who is the town "Goth" and the town's reject. What can you expect when her mother is a drunk and she has no father and a filthy trailer to call home? At the end of the novel he tells her how he has registered her for school and giving her money which she at first refuses. He then tells her the money was obtained illegally by a member of his family and he wishes to help the family name by doing good deeds with the money. But I am a freak! she cries and he tells her that he is one too and he did well and so could she, but she had to get out of this town, the town was killing her.
I thought it was art, the way he summed everything up that way. Yes Pendergast is a freak, an albino with snow white hair and strange ways and who finds it difficult to say thank you to anyone but he has found a way to live with it. Intelligent people are often freaks. I think he is alluding here to the fact that people tend to pigeonhole you, and she needed to get out of the town to start a new life because you can never get away from your box they put you in. I live in a small town and they have their ways and one must adapt of course. It can cause the worst kind of claustrophobia, my daughter couldn't wait to get out of town in spite of the fact she has dear friends here.
Pendergast chasing murderers, and I am bit tired of them it's the only fiction I can find much of that I like. The attraction is I think that people find it tantalizing that someone they know is in disguise, for someone among them was capable of murder. It's the social mask, what evil does it hide? It appears from the many murders that go unsolved, it hides a lot.

Arabic Lots

2011-07-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

Dreamhouse Attic is a site with a great deal of the arabic lots, this is a sort of formula using the Ascendant of your astrology chart. Finding money in the chart is a pastime I seem to never tire of, so my fav is the Lot of Wealth. Destiny seems to have plowed a course and left this birth chart of mine to remember it by, for it seems all things were foreshadowed and if the ancients thought one day they could predict everyone's life, well millions have been spent trying to predict the weather. What we find is that the weather cannot be predicted, it can be linked to probabilities and that is exactly what astrology is. To be sure I have felt the jealousies of Venus in Scorpio and a great deal of puzzlement has been with me as to why I, the least jealous of all people should find myself so fiercely jealous when it comes to my love life. It has been said the percentage of correct prediction is 84 percent, which isn't bad. I try to change myself, self-improve myself and have been ever since elementary school when no one liked me. Yet with this comes the question of why, since these things were not linked to my personality or some lack in myself although I do have lacks of course but rather to my family messing up my life with great impact and ignorance of that fact. Still a malignant mother and a teacher getting her revenge on my family is not good luck, is it? Authority of all kinds has failed me, parents, teachers, policemen, bosses. I do not see this in my astrology chart but somehow I don't doubt it is there. With astrology everything is explained, and it does so beautifully.
Those who follow astrology usually do so because their lives are so very bad that they start searching for answers. It seems horrible to have such bad luck, but it is better at least to feel you understand it. I myself have planets without essential dignities which means to talk without tact, to be quarrelsome, to be always butting ones head against authority. So it has been, but I still feel that is right to do so. It seems sad somehow to blend in and yet I long for it like sunshine in the winter. It is sad to melt into the crowd and be forgotten, but somehow I think we are forgotten anyway.

Writing

2011-04-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

As joyful as it can be to write when you want to the opposite is true if you don't want to. It seems that everyone wants to do it and to learn how to do it but it is about a huge investment in time, discipline, and faith. Where does one find the confidence to chose a path anyway? There are so many options.
They tell me the public brought paranormal to the fore, but the many half vampire, half werewolf, half of somethings make me cringe. It's almost as if we've got this new material but we've got to do the same things with it. We go for newness but somehow we can't arrive. Newness must arrive with the person themselves, who they are and what they think and what they write cannot be separated. I get these impressions from the huge amount of reading that I do, almost a book a day and no, I am not joking. What I get is a tiredness of this glut of stories, a sense of sameness, that I'm reading the same thing over and over. What I want is unpredictability in story even as it is in life. The thing that books did for me when I was between being a child and an adult doesn't happen now. This overwhelming sense of possibility.
Being a writer is an odd thing, people study it and even so I don't think it has parameters. The simple telling of story seems to be enormously complicated.
NEVER start a story with a character waking up.
NEVER change point of view
NEVER start with It was a dark and stormy night unless you are Snoopy the dog.
NEVER have the main character be the murderer or an awful person.
NEVER tell a characters dream in detail
NEVER use the passive voice, actually this is very useful.
NEVER use exclamation points.
NEVER have the answer be aliens did it unless things are exceedingly odd all around during the story.
NEVER forget to enclose a self addressed postage paid envelope
NEVER call editors constantly or make a pest of yourself. I'm told publishing is a small world.
NEVER use colored paper or confetti or perfumed paper.
NEVER have characters on drugs or depict drugs in any other way than dangerous, deadly, and unsavory
NEVER say love does not exist. Make those dreams come true at least on the page.
I think it wise to remember that people who do read like some wordplay and things of that nature because they love words. That's why they are reading.
This is a list of advice I've read or been given. It is not I who is wise and know these things. I do however, cook a mean fried chicken.

Life by Keith Richards

2011-04-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

This book is like a very long interview with the rocker and guitarist for the Rolling Stones. The strangest thing about it are the things he says about drugs and his drug use, and how they kept throwing him in jail and two years later they were naming streets in his native part of London after his songs. He says that he wrote the music and Jagger would do the words, which didn't suprise me. I was suprised that Jagger can play, he just doesn't do so onstage. As for Brian Jones in this memoir he comes off looking not so good, a man who was violent with his girlfriends and often so stoned he couldn't contribute to a recording session even if he did manage to get there. As for his death Keith says that he was so self-destructive that he himself was to blame for his death regardless of all the theories that maybe the guy he hired as a contractor killed him. For anyone who does not know, Brian was found dead in his own swimming pool the same night there was a party at his house. He is perhaps most known for playing the sitar on "Paint It Black" Keith has shown regret and shame in interview but not over his drug use, but over the fact he took Brian's girlfriend Anita away from him sometime in the late sixties. I see it that way, the way he stares defiantly at the interviewer. Somehow he is ashamed. In his new book he says he rescued Anita from a violent Brian, but it is odd how Anita goes from Brian to Keith to Mick. Anita was with Keith the longest, for many years and supposedly with Mick only once. It is like that song "You're So Vain" where she sings "You're with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend." I used to think for that reason that song was about Mick Jagger, but now it seems to be about Warren Beatty. Beatty says it is about him, just as the song says. Marianne Faithful, singer of "As Tears Go By" and Mick's girlfriend claims she went to bed with three of them in an interview. Perhaps most telling of all, Keith writes Gimme Shelter while Anita is filming Performance with Mick and he suspects having an affair with her. Looking back on it, he says maybe that song had something to do with that though at the time he didn't make that connection. I rather think these proper English boys are so out of touch with their feelings, and when Keith writes about Mick he leaves out a lot. He says that Mick is his "mate" but on one tour they refused to talk to each other at all so had to speak to each other through other people. I can imagine people running back and forth with "messages" So perhaps this book, as very thick as it is, leaves a lot of unanswered questions after all. I have an idea that Keith is not very introspective and perhaps doesn't know exactly how to put things into words at all. I was suprised how much of the book I already knew. Perhaps that is why Keith writes songs, to say the things he cannot say.

Shadowfever by Moning

2011-02-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

I have followed this series and this book is the last one I'm sorry to say. The Fae care nothing for humans and are so sensual and beautiful that it is more than a poor human can stand. Yet stand this heroine MacKayla or "Mac" must for to fall under thier spell is to lose oneself entirely and become a sex slave or "Pri-ya".
In the first book she meets Barrons and who he is exactly is never explained but he is so powerful even the Fae fear him. Lost in the dangers that the shadows of Dublin, Ireland hold she sees a bookstore with all it's lights lit up where she meets Barrons. He never lets the lights go out for shadows hold creatures who would suck the life out of you. She meets Barrons and immediately they are attracted to each other and start to argue with each other. They can't stop fighting with one another even though the attraction between them is so strong. This love or hate relationship is the center of the story.
The books are sort of ghoulish, sort of like a book about zombies might be. She kills a lot of creatures in these books. The books they also say are very sexy, but if you read them there is very little sex in these books. There is sexual tension so tight I wanted to shout at these characters, get together already!! There is so much action that it is hard for these two just to keep up with each other and they lose each other entirely sometimes.
This is most of all a romance and a sensuous one at that. I hear it is very successful. That is as it should be. This is what I did last weekend, all weekend, is read Shadowfever.

Food Network

2010-12-27T12:02:00.001-08:00

I am addicted to Food Network which annoys my family so much I wonder why. What could be more harmless and easy to watch than cooking? I can't believe you can make ice cream without an ice cream maker. I can't believe you can buy potatoes you don't have to peel (Yukon Golds and Fingerling potatoes). I am amazed that pickle making should be so easy, or that soup doesn't have to simmer for hours and follow a complicated recipie. In short, I'm sort of learning how to cook and my family who only wants meatloaf or fried chicken and macaroni and cheese only out of the box is starting to wonder where it will all end. Where will it all end?
I want to eat roasted Beets and try fish blackened with cajun spices in a cast iron skillet. I want to coconut my shrimp and use a white sauce for once on spaghetti. My family is having the horrors and refusing to eat.
What is a mom to do?
Well, I go ahead and cook the same old thing and watch food network and write down interesting things in a notebook. I told you it's a real addiction!
Meanwhile, I wonder if Bobby Flay dies his hair. It changes subtly in color and early photos show him as a carrot top. I wonder why Paula Deen's sons changed so much on her show as time went on, they were so embarrassed by their mother once! I wonder if Big Daddy has a wife and really makes up all those recipies. I wonder if the Semi-Homemade lady really is like that, and if Emeril has an ego as huge as he appears to have. (Can anyone be filled with so much confidence and self-love?) I have to go now. I wonder what is on Food Network.....

What I Am Thankful For

2010-11-30T13:26:00.000-08:00

My daughters are like two pockets full of sunshine in that they are so very much themselves and I am always impressed by them and amazed that I had children and those children are these two wierd and intelligent and fearless and energetic and enthusiastic people who are not at all like me.
I suppose it's what you get when children are a little spoiled as mine are, they have a feeling of entitlement. They think they are supposed to have things when they need them in spite of the fact we live below the poverty level. We do make fantastic efforts to see every need is met, but I am not Wonder Woman. My youngest informed me she need a laptop computer pronto. My magic wand is all out of power as my wallet is out of money. She is serene. She knows that somehow I'll find a way.
If you love them they grow up with a tough skin and a confidence that cannot be shaken later on. My daughter, who used to sing with a blanket over her head she was so shy, is now in the regional choir as the seventh soprano. We just told her she could sing, over and over and I guess she believed.
My eldest loves small children. She was able to get a job as a teacher's assistant. How blessed to do work that you love! I am so happy for her. Small kids fill her with energy and sparkle and she brings home tales of what this little boy or girl did all the time. She usually finishes by saying, "And they were so CUTE!" She is going to college to be a kindergarten teacher.
Actually our house is more like Rosanne's than Everybody Loves Raymond. We fight and yell a lot. My kids do very little around the house and washing dishes is out of the question. On the other hand, we are not model parents for we lost the power somehow to tell them what to do and them pay attention.
Oh well.
If they tell me to jump into the lake I am glad at least that they are able to tell me that. When I was a kid I didn't dare disagree with my parents and my Dad had a mean backhand slap. So in a way it's all kind of bittersweet.

Sirius, the Star of those who do Great Things

2010-11-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

The sign on the cusp or beginning of the fourth house is how we are remembered. For the chart of the United States the fourth house is how we remember native Americans and the sign is Pisces. Truly this is apt, for we remember them with deep compassion and sadness. The fourth house is the house of endings also in a hoary chart and in your own birth chart. You can see how you will be remembered, wow.
Where Sirius is shows where we will do great things. Sirius in the 4th house would surely mean to perservere because the ending will be successful. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky of the constellation of the Greater Dog. When Sirius is in the 8th house you will be honored after your death. Like me.
I don't mind being honored after my death but I find it less interesting than what happens while I am alive.
I am frustrated by Emily Dickinson, dying before her great fame. She never knew she became famous, unless you know things after death. I got a feeling after death you don't care anyway, what with being more spiritual and an angel and all. Maybe for Emily the writing was the thing, and it didn't matter. I think surely our connection to this earth is thinner and success no longer personally interesting.
Sirius lies in the middle of the Sign of Cancer and it is true that more millionaires are Cancers than any other sign. I think it is because family drives us to succeed more than any other thing, and Cancers are strongly concerned about thier families. The millionaire's degree is 29 degrees of Cancer.
To have this star culminating, or in the 10th house, must surely be the greatest luck of all.

A Need for Speed

2010-11-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

I think some of us writers have a need for it, speed I mean. The mind wanders, real life intrudes, you lose focus, you forgot what you were aiming for originally, or worst of all, you get bored with it. Your writing for some is a polishing act, for some a book is written in a moment or one afternoon. The words just had to be written down later, you just had it all in a flash!
I dislike keeping a journal. Why? I whine a lot. I'm bored with writing down things I already know. Some things I don't want to remember, for instance I can conveniently forget things if I chose. It makes life livable. For instance, my best friend died and I was tortured every year when her birthday came around. I told myself to forget it, and I didn't remind myself of the date she died either. I didn't want to remember. Some things I do I'm not proud of, for instance I have great difficulty remembering when I was fired from a job. In fact, I can't remember when I was hired or when I quit jobs in the past when filling out new job applications, ya know? It slipped my mind. Sorrow is the impetuous for my forgetfullness. I'm wistful at leaving a job and the people I would know no more every time. I do creative filling out of applications, if anyone noticed they never said anything to me.
Creativity in a sense is a necessity. You have to tell the story of your life to yourself in a sense. I can ride out painful memories by flooding my mind with other things or keeping busy. I tell myself I am still a good person when I do something wrong. I tell myself I am a good person when I do something good or right. So basically I'm just flattering myself all the time. I need that.
What do I miss in books??? The sense that anything could happen I used to have. The sense that what I am reading is real, (I forgot it was fiction) There is magic in us for sure but people tend to churn out what they have read before. Do we want a suspense novel? Do we want a romance? Do we want an historical suspense romance science fiction paranormal? Why not? Publishing has it's niches of course. In a life, all those niches could possibly be present, couldn't they?
What is present is that people are reading books, regardless of what you hear. Reading itself for me is something I would do even if what I was reading was bad, I am that addicted. As addictions go it is a strangely wholesome one. My life is so small outside, but so big inside. (This sounds like a science fiction novel, doesn't it? Sci-fi loves the tiny and the giants colliding with us who seem to be the same (right) size.
What a book is is a mind. This mind believes certain things and thinks certain things are possible and others are impossible. It doesn't mean that's the way it is, it's just interesting to peek into the internal workings.
Scientists say our brain cells or whatever mirror the person speaking to us, as if in sympathy. This is a biological thing. They say books are all about emotions really. So we feel right along with the character and this is the way we were wired and this is the way God meant it to be. So when the book leads us we follow, no matter how unwilling we are in the beginning and that is the essence of what a novel or a movie is. So we are all mirrors, hmm.....
I think that is why we love Stephen King. He said himself he doesn't know where the story is going when he writes it, to him it is like real people moving against a changing universe and where his characters show hidden depths and where he travels along like another passenger wanting to find out the end. He likens what he does to archealogy, or digging something up that already exists. Now that does seem like real life to me where we don't know how things are going to turn out and where we are constantly suprised ( and disappointed).
My favorite King story is The Body from Different Seasons. Why? It stuck with me, that's all, with a vividness other things don't have. King remembers best being 12 I think. He writes best about being a kid.
What do I write best about? I don't know because my mind is all phantoms that vanish when I try to write them. Perhaps I'm not a writer at all. It takes a doggedness and a stubborness it may be I don't have. Maybe it's just that when things hurt too much I try to forget them and that is the last thing a real writer needs.

Opposites Attract

2010-09-17T12:48:00.001-07:00

Who is our opposite?
Astrology says it is your Sun Signs opposite, if you are a Sagittarius then Gemini is your opposite, is you are an Aries then it is all Libras. Scorpio who always want to dig deeper for the truth find their opposite in Taureans, who just want to enjoy a good meal and fill their Venus ruled senses with pleasure. ( For an idea of who represents Taurus well, Cher has a peregrine Taurus Sun so could be said to be that almost perfect Taurean expression.)
If you do your natal chart then then it is the 7th house which represents "others." It is the house of lovers and also the house of open enemies. Don't lovers sometimes turn into enemies! Then look to the ruler of the 7th to see how your relationships pan out. The ruler of my 7th happens to be in the 12th house. It is said this is the house you cannot see, the house of your blind spots and it is true that I cannot figure out relationships. When they fail I don't know why, but vaguely feel it is my fault. (The 12th is associated with secret sorrows.) I find this interesting. Interesting that my 7th is Taurus and that I'm married to a Taurus. So what does the sign on the 7th house mean?
It means these are the people you are going to run into, for good or for ill, for your whole life. They seem to find you. You can run but you cannot hide, for your opposite is what you long for to fulfill you.
The Taurus love and appreciation of beauty and the sign's beautiful self-containment and caring not a whit what others might think is a wonderful thing. This is what we want in our opposite sign.

Watch A Baby Day Be Born

2010-08-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to the singer of "Brand New Key"? She sings I've got a brand new pair of roller skates and you've got a brand new key in her happy bopper song and my friend Sherry said she lost her credibility with such a silly song. At any rate I didn't hear her on the radio anymore. For me female writers and singers of songs are superior to that of males, the female capacity for understanding and empathy is just greater I've always thought. Melanie Safka inspired me when I was very young and I cannot even explain the hold she had on my imagination. I became a vegetarian for a short while because of her, and I find that strange for no one loves a burger more than me. I thought it would give me her spirituality and artistic ability but all it did was make me light headed. I didn't feel grounded eating vegetables. Is that wierd? It does seem to make one think more and all those higher I.Q. Asians and their rice diets can't be wrong can they? We believe things without proof, we feel our way through life, we emulate those we love just because we like the songs they sing so very much.

Do you have a photograph, when you were still in high school?

Were you happy in it, little reason lots of rhyme,

Were you happy in it at the time

Deep down in your memory do you recall the lines

when your heart was in it but your reason changed your mind

When you would love forever, but your reason changed your mind.

Melanie later in her career sang such songs of disappointment and she seemed so innocent and so full of love at the beginning.

You see she was the actress who played the part of snow

they asked her to play starshine she turned down the role

they asked her to play windsong well she'd give it a try then they asked her to play music,

her own sweet music ah,

they asked her to play music

and she sang 'till she died

So at sixteen I set my alarm for 5 just to watch a baby day be born just like in the song. Art might imitate life but I say life imitates art much more.

Tower

2010-08-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

I used to imagine my room a tower
me a princess enslaved
and out there lovely meadows
till the cliffs met the sea
and no one to question
who I am as me
as I sit here watching the radio towers
that blink on my slow rivers
that may one day find the sea
I have loved my own words
better than life itself
and I find no reflection of
what I have understood
in what I meant

Wilderness

2010-08-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Does God see this wilderness
below his feet
and when He hears the poems
does he think of me
you see like Shelley
I wrote of him enough
and that's enough to be a troubadour
that's enough of love
there's a wind rippling by His ear
of songs each of us have sung
and if He caught a harmony
will He come?

Who?

2010-08-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

You always told the truth you know
you said this day would come and then it came and now
there's no one else who understands me
so I talk not being understood
just to talk, enjoying the words I know you'd know
if you were here
but you're not and never can be
you led always I followed
but I cannot follow you there
Then autumn your favorite season comes
and I'm reminded of everything I might've done wrong
I want to work in this Mordor, this place without light,
until tiredness leads to numbness
until I can find the pieces of my heart

A Promise

2010-08-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

I may do nothing now or never
to reach that something I can't define
I may run far never to get
away from whatever behind
the only certainty is that today
more than any other day
so uncertainly lived
I feel the need to escape
those tomorrows like today
and you like a tomorrow never seen
like a promise will shine
and smile in my dreams

Pallas, Vesta and Chiron in Astrology

2010-07-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

Astrology seems to always have something new and the explosion of knowledge about Chiron is one example. Said to tell of where we are psychically wounded, it always tells of where we can find our greatest talents and strengths. Look at me. I am a writer. I have Chiron in Aquarius in the third house, exactly the same placement as Robin Williams although I haven't his sense of humor. Aquarius always speaks of something unusual and the 3rd house is above all the house of communication. There is more in my chart about the difficulty I've always had with talking to people or communicating.
I have the Sun in the middle of Mercury and Saturn, so my Sun is a blend of Mercury and Saturn. If there is a planet at a midpoint this is very important. Any Mercury Saturn aspect represents blockage and frustration. I have an aspect between Mercury and Pluto, which represents a childhood in which words would used cruelly or with the desire to dominate and intimidate the child. Mercury occupies however my 2nd house of assets. So the planet of communication is my greatest asset! Whew! So, am I any good at it, at writing? Where in my chart am I competent?
The asteroid that shows what you are good at is Pallas. I have Pallas in the 3rd house of communication. Pallas is very useful when looking at charts.
The asteroid that shows where you want to work hard is Vesta. I have Vesta conjunct Mercury. Once again work, communication and Mercury are linked.
My Arabic lot of Exaltation is Virgo. Virgo represents the secretary, the maid, the accountant, the sort of detailed work and preciseness my father did for a living as an engineer. Virgo is ruled by Mercury.
If you have your chart done at Astro.com you will see the x in a circle which means the Path to Fortune. What planets aspect the path of fortune are those which will help you achieve success. Mine own aspects Mercury and Jupiter in the 10th in Libra. What does this mean?
It means a Mercurial or Jupiterian career, career is also indicated by planets in the 10th. Libra is an artistic sign so this means an artistic career. Mercury in Capricorn, well Capricorn is a sign with drive and ambition and it's also an earth sign. The sign of Capricorn doesn't seem to be about a career as a writer at all, but I remember that the sign is our style of communicating and not what we chose to communicate about. What sign Mercury is in won't tell us what our career will be, rather it will say how we will talk to our co-workers when we get there. Mercury to some degree is about our intelligence however and what we are smart at processing with our communicating.
Chiron is the most interesting at all. It's said what we are bad at in Chiron in our early life is what is our greatest talent later on. Malcom X couldn't read or write until he went to prison. He couldn't understand the words so he asked for a dictionary. He started writing down the dictionary starting with the letter A. He became a great speaker and writer of several books. He became famous. The fact he couln't read or write brought him down to being a criminal early in life, and then became his greatest asset later in life. It's a great thing, Chiron. Since Chiron orbits between cosmic Uranus and down-to-earth Saturn it is thought that Chiron is a bridge between spiritual gifts and the realities of life threatening to crush our spirits. Some astrologers think we have an advantage over those who lived without Chiron, the discovery of something is linked to it's usefullness and our awareness of it. So even if Chiron and Pluto existed before, they were not making an impression on people's birth charts. Chiron and Pluto say we can transform ourselves and live a better life on a more spiritual plane. The emphasis seems to be on self improvement. We don't know ourselves very well, as Malcom X could have told you. He had no idea until he went to prison the great thoughts that he could think once he had the leisure time and inclination to think them. I think for many of us, we have hidden potential and astrology can be a clue to opening up that treasure box.

Patients Like Me

2010-07-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

If you have fibromyalgia as I have, it can be very confusing. There are many mysterious symptoms and even one's thinking can be affected. (They call this "fibro fog". It is also called "cognitive function")
Wouldn't it be nice if you could get together with people who had the same thing and compare notes? Do you ever wonder what other treatments are out there?
Now you can find out on this site. There is even a search thing on it so you can find out which ones are in your state for example, or who has the same disease or syndrome (fibro is sometimes called a syndrome, don't know why) as you do.
I've felt like I've been lied to for instance. When I first was diagnosed by my doctor, he told me fibromyalgia is not "progressive". What this means is that it doesn't get any worse. (It also doesn't get any better.) My fibromyalgia has in fact gotten a great deal worse. I was curious if other people were experiencing such a great increase in pain and I found this site.
It is said that some doctors report a whooping 10 % of patients they see have fibromyalgia. Often they are not believed to suffer any pain at all by loved ones or even by their own doctors. There is no test for fibromyalgia, it's just a bunch of symptoms with no discernible cause. It's maddening to hear people tell me it's all in my mind. If only people could be me for a minute, they'd feel some pain alright. Fibromyalgia has become a sort of "blanket" diagnosis for anyone who comes in with aches & pains and no known cause. It's easy to write it off as such and prescribe anti-depressants because often depression causes aches and pains just like fibromyalgia.
Recent research suggests that fibromyalgia and depression are not related after all, and they've found people not depressed who have it. However I think it likely that someone who suffers such pain might very well become depressed.
I remember when I got it. I lay on the bed and every joint in my body was pounding with a painful rhythm. In those early days I didn't get headaches like I do now, I merely thought it was the onset of arthritis.
There is a funny story I have to tell. I was amused to read that striped clothing or anything with stripes make many fibromyalgia patients seasick. It causes the eyes to sort of mess up and it was one of the things I noticed. I told my hubby that and he laughed and laughed at me, but I was dead serious. There is a long list of fibro symptoms that can mess with your head and make you think your brain is rotting away up there. The hair loss I found hard, as I was very vain about my hair. Still I would go bald is that is what it took to get rid of the pain. Pain is a terrible tyrant, taking away humor and any enjoyment and making one quite stupid and irritable. Irritability and a short temper are what I have, so I turn to silence. Saying nothing insures I will not say something I am sorry for later.
Pain is my mistress and I have to dance to her tune. She rules my life. One day maybe research will find a cure. I hope so.

Mediums on HBO

2010-07-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

My take on the show was that some of the mediums were the real thing and some of them were not. They take your hand and tell you about your loved ones who have passed on and you can communicate with them. However amazing some of the things are they pick up, I wonder if they plucked it from the minds of those sitting in front of them rather than the dead.
Telepathy, says those in the know has been proven again and again. However talking to those who have passed on has not.
My best friend and I had the habit of calling each other at the same time and getting a "busy" signal. We did that so much we laughed about it for years. I thought I could tell by the ringing of the phone that it was her. We were so well-suited to one another and so in synch, that I am amazed now to think that I didn't think a thing of it. I've never met a friend who liked everything I liked and enjoyed hearing me talk on and on and on.....So it's telepathy I find easy to believe in.
People who've never lived in a haunted house find it difficult to believe in ghosts, so I guess we have to experience things before we believe. I get it, but I find it tougher to think how horrible it is if it is not true what these mediums do.
So how do people under hypnosis speak in other languages? Well I see it and believe something is happening, I just don't know what. How does it work?
I think perhaps that is our internal cockiness, that we know we do not die deep inside, that is our arrogance and true faith. That is what mediums offer, confirmation that we go on and live, just in another place.

Midlist and Holly Lisle

2010-07-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Midlist is supposed to mean those books and authors who are not at the top and not at the bottom but in the middle and it's dying I hear. These are the quirky books off the beaten path and I didn't know they were dying, I just know that books nowadays seem like they are all the same. Still we do have books like Watership Down and we have Kurt Vonnegut of course but the idea is we should have more, for readers like me who read about 80 books a year or more finding a good book is much harder than the occasional reader can imagine. So what can we do about it? Nothing of course except buy as best we can but if you Google Holly Lisle she says she is trying to do something about it. I can't find one of her books where I live but she appears to write a lot of fantasy and has a sort of help struggling writers classes.
The way she writes as if she is talking to you is refreshing to me, this lady was a nurse at one time before she was a writer and she confides in you the mistakes that she made. Her no nonsense and matter of fact approach is like a balm to my nerves and I must concede I think her truthful for I read much of the same on other writing sites.
For once you have been swept away by a mere book then you know how special this may be and how we want more, for though we may be average I'm pretty sure our dreams are not.

Other Blogs

2010-06-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

I like "Once Written, Twice Shy" and I thought the advice strange that if you are embarrassed at the idea of reading what you have written out loud then, well, you shouldn't write it. I find this impossible. I am embarassed to say I need to go to the little girl's room so I can't possibly write anything at all except maybe "See Dick, See Jane, See Dick Run."
Scarlett Parrish is blogging about her writing on her blog and how many words she gets a day is often in her blog and some nice pix of beautiful men.
So many blogs, so little time.
I found a blog by a Dorchester Media author who lives in Jersey and scurries all over New York City who posted pix of her dog, her boyfriend, her clothing, her friends, restaurants and took pix of her food before she ate it. I found it a strange experience and read a lot of it at one time. To immerse oneself in someone else's life seemed odd, but at the end I decided it was too Second Hand Rose for me. I wish I could remember this author's name, but I can't. If there was a plot to it, I swear it would be a novel. The only thing is, nothing much happens and I am at the end a tad jealous of someone who gets chocolate delivered by jet from Europe that must be eaten in 3 days because there are no preservatives in it. I want to eat that chocolate, darn it, and not just admire it in pictures.
I think that is the thing about novels and about any of us, we must identify with the character. I myself who have lived from upper class to middle class to lower middle class to below the radar that I kind of identify with everyone. Still, it is your poorest moment in life I think you identify with more. I see homeless people with a kind of sadness because given the right amount of circumstances it could be anyone. We say this but we don't believe it. The intelligent ones are truly below the radar and can't be seen.
I think you are made from your past like clay in a sculptor's hands, and you cannot be heard when you say you want to be this or that. The past comes back constantly the older you become it seems to me. The ability to forget the bad parts is a sort of talent I wish I had, I've a friend like this. When pressured and questioned closely, she still doesn't remember some bad stuff. I am convinced she has the talent of selective amnesia. I think there is a sort of concreteness to memory that cannot be manipulated, not only that, experts say the more times we remember the more we beat a path to that memory in our brains and strengthen those synapses. I think that is what Jackson Browne meant when he said.
though the future is there for anyone to change, don't you know it seems
it would be easier sometimes to change the past
The blog "The Newbie Guide to Publishing" has a lot of good advice I am told, although I haven't read it that much myself.
Anyway, what I mean about memory is that you can learn to forget, I have. It's easier to forget than it is to become a different person and change your future. I think that is what he meant.
Blogging though is used perhaps too much for promotion I guess but that's the way it is. I am old enough to remember when we were being told that television would be a great way for artists to show their work. Hmmm. I don't think that ever happened. We didn't have a television when I was a kid until I was about 10 yrs. old. I remember playing marbles laying down in the dirt, hanging ropes on trees so we could swing like Tarzan, and making paper jewelry. I didn't miss television at all.

Be Anything You Want To Be

2010-06-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

My friend Sherry called me one day to tell me she had had a dream. She talked on and on about it.
She was standing at the top of a red velvet staircase. The air was tense and she knew an important decision was going to be decided by her, which was whether to go down this staircase or turn away from it.
She just knew this dream was very important. What did the universe or whoever want?
I think I know now.
Trembling on the edge of sixteen, she had to decide whether she would cling to the values of her grandparents who had raised her or strike out on her own and be unconventional. (She chose to be unconventional, eventually.) What was odd was her striking innocence when it came to knowing that the person she was befriending or agreeing to date was a bad person, she was abused again and again by people. Her first husband beat her, wanted an open marriage, and turned out to be gay in the end.
Sherry often told me that that was all you could expect from people.
Her assumption was that all people were bad, this is the way it is.
Poverty itself will bring you in contact with a great many bad people and she was sent out into the world without even a dollar to call her own, nearly starved to death before she finally found that waitressing paid well. The waitressing she did became the death of her because everyone went out drinking after work, blowing all the money they had just spend the evening making. She found living with her abusive husband easier to bear when she drank and she became an alcoholic. She was so proud the day she called me and told me she had managed to beat him up instead. She was working hard and he was not so she was able to beat him up, his muscles had turned to jelly on a steady diet of beer and Cheetos. She was happy. Then she divorced him, got the car and kept it in his name and then didn't make a single payment so to ruin his credit.
When her grandparents adopted her, they told the judge they would take care of her. What they did was make her into a household slave who cooked all the meals and cleaned the house and picked up their poodle's poop and then telling her that her mother was a slut and she had bad blood, just like her.
All of this is so sad that sometimes I feel like if I cried about it I would never stop, like some crazy looney and then pull all of my hair out. She was my friend, in fact the only person who would be my friend in elementary school. I was one of those girls nobody talked to, an outcast who they would pretend smelled bad. (In fact, I bathed twice a day, convinced that I did in fact, smell)
If I could go back in time I would tell her that never mind the red velvet staircase and never mind those people who tell you who you are.
You can be anyone you want to be.

Book in progress

2010-06-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

Knock on wood, I've written a book. It isn't finished but it's done, I mean I know what I'm going to do with it and have actual words to go with it and an ending and a beginning and a middle.
Now what?
It would be easy except there are all kinds of obstacles like no computer and that's like no way Jose, I mean I have a pc just no internet but I do have a warranty but no way to travel the one hundred miles to the store and have it repaired. So I feel like holding a sign up at any intersection begging for money to have my pc repaired as this book is singing in my brain and I've always wanted to do this, by God, and there should be a way, the Red Sea shall part, money will fall from heaven or heaven help me I can find a job. No one in the family understands nor will they lend money while they buy bigger & more impressive phones, that this is a burning lifetime desire and nor do they understand that while in the past I have been sort of talking about & never doing anything about writing now I have, really, really done it because when I talk about my writing their eyes glaze over or they act like they smell an unmentionable smell and manners too good to mention it.
Holly Lisle says on her site to never expect any help or support from family. It's true. Unbelievable but true. Writing is never thought much of until it brings in actual cash and until it does it's a pipe dream, a fantasy of crazy people like you. You're nuts.
Polite society acts like you've seen UFO's and been abducted many times, people think you're trying to act like you're better than they are and by God, you put your pants on one leg at a time just like they do, (My Dad said this koan constantly, like it was impressive and I felt that my intelligent father talking about pants and pant's leg meant something else entirely and I was too stupid to get it because talking about how people put their pants on and whether they do it like you do is incredibly stupid) and why don't you do something you're actually capable of doing like working at the EZ Mart because you are ordinary just like them, you grew up right in their neighborhood by God and writer's are people who went to college.
In fact, I believed that writers were like experts and authorities and what they wrote was the absolute truth just because someone printed it on paper and put in between cardboard covers with a title and everything. I remember when I discovered that the author of "Flowers for Algernon" wasn't a shrink and was in fact in therapy himself. Some of that stuff he just made up. Stephen King says people typically believe that fiction is real and that non-fiction is false. I believe everything I read while I'm reading it, which is just me I guess.
In fact some of us have to do something when people say we can't do it, stubbornly and stupidly. Like me. I wrote a book, sort of. Just need a few more polishes 'till it shines.

Jennifer Weiner

2010-06-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

The book is "Goodnight Nobody"
She is a wife with 3 kids who sets out to find out who murdered a woman in her neighborhood that she barely knew, just because she needs something intelligent to do and she used to be a reporter for a tabloid who reported on celebrities and their latest rehab visits and affairs, but a journalist anyway! She lives in Connecticut in the wealthy neighborhood, she feels stupid talking about whether the milk at the store is really organic or not and feeds the children McDonald's food which would cause a scandal so she hides the evidence and wipes off the ketchup before going somewhere. She married someone she didn't love, but merely liked and when an almost lover from her youth appears she starts to wonder if she didn't make a mistake and if she did, how can she fix it now with 3 small children? She has not made a single friend in the Martha Stewart clone crowd and nor is she happy paying 2 thousand a month for the exclusive nursery school her kids go to because all they do is watch the kids finger paint.
Yes, she mocks the rich even as she is one of them. She feels out of place. Then she finds out her best friend who is an intelligent Paris Hilton had her almost lover almost deported out of the country.
So who killed this woman who had ghostwritten a column called "The Perfect Mother" who really did seem to be a perfect mother who is found laying on her kitchen floor with a knife in her back?
This is the same author who wrote "In Her Shoes" and if you didn't read the book then you probably saw the movie.
I have not finished this book yet, because I am so enjoying the journey of reading it.
As for what the title is about, all of you with children know the famous book "Good Nite Moon" for wee ones in which the author says goodnite socks, goodnite clock, goodnite nobody and in the book the child Sophie asks "Who is Nobody" and she says she doesn't know but she thinks that Nobody is her. Her husband is seldom there and she has no friends and her children seem to be always wailing or crying or spilling something on her constantly, as any mother knows. This book talks of motherhood as it really is, though she loves them. She is so easy to identify with and writes so clearly one could laugh out loud with her and feel like she is a friend.
She certainly seems like she would be a great friend and she has written a very good book.

NCIS

2010-05-29T10:16:00.001-07:00

What can I say about this T.V. show? It's not the stories, which are like cop shows you've seen before, it's the characters.
Abbey, who sleeps in a coffin and wears mostly black?
DeNoso, who knows old movies and asks, couldn't it be like this movie, what these criminals are doing?
Gibbs, whose steely stare makes his underlings stutter and stammer? Why does he hit his people on the back of the head, is it loving or just shaming or just abusing?
Kate, was she too beautiful and so replaced with an Isralei terroist who can't drive and whose mistakes with the English language make some of the best lines on television?
Is Denoso really the most beautiful man you've ever seen, or is it that he knows he is beautiful that makes it so funny when the women he works with cut him down to size?
Is Abbey a genius?
Isn't Gibbs proof that a much older man can be sexy?
Can't we let Ducky keep talking and rambling on like some academic history professor?
Is De Noso imitating Carey Grant? I think so.
Is there a better show than NCIS? Naw......

Jackson Browne

2010-05-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of getting old is getting those great recordings at a bargain price. I recently picked up some Jackson Browne and found him as great and sweetly sad as ever. What could ever compare to "Fountain of Sorrow" or "Jamacia, Say You Will".
I really love piano, and somehow songwriters who play the piano seem to write the songs I love the most. Screaming guitars I never liked, though a good rock'n'roll song I love. Us women from the sixties know quite well that rock sometimes reflects badly on women, we just never cared. I'm thinking now of the Rolling Stones. From "Stupid Girl" to "She's Under my Thumb" to "Bitch" to "Stray Cat', you're talking songs to make a feminist take up arms. It's rock tradition, sort of. I like the Stones. As Jagger sings in Wild Horses,
I know I've dreamed you
A sin and a lie
Anyway, Browne is one of those who respects women, which makes it easier for me to like him. He expresses himself as a sensitive man who is simply aware, not feminine himself. I heard a new song recently, (New to me)
I'm not sure what you think you see, I'm hoping you'll still know that it's me
Oh, if I'd only known
What your heart costs
Call it a loan
or a debt that I owed, or a bet that I lost

Cooking

2010-05-18T11:31:00.001-07:00

I was taught how to cook by my husband after we were married. He showed me and then I was supposed to do all the cooking. I found this unfair. Why was this my job? He, after all, was fully able to cook. Anyway women are more likely to mop the floor and cook than men and I'm not sure I really want things to change and every man wearing an apron but I feel faintly abused. Anyway, my mom was Southern but couldn't make biscuits. Biscuits are a necessary part of meals, especially breakfast in the South and my mother's lack was due to 8 sisters. This made it difficult for her to even get into her mom's tiny kitchen and even watch her mom and sisters cook anything. I found biscuits to be made by my husband in an unconventional way. I failed many times at making biscuits, I made odd rocks and strange textures and flat little pancakes before using this method. I thought to share it with you.
Take self-rising flour and throw away your baking powder or save it for that banana nut bread. Add whole milk and stir until it is between thin and thick, anything between. Add one big blob of Crisco shortening, about 4 tablespoons. (Hmm....flour is about 2 cups I think) As you can see, I hate to measure anything. I don't know why, it seems so complicated and too much trouble. Melt shortening in a cast iron skillet, (why cast iron? It's traditional I guess) Pour lard into flour and milk mixture.
My biscuits were very bitter before, baking powder lends a bitterness for me otherwise. I know this is not how you are supposed to make biscuits.
However, if I do it the proper way, by slicing pieces of shortening with 2 knives into the flour until crumbly textured, I can make pie crust very prettily, (even if it is 2 inches thick) Cobbler however is easier and everything taste better soaked in berry juice or peach juice. Very forgiving.
Well, that is my cooking tip for today.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention. Sometimes, by complete accident because I never make biscuits that taste the same twice, I get this light and fluffy and delicious pastry that is ridiculously wonderful. I remember how my Aunt Lena Mae made wonderful creations out of flour, buttermilk and vegetable shortening. Her biscuits were so amazing she made them on huge cookie sheets and still had no leftovers. A well-made biscuit is better than baklava, better than chocolate eclairs, better with a homey goodness that tastes like childhood.
I think it is when I get the milk exactly right and when I stir very little. It's like a suprise to open up my oven.
I never know what I'm going to get.

Nancy Makin to appear on Oprah

2010-05-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

Nancy Makin 51, once weighed 703 pounds. She is 51 years old and from Michigan. She lost a whopping 530 pounds and wore pants at 103 inches around the waistline. I find her unexpected.
For one thing, she is a very attractive lady. She talks well and is not anxious about being on camera and feels she has something to say. She makes her living now cleaning houses and presumably, appearing on television.
She didn't go out because people stared at her and were not friendly she says. Her sister gave her a pc and she said it gave her a chance to talk to people without them knowing what she looked like. She doesn't have anything to push and doesn't have a load of weight loss advice. She was lonely and she ate, once connected to the internet the weight just came off.
It is wonderful how supportive the online community can be, and how our worlds might be a bit larger now if we chose. I found her strangely fascinating.
Also, Betty White will be on Saturday Night Live this weekend! Hooray! She is in her eighties and as funny and bright as she ever was. I am looking forward to watching the show.

Lunar Return Charts

2010-04-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

It is interesting that you can go to astro.com and have them do a lunar return chart for free. This horoscope only lasts one month. With Venus in the 2nd house, my money problems are going away one can be sure. However what most people want to know about is their love life. This calls for a Venus return.
I searched for Ephermis and found one online for free. Venus returns to my degree of Scorpio on January 7, 2011. I now have a Venus return.
Venus is in the 12th house of secrets and behind the scenes action. This suggests a secret love affair or doing something you love in solitude. This suggests that a person might be lying low for awhile, and since Venus also represents our attractiveness, perhaps a time when people don't see or appreciate my talents or gifts.
The 12th house is secrets, things you do alone. This could be the novel I am working on. It is secret as no one will see it until it is completed. Venus represents art of all kinds, a book, a painting, a thing of beauty or beautifying. I might get plastic surgery!
Synastry, or how your chart shows your relationship is a breeze at astro.com. Enter birth times and away you go.
Interestingly, my Sun is the same as my Hubby's North Node.
It means we are to help each other achieve.
The science of Synastry is one that everyone seems to be interested in.
Horary questions are a science of asking a specific question and hopefully the planets will show you the answer.
People have asked if there is life on other planets and also where did I leave my car keys?
In some way, I am to be like the person who explains our life. I am full of words and hubby has trouble expressing himself. I put things he feels into words for him. This I understand. The North Node being what he is trying to achieve is what I have already achieved with my Sun there. Weird, uh?
Astrology weekly is a site I recommend. Lots of answers there by people who all seem to live in Europe strangely enough.
May you all shine on.

Astrologers

2010-04-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I could be an astrologer. I'm itching to get my hands on some poor guinea pig and talk their ears off. I thought it was interesting to learn about reality from Astrology.

For every point on your birthchart there is an Egyptian bound ruler and the ruler tells "the reality of that point". The trigon ruler tells you the spiritual expectations of that point. So, if you know your Ascendant degree you can see the lies you've told to yourself and how things really turned out if you know your planets.

For me, the Moon is my spiritual ruler. This is how, in theory, I think things ought to be. This is my ideal. The Moon is all about emotions and family and I want a loving family more than anything else in this world. I tried very hard to get my family to love me in fact.

Saturn is my Egyptian Bound Ruler. So, Saturn is the reality of the point that is my Ascendant. Saturn is all about rules and regulations and limitations. I wasn't able to spend time with my family because they seemed to always want to spend time with someone else! Saturn is contraction, coldness, and crystallization of emotions. I could say I've grown a cold cold heart when it comes to my old family, but for my own children I had high pie in the sky hopes. Once again, I had to work a lot and didn't get to spend as much time with my kids as I wanted to. There are constant money problems, vehicles that need to be fixed we can't afford to fix. I blog at my library because I can't afford internet. It is Saturn's way to place obstacles in your path. It isn't that you can't do something, it's that the something becomes very difficult to do. I have very strong Moon ties to my family, but we have problems. Money problems often accompany Saturn also. Saturn isn't always the bad guy, Saturn represents that you'll have to put in hard work to achieve anything. That is just the way it is for everyone has Saturn in their chart somewhere doing something. But then hard work is often good for us, as my father constantly told me growing up.

Another way to use this is for your Sun if you were born in the daytime and the Moon if you were born at night.

The moon is Bound to it's ruler Mars. This is the reality of this point. I sometimes feel like I am negotiating a minefield because people are always, constantly hurting my feelings. I want to be myself (and I'm a little wacky I suppose) but being myself constantly puts me where I'm angry. My Moon is emotions and with Mars that emotion is often anger. (Mars is also about drive and energy, not always anger) The Trigon Ruler of 5 degrees Cancer is Venus.

Trigon Ruler = Theory

Bound Ruler =Experience

My ideal would be that everyone would love me, easy to see that with Venus as a ruler

What I read says that if the bound ruler and the trigon ruler have good aspects between each other then all is well.

Mine too, but I suppose all that means is that I live well with ambiguity. We all live with it. We all wish things were different. I live with my angry Moon by being quiet and keeping my radical thoughts to myself. I try to agree with others, even when I don't. I try to be sympathetic, emphatic and helpful. I guess that's what they mean by harmonious aspects. I've sort of worked it out.

I found this interesting and I hope other people will too. We have seen our dreams fall by the wayside and tried to live with what we had. Most of us try to be better people, I believe that. Some of us have aspects that make us wonder why we have to have hard lives, and we don't know any answers. It is interesting that astrology at least knows what our questions are.

Friends With Your Readers

2010-04-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

It has been said that everything we write is like a letter to someone we know. It doesn't matter if that person is alive or not. Stephen King that his constant reader is his wife. It is she that he wants to make life, it is she he wants to say that his story is good. I think that good writing implies this sort of innocence. Sometimes when I read rude things that people say on my blog I feel very much like never blogging again, but then I think that I must write with the idea that the reader is my friend, that this is necessary and inescapable. I saw Julie and Julia and I thought it wonderful. This woman had a blog and there was much gnashing of teeth among authors because the movie made successful writing appear easy. I read many blogs far better than mine, but we are who we are I suppose. You strike a chord for some and not for others, some people abhor James Patterson and some love him. I think his books read like an outline for a book not yet written, like maybe he is asking people to use their imaginations.

Putting it that way, his writing doesn't seem so bad.

I try to see things from differest views. I often visit a site called Absolute Write. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to be a writer. These are real people. I was so jealous when there was a writing convention and a bunch of them got to meet one another. I live in an area where no one would hold a convention or a concert, the town is so small you could drive through it in less than 60 seconds tops.

Anyway I had blogged that writers are thieves as a title then totally forgot what I was going to say. Here is the quote, "Borrow from one and it is stealing, borrow from many and it is talent." I had thought I had to write something totally original but from reading books I've discovered writers copy other writers all the time. The similarities are so strong I wonder if a little plagerism isn't involved. I don't have to be original to write, only serve up a recipie from many. I know that sound terrible but I think it also happens to be true. Many are not original, after all. I was watching Lethal Weapon one night and thought of something else that is true. People want the familiar, here we have a couple of guys playing cops and that is so old it's moldy. The twist is the suicidal Mel Gibson, a thing abandoned in the later movies. Is there a writer out there crying night after night over the loss of his vision because superstar don't like that part of the script? I imagine so. He probably wrote a novel instead where you can be your own boss. I missed that part. I think writers should be the boss of their creations, but it is one messy world instead, and movies get made, mostly bad movies. I read books instead, but cinema has it's own pull and magic, and sometimes that is compelling. Sometimes magic happens.

Anyway I think this is the recipie: Overall something familiar, then a twist. People want to feel like they could slip into the shoes of the hero or heroine. I think that simple also is best. I can't stand to try and figure out who a dozen characters are and seldom care about them. I think they should be exaggerated cartoonish and twisted. Now that's fun, like the nosy neighbor or the kindhearted boss who acts mean and always about to fire somebody. Then a dozen of those wacky people is alright.

Writing is best of all to me because there are no rules or recipies.

Poor Me

2010-03-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

When I was in school we had a young girl named Karen who was treated as if very special. She had the disease known as "failure to thrive". I was quite jealous of her. I had a lot of problems of my own in fact but they were secret problems, not the kind of thing you advertise. One day while at work I was regaled by a woman telling all about a rape to a rapt audience who were saying all sorts of positive things to her and it made me feel a little sick. If I did happen to be raped, I don't think I would talk about it at all. All this has made me think about how America is the land of the underdog. I was watching a movie about a girl who never got any attention and didn't get anything from her stepmother, this modern Cinderella who was in fact the star of the show acting shy and unnoticed and desperate for attention. Of course she is very talented and the truth comes out at the talent show and she gets the guy and all the attention. I don't think it is right to always give everything to those with a tragedy in their life, I think maybe there are many with secret tragedies who somehow manage to overcome as I have. There was a girl who had lost her son at my last job; she liked to talk and not work and that was okay. Everyone liked her, I did too, but I was forced to do jobs that were very difficult. I would see her happily chatting wiping the sweat out of my eyes and yes, be a little jealous. I think maybe it is wrong to be so instantly sorry and accomodating to those who suffer these public sorrows, maybe being treated just like anyone else could be a good idea.

Writers are Thieves

2010-02-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

For writer's advice I consider great, please visit HollyLisle.com. You might recognize her as a fantasy author but she has also written some romance. She was formerly a R.N. and had a bumpy road to writing success and wishes us to know that it shall always be bumpy if you choose a writing career. She is frank and to the point and not wordy, something I find refreshing. It is something of a paradox as to why a writer would help for free so many struggling to write, there are some who say that writers do not compete with one another. I don't remember the origin of the quote, but a famous writer said that truly Norah Robert's sales will not hurt for instance Stephen King's because people follow that genre and who read King's stuff wouldn't read Ms. Roberts books anyway. It seems, if you just surf the Web, that everyone wants to be a writer these days. I think that people believe that it is easy, but once attempted, one will never think that again. Some I think just want to be a struggling writing and not do any writing at all, inspiration is skittish and our lives are busy and demanding. I am reminded that creativity often takes time. I am impressed at how often writers say that they start by doing nothing, idly taking long walks or working in a garden, or any activity that doesn't use a lot of brain power. Then, at odd moments, inspiration comes to you they say, when least expected.

(I find that I never get an idea when I have a pen in hand and blank paper in front of me and start commanding myself to think of something. It kills the process it seems, at least for me.)

I know that I have these wild and wicked dreams, to live off imagination seems as far away as dragons, or clouds. There is a great deal of work involved also, book writing is like ballet you know. Ballet is said to be "Making the difficult seem effortless." I think writing is the same.

I think "Know Your Ending" before you write good advice, tho' not written in stone by any means. Stephen King, that great writer who has earned millions, does not write this way. However the Harry Potter books were thought up at least, from the ending to the beginning, backwards. Reading how she created Harry Potter was one of the most fascinating things, she literally tells every detail of how she worked her books out. Amazing.

I hope that computers and great generous people like Ms. Lisle will create even more writers, because there is nothing I like better than to read. There can never be too many books in the world.

I am a great borrower of books and recently I read a post at Absolute Write that says that when you spend money on books you help the publishing industry. This is so obvious it shouldn't need to be said but I never thought about it that way. I spend as little on books as I can, wait for the paperback to come out on new books or for friends to loan me theirs, I am quite wicked. Now I buy more and I hope you will too. Let's support the bringers of dreams.

Where is my Manuscript?

2010-02-17T15:09:00.000-08:00

The time it takes for a publisher to get back to you can drive some people bananas. There is an online magazine named "Clarksworld" which I hear accepts a manuscript in a mere 3 days. There is a lot of great fiction on the site and a request for donations and you can buy the fiction in book form. It seems a sci-fi magazine but it has good writing. Most publishers recommend you enclose a postcard so they can let you know that they've recieved your manuscript. Good Idea. There is even a site called The Black Hole which keeps statistics on how long it takes publishers to get back to you, which is a sci-fi, horror, fantasy site it appears also. There is a lot of help online for those of sci-fi persuasion. Cobblestone Press has a community you can join with workshops to help aspiring writers. It's all helpful, especially if you're wondering if your manuscript you are waiting to hear about so desperately isn't, really, lining someone's birdcage and catching poo.

Can You Judge A Book by it's Cover?

2010-02-16T10:56:00.001-08:00

I think we do judge books by their covers, it's like a promise made to us of what is inside. I remember seeing "An Accidental Tourist" by Anne Tyler and I just had to read it. I was wondering about the title. For me it is the title that makes me pick up a book, and not the cover. They say men are more moved by photos and women more by the written word, so it may be that since I am female it is the title that draws me. I know a title drew me in and before I knew it I had devoured over five Anne Tyler books. Tyler is married to a phsychiatrist, which seems to contribute some to her style of writing since there is always a psychological reason for what the characters too. None of them seem to suffer from out there abuse or poverty and that is just so, just 'cause the author has been in this sort of sheltered life where the biggest problems seem to be in just finding one's way and identity.

Andre Norton, who took a man's name because she wrote man like books and who would read them done by a woman?, has passed away. Mercedes Lackey seem to fill that void very well with stunning language in the Norton tradition. Andre Norton refered to herself as a "staid teller of old-fashioned stories". The Norton title that first drew me in was "Moon of Three Rings" and in it were people who changed to animals and back again on a world where the Moon had 3 rings. This world of villages where people live in the Middle Ages is one we come to again and again, as if this is the home we best understand.

I remember seeing the "Sword of Shanana" and I had to read it this book in the Tolkein tradition.

I guess I will keep on judging books by the title and for the most part, this seems to work in helping me find a good book, very well.

Americans Don't Care

2010-01-25T08:40:00.000-08:00

I was watching the news during the gasoline crisis when prices kept going up and it seemed there was no end in sight and some commentator on there said that Americans didn't care about the environment or higher gas prices because we kept buying SUVs. Then the other day it was said that Americans don't care about the new health care plan. I'll tell you what I think, I think it doesn't matter what we think. Sure, we have opinions but there is no one who cares about those opinions, and someone who talks about politics at our break is wasting our time and they get strident and sometimes start yelling, I guess because they are powerless and the whole thing is pointless anyway. I think if there was a place we could go and be heard we would go there but there is not. What is going to happen is going to happen by the powers that exist today and Rosie from Poonatkee doesn't matter. Pulic opinion polls do show that people think they are being lied to, imagine that!

The Path to Fortune

2010-01-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

Mr. Garth has written the "Five Pillars of Fate" about 2nd century astrology and the Arabic lots. This means that the lot of fortune in your birth chart is also an Ascendant and there is another second house. The second house is what you do for a living and my birth chart has a second house of Capricorn but my fortune chart has a second house of Gemini. Gemini rules writing, teachers, wordplay, communications and twins. Capricorn is an earth sign ruling government, banks, time honored institutions, things from the earth such as gold or minerals, and older people especially men. The first house of your fortune chart rules you, your physical body and what type of person you are as well as your birth chart does. The ruler of both of my charts are in the fourth and the second house repectively, I mean the Ascendants. I am a person who loves books and words and also being at home. I took my last 2 vacations at home actually.

Still there is one more thing representing our life force and that is the lot of Spirit. Valens says to us from the second century "The Spirit and it's ruler govern matters concerning the soul, intellect and actions thourgh discourse and through giving and receiving." Here we are in all our glory or messed up condition as it may be. Mine is Gemini.

Fortune is our portion given to us, it is walking across the street and being hit by a bus because it is something that happens to you. You don't have any control over it. Spirit is ourselves deciding to cross the street. Our Sun Signs are us too more in the matter of personality. Our spirit is our style of doing things. Garth has his fingers on the astrology of Valens in an easy to understand book. The ninth house is the house of higher thought, of kings and queens, of where you are noble yourself, the ninth from the lot of fortune may tell you where you outdo yourself in royal style. I have Aquarius and Leo respectively. Dramatic and quirky. The tenth house of career will tell you public reputation and what you do and is along with the first one of the most powerful houses. The 10th house from the Lot of fortune and any houses in it have a lot to do with your success (or failure). I have Mercury in the second house as the tenth in my fortune chart and indeed Mercury rules my Lot of Exaltation. So it is how I see that this planet, more than any other, is what will power any success I will have in life. Astro.com will calculate the lot of fortune for you and then make a new chart with whole signs with the sign the lot of fortune is in as the first house. This new fortune chart is very enlightening. It is thought that if you were born at night then this lot is actually the Lot of Spirit as most reverse the formula for night births. Night people you count the degrees from the Moon to the Sun counter-clockwise and then count the same degrees from the Ascendant in the same counter-clockwise direction. I found this very difficult and actually mixed them up for many months. The ancients counted one two three and so can we, we can do it exactly as they did the Lots.

In some unclear way Neptune is tied up with your fortune, I don't understand it but cannot deny it is so. Jupiter is very important of course but Saturn figures karmically as signalling when we recieve what we are due.

We cannot decide our fortune but we can take the portion given to us and do with it what we can. Our fortune, like our talents, are given to us at birth.

The Anaretic Degree or Extremes in Motion or Pink Floyd's Roger Barrett

2010-01-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

The 29th degree of Leo is the Ascendant of Pink Floyd's guitarist Roger Barrett. His use of LSD in the 60's has been talked about and it's been said he was a victim of the times he was born in, for drug use among muscians at that time was at an all time high. What is interesting is that this 29th degree means "being at the end of one's rope" and for Barrett it was issues about identity or "who am I?" Your entire life is supposed to be focused on that point as well as bringing out the extremes of that point. Leo is all about self-expression so his whole life was about expressing himself and doing so vividly, (Leo rules show business).
It is called the degree of fate for it's karmic implications.
He also had Pluto in the 12th house even as Kurt Cobain did which implies living on the edge of an abyss, ever in danger of catastrophe, always with things hidden deep within the self.
Since houses always work in pairs then 2 houses come into play. For me, it is the second and the eighth houses. I thought this amusing if rather sad that these are the money houses in one's chart, for lack of money dogs me like cigarette smoking or a black cloud that follows only me. A smoker must have their cigarettes and chosing between cigarettes and food I've always chosen the former as any smoker knows. These houses also stand for things we value, including ourselves. Self-esteem issues dog me, for I don't want to think of such things; I don't want to think about money at all. Other sources say the 29th degree is one of wisdom and of the fullest expression of that sign, others say it is a place of indecision, of not knowing what to do. Astrologically speaking, things are uncertain and not well understood. Certainly we know some things, for me the important real world house called the second falls on the 29th degree of Sagittarius and the rest of the house is in Capricorn. Now Capricorn in the second house is considered very good, Capricorns are quite good with money and get value for their dollar. However I am not good with money at all. The second house also represents assets, this is the plus side of the equation, this is how we make our money. It is called the house of survival. Here I have Mercury. I don't have a Mercurian job I have a job ruled by Saturn as I work in a poultry plant. Saturn rules Capricorn. Small animals are ruled by the 6th house, the house of work. What does it all mean?
I think it means that in a sense I have failed. If there was a test I missed it, I was absent that day.
According to some astrologers the planet ruling the house is more important than any planets actually in the house, and so free-wheeling Sagittarius who can't hold on to a buck or anything but their own heads is the sign on the cusp. Sagittarians are ruled by generous Jupiter because God takes care of drunks and children and this sign needs all the help it can get. Luck comes into play for this sign and being saved at the last minute. Now a Jupiter ruled house can't be all bad, can it?
These 2 opposites of poverty and wealth are in my second house, Jupiter and Saturn. I see this in my life. I see unexpected good luck but a steady never-ending river of bad luck to swim in. I feel that I must, absolutely must get in control of my financial life or face ruin of dynamic proportions. I am literally on my own, there is no help for me from family or inheritance, or retirement I mean nothing. That sounds like Saturn to me.
In the end I think it is Saturn that influences the second house and not Jupiter and so the 29th degree does not seem to be doing it's karma for me, though money issues are extremely a problem for me. So to study this in the realm of personal experience I say Sagittarius doesn't rule my second house, Saturn does so the idea of cusp rulers is a bunch of crap. The Ascendant is the most important personal point in the chart so in Barrett's chart it might be a different story. The second house is interesting to me because survival is the first and most important thing after all, and it isn't hard to understand the second. I don't know a great many things but I know who signs my paycheck.

The Tarot

2010-01-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

I was given a deck of tarot cards at a young age and I have an opinion about these cards. You can also use a regular deck of cards to forsee the future, if you've a mind to do so. I think that time stands still in front of us sometimes for if the future was not already written then how could anyone see it? I just got a tarot reading online that was spot on, which shows me you don't have to have the actual cards in your hand for it to work. The cards "knew" what question I had asked, and that it was about work, but it's not the cards that know things. Who does? Why yourself of course.

I had a friend who told me that she had noticed that after you "cast" the cards over and over again that the cards ceased working, well your mind does get tired. Your subconcious seems to put the cards in their correct positions, telling you things you already know, just not consciously sometimes. You "find out" things you already sort of knew but were not acknowleding in this symbolic and lovely form. The cards aren't evil any more than it was true that witches can give you the evil eye as was believed for a century or more. People believed that someone could curse you just by looking at you. In a way, people's belief in the magic value of the tarot has me somewhat frustrated. It is magic in the sense that we all carry magic within ourselves. They don't make life better or worse, for much of life is just boring. I see a lot of hard work ahead for me, and I didn't need tarot cards to know that.

The Dome

2009-12-22T12:50:00.001-08:00

The Dome is the title of Stephen King's new book. It is a very thick book indeed. A small town in Maine has an invisible dome suddenly appear and no one can get in and no one can get out. King uses the terrible accident he had in which a driver hit him while he was walking down the side of the road in this novel, he was prescribed Percocet for his pain. Someone in the novel contemplates suicide with Percocet, another becomes addicted to Oxycontin. The man in charge has become rich selling meth, "Big Jim". He has more money than a person could spend in 1 lifetime in an account in the Caymen Islands, but he doesnt' want to retire and sip Margaritas in some tropical local no sir. This little town is his town and has always been his town and he cannot stand the idea of someone else running it. He kills two people in his office with his own hands. Of course you know this is a King novel and that murder and insanity is sure to follow, but there is little magic except of course for the existance of the Dome itself. As for the writing itself I find it is about middlin' folks, middle of the road stuff that we have come to expect from King, which is on a higher level than most writers. King tells us about the motivations of these people and of the awfulness of people quite clearly.

For a writer who writes so much about the unlikely and the never gonna happen in a million years kind of stuff King paints a very clear picture of reality. For his people are real, and just as bad and as spiteful and as mean as they are in everyday life. Being lower middle-class or downright poor as King was in his childhood means knowing how bad people are, and that is a lesson I myself have learned. When people have nothing or very little, their natures are not improved for it believe me.

For all of that I enjoyed reading it, enjoyed a writer putting into words what I myself find so difficult to say. I enjoyed the way Karma has of catching up with the bad guys, now I wish that was a part of reality that I know also.

For life isn't about friendships or love or romance or any of that stuff for most people. It's about power. As the pirate says, "It's what a man can do or what a man cannot do" in Pirates of the Caribbean. I hear it in people's voices and in the way they stand and the way they say the things they say, I hear how much security they have in the world, and how much power. I am pretty much powerless, but I read the fantastic to hear the real so much more. In my own head when I read, I am just reading, just reading.

Scorpio Rising

2009-12-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

Having recently realized that my birth certificate was incorrect and I am actually a Scorpio rising, I am pointing fingers at my silly self for taking so long to figure it out. Called the "Razor's Edge" ascendant because it is so very difficult and makes for a difficult life. Having worked once in Labor & Delivery I know they often put the birth time as whenever they get to sit down and write in the chart, which may be as long as 20 minutes later. Also, people tend to round numbers up, so 2:51 becomes 3:00. Also, the stars have moved after a couple of thousand years and the stars in Aries are now in Taurus. However I think the signs still valid. It has been remarked that these Aries stars being in Taurus has made them more peaceful and generally cooled down, which makes a sort of sense when you think about it.

However when you look up your fixed stars on the site Constellation of Words then the stars are where she says they are, (generally one sign away from where ancient people saw them).

The Rising Sign is important because it's ruler is the ruler of your chart. With a Sagittarius rising my ruler was Jupiter, with a Scorpio rising then my ruler is Mars as the ancient ruler or co-ruled or ruled by Pluto now in modern times. To make things more confusing the ruler of your part of fortune is said to rule the chart. Okay.

There was research that showed that the planet that was the closet to the midheaven influenced choice of career, but I understand that planet has to be 8 degrees or less away from the midheaven point. The midheaven is that dark line at the top of your chart. If there is no planet 8 or less degrees away then you go with the ruler of the 10th house. Mine is Virgo so the ruler is Mercury. It is amusing, if you have a toddler or a young one at home, to look at their chart and think of what they might be when they grow up. I am still waiting to grow up myself and still waiting on that career in communications that was foretold for me by Mercury, but even astrology cannot overcome serious screw ups such as myself. Venus at the midheaven fortells a career in something that gives pleasure and is female oriented, artistic careers usually. Jupiter foretells that whatever the career is, it will be big, big, big, 'cause Jupiter means bigness and if Jupiter is close to the midheaven astrologers say you're going to have good luck with your career for forever you lucky person. Even a bad planet at the midheaven isn't bad, 'cause the nobility of being there is transforming to Mars or Saturn. They are improved the stronger they are in astrology, if that makes any sense. A Mars in his home sign of Aries is a happy Mars, or in his exalted sign of Capricorn. (No one can figure out how Mars is exalted in the cold sign of Capricorn, the ancient astrologers say it is so. Like so much in astrology, we don't understand how they figured this stuff out.) Robert Hand is an astrologer who spends a lot of time looking up ancient writings and translating them. I was amused to see him finally on television commenting on, of all things, Nostradomus.

Einstein had Hamal in his chart, this star is known for making people independent. Einstein certainly went against convention in his math, which nobody cared about except other mathmeticians. Einstein couldn't believe how many people were interested in his work and in himself, when they couldn't possibly understand his equations. Other children were born at the same time as Einstein, and they didn't become Einsteins. That is true. I think it is our nature being made in the stars, not our intelligence. My 16 year old has Hamal at 6 degrees of Taurus on her Moon, and independant she certainly is. She works part time and buys her own clothes and stuff. It remains to be seen how being independant will show up in her life.

Fireflies by Owl City

2009-12-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

Thank My Space for Fireflies, 'cause that is where this song came from. Electronic pop with fantastic, fanciful lyrics.
Adam Young wrote music in the basement of his parent's house in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the song he sings,
I get a thousand hugs
from 10 thousand lightning bugs
I'm much to tired to fall asleep
Adam Young is young, he is only 20 years old and "Fireflies" made it to #1 on Billboard's top 100 songs. Owl City is a musical project with Adam Young and so called "synthpop" music. On my daughter's computer, this song is called "electronica". It is kind of Disney like to me, like a cartoon, except when the chorus comes in strong with a kind of rock feel you realize that it is a rock n' roll song. On the Owl City site there are free songs along with Fireflies to listen to, one is called "Strawberry Avalanche" and "Hot Air Balloon". In the first song he sings, "this is a world of dreams and reverie". In "Hot Air Balloon" he sings, "We will stir the stars around...thinking of the weekend we were in love."
I think I know what he is singing of in Fireflies, it is that magical moment when you drift off to sleep. It is the doorway between being awake and your dreams in which magical and whimsical thoughts may occur to you. At the end he sings, "I fall asleep."
My 16 year old daughter was playing this song on our computer over and over and I thought it perfect for a 16 year old, not realizing at the time that the rest of the world loves "Fireflies" too.

Algol the Demon's Eye

2009-12-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

Algol seems to be a star associated with catastrophes but also feminine energy that brings creativity to people. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones has his Moon on Algol. He wrote songs like "Under My Thumb" and "Stray Cat" that were not very nice towards women at all. The Stones have never wrote songs about romantic love. There is one song titled "Stupid Girl". A previous member of the Stones who died in their early years was Brian Jones, who had Uranus on Algol in his birth chart. Jones, who Richards says really made his mark and that he knew of 15 children at the very least that Jones had fathered, was always going from one relationship to another. Johnny Depp has his Venus on Algol and I don't know about his love life. There are also some scientists who were brilliant with planets conjunctioning Algol. Uranus is the planet of genius and when it is on Algol it is an indicator of genius, but of genius so great they may be rather freakish. All of this doesn't go with the idea of Algol being bad luck always, it may not be a bad energy, rather one that is intense and hard to handle. It appears to be a creative energy in the chart.
Diana Rosenberg has written a book about stars which I want to own badly says,
"Some of the fixed stars are harsh, yes....stars confer tasks upons us which, if comprehended and accepted offer great rewards of power and creativity." John Lennon had a planet on Algol, and his violent death is often associated with his having a birth planet on Algol. Also the star Facies is in his chart, a star it is said means a violent death. Well I have Facies, so if I die a violent death I am a believer for sure.
What I read about the stars I take the information with the proverbial grain of salt. Some things even professional astrologers seem to get wrong. I mean it seems to me that something is going on with these stars, that Algol makes one creative may be the only thing I can say for sure.
I must add one thing, I got interested in Algol because my hubby has his Sun on Algol in the 1st house. Now the 1st house represents the physical body, and Algol here on the Sun means a lot of accidents. I read an ancient text translation that said, "If the Sun be with Algol and Mars is also with Gemini, the hands and feet will be cut off." Strange, my husband had his foot amputated after a load of posts fell on him. He also injured his back vertabrae. He is always damaging his hands, but then he works with his hands so perhaps that is reasonable. It gave me a shiver to read that, it was close enough to what had actually happened in his life. His Mars is in Gemini. It also says if the Sun be with Algol then you have this ability to conquer your enemies. He has this amazing ability to win arguments and come out ahead I must say. Now Taurus is called Taurus the builder and my hubby has the ability to build anything, he uses wood. People bring him old wood all the time. He is well liked and people give him things, it seems to me they do so partly because of a sense of compassion. They just kind of feel sorry for him. Sorry he has had such a lousy life and that he is an amputee. Algol is in Taurus so if you are a Taurus then you might have this star on your Sun. It is given a 5 degree orb because it is a powerful triple star. Oh yeah, his Lot of Acquisiton is in Pisces, that most compassionate of signs ruling the lot of how you acquire things. He gets things because people have sympathy for him. Astrology just has these amazing predictions that happen to be correct. He also has me, who supports him. I went out with him because, yeah, I felt sympathy for this man who had lost a leg.
Also things miss, like my Lot of Acquisition is in Aries and Mars is there in Aries which means I should take in quite a bit. I don't. Anyway, Mars here means you get what you get by robbery or sports. Or it can mean the things you get, like you collect sports memorabilia and weapons. Mars is the God of War after all. Or it could be as Ms. Rosenberg says when she writes that a planet conjunct a fixed star takes on the qualities of that star permanently, from birth to forever. My Mars is conjunct a Mercurian star which rules the mind. So maybe that explains how I am more likely to collect books than I am to collect guns.
My chart also says I will be famous and perhaps rich, still waiting for that one.
My powerful Mars may have a lot to say about why I take something no one likes and defend it, like say for instance, astrology.

Predicting the Future

2009-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

I have been bushwrangled and sidetracked by Astrology from other things I should be doing, but I don't think it has been a waste of time at all or anything like that. Personality, temperament and abilities seem to be shown by astrology very well and I have not been interested in it's alleged ability to see the future and uh....fortune telling.

I was astonished that my future may actually be bright after all, since I've studied triplicity rulers and the Moon will rule my life soon. I can't help but feel hopeful. To study your chart is to see those things that are good for you through the planets and what you need to stay away from. If you were born in the daytime Mars is the villian, if you were born at night it is Saturn. Mars seems to create enemies and Saturn seems to cripple you in some way. Say you have Mars ruling the 12th house (which is in Aries), a Mars that is in the 10th house. The 10th is our reputation and our career. The 12th represents jails, hospitals, things that are hidden, things done in solitude. I am talking about the horoscope of Mae West, who had Mars like this. Her vaudeville act was so obscene that she would be thrown in jail, she had enemies. This being thrown in jail damaged her reputation. Later in life her triplicity ruler became Venus instead of Mars and that was when she became famous. (I got this from "The Five Pillars of Fate" book by A. Garth.)

The 10th house is very important, it is our career and our reputation. It is a very lucky house. The house that is 10 houses away from your Lot of Fortune is very lucky and has to do with the same things, career and reputation.

I will tell you about myself (which is all I know at this point) and that is that when Mars ruled my first 28 years I got bad will from others because Mars rules my 12th house. Nevertheless I was born at night so Mars is not a bad planet for me, what was bad was that it ruled the evil 12th house. I seemed to only make friends with bad people, jealous or manipulative people all the time. I despaired of ever meeting a nice guy too.

When Venus became my ruler I was 28 years old and I still had the same job I'd had for years-but I started to hate my job. I quit and couldn't find anything except work as a waitress. My boss treated me badly. Venus rules my house of work and servitude, the evil 6th house. My triplicity ruler was ruining my work life. I applied for jobs all over the place but could not get a good job. I work now at a poultry plant, which is the best job I've had I am sorry to say. The thing is, the 6th rules small animals like chickens. I find that amusing. The 6th is like how are you a slave? I am a slave in that I have to do this job and they are a little rough on you. The 6th speaks to you of servitude and enslavement, it might be good and it might be bad but it will be in bad spirit. The 6th is a evil spirited house. For some the evil spirit will not be even noticeable, for me I notice it. Also my 6th is the 12th house from my Lot of Fortune, so it is kind of double curses on me.

My Moon is in the 8th house. The bad houses are the 6th, 8th and 12th. The planets that rule a nighttime birth are the Moon, Mars and Venus. My planets all rule bad houses, houses with bad spirits as Mr. Garth says. But I cannot say my life isn't worth a jar of poo dug up at midnight from a graveyard at All Hallow's Eve. (Joking!) All of us have these houses and all of us have some bad spirit in our lives, but we also have good spirit in the 5th and the 11th. The planets position in your chart can tell you a great deal, are they in good houses or not?

So all of this leads me to believe in some kind of luck, not like gambling luck where you will always eventually lose and the casino will get rich but not you, but luck that is fate. Fate as in no matter what you do you cannot change it, fate as written in ancient texts by ancient Greeks, fate as in I should forget some things because no matter what, and I don't know how or when or why, some things are just bad.

I have Saturn in conjunction with the Sun. Astrologically, this means I doubt myself. Confidence is something I don't know what it's like to have. I have attempted to change this in the past, now I believe it is fate. I have always been like this, I am always going to be like this and so what? I write like someone whistling while they walk past a graveyard, in defiance of a constant feeling inside that what I write ain't worth that check you get in the mail made out for a million dollars. I live and pretend it ain't so. I get by okay.

I write because I have gotten praise for it and it delights me more than ice cream with whipped cream. I need it like breath. With astrology I can say that Saturn is here, it explains the unexplainable and it does it so beautifully. Fate is hugging me tight and squeezing the breath out of me.

On every life falls a graceful note so it hardly seems fair of me to complain. I've got a real appreciation of things other people don't even understand, an emotional base from Venus and the Moon. I can love things, be crazy about things like Tori Amos. She is great. She carries me away to addresses not in the phone book.

I think there is balance. You get bad and you get good in a balance in life. I got a lot of bad in one area because I got a lot of good in another I believe. I can look at my chart and what I see that is good are the aspects between the Moon and Venus and Neptune. This is my magic, all these trines and quintiles aspecting these 3 planets. The planets of artists and musicians very often. They present their good faces to me because of their good aspects. There is fate and there are some things you can change and some things you cannot.

The Moon receives and is passive.

The Sun gives and is active.

I am a Moon person because I was born at night and because the Moon aspects every other planet except Mercury. I think it may be that most of our fortune can be told, it appears so to me.

So I guess I'll wait on the Moon, she will be my chart ruler. I am interested to see what may happen.

Playing with the Wolf

2009-11-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

My friend Sherry and I once wrote poems about the proverbial "wolf at the door". You have to survive first, even if it means hunting like the wolf. My poem was about basically ignoring the wolf and Sherry's was about inviting it inside and playing with the wolf. Playing with the wolf would never have crossed my mind, the horrible things that happen to us when we don't know what we are going to do; when we lose our job, when our family throws us out the door or when an illness threatens to leave you homeless or your car breaks down and you are thinking about walking to work. This, to me, represents the wolf and it did to Sherry too, it's just the way she thinks. When faced with horrible people she often found herself working with as a waitress she played with them, I ignore the low class people I work with. Two different styles of living.

In astrology Mercury rules the tongue and it is a rule that Mercury is inclined to be negative. Mercury itself is neutral, it belongs to neither the day or the night and is neither male nor female. In our interactions with one another we are inclined therefore to be negative, to gripe when we are having a bad day, and like the wolf the bully tends to go for the one who is weakest, just as the wolf goes for the baby elk or the wounded elk to chase and tire down for the kill. These people often remind me of David Letterman, these people often have no talent or abilities of their own, (in fact, Letterman offers scholarships to "C" students as that was what grades he made in school himself), this super criticalness and making fun and being ready with a joke when anyone slips up, this mocking. I knew someone very much like Letterman and he spends evenings reading encyclopedias, alone. When younger I thought him so clever, so cool. Now I see him and wonder how I ever let his lashing comments burn, why did I become so hypervigilant whenever he was around to be extra "cool"? I, once I realized how much this old friend was like Letterman, was never able to think of him without this comparison in mind. He is like a wolf. We need people who nurture us, who are not wolves.

Then there is the question of why we need wolves at all.

Why did God make it where we come to these dead ends, where we end up hungry or cold or at the end of our rope? How can you think of God's grace or of beautiful things or what is possible when you haven't even had anything to eat or are freezing cold? Why must we have these experiences? I've accepted reincarnation but even so, it doesn't explain this.

It is said the real world is an illusion and our job is see past that.

For me, I just don't talk when I really feel bad, though complaining is something I do as a sort of pastime with others. When it comes to close to the heart, complaining just makes my heart bleed more. I've learned to be careful about what I say, the sayer forgets them but the target may never forget. I remember things people said to me from years ago. The wolf makes people like animals, they don't care they are so focused on themselves. We should try to remember the wolf isn't the people we live with, the wolf is at their door as much as he is at ours.

Triplicity Ruler

2009-11-21T10:11:00.001-08:00

Every 28 years of your life is ruled by a planet, a triplicity ruler. Okay, first you have to know what planet rules your chart. If you were born in the daytime then the Sun rules your chart. If you were born at night then the ruler is the Moon. I was born at night and my Moon is is the water sign of Cancer. My life is ruled by the Water triplicity. Here is how it works:

Fire = Sun Jupiter Saturn

Air = Saturn Mercury Jupiter

Earth = Venus Moon Mars

Water = Mars Venus Moon

Please be sure to check my work before taking it to heart as I can make mistakes, I am a fan of astrology but not an astrologer.

I was amused to see that my first ruler was Mars, as I grew up with a family at loggerheads with one another. My father was violent and my birth chart says I have a likelihood of being physically hurt by another because I won't back down. With my father that was a likelihood to say the least but I survived. At 29 I entered the rulership of Venus. Now the astrologer I have been reading says to see the strength or weakness of your ruling planet to see what these 28 years will be like.

Mars for me is in the 4th, the 4th represents secrets, mysteries, things underground, family. It is said by this astrologer to represent things that go up and down. It was a big secret that my father was beating my mother and it was a mystery why he (or anyone really) would want to do such a thing. The 4th is about the most powerful parent, which would be my father. But a planet symbolizes many things and Mars was me asserting myself, breaking free from the bonds and the promises to my mother to always keep this secret. (She would always protest she loved my father). You see, this sadistic beating of someone else in secret and that person agreeing with and not fighting against them, almost an S and M thing is subterranean, something underground. It was almost as if my mom wanted to be beaten, and then asked for sympathy and help from other people when it was her fault it was happening in the first place! (I don't give to those charities that help abused and battered women, it wouldn't suprise me if a great deal of them don't encourage and like it)

Then at 29 Venus rules my life and I am very interested in becoming an artist or a writer, I am loving music so much now. I always loved music, I think Venus just made me love it more. Now Venus is in the 12th house for me, the 12th is a BAD house traditionally. It represents things that are hidden, things about you the world does not know. Venus represents artistic talent and my talent is something that is hidden. Those who know that I've published belittle it, don't think much of it, and most often are not interested enough to read it at all. Now Barbara Streisand has Venus in the 12th so it doesn't mean the world won't love you, I do get published but I get precious little praise at home. So it has not been such a great time, Venus is a beneficial planet but she is full of bad spirit because she rules the BAD 6th house and she is in the BAD 12th house. It is hard for me to get inspired, to get to do my writing, to get people to think it important enough for me to allot time to it. However, once my writing gets to an editor I often get praise. Once a New York editor called all the Stubbs in my town until they found me on the phone to tell me how much they liked my story and to advise me I should buy a computer. (I was typing on an old Royal typewriter and using a ton of liquid paper.) So the 12th represents the public, the collective unconscious.

It is interesting.

Hitler's Chart

2009-11-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

I was suprised that we knew the birth time of Adolf Hitler and could do his chart. He is lacking in an element and that element is Water. It is thought this made him lack compassion for others, but also his Venus was in the middle of 2 malefics. By orbit Venus would square and then conjunct these 2 bad planets for his whole life, and Venus rules his Libra Ascendant. In fact Hitler fancied himself an artist and made a meager living painting postcards in Vienna I have read. He died at 56 years of age. Astrology studies extremes just to understand if perhaps the planets can say why we are as we are, it seems the planets create a leaning towards something rather than saying "this is how you shall be". Still, in the currents of time if we drift this leaning towards can be very powerful.

Heaven's Sense or College and the 9th House

2009-11-14T08:56:00.001-08:00

The 9th house is about college, and the ruler of the 9th (as with all houses) is more important than planets actually "in" the house itself. How this ruling planet sits in your chart is what happens concerning higher education.
Turning to myself as an example as I always do, the 9th for me is Leo so the ruling planet is the Sun. My Sun is in conjunction with Saturn, giving me loads of self-doubt. So there is me thinking I am just not smart enough to go to college, in fact I did go for only a very brief time. But Leo is where we play so wouldn't I be partying it up in college? Well, no. The 9th is the house of philosophy, higher thought, abstract concepts are what I play with and moral issues are what I think about. But, and this is a very big but, I resent using my mind as anything other than a toy and only think about what I want to think about.
My mind is my toy.
The 9th is the house of the mind.
Astrology is really simply laid out really. The 9th is a Universal house. (I think about the world)
Houses 1-4 are personal houses.
Houses 5-8 are social houses
Houses 9-12 are universal houses.
The 9th rules publishing because it rules the public expression of ideas. I want to be a writer and it is a work of love. My 9th is ruled by Leo. When Leos are workaholics they do so out of love, loving what they do. Social acceptance, validation and applause are what Leos seek. Leos don't need to look for love, they love themselves already very much thank you.
It is interesting to note these 3 classifications of houses in relation to oneself.
For instance I have Mars and the Moon squared in the social houses and nothing else. (Well I do have the part of fortune in the 7th) Anyway, this is how I deal with other people, with aggression or with the Martian love of competition or with the Moon's emotions.
I find this interesting because it is so true.
However, the degrees in the middle of a sign, the 11-20 degrees, are the working degrees. The planets here are the ones you'll use the most. I only have Mercury which is the planet of communication in these degrees. Once again, truth.
So I am somewhat thinking what I want to think merrily forgetting any knowledge I don't like learning and there is this urge to communicate it to someone else. I find myself telling my hubby astrological things he has told me time and again he has no interest in.
That is because he doesn't believe in astrology.
I just don't care.
I remember and tell myself to shut up.
My hubby is a "meat and potatoes" guy, like let's talk about the here and now and the real and not about possibilities and not about abstract concepts. He is a simple man. Reality is his playing cards and what is likely to happen, he is not suprised at thoughts but rather by things that actually happen. I think poverty made him that way. One must be vigilant after all, to keep the hungry wolves away from one's door. I find that as long as I am warm and well-fed today I can forget about tomorrow. Primitive man, after all, had the same concerns but still found time to make dot to dot pictures of the constellations in the sky and think about what the stars might mean.

NaNoWriMo Anyone?

2009-11-12T12:12:00.001-08:00

November is write a novel in one month month, that is if you are participating in NaNoWriMo, (Can't see any link to Mork & Mindy and the alien who said hello by saying NaNoNaNo.) I did see a link to Tom Robbins, that author of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" and "Another Roadside Attraction" His advice on writing a novel is to forget all advice and write the darn thing. Hmm...interesting.

He says that novels are compelled into being, that they come with naviete. I can be naive I think to myself hopefully as I read....I can forget things like advice too!! I have a feeling there is more to it than that but never mind, NaNoWriMo is about writing at roughly the speed of light, to write so quickly that perhaps you silence those internal censors and that part of you screaming, (it sucks, it sucks bogwater!)

Birth Chart of United States

2009-10-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

There is a constant argument over the birth chart of the United States, many feel we have a Sagittarius Ascendant. That means that right now Pluto is in the second house of money which could mean bad economic times for the country. Of course, bad times are already here and it can take over 12 years for Pluto to transit a house. It is said things must die so that other things can live, Pluto represented decay and destruction. I actually have not been following Pluto transits being fairly new to astrology but what I think Pluto as well as Saturn do when they plow through the houses is give you a dose of reality. The second house of the U.S. is Capricorn which is an earth sign so that means reality also. If the U.S. had an air sign in the 2nd house it could well mean the way we think about our possessions could undergo a drastic change, but with our 2nd house in Capricorn and this sign representing institutions like banks and governments then it may be our eonomic situation is going to get a great deal worse before it gets better I am sorry to say. Pluto in Capricorn opposes Venus, Jupiter and the Sun and that is not a good aspect, the opposition meaning things that are out there for everyone to see. (A square is something hidden).
I think that the economic push is required for change to take place, and that is why it is taking place. (Resisting Pluto and change brings about destruction astrologers say). Hilary Clinton tried hard for health care reform but I guess the government wasn't ready, there is strong resistance they say in beauracracy and any change is unwelcome. (I quite like Hilary who is charming in interviews and could never understand why the men in my life cannot stand her)
They say we are a consumer society, I know that my house is full of things that I have bought and then wondered, "Why did I buy that?" There is a joy in owning something and a righteous joy, I just think we ought to, just sometimes, find joy in something else.

Regina Spektar

2009-10-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

"Far" is the name of this CD and I enjoy listening to it although the lyrics very often can't be stretched in any way to make sense such as "we made a computer out of macaroni" but with a little more time she might be great. She is after all, very young and so talented. She reminds me of Tori Amos and not because she is a red-haired piano player who has a lot of words in her songs, (well, that doesn't hurt for Tori is all those things). She was on Good Morning America and the comment was made that she was as "cool as a cucumber" which meant I suppose for one so young she seems so very confident. She wore a turtleneck that fit her loosely not tightly and a skirt that was knee length so she in no way resembled pop stars who flaunt a sexy body, she was dressed in regular clothes. When told she was marvelous she grinned and laughed, I suspect she felt the compliment too much and embarrassing. This is how we treat creative people on television let us hope it doesn't turn this young girl's head. She plays with words with a sense of humour, I can't wait to pick up more of her music.

Looking for Pisces

2009-10-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

Within every sign are lessons and wonder, Pluto's polarity point for me is Pisces so I am looking for Pisces. My evolutionary path is compulsive crisis in order to bring about change, inner emptiness that only spirtuality can fill up again, but that's just me. There is a consistency in me because the archetype of Pluto in Virgo is also the thing going on with the South Node in the 6th house, corresponding to Virgo. This is criticizing the self and being masochistic or sadistic as the person may be, depending. The polarity point for me is Pisces, and my North Node corresponds to Pisces in the 12th house. The 12th house North Node is about forgiving one's self and about faith. We want to grow, we want to dissolve old patterns of behavior. Terrible things happen when we do not. Pluto retrograde is about withdrawing from society's norms, so here enters Astrology for me.
So the polarity or opposite point of Pluto and the North Node are the future, or what we are evolving towards. When we are born with the parents that we had, this was our karma. This karma is often worked out by the age of 28 to 30 and then we strike out on our own. This desire to grow, even if it is extremely painful, is what we are doing deep inside. We can look back after many years and see our wrong thinking, the things that were not true.
It is interesting to look at Aries, the first sign in evolution. Not at all less important is Aries or with any less to give, there is instinctive learning through action. Self-discovery means one needs to be independent of relationships, to stop dependencies. To stop dependencies is a supreme form of giving because we are teaching others also to be equal in relationships. Since we are all on different paths then what I experience is different from you, what I need to learn is in a different classroom with a different teacher.
These ideas come from Jeffrey Green, who has written books about Pluto.
The ideas have the feeling of truth, although reincarnation is not an idea I embrace. I know that there are things that we do not know which are difficult to quantify. I cannot say if these ideas are true or untrue, only that they are interesting.
I was amused to Shirley McClaine in a recent T.V. interview and she was asked,
"How do you know that these things are true?"
She replied, "I don't know that they are true."
I have read of Jess Stern, who tried to prove reincarnation and every time he could not.
Reincarnation explains things beautifully, however I wouldn't want us to be like India, where people accept cruelty to the lower classes because they deserve it don't they? Otherwise they would have been born in a higher class if they did not, wouldn't they? Religion has brought them to this cruelty, how awful is that?
The signs themselves are loose fitting clothes, different for every person.
I remember the joyfulness of Leo and the pattern of self-expression. The sense a Leo has of being special and of special purpose. The 5th house is Leo for us, ruled by the Sun as Leo is ruled by the Sun. You cannot deny, knowing one, that Leo is a Leo for they shine brightly.
I cannot deny Taurus as my hubby is one, that this is a real thing. It is said that Taurus seems glued to their chairs just as they are to their opinions! I laughed when I read that, for it is just too, too true. This inertia seems to be an effect of Sun in Taurus. He is in no way less himself for being a Taurus, he does in fact have a Moon in Aquarius. He clings to certain patterns and disregards others for an Aquarian Moon just like his Mars in Gemini is about new ideas and he doesn't embrace new ideas at all. These undercurrents of our being confuse us and repressed they come to light in strange and unusual ways. I am like his shadow self and his North Node is the same degree as my Sun in Sagittarius. It is said the Nodes are about relationships in some mysterious manner, there is some fate in our knowing each other I cannot see.
So my past is about being hard on myself and as the South Node position is easy to do. Life seems to be pushing me hard by being critical of myself to force me to defend myself. To be so hard on me, to punish me so severely, that I try to grow past feeling worthless.
As for Hubby's shadow self, he has 2 children who are Aquarians and one who is a Leo. The future is stamped on an Aquarius and self-discovery is stamped on a Leo. His shadow self is constantly emphasized by his family. If we refuse to grow we become increasingly dissatisfied and unhappy, we don't know what we want but we want it badly. We want to grow. Traumatic experiences force growth on us and we may unconsciously seek trauma and crisis, forcing growth on ourselves when we refuse it. Happiness is supposed to be around the bend after we go through these terrible things. I hope so.
I try to understand why things have happened to me, to think that there is a reason is very inspiring to me.
It is a fact that there are people who kill thier own success, thinking themselves undeserving. They say Neptune represents these unconscious judgments we make of ourselves. While we seeks success and pay lip service to how great we are outside inside we may be planting landmines in our path we know we are going to step on.
For if astrology is right then life is just school, and we are all in a classroom.

Creating A Crisis if You Don't Have One

2009-09-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

What I have learned, I know this much is true.

The 8th house represent crisis, and with the Moon here it represents one crisis after another. You could say it is in your nature to live with crisis. You could say that it is your world and if you ain't got one, you go out and make one. Any planet in this Pluto ruled house is trying to transform I read. I get it. The Moon is emotional, so here is our emotional landscape and we are creating as well as being created. A Virgo midheaven strives to analyze and understand, and we think we are done once we understand something. Unfortunately, understanding does not necessarily solve problems, it just means you understand the problem that you have. This is, after all though, the basis for psychotherapy. You are supposed to holler Eureka! and everything fall into place! Oh, I felt guilty 'cause I wanted my dad for myself or some other foolish nonsense. (Or not so foolish, what do I know?)

A midheaven or the 10th house with Pluto sitting there in your chart means you want to transform your job and have the career that will make you happy. What I do is get so unhappy with my job that I quit, sometimes quite suddenly, without knowing what I am going to do to support myself. I force this crisis on myself so that I have to transform and find something else to do for a living.

Possible blog readers, this ain't so smart.

Besides almost starving to death and having anxiety attacks, these attempts to transform just don't work, but now I understand myself much better.

And understanding something, like seeking a crisis, is something I want to do.

What we Don't Know

2009-09-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

What we do not know is difficult to quantify and it is how we are that we try to. A truly smart person is the person smart enough to know how stupid they are and if that is true then I must be highly intelligent. If the South Node is what we do know then the North Node is what we do not know. Each of the houses the nodes are in show the area of life of what we know/don't know.

Elizabeth Spring has a wonderful site about the Nodes of the Moon by the way.

Since the 12th is about the unconscious and the collection unconsious, magic and deeper realms not reached by reason, then it stands that my North Node cannot be reached by reason or thinking about logically. Darn. As much as I want to connect the dots here it is not possible for me to do so it seems. However nodes still help me when doing the charts of other people.

My joy is in doing creative things so there is 12th house Nodes and Venus. They've got to do their secret and hidden 12th house things as this house symbolizes. Sometimes truth is not being smart, but rather just listening for the high notes.

The Polarity of Pluto and What You Already Know

2009-09-28T03:32:00.001-07:00

I was reading Evolutionary Astrology: Pluto and Your Karmic Mission by Deva Crystal Green, parts of this are online. What a great book this is! This is the sort of deeper astrological knowledge I long for. What interests me here (out of many interesting things) is the truth of how the South Node is what you already know. Since all I really know with confidence is myself, then it is myself that I look for. Okay, so I have South Node in Taurus in the 6th house. Here, the text says, the left brain is very developed. I understand a left brain ability is that of language. The book says "the ability to organize information in a linear manner." whatever that means.

If you have your birth chart done and you see the North Node but no South Node, the South Node is directly opposite the North in your chart. So with my North Node at 28 degrees Scorpio I know my South is at 28 degrees of Taurus.

The 6th is the house of servitude. There is a focus on self-improvement. I am that way! Here we learn humility, and I have had a double dose of humiliation in my life so I must have humility. Okay so we know where we have been and with the North Node, we know where we are going, or what we are growing towards I guess.

What we are growing towards is also Pluto's polarity point, or the point directly opposite Pluto.

My polarity point is Pisces and my North Node is in the 12th house, corresponding to Pisces and ruled by Neptune.

The North Node, and the planet ruling the North Node can transmute you to new levels of expression says this wonderful book.

We transmute when we travel from childhood to adulthood, we are ourselves but forever changed. I think that is what transmute means, (maybe).

I would guess, that since astrology is so much about balance, that I need more spirituality in my life and that is what I am supposed to be striving for.

Mercury is said to show in what area of life this striving takes place, so mine is in the 2nd house of what you hold dear, possessions and what you possess. Okay, I am going to take a wild guess here in regards to myself and what I think this means. I was not thought well of by others as a child, I was teased and mocked a lot. My self-esteem has taken a horrible beating in my life. I would guess my karma is getting some of this self-esteem back and thinking more of myself than I did before.

For in psychiatry, there are triggers for depression. These main triggers seem to be humiliation and loss. In the human mind, humiliation is as powerful as loss. We need to think well of ourselves it seems. When being humiliated is as soul destroying as losing a loved one, that makes it very bad. We need a certain amount of confidence to be able to do things, and if we cannot do anything then we are in a terrible condition. Part of the draw of astrology for me is to say Yea! I have talents just like anyone else and I am just like anyone else, strange as it sounds. I have been standing outside looking in, astrology tells me I belong inside with everyone else. I have been somewhat isolated, and though I enjoy being by myself a person still needs to be a part of things.

It is interesting that if Pluto squares the Nodes then we have skipped vital steps in our development. I have this aspect. Pluto rules transformation and the 8th house. We are running back and forth between the North Node and the South Node with Pluto squaring the nodal axis. Growth as children actually happens this way, with leaps forward and leaps backward so this seems rather a natural thing to me.

This is a great book and I have a deep desire to own it and have it on my bookshelf. It may be astrology can help us become better than we were before, with an understanding and who we are and what path we walk upon.

Sabian Symbols

2009-09-27T08:07:00.001-07:00

The Sabian symbols were created in 1925 and are widely used in astrology. The clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler who was in wheelchair for much of her life was the one receiving these images. Marc Edmund Jones was the author of the book but it was Elsie Wheeler who saw the images in her mind's eye. She had clients and was tired of the same old questions such as how do I get rich or when will I meet the love of my life? She wanted to make a more lasting contribution. She said herself that on some of the symbols she felt she had lost focus, so these symbols are be taken as something that may or may not be true. They are to inspire you and if they don't, discarded as useless.

The Sabians were an ancient race living in Mesopotamia, where astrology is said to have originated. The ancient Chaldeans then took up astrology.

Each degree of the zodiac has a Sabian symbol. If your degree is exact at 15 degrees 0 minutes then you read the 15 degree symbol, if it is 15 degrees one minute then you read the symbol for 16 degrees. I found this on a site on the internet, hope this is right!

For example, the Sabian symbol for 15 degrees of my Mercury is, "In a hospital, the children's ward is filled with toys." I think this reflects how words, and a love of language, is healing for me. It links the childlike wonder and the powerful imagination of children at play with their toys with the planet of communication. Reading books was my way out of a terrible childhood, it was like removing myself from the pain of my world into another.

My Mars has the Sabian symbol, "A man expresses himself in 2 worlds at once." To be sure, I have loved books about entering other worlds such as Narnia, the Amber books, and Lord of the Rings.

The planet of inspiration is Uranus and mine has this strange Sabian symbol that seems to sum everything up.

Uranus 7 degrees: The wonder of the constellations of stars in the night sky.

Nodes of the Moon

2009-09-27T01:05:00.001-07:00

The nodes of the moon are called the Dragon's Head and the Dragon's Tail. They are mathematical points in space where the Sun's path crosses the Moon's orbit. This brings up reincarnation because it is said the North Node is where we need to grow towards, and the South Node what we already know all about from past lives.

The Moon has some associations I don't understand. The Moon is said to be a lot about memories. The Moon also represents the public, like if your Moon is at the midheaven you will be famous. The Moon is our emotional response. The Moon is how we nuture others. The Moon represents motherhood and the feminine. The more aspects other planets make to the Moon, the more likely you will be famous.

If a planet in your birth chart is in the same degree, the same place as your North Node then this is showing your special ability or talent. Lunar power is flowing through this planet. Transiting nodes hitting a natal planet can magnify that planet in your life. The transiting nodes are telling you where you are going.

There is some tie with relationships with the Nodes of the Moon. It is thought the North Node is important in synastry, or the comparison of romantic partners.

I have North Node in Scorpio and South Node in Taurus. Now this can be considered to be about money, for Taurus is always accumulating things and money. Taurus corresponds to the 2nd house of money. It could also mean in past lives I did everything myself and need to learn to work with other people. Now this is contradictory because my North Node which is telling me to work with others is in the 12th house of doing things alone. I have stars that say I enjoy solitude and a Venus in the 12th also to make sure that I do enjoy being alone. Then Jupiter is in the sign of partnerships, Libra. And then my part of fortune is in the house that corresponds to Libra, the 7th house. My Moon is in the 8th house of how others see me. (The 4th house is how you see yourself) Somebody, call me in a real astrologer!

Okay, so maybe my chart is telling me that no man, (or woman) is an island. We do need other people. I don't know why, but we do.

And yet Taurus is so much more than money and the security they crave and try to satisfy by accumulating money. A Taurus is capable of working so hard for those they love and can sacrifice everything for others. I know Taurus so well, I don't understand Scorpio. Maybe that is the meaning of the Nodes for me, to learn what Scorpio has to give.

Sirius The Brightest Star in the Sky

2009-09-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

Sirius is the brightest of all stars, brilliant white and yellow in the constellation of the Greater Dog. At -1.46 magnitude, it is given a 5 degree orb because of it's power. It is said to correspond with 12 degrees of Cancer. In ancient times it marked the hottest time of the year, which we still call today the dog days of summer. It makes it's natives custodians and guardians says it's star page. Ptolemy gave this star the nature of Jupiter and Mars. The Mars part of the star causes problems especially if this star is in conjunction with Mars. It can be too strong an influence if on the Ascendant. The dangerous passions of Mars I understand can come from outside of you also, as in someone trying to kill you. That could be considered bad luck I say but Sirius is considered fortunate. It brings passions, resentment, devotion and honor.

In astrology the left side of the chart represents self and the right side represents others. One way to read a chart is to see how many planets are on one side or the other. This is revealing in my case. It is the Moon and my Uranus that comes to the fore, the planets on the right side of my chart, in my dealings with other people. I have an emotional response first of all, and others inspire me.

The brightest of all my stars at the same degree as my natal planets is Bungula or Toliman. It is conjunct my Venus in the 12th house. Now the 12th, 8th and 6th are considered "unfortunate" houses. Venus is the bound lord of every planet in my chart as she rules my impudent Mars and with a more powerful star to boot. According to which tradition of astrology you follow, these houses are very bad or not bad at all though. Venus at 2 degrees away from the Ascendant, is she considered powerfully on the Ascendant or not? That depends on who you ask also.

The 12th represents things that are hidden, all things like artistic talent and sensitivity and all things beautiful are ruled by Venus. This star itself gives friends, musical and artistic abilities. Who would've thunk it? I've friends I've not realized I have until something bad happens to me and I need help and I find I do have friends. My ability to write well doesn't show up when I talk, in fact I stammer and stumble over words. I talk badly in fact. I can write well only when alone, it is a fact that most writers must be alone to create. I express myself badly in public, I find I am misunderstood a lot. I don't dress well, reality doesn't agree with my inner vision. Somehow people think of me in a lot of different ways it seems. I guess it depends on what mood I am in when they meet me. First impressions often seem to be permanent impressions. As the Moon constantly changes so things the moon touches in our charts constantly changes. (My daughters have the Moon in the 2nd house of money, I am terrified their finances will be up and down like the phases of the Moon) I have a Moon in Cancer, the sign the Moon rules and it causes one to have constant shifts in temperment. A bad mood or a good mood either one doesn't last long, and sometimes these moods overlap each other. A Moon in Cancer is extremely sensitive, mine in the 8th house of others means I am sensitive to other people. I feel other's disapproval almost like a force striking me, like a gust of wind. Weird. I can feel other people too darn much. When someone is in the same room as me when I write, I can feel their mood and it influences my writing. Not a good thing, as I want my writing to be pure me and no one else. The Moon rules my chart too.

There are ways that astrology is not true also, for all I write about how it is. For instance the 6th house is supposed to be about our health and illness and I find little about the 6th to be about this. (Much more sure is Saturn, Saturn lames. Mine is in conjunction with my Sun in the 1st, so I guess it is my conscious will that is lamed and to be sure, no one has more problems than me asserting myself or making up my mind) Another astrologer and I cannot remember who, is on the internet saying the same thing. My Taurus in the 6th rules the throat, and my throat is fine so far in my life thank you very much.

Still, so much is eerily true. That so much is true is still amazing.

Sadalsuud, Luckiest of the Lucky

2009-09-26T05:10:00.000-07:00

What is the luckiest star in the sky? It may be Sadalsuud at 23 degrees of Aquarius. According to a fixed star book, this star culminates at 26 degrees Aquarius which is where my asteriod Pallas is and where my Arabic part of Luck is. Cooincidence? Ancient texts say that the part of fortune at 9 degrees of Gemini indicates loss and poverty so that is not so good for me, as that is where my fortune is in my chart. I have wondered if I would find poverty in my chart as it seems no matter what I do my financial state is a sorry one. I do seem to get by, just barely sometimes.

So why look at stars? The difficult mathematical formulas are beyond me, you must do longtitude and latitude and other things I do not know how to do. I don't know why I study stars, I need something to occupy myself I suppose. Regulus is a star close to the epileptic, whatever that means, so it is more certain it resides at 29 degrees of Leo and is a star of the 1st magnitude, very bright and powerful.

The star that is a Rock Star is Vega or Wega. It makes people it influences refined and inclined towards music and intellectual pleasures but also wantonness and shamefull indulgences. Doesn't that sound like a rock star? A star prominent in the chart of Shelley the poet, astrologers say this star shows up more in the charts of writers than any other occupation. In spite of the danger of gluttony Vega is called a fortunate star. It resides at 15 degrees Capricorn.

At my midheaven is Zosma which is unfortunate, sort of. It gives an alert mind but unhappiness and melancholy. The native receives benefits through disgrace. It is the star of victimization, one might be a victim oneself or do charity work with those who are victims. It gives sympathy for those that the establishment makes powerless. I do indeed have a great deal of sympathy for people in dire straits, but then I am often one of those people myself so can be of little help to them other than the sympathy I can offer. I understand how someone can be so confused and so hurt emotionally that they do foolish things, and how working a dead end job can take away one's self-respect. I don't understand how my own disgrace can benefit me, that is for sure. This star resides at 11 degrees of Virgo.

My lucky stars reside at my Mercury, Neptune and Venus, and those themes play out in my life for sure. A strong Mars makes me sometimes combative and want to argue and intolerably frustrated when I cannot get anything done. I feel like I could explode sometimes. A strong Mars is supposed to give one confidence, but the only surety I have is in my writing. I have a perhaps unreasonable belief that my writing is great. Someone can tell me it sucks (and they have) and it doesn't bother me one iota. I have a love of language that is pure music to my ears when I see it on the written page. I wrote a poem about this once called "A Good Ear" and it ends:

and moving fast like whirlpools in my mind

all because of a good ear,

and it may be all I ever need.

The Five Pillars of Fate

2009-09-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

A new book by Antoine Garth, and he is offering classes too. The pillars of fate are the Arabic lots of fortune, spirit, basis, exaltation, and the lot of Acquisition. The Lot of Fortune is calculated at astro.com, however I did my calculations of my Lot using the directions at Aquamoonlight. This site gave me Gemini as my Lot of Fortune and Gemini rules writing so no suprise there. Garth is researching 2nd century astrology and they used the lot of fortune as the Ascendant in a new chart. This gives a new horoscope. Your new 11th house is the Lot of Aquisition, which tells you how well and by what means you earn money. Jupiter in this house is very good, or Venus. Mercury is considered neutral. When they say planets such as Saturn and Mars are malefic or bad they are talking about the tendency of these planets to cause trouble. They may not cause you any trouble at all. My Lot of Acquisition is Aries and so is ruled by Mars. Mars it says means I will get money by sports or by robbery! This is when I guess it is good to know your fixed stars and how these stars are a permanent blend with your natal planet when they are in conjunction with them.

I believe the star Algenib in conjunction with my Mars has caused a tendency towards mental gymnastics rather than physical. A Mars in Aries such as I have is a placement of atheletes and people who are very active. I am mentally active rather than physically active. This is okay, this is the Mars drive expressed differently. I have a drive to learn things, to be constantly learning something new that I didn't know before. My Mars has been permanently changed and will forever have that Mercury or mental slant to it. Mercury rules the mind.

For the part of fortune is said to be an unseen force, the path you are forced to walk upon by fate. You didn't choose it, it chose you.

The part of Spirit is that which animates us, ourselves walking the path.

The lot of Basis is said to be the foundational motivation. Can you hold onto what you gain?

The lot of Exaltation I think is where we may be exalted, or raised to higher standing.

This new chart with the fortune as the first house will have a new 10th house. This tells you what social role your occupation serves. This is the job we are supposed to be doing, of course, not what we are doing for a living. Mine is in Pisces, the most sensitive and compassionate of signs, which I suppose means I am supposed to help those less fortunate than I.

These lots are said to tell the fate. There is some interesting videos on Youtube about this new book, not a lot of views though!

For Merury rules Gemini and so rules my part of fortune but my part of Spirit is ruled by Venus. That most important of houses, the 11th holds a Mercurian star. The 11th is said to be the most fortunate of all the houses, representing help from friends and what you gain and what money you make from your career. It is Dreams Coming True.

My husband's chart is dominated by 2 stars that represent him very well, Algol and Procyon. He has the most evil star in the heavens in his 1st house, representing the physical body. He has had a lot of accidents and has had one leg amputed after a car wreck. He prefers older people, he likes them very much. Almost all of his friends are older than him and they help him a lot. The star Procyon says "help from elderly friends" and no, I am not making this up. These stars say "quick to anger" and he is that way. When a young girl ran into him while talking on the cell phone he lectured her so thoroughly about her carelessness that she cried and was shaking. He said he did it for her own good. The poor girl probably turns her cell phone off now!

I am trying to make sense of my lots and this new chart. I think it is interesting stuff. My husband having the awfulest star conjunct his Sun has not ruined his life at all, it seems that even Algol is just a bit of bad luck run into along the way.

The star Procyon says, "help from elderly friends".

Midpoints

2009-09-19T21:41:00.001-07:00

This is a Hubble image of the star Mira.

The midpoint is exactly what it sounds like, the exact middle point between 2 planets. It is important when a planet is at the midpoint. I've read to use a 3 degree orb. If a planet is within 3 degrees of a midpoint then it is at the midpoint. People who are interested in astrology usually want to know about their love life. So the Venus/Mars midpoint is of special interest to them. Venus being the feminine and Mars the masculine principal. You can go to Astro.com and get a natal chart for free and then there is a site on the internet that will calculate midpoints for you. It is easy to do. If Mercury is at your Venus/Mars midpoint then you are always talking about, and thinking about relationships. If Saturn is there then you will have frustrations and difficulties and constraints on your relationships with the opposite sex. Some of us don't have a lot of midpoints in our charts, I think I have only 2. The midpoint of my Mars/Venus is the asteroid Juno. Juno represents our marriage partner. I tended to look at my romantic partners seriously with a thought for the future. I was thinking about possible marriage all the time, or if the relationship had a chance or if I was wasting my time basically.

Noel Tyl writes great stuff about midpoints at his site. The midpoints of these planets can be, he says, interpreted like this:

Saturn + inner planets = Frustration, Inner Criticism or Self-Mastery and Achievement

Mercury or Jupiter + Saturn, Uranus or Pluto equals intellectual gifts, communication skills.

Mercury, Venus or Neptune in any combination equals Idealism and Perfectionism

Saturn + Outer Planets (Uranus, Neptune or Pluto) = Harsh Realities Shape the Life

Of course, when you know very well the meanings of the planets and you know the midpoint is a blending of the 2 energies then understanding will come to you.

I have my Sun at the midpoint between Mercury and Saturn, so communication skills for me!

I have Jupiter at the Sun/Moon midpoint so I'm kind of stuck with positive thinking, like I have to do it, which is somewhat limiting. If I don't think positive I absolutely cannot do anything. I think that is the problem with this midpoint.

Also interesting is that what you talk about is Mercury. It appears that if you look at aspects to Mercury you can see what comes out of your mouth. The only aspect my Mercury has is to Venus, this planet wants everything to be beautiful and pleasing and this is the semi-square. This is not a major aspect but I'm told it counts.

Also interesting are Egyptian bounds, and if I follow my bound Lords I find that Mars is the Lord of both my Sun and my Moon, but Venus is the bound Lord of Mars.

I have found a puzzle to work with in astrology and if I put it all together perhaps I'll see a picture of myself. I find it to be an uplifting thing to do.

There were various "hooks" along the way which hooked me on Astrology. Each thing I learned verified astrology for me, this is true, yes, this is so, and seeing myself in the planets. Chiron and how it represents wounds and how the 3rd house represents siblings and elementary school and how my brother and constant teasing in school hurt me. This is truly my wound. Astrologers say that your wound is how you can help others, that this is your task. I don't know how to do this. Jupiter is telling you where you have the most room to grow by it's house position. Neptune is telling you where you don't see things too clearly. Venus tells you where you love to be, and Uranus tells you where your purpose and talents may lie. Pluto could be telling you where your personal power is. Mercury tells you how you communicate and what you like to talk about. All of this is potentially very useful information and can lead you to think about yourself.

As one of the ancient Greeks said (which one was it?) "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Virgo the Virgin

2009-09-18T18:25:00.001-07:00

Virgo is Latin for virgin. There is a certain cleanliness of the mind when you consider a Virgo. My father was a Virgo, he never told a dirty joke, and never laughed at one either. He would smile and nod to be polite but I knew he was displeased inside. Virgo is an earth sign but it is a very mental and hard working sign. Virgos lack spontaneity and may be overly critical. My father was obsessed with details, things had to be just so. Virgos may make you feel inferior but inside they feel humble and want to help others. Unlike air signs Virgos have a great deal of common sense. There is a certain objective detachment to Virgos. My father was an engineer who built bridges, exacting mathematical work. It is work right up a Virgo's alley you could say.

Any planet in Virgo in a chart will act like it is oppressed. I find this strange but true. Perfection is not something that exists in the world and perfectionists are never completely happy. Restricted by the bonds of Virgo, Pluto will not be so powerful nor Jupiter so abundantly expansive. In emergencies Virgos can stay cool and calm and rational, and who doesn't need that, in an emergency anyway.

As a child I was often annoyed that I had to tie up the loaf of bread tightly and keep the water jug in the refrigerator completely full, but now I know that my father was a Virgo and could not help himself. Still whenever I needed help I knew who to call, and who would know exactly what to do and be completely calm even after I wrecked the family car. I love you Dad.

Leo, where we play

2009-09-18T17:28:00.000-07:00

It is amusing how you can find the area of life in which people play by looking at their charts. Leo is the natural ruler of the fifth house of games and play and love life too. The fifth house is said also to represent our first child. My hubby has Leo ruling his 6th house of work, and he does love to work. My youngest has Leo ruling her 7th house of partners and she does have high times with her love life and also partnering up with her best friend. Mine is in the 9th of higher education and I do like reading books and ideas. I love to think, and maybe that is what Leo ruling the 9th house is, I don't know. My eldest has Leo ruling her 12th house, that house that is so hard to figure out. The 12th is said to represent our subconcious. It is also said to represents institutions like schools and hospitals. My eldest wants to be a teacher. Maybe that explains where she plays is the 12th's tie to any institution. As for the 5th representing your first child, mine is in Aries and I fail to see what that means. One thing I do know is that we have an awful lot of the same points in our charts. Her Saturn is at 26 Sagittarius where my Sun is. Her midheaven is 9 Gemini which is my part of fortune. Her Ascendant is 10 Virgo which is my midheaven. I think this is significant. (Maybe not, 360 degrees and 10 planets, after all) I can't do the math on that one as to the likelihood of sharing the same degrees.

Anyway where Leo is in our charts may be where we are at our happiest, and though we might know that already, isn't it wonderful that the stars can tell us again?

J.R.R. Tolkien

2009-09-15T16:38:00.001-07:00

Tolkien and I both have Saturn on the Ascendant. This is supposed to make a person be very strict either with themselves or with others or both at once. He was a strict Roman Catholic. Saturn tests us and makes us wait. Saturn rules old people and when you get older Saturn is supposed to be easier on you. Delays and frustrations of all kinds happen with Saturn transits and an earthy understanding of the house it has just transited. Yet Saturn is often strong in charts of the musicians and the old classical composers, the thought being that Saturn represents structure and organization and that is needed for creative endeavors. It appears that Tolkien's Saturn didn't hurt him in writing great fantasy novels.
For Tolkien fans every detail of his life is of interest.
The first part of the Lord of the Rings that was written was when Gandalf visited Bilbo and told him his suspicions about the ring that he had might be the One Ring.
Authors are often told to keep their work secret until completed, Tolkien often met friends at an English pub and read to them parts of his work in progress.
Tolkien said he first started writing with no idea any of it was about religion, and said it didn't need religion added to it, it was already in the symbolism.
Tolkien could read at the age of four.
The first language he learned, besides English, was Latin.
Extremely talented at languages, he made up imaginary languages just for fun.
He was assistant lexicographer of the Webster English Dictionary.
He suffered poverty when he was a child.
Fans can quote entire passages of these novels, so can I.
We owe publication of The Lord of the Rings to a man named Rayner Unwin. His father was in publishing and at the age of 10 he read The Hobbit. As an adult he became a publisher and was presented with The Lord of The Rings. No one else wanted to publish it, but he did. It was thought that the publishing company would take the loss that the book would surely be. Pirated paperbooks were made in 1965 and by 1968 the books were a huge success. Tolkien was suprised that the books were successful also.
Tolkien used to call rude people, "orcs".
The name "Middle-Earth" came from an ancient poem he translated.
Tolkien insists that the One Ring does not represent nuclear power.
As a child he was bitten by a spider.
My fav, when Frodo turns to Sam and says,
"I wanted to save the Shire and I did save it, but not for me. It is often that way Sam, that some people must give something up so that other people can have it."
I like to think that Middle-Earth exists somewhere, that Tolkien came from there.

Vesta

2009-09-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

Vesta is an asteroid in astrology said to show where you may be dedicated. I think Vesta shows where you can focus your energies for the greatest benefit. My Vesta is exactly where my Mercury is. It is in the 2nd house of resources. The meaning couldn't be more clear, my talent for communication is my greatest resource.
Vesta is the Roman goddess of the hearth. Vestal virgins I read swore a vow of chastity for 30 years. A sacred fire burned in the temple that was never allowed to go out. A lot of people I've done charts for have Vesta in the 6th house of work, which means you should work hard at your job.
People interpret this asteroid differently but I think she is a clue to where in life is your place and your way to make your contribution in this life.

Pallas

2009-08-30T11:42:00.001-07:00

Pallas is an asteroid in astrology named for the Greek Goddess Athene. She was a goddess of war and often shown with a lance and a helmut, but she was also the goddess of peace strangely enough. Goddess of wisdom too, she is often depicted with an owl. In astrology Pallas is how you solve problems and your ability to see patterns. I became interested in Pallas because I was doing the Arabic parts and so many of them gave me a result of 26 degrees Aquarius which is where Pallas is in my birthchart. The Arabic parts or lots are a point in your chart for different things, like Luck, Daughters, Father and the Lot of Fortune. The Lot of Fortune is considered the most important. My Arabic part of Art is Pallas, and Luck too. There is even a lot for your own death and I am not calculating that one thank you very much.

I read that Pallas shows where you solve problems, if she is in your fourth house then you solve problems best at home. In the 5th house of creativity and games she depicts your winning strategies and helps artistically. Einstein had Pallas in the 10th, this is where you solve problems best at your job.

The houses show where and the signs are your style of doing it. The houses are different areas of your life and the most important house is your first house. I would guess that just as planets in the first are influential over your whole life that someone with Pallas in the first would be a great problem solver, mathmetician or fashion designer.

I can tell you what I think Pallas does for me. I have Pallas in 3rd Aquarius. This is someone who thinks of solutions no one else thought of, Aquarius is where you are unusual. The 3rd house rules short journeys and the day to day things you do. This represents someone who solves problems by taking a walk and I actually do this. The third house is represented by Gemini and ruled by Mercury. I solve problems with words. I write things down and make lists and this is how I solve problems. Gemini rules writing. I do recognize the influence of Pallas in my own life.

When I blog about astrology I am taking information from many sources and seeing patterns.

Now these things are conscious, I think to myself that I'll take a walk or write it down. I mean that I know now what I was doing before instinctively.

It has been written that someone with Pallas in the 12th would suppress their talent. Any planet in the 12th is hidden away they say. The 12th is a mystical house as is the 4th and the 8th. Somehow I think that this is not always true at all, I have a planet in the 12th, Venus. The 12th house can be a terrible place it is true, but also a great place. It is said the 12th has no boundaries. What this means to me is that Venus is in every area of my life quite frankly.

Astrology does not predict the future in my opinion, neither does it mean that you can do nothing to change the future. I myself don't look at transits, and even for professionals they sort of see things in hindsight when they do see them. In my humble opinion of course.

I see it like this, every planet has 2 faces, good and bad. Good aspects can help bring out these talents you have but you have this potential. Every person is a treasure within, I am looking for mine.

Planets that Take Over the Chart

2009-08-29T03:46:00.001-07:00

Astrologers sometimes find a planet with so much influence that it literally takes over the chart. This planet becomes the star of the show. There are 3 or 4 reasons for this.

A planet that has no aspect with any other is called wild and it expresses itself in a unique way.

If a planet is conjunct a star it can have great power, Regulus is the most powerful star in the sky. Some stars are so fortunate they are called protective stars 'cause they literally protect and help you. Spica at 22 degrees Libra is one. A planet all by itself on one side of the chart is greatly emphasized, just like Uranus in the chart of ballet dancer Isadora Duncan. (Isadora was always shocking people flying into the face of convention) Another way a planet takes over is when it is the only planet you have in one of the 4 elements, air, earth, water and fire. They call planets like this Singletons. Astrologers say these planets "suck up" all the energy in your chart. In my case it is a beautiful thing.

A planet at the exact middle between the Sun and the Moon will take over a chart. Eleanor Roosevelt has Venus here, and she was loved by everyone. Boxer Muhommed Ali has Pluto here. Mother Teresa has Neptune at Sun/Moon. This one planet characterized these people very well. For other people who we are is not so obvious, as in the case of Marilyn Monroe. She was all air, she was not a sex goddess at all. She was a Gemini. (A sex Goddess would have to be earth and water).

Yods are when 2 planets sextile one another and both are 150 degrees (give or take 5 degrees) from a 3rd planet. This 3rd planet, it is said sucks up the energy from the other 2. I heard of one person with a horrible childhood who used their 3rd planet to overcome it. This planet was Jupiter, the planet of abundance and all good things. This Yod saved his life you could say. Yods are not well understood, they are mysterious. I know that they can take over a chart.

I have Jupiter as a Singleton, it is my only planet in an air sign. Libra is an artistic sign. It is also the sign of partnerships, marriage as well as business, as well as friendships. All my energy goes into artistic pursuits, either enjoying it or doing creative projects. I always want someone to enjoy these things with me, Libra again!

Here I am reading and writing or talking all the time and living life on a mental plane. I live my life like an air sign. Jupiter in Libra is who I am, Jupiter has taken over my chart.

Every sign and every planet is in our charts, there is always a way to understand one another. If we want to. There is always an "out" from terrible experiences. There is always a door to open. You can fly above things that try to crash and burn you, like James Taylor sings in his song, "All My Golden Moments"

And all I really needed was the proper point of view.

How You Are Supposed to Make Money

2009-08-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

Astrology tells us not what we are doing for a living, but what we are supposed to be doing. Your money houses are the second, eighth and eleventh and planets there are clues, also aspects to the midheaven. The fifth house rules creativity, so the sixth house represents money made from creative projects. I have no planets in the 6th, which I suppose means I will never make a living writing books. I don't stop writing or trying to publish because of it though. The fact is that a chart is never simple nor easy to understand and there are exceptions to every rule. That doesn't make astrology untrue, like heaven above us we don't understand it, that's all.

It is a fact that we enjoy doing what we are supposed to do, so Venus the planet of what pleases us is a clue to career. My Venus is in the 12th house, which means I enjoy solitude and working alone. (Sounds like a writer to me) Venus also quintiles the midheaven. Mercury, the planet of communications trines my midheaven. (120 degrees away) My midheaven is in Virgo, but as Virgo obsesses (usually about their health, this is the sign of the hypochondriac) astrologers say that a Virgo midheaven might only mean that you are obsessed by your career. The element of the sign at the midheaven is a very important clue to oneself, a earth sign wants to see real results for their efforts, an air sign might work just for the mental challenge, a fire sign might work just for spiritual rewards or to be a leader and in the spotlight, a water sign wants an emotional tie to their career as water signs are all about their emotions. Virgo is earth, and the biggest thrill of my life is seeing my name on something I've written or a check for something I wrote. To be paid money for what I write means that it has value, and the money I've made writing means more to me than any other money I've ever made.

For me the biggest clue was Neptune, the planet of dreams in the 11th house. The 10th represents career, so the next house is money made from your career.

A writer could be called someone who makes money from their dreams.

Fixed Stars

2009-08-25T03:00:00.001-07:00

Anne Wright's wonderful site about stars is called Constellation of Words. You go here with knowledge of what degree and what sign your natal planets have. What you are looking for is for a planet at the same degree and of the same nature as your natal planet. Ptolemy, some ancient writer who unfortunately forgot to write down how he came to his conclusions, has recorded what planets these stars are like. For instance Aldebaran is the Persian Royal star of the east, and is the nature of Venus. If your Venus is there then this star will ring clear and true in your life, it can express itself most purely and distinctively. This is the star said to figure prominently in Eisenhower's life, and like Venus, that power was likable and beneficial. The opposition is said to be very powerful also, the opposition being directly across the chart. Antares opposes Aldebaran so if you have one you have the other also. Antares was called the "Fire star" and is associated with military honors. Antares is red and emerald green near the center of the constellation Scorpio. This star has the influence of Mars modified by Jupiter. All can be found at this site, and it is very interesting.

I was amused and excited to see I have a star and it is a Martian star. I have Algenib at 6 degrees of Aries and it's influence is Mars modified by Mercury. Since my natal Mars is also at 6 degrees Aries that makes Algenib a powerful star in my chart.

Amusing note here: said to denote a poor professional beggar. I have been in desperate circumstances.

Then the site says this star is favorable for finances!

The stars are said to "raise you up high" and then drop you. Stars work in short, venhement bursts so the stars, after working their magic, stop working and then you have to struggle to keep what you've gained.

However the qualities and talents of these stars stay with you. Mars is associated with quickness of mind and body. Also with courage and accidents. Mars is our drive. I have a powerful drive and I never give up! Mars is in Aries in my chart and conjunct a Martian star. Mars also rules the head and I have had a lot of accidents involving the head. Also said to cause headaches. Mars transits actually indicate when accidents can happen.

Stars seem to be lucky and unlucky also, don't they? My star page says Algenib causes noteriety, dishoner, violence and misfortune, but Mars and Mercury together promise mental brilliance.

I find it romantic that I have a star that belongs to me and I am so happy that I have one, in spite of the bad luck it is said stars can bring.

The Universe

2009-08-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

I think the universe has boundaries that we cannot cross but we get a lot of what we wish for. I am a person who dislikes using her mind and I got a job that only uses my body and the boredom of this job is soothing to my rattled nerves. I also wished for a mate who would give me security, and I got that also. I remember when I made these wishes and that it was a full year later before these wishes came true. I am just amazed that these wishes came true at all. I was in bad shape at the time, my family had blown apart and didn't care at all for one another.

Families can be found in astrology and it amazes me how family charts are made so that the family can get along with one another. Just as my father was a Virgo and made to serve as Virgos are, my mother had Pluto in her first house and she needed a servant. Cancer is the sign of motherhood, and my father needed someone to mother him as he hadn't had a mother. Stranger still is the charts of their children.

Your Moon rules your emotional life, and when someone's Moon sign is the same as your Sun sign then you have an emotional understanding of this person. As my father is a Virgo, his son had his Moon in Virgo. As my mother is a Cancer, I have my Moon in Cancer.

So it is with my own children, my hubby is a Taurus and my youngest has her Moon in Taurus. Strangely enough, when our marriage was very much in doubt my first child of ours was born, and she has the Moon in Libra which you might say doesn't mean anything, but it does.

As I have been an introvert who does not know how to socialize, my eldest is a Leo with a Libra Moon, who is my opposite. What I lack, she has. In a way our children are gifts to us, really and truly a blessing.

People tell me the way to reality is visualization. You believe in this vision in your mind and then it comes true. I doubt the universe is as simple as that. If that were true then we would be getting what we wish for all the time.

Our wishes I think go with our life's purpose. A clue is the midheaven. My midheaven is in Virgo, and whatever I write and whenever I talk to others, my wish is to improve their life. I want to give good guidance and good advice to to others. I want to help people. The funny thing is that it is I who very much needs help but still this command goes on, even when I am hurting. The midheaven often represents the father and my father was a Virgo. Still, it seems that when I help others I seem to help myself, truly. I was an outcast in elementary school and ate lunch by myself, which was mortifying. When I see someone sitting alone I go and sit with them. It is an instant reflex on my part. I cannot stand to see someone sitting alone because of memories. This was because of my fourth grade teacher, who made fun of me. I was later to learn that she hated my brother who was her student three years before and hated my family and was punishing me for that reason. I was 9 years old and couldn't understand what in the world I had done to deserve her punishments. I spent a great deal of the 4th grade in the principal's office. I think that this experience may have been for the reason of teaching me to help other people who for whatever reason are not in the mainstream, people who are rejected by others. A side effect of this is a deep mistrust of authority and authority figures that I have, I have this deep need to not follow the rules or to fight authority any way I can. I thought it would be helpful to look up my 4th grade teacher and tell her how I felt, then I realized that if she was still alive she would be 90 yrs. old!

There is no fairness to life but we do receive gifts. As if the universe knew I would need some serious strength and the ability to stand alone, I have these aspects in my chart.

One gift is the gift of music from my Moon trine Neptune. Neptune represents dreams and illusions and when I hear music it is like a story unfolding in my mind and it can change my mood from bad to great in 5 minutes! How amazing is that!

One gift is my Grand Trine in fire of Saturn, Mars and Uranus. A trine between Saturn and Mars makes a person very strong, their drive and determination is flowing freely into their sense of rightness and of orderliness. Uranus is our talents, our genius. Mars is my will, welded together with the strength of my Saturn and the talent of my Uranus. What a great trine this is! What this means to me is that when I work on creative projects I do so in an orderly and organized fashion designed to get the most out of myself!

Pluto is a planet that causes a lot of problems in a person's life if badly aspected. I have no problems with Pluto because this planet trines my Sun and sextiles my Moon! This is extremely good for a chart.

Mars represents drive and determination and your ability to survive. There are 3 major ways a planet can be made stronger. If it is on an angle, if it is in the Sign that the planet rules, and if it is conjunct a star that has the same energy. My Mars is in Aries, the sign that Mars rules. My Mars is close to the angle of the nadir, the very bottom of the chart. My Mars is conjunct a star with mostly Martian qualities. This makes the star's energy able to work well because instead of muddying up this energy the energy is pure and sympathetically works together. I have a very powerful Mars. As I have had a terrible childhood so has my brother, and he has Mars on the Ascendant, a very powerful place for a planet to be. This planet was in the sky above him when he drew his first breath when he was born, that is what a planet on the Ascendant means. Mars is our strength and the universe knew that I and my brother would need lots of it! This makes me wonder, was my parents marriage destined to fail? It would seem so looking at their children's charts that they were going to fight a lot and indeed, they did. It would seem it was written in the stars.

But just as I can stand alone and have everything I need in my chart it is that I find myself isolated. My needs are satisfied by myself. I have all the elements of air, earth, fire and water. In a way I just don't need other people at all, and I have been able to survive the awful people I seem to attract. As I project kindness and sympathy people naturally come to me when they need something. I am always asked for money and to run errands for other people of all kinds, to loan people my stuff and to listen. My relationships with others are unsatisfying. Maybe there is a reason for this and the reason is that I was supposed to be alone. I enjoy being alone and solitary pursuits: to listen to music, to read and to write. The universe has given me what I need to survive and not only survive, but to enjoy the life I have. My children themselves are well able to take care of themselves too, they don't need me very much. The universe is kind to me you could say and you could say it has been cruel. I have been drawn by circumstances into this solitary path, maybe the path is my path. My planets are tightly woven together in my chart in mostly good aspects, myself is my strength. Just as a writer is telling a story to himself and entertains himself, later he will put it out there (if it gets published at all) and hopes that maybe other people will enjoy it also. A writer has all this in himself.

You could say your favorite color is a clue to oneself. Astrology books say that Mars is an assertive red and that Neptune is blue and that Moon in Aries is yellow or orange. A Sagittarius is represented by purple. My color is deep blue green, the color of Neptunian dreams and of a Martian Spring, the color of tranquility that I always reach for. Peace or something very much like it.

Chicken

2009-08-11T09:21:00.001-07:00

Since most people will never work in a chicken plant, as I have, I thought it might amuse others if I told of the many rules enforced by the U.S.D.A. to protect our food supply. The ones I am familiar with concern contamination. The wall of the plant for instance, is contaminated. When you stack things like pallets or the huge cardboard boxes we use and they touch the wall then they are contaminated and cannot be used. If one cardboard box corner touches the wall then all the boxes in the stack are contaminated. Even though we use cardboard to put chicken in, cardboard itself is contaminated. Cardboard cannot touch chicken, and if the plastic liner has a hole in it and touches one chicken, then the entire box, which may contain 100 lbs. of chicken is also contaminated.

The bottom of a cardboard box is considered contaminated. We would use these for 40 lbs. of drumsticks. The plastic liners we use are a bit large for their containers, so we had to tie a knot in the side of the liner to make it fit snugly and in no danger of touching the dangerously toxic bottom of the box. If the knot was too large, you could not squeeze it onto the edges, if it was too small, then the liner would spill over too far over the sides. The proper knot, hand tied by hand, had to be made. It was useful to have boxes with liners already made for those periods when a lot of chicken was coming down the line. It was important that these be stacked with liner against liner, 2 boxes upside down against each other, so the bottom of the boxes were against each other because the bottom of a box is contaminated. If one liner was touching one bottom, you threw away the entire stack and received a reprimand. These reprimands were written down and had different names which I never learned, being but a lowly line worker.

Another rule is: Anything that touches something that is contaminated is also contaminated.

Also if you remove all the chicken from a box you cannot reuse it, even if you do so immediately, as it is now contaminated.

If a cat somehow gets into the plant and is higher up than the containers of chicken then the chicken is all contaminated, every one. Rhetorically speaking, that is.

If a chicken foot or a chicken back somehow gets into a box of chicken then the chicken is contaminated. I was amused to see the grocery store sold chicken backs. Someone should tell them.

If you are spraying the floor with the high-pressure hoses that we use and accidentally spray some of the water hits something and sprays up onto chicken, then that chicken is contaminated.

The roof is of great importance because if the roof leaks on chicken then that chicken is, you guessed it, contaminated.

Although I find some of these rules amusing they are of course for our protection and should be followed.

Christine Freehan

2009-08-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

This author has written a lot of novels in which the man is a vampire and who will die without his mate. I think these books have a lot in common with the Twilight books. There is a man telling you he will die without you. Hmmm, maybe that is just what women want to hear.

They care for their mates tenderly and go bonkers if they are threatened by someone else. Christine Freehan knows some secret and I'm not sure that is what it is. I also want to know how she writes so many books. How many ways are there to say I love you.

What she seems to imply is that love itself is dark, even if her stories did not contain vampires. I think that is true. We don't know why we are attracted to certain men, some of which are very bad for us. We don't care. It is the wonder of a women who was without weight and without a home and without a man, to realize that at last she has everything she has ever needed.

Tori Amos Scarlett's Walk

2009-08-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

I think Scarlett's Walk is the best CD I own. Tori Amos is an artist I've grown to love, but I didn't take to her right away. These songs are very much like songs you've heard before, only done much better this time.
There is a song that is suitable as background music or for a meditation room, there is a dancing song that has you tapping your foot and a love song that isn't like any love song you've ever heard. She is what you've heard before with things you've never heard before. She is caught in her own passion when she sings and she doesn't sing for you, she sings for herself.
In one song she pauses and hits one note on the piano six times, nothing else, just this one note and it's perfect.
"Don't Make Me Come to Vegas"
don't make me kick him out of your bed
I am vigilant
'cause it could be done and it has been done and I think I am
up to it.
don't make me come to Vegas don't make me kick him out of
your head
but with the desert's kiss
she will slip into your net
Over my dead body
A couple of these songs are about rescueing some young lady from a rascal or cad who has taken her to Vegas, and it must be quite some story.
I saw her on Johnny Carson in what I swear looked like a prom dress that was huge, yellow on top and a white skirt. Her leg she swings over to the side like in the photo when she plays the piano, must be a habit of hers I guess.
The lyrics are so great and she sings with a crystal clarity I've never heard before in anyone's voice. I am stunned, happily stunned by her.
These songs are too deep to come from anywhere else but her own life. I think it is poignant when a singer sings her own songs from deep inside her own heart.

Midheaven and the Axis of Your Life

2009-08-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

The top of your chart is about your career. This is a science in itself and it seems it's done different ways by different astrologers.

There are 4 dark lines called an axis. The line at the top is the midheaven point and mine is in Virgo. Now Virgo works behind the scenes as an assistant or a servant to another. Virgo is interested in health and diet and in details and are considered picky. It appears that for me this represents the spirit in which I do things, for Virgo serves others. I like to think I am helping people.

Some say the planet nearest to the midheaven represents what your career is. For me it is Pluto and Pluto likes anything to do with detective work and revealing secrets and anything to do with death. Well I do like to know secrets.

I've also read that the planet in good aspect to the midheaven, meaning a trine or a sextile or a quintile is the one to be considered as indicating the career. I have Mercury trine the midheaven, the planet about communication.

Capricorn is a sign concerned with career, in fact Capricorn corresponds to the 10th house of career. Capricorn is ruling my 2nd house of money, which coincindentally is also where Mercury resides.

Since Saturn sort of represents work it is thought that what element Saturn is in tells you something about yourself and the way you approach career.

An earth sign is concerned with building a career and doing something like earning a college degree or having a job in which you can work up the ladder and can be promoted. An earth sign has a common sense approach to career.

A water sign must have an emotional attachment to what they do in some way, for instance a Scorpio midheaven may be someone who works for the F.B.I. and maybe feels a sense of comraderie with the other agents and that he or she is doing something worthwhile. The job is something that can be all consuming like a water sign likes it to be.

A fire sign Saturn represents someone with personal goals that might have nothing to do with making a lot of money or status. They might have a goal for instance of becoming a better person, or being the perfect mom. It very well might be a goal just for themselves, very personal. I have a fire sign Saturn and I can see that this is correct for me.

Some astrologers have complicated ways to figure out what career you should be doing that I cannot put down here, because quite frankly I don't understand them.

I must say that Virgo is something of a perfectionist and I am constantly tearing up paper upon which I have written the beginnings of novels. I think that my Virgo midheaven is pushing me to be perfect and I am so unhappy with whatever I write that I may never become a writer.

The axis represents what sort of person you are according to what signs the 4 points of this axis is. If your axis is in fixed signs then you would resist change. A fixed sign follows through on any project until it is done so fixed signs are great.

If your axis is in mutable signs you have great flexibility. If one approach is not working then a mutable sign will try something else.

If your axis is in Cardinal signs, (Cancer, Libra, Aries and Capricorn) then you have great beginnings but don't get things done so well. You are a great leader and very inspiring however you seldom finish what you start.

Most people are a mix and to be balanced is a very good thing. Some of us don't have this balance and we suffer our shortcomings.

Hillbilly Dictionary

2009-08-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

plum like - To totally forget as in "I went to the store to buy bread and I plum like forgot it."
mess - enough of some food item to make approximately four servings as in "We don't have enough okra in the garden to make a mess."
tacky - Something that looks bad, usually used in regards to yucky fashion as in, "That broach on her blue jean pocket just looks tacky.
tacky - behavior that is bad, such as breaking up with someone by asking your mom to do it for you.
Bless her heart - this makes any negative comment okay, because you are saying the person tries but just can't do it right as in, "She can't cook at all, bless her heart."
fixing - you might think fixing means repairing an item that is broken but it really means you're about to do something as in, "I'm fixing to go to the store."
"Did you get enough to eat?" after eating dinner at someone's house is polite and signifys that the host will offer you more food if you are still hungry and does not mean to imply that you eat like a horse, or a pig.
"Did you get gone?" means "Have you left for your trip yet?"
"I didn't ask you to." is hillbilly speak for telling you that although you did something nice for them, they did not ask you to so they are in no way obligated to pay you back.
"He looks squirrelly." is used to describe a man who has a lot of hair that is wild and unkempt. This reminds hillbillies a lot of rodents who live in trees.
"She talks about everybody." is hillbilly speak for the gossip who does it for the sensationalism aspect of spreading rumours and is a negative statement.
"Whoa." You are driving too fast.
"She thinks her poop don't stink." is hillbilly slang for she thinks she is so high-class and is so snobby, that she would be so stupid as to believe her bowel movements do not, like other peoples, smell bad.
"Well why did he do that?" is hillbilly talk meaning that someone did something for no discernable reason at all.
"Mmmm..." I am listening, keep talking.
"Didn't no bird every fly so high that it didn't fall one day and hit the ground." is hillbillies remarking how even people who have a lot of money and think themselves better than everyone else can still suffer setbacks and bad things can still happen to them. It is a gentle reminder that we are all just people, just like birds are all birds.
"Whee." You are driving too fast and I like it.
"Getting your tank full." means getting drunk see "getting tanked"

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

2009-08-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

I read this book when I was very young and I got it because it was a very large book, I loved to read. I didn't know what I was getting into, this book has the texture of real life, all the misery of family life that I knew so well. All the same there is great genius in the eldest girl Louie and a great sort of happiness with imagination that I have myself.
The book has the same structure as Ms. Stead's childhood. Her mother died when she was 2 years old and her stepmother didn't like her, just like Louie in the book. Christina Stead had a love/hate relationship with her father just like Louie also from what I read about her. The war going on between the father and the stepmom I latched onto instantly, for that was what was going on in my own life. I got instant recognition, yes that is exactly how it is I thought but at the same time the book gives no solution and no judgments, it just is.
The stepmother Henny has many children, there wasn't a way to prevent pregnancy I suppose. Her husband had a job once and then lost it and Henny is forced to sell everything, her lace tablecloths, her dishes, anything to keep food on the table. He plays with the children and is pretentious pretending to be a great philosopher and scientist. He has a way with children for sure but he gives up even the pretense of looking for a job and the family sinks deeper and deeper into poverty. He does not think that he himself is at fault for anything, he is strangely disconnected from any worry at all. He leaves all the worry to his wife. Henny has tirades in this book, terrible screaming she does at him. She is bound to her husband and has a brief affair with a man she doesn't even like from whom she gets as much money as she can to feed her children. She plays the game of Solataire over and over again, until her mind grows blank and she no longer thinks of the sad situation she is in. Again, this is something my own mother did, ignoring the cries of her children and playing this endless game of cards. I wondered why she did it. I guess it was to numb her mind and think of nothing. The father and mother end up staying in separate parts of the house, using the children as messengers to one another.
In one of their fights Louie has a moment of clarity when she realizes that this war between her parents is ruining their moral natures. They call each other the vilest names they can think of, there is Henny sinking while her husband stands in the sunshine playing with the children without a care in the world.
When Henny dies it is a strange thing but a real thing the children's reaction. Being children they simply know that their mother is not there anymore and accept that she is in heaven easily. There is not much grief. The book says: When it stormed it was as if Henny too had stormed, but in another room in the universe, now under lock and key. Louie had gotten the idea to poison both her parents, but she got scared suddenly and put all the poison in one teacup. Henny somehow knows immediately when she sees Louie what she has done and what she says is remarkable. She says she doesn't blame her and goes into this long monolouge worthy of Hamlet. Then she picks up the cup with a jerky movement, as if she would stop herself but couldn't arrest the motion, she had already made a decision about life without even realizing that she was making it. Later Louie tells her father what she had done and he doesn't believe her, of course. She like her mom kept expecting something from this man and he couldn't do anything, not even grow up.
The man who loved children loved them because he was still a child himself.
Strangely enough their poverty improves after Henny's death and there is no one to worry about finances now that she is gone.
Louie runs away at the end of the book going for a walk around the world she says.
It is a remarkable book. Louie knows quite well when she crossed the line from the normal world, she had never been normal. There used to be this sort of yard between her world and the outside real world that she used to play in but it's gone now the author tells us.
In this secret world between us and the author, we recognize that Louie is a genius. She doesn't tell us that and no one tells Louie that, it is evident in the bedtime stories she tells the younger children and in the thoughts that she thinks. She worships one of her teachers, a Mrs. Alden, and she starts a great creative work called the Alden Cycle. She tell her parents she is doing homework when really she is working on this project of writing about the wonderfulness of Mrs. Alden. I did worship one of my teachers when I was young just like Louie. I think a child that is neglected tends to do that, to look elsewhere for a mentor. Louie throws herself into books of the great philosophers and poets the same way I fell into books, and she thinks thoughts so deep and yet still plays the role the family has for her. I think we do that. The parents are quite ignorant of Louie, and when she speaks her true thoughts they tell her she must not think these thoughts; they are crazy thoughts. I remember reading The Greening of America and telling my mom about it and her telling me I was being brainwashed by this book. I think she thought I was becoming a communist or a demon or something totally terrible and somehow criminial. This book was published in the sixties and was about the hippie movement making America more beautiful, more "green". The author later stated that the hippie movement died instead, what a relief for my mom!
The Man who Loved Children is beautifully written, but it's uncanny how much of this fictional book is so very real. I think it must be the real childhood of Christina Stead. Maybe because her childhood was so much like mine, I don't know, but this book, more than any other I have ever read, seems the most perfect reflection of real life.

Egyptian Bounds

2009-07-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

Egyptian bounds are used by some astrologers and not at all by others. There is a table on Wikipedia. This is a system of internal rulerships and what degrees of a sign. For instance Cancer has these lords,
0-6.999degrees Mars 7-12.999 Venus 13-18.999 Mercury 19-24.999 Jupiter and so on.
So it is my Moon is Cancer is at 6 degrees and the bound lord of my Moon is Mars. The Bound Lord reveals reality of the point in actual experience, rather than in theory. What is instead of what should have been. It appears to me this means that my Moon is subserviant to Mars in my chart.
A personal point for all of us is the Ascendant. You're supposed to look for the Bound Lord of this point to see which direction you should be going in life. Mine is at 0 degrees Sagittarius and my bound Lord is Jupiter. Jupiter is in Libra in the tenth house for me. Now Libra is an artistic sign and Libra rules the house of career so this would point me toward a career doing creative work.
My Moon is in the eighth house but it's bound Lord is Mars which rules the 5th house of creativity. Like a teacher who wants to make sure that you don't make mistakes, your birth chart will point out the same things again and again.
I used to wonder what career I wanted. I couldn't decide. I am interested in everything. I like science a lot and psychology. I wanted once to be a high school counselor. If I had gone to an astrologer then I could have been told that I was to be an artist of some kind, and now that I am much older I know it. It would've been extremely useful to have known that when I was younger. I think astrologer would be great for teens trying to decide on a career.

Degrees of a Sign

2009-07-31T03:55:00.000-07:00

With astrology it seems there is always more to learn. I was surprised to learn that the degrees of a sign meant how far you were in understanding that sign and the house that sign rules.
They divide the 30 degrees of a sign into 3 parts 1-10 degrees represent astrological kindergarten, where you are learning
10-20 degrees represent the working degrees of a sign
20-30 degrees represent spirituality.
The planets in the middle are the ones you use in everyday life. I am a Sun in Sagittarius at 26 degrees and my Sun is spiritual and yet only a backdrop, a background. I have two planets at zero degrees and I know nothing about career or friendships, the houses that these signs rule. Yes I mean I haven't the foggiest idea about my 10th or 11th house.
Ourselves are mysterious, how great it is to finally have an explanation! The world makes sense again through astrology.
The only planet I have in the middle of a sign is Mercury. Mercury is the planet of communications. Every day I think about communicating and how to communicate, this is my focus. Even when very young I wrote things and was amazed at how the act of writing made me feel better and I didn't know why then and I don't know why now. It just works.
I wrote that my Sagittarius is only a background, but that could be due to it's conjunction with Saturn. Saturn puts the brakes on any planet it is next to. I do have Venus in the last 10, and beauty for me does move me spiritually and no, it is not in the background. So I think the loss of my Sagittarian nature is entirely due to Saturn's influence.
My planets in the first 10 degrees seem to express themselves in a wild manner. They seem to be a part of me that is instinctive and reflexive. Being not fully integrated into myself, they seem to be the thoughts that come to me and make me ask, "Where did that come from?" These energies are not something you make happen, they are something that happens to you. Pluto rules jealously and I can be suddenly and violently jealous. Jupiter rules optimism and I am optimistic even if I have just lost my car, my job and my boyfriend all at once. Neptune is the planet of illusions and I do tend to be pulled into dreams or into thinking that is just not real, not what really happened or could happen. These 3 planets in the first 10 degrees make me have to reason them out, 'cause they are illogical. These energies sometimes wipe me out and I don't even make sense. I am pulling nonsenical things out of the air.
So it is I guess that I work with creative projects, 'cause I couldn't be a jet pilot or a doctor for sure. I believe there is the job we are supposed to be doing, what God wants us to do. This is what we have these talents for.
We have a purpose in this lifetime, and part of it is figuring out what our purpose is.

The Saturn Freeze

2009-07-30T03:50:00.000-07:00

Perhaps no one else has noticed this, but I have. When you read all the descriptions of Saturn by all different sources one thing becomes clear.

Saturn freezes.

Like Jack Frost the touch of Saturn is cold and pessimistic. If one lived a sheltered life perhaps your fears wouldn't lead you into Saturn's cold embrace. Saturn is connected with reality, with seeing things how they really are; so with a loss of innocence you fall into Saturn and he never lets you go. Not only that, but Saturn fills you with doubt wherever he touches your chart. You doubt yourself. Sarcastic and skeptical and rigid, Saturn is like the dirty old man you run away from 'cause he is such a pervert. Saturn represents law and order too. In my life, society has let me down. Society did not protect me and neither did my teachers and parents follow the rules I had to follow, which is unfair of course. Many people come to hate Saturn in their chart. I did.

Like the old man in pictures of Saturn, this planet resists change. It's safe the way things are this planet seems to say and if you change you might suffer and die. I suffer from too much Saturn of course in my chart and I wish for freedom from the jail of my own being.

Saturn conjunct Venus makes one have one relationship, sometimes a very bad one, and stay with it through thick and then no matter what. It makes one feel dutiful towards you partner when every other emotion is gone, even love. Saturn sometimes represents the father. I have a friend with Saturn conjunct Venus and not only is she stuck with a bad relationship her father also tries to control her every move. This conjunction is in the second house of money, and her father is always threatening to stop giving her money. Somehow she is doubtful of her financial ability, she thinks she cannot survive without her father giving her money. Saturn and self-doubt again!

Frozen time and time again, I am afraid to make a move in my life. I fear success and I fear failure. Saturn tells us it is best that things remain as they are, who knows what could happen if things changed? Saturn is the planet of constriction just as Jupiter is the planet of expansion. This planet is needed as a cosmic counterweight to the appalling excesses of Jupiter, the world could not exist without Saturn.

That doesn't mean I have to like it.

The 3rd House Mindset

2009-07-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

Noel Tyl is an astrologer and you can Google his name and read his essays online, some of which were written for new astrologers but still interesting. I was interested in what he said about the 3rd house being our mindset. It is like the lens through which we look at everything else. The 3rd house corresponds to Gemini and is ruled by Mercury.

We are a bundle of contradictions and we interpert the planets in our own way. Our life's realities means a horoscope means different things. What is interesting to me is the simple declarations astrology makes to me about strengths and weaknesses. Things I knew instinctively are now articulated. It gives me self-awareness. This is who I am.

Noel Tyl makes a client's astrology chart like the one in the picture. He makes strong aspects clear by pressing the pencil down firmly on the paper, and less important aspects he does with a light line. I thought this a clever way to see the whole chart clearly. One thing he looks at is the sign on the cusp of the 3rd house, ruling that house, and that sign's ruling planet for your mindset.

For instance if the sign is Sagittarius then the ruling planet is Jupiter. Jupiter has a strong tie to education. You would be comfortable with learning and higher ideals and knowledge. You also look at Mercury's situation, the ruler of the 3rd house. Often when Mercury is squared by Saturn it make a person prone to depression, it gives seriousness and makes one hypercritical. Mercury rules verbalizations or talking about something and Saturn makes one critical and less emotionally moved. However much depends on the strength of Mercury in this situation. If Mercury is in a position of strength, (On an angle, in the signs that Mercury rules, peregrine, or at Sun/Moon midpoint) then there is this ability to succeed in spite of difficulties. A powerful Jupiter also helps Mercury, but then a powerful Jupiter helps everything in a chart.

What I want to share is what this told me about myself. It can tell you about yourself too.

Mars in the 3rd or a sign ruled by Mars makes aggression an okay expression for you. It is a placement of high-pressure salespeople. Saturn in the 3rd house or ruling the sign of the 3rd house gives a lot of seriousness. Clint Eastwood has Saturn in the 3rd. The Sun in the 3rd or in Leo (Leo is ruled by the Sun) gives one a large ego that rationalizes everything one does as alright. Cher has this placement. The Moon in the 3rd or in Cancer, (Moon rules Cancer), makes a person prone to emotional excess. The Moon rules emotions and there is this tendency to feel rather than use logic. My 3rd house is in Aquarius, ruled by Uranus. Uranus represents the rebel, and there is this need to sustain rebelliousness. There is this belief that you have to rebel to maintain your individuality.

My mind-set then is Aquarian. Aquarians are great humanitarians and great friends. They are the most unusual people, Uranus rules the unusual and the unexpected. In fact what house Aquarius rules tells you where you yourself are most unusual and that is quite something. I would be unusual in the way I communicate.

There are echoes in a chart that hit the same trends again and again. I don't know why. My unusual thinking processes is echoed by a peregrine Mercury. A peregrine planet is one that has no major aspect with any other, a planet isolated but made stronger because of it. It is called wild. A wild peregrine planet will act in unusual ways, so I have an unusual planet echoing my unusual Aquarian mindset. People often have aspects in their chart that say the same things over and over strangely enough. Pope Benedict has Jupiter peregrine, the planet of high ideals.

If it were not for other aspects in my chart I would be blurting out unexpected things off the top of my head all the time. A chart is curbed, re-routed or stopped in it's tracks by the opposite planet. Nevertheless my 3rd house is a part of me anyway, even if it is a part of me that people seldom see. I want to be that one voice that disagrees with what everyone else is saying and I think that is what makes me myself. I see myself as the one breaking all the rules even if I am following the rules to make my life easier, I am a rebel in my heart.

Quintiles

2009-07-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

There are 360 degrees in the circle that is your astrology chart. When two planets are 72 degrees apart this is called a quintile. What is interesting about this aspect is that it tells you a talent that you have, a talent that you were born with. I think I have something to add because I know my quintiles so very well.
I have one between Mercury and Neptune. Mercury is the planet of communication, it tells you how you think. Neptune is the planet of dreams and illusions. This quintile makes one a fiction writer because you can easily put yourself into an imaginary world and imagine being someone else. It lends a magician's abilities with your ability to communicate. This is straightforward for me and easy to understand. I find that I am easily drawn by reading into the world the author creates too. Reading has always been a great pleasure for me, a wholesome and dependable pleasure.
My other quintile is between the Moon and Neptune. The Moon is our emotions and our heart and all about our feelings. This is an aspect of muscians, but I have no musical talent. What I have is an intense enjoyment of music. When you combine the magic of words with music then the effect on me is quite indescribable. I can be lifted up in spirit to the highest mountain and the amazing thing is how inspired I am. I can't articulate how rich these experiences are or how deeply music moves me. It sounds stupid to say it the way I am saying it, I cannot tell anyone how great music is to me. It is a great gift.
Often people will talk to me about lovemaking and how great and mind blowing it is, but I can truly say that is not the greatest thing in the world. I would tell these people to listen to some music like the 5th Symphony or to read a great book like Watership Down and that it would be better but they would not understand or agree. I understand that I have these gifts and I was born with them. The gifts a quintile gives to you is as natural to you as breathing. I am sorry that I cannot share them or even explain what I mean.
Go to astro.com and see if you have quintiles, 144 degrees apart is a biquintile. This is the most amazing astrological discovery I have made.

Free Floating Ideas

2009-07-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

I get writing ideas all the time. I just don't do anything with them. I thought I'd share a few, a view of the flowers in my mind.

In Star Trek the Vulcan Mr. Spock would elegantly place the tips of his long fingers on your face and remove painful memories. I always thought that an amazing idea and wanted to do that in a book. Once memories are removed that you can't get over, a person could start again. I had an idea of a rogue psychiatrist on a private island doing just that for a woman crippled with anxiety and fear of leaving her home. This new experimental treatment would remove memories but maybe they went too far...maybe she becomes so robustly new that the guy is knocked out by this transformation and falls for her. This, of course, is a romance. Who has not lost much needed confidence and been drug down by abuse or loss and sure we survive but we're not the same. If we could start anew there would be this innocence and this love of life that children have I believe. A whole new world, surely.

What if the world economy did collapse? Would we return to a life of small farms and growing our own food? It might be a better world. Our ancestors had more free time than us, once the harvest was in and winter arrived it was a time for games and stories and people visited one another. It might be quite nice.

What if women ran the world? I don't think that women want to do that but they certainly could. I think men and women work best in partnership, maybe that is the way it's supposed to be. If women recieved some sort of power that elevated them into leadership, they would do what they had to do of course. I just wonder what sort of world it would be. In Ursula LeGuin's book, "The Left Hand of Darkness" people on a planet named Winter could change genders. Man and woman in the same body, what a concept! I think what she meant was that just as light is the left hand of darkness, so women are the other side of humanity. We are polar opposites and we are supposed to be equal, even if society says we are not. Male and female, like right and left, light and darkness or yin and yang. She doesn't really lecture about equal rights, she just tells this story and you draw your own conclusions. I like the power of stories to do that, and she is no slouch at world building either. The Dune books also remind us of the power of the female sex, the Ben Gesserit that the author modeled after his own wife. What a great woman she must have been! The great point in this book was "Revenge is for babies". I had to think about that before I got it. What I think Frank Herbert meant was okay, somebody did something to you and you want revenge but it is immature. If you deviate from your life plan to chase after revenge then you have wasted your valuable time and damaged yourself in the process. A mature adult realizes this and does not chase after revenge but picks himself up and continues. I think that is what the author meant. It is true. I think this is one of the things I like the most about books, these nuggets of knowledge that you pick up like golden coins in the sand. Women were very important in the Dune books, and they were the teachers of the men. In this fantasy world, the women could and did fight in hand to hand combat and it was balance and knowing your opponent's next move and being focused that mattered, not the male's superior strength. These books are heady stuff, impossible to describe really, if you have not read them. If I started to describe them I would be blogging for an hour or more. I think these books are so famous that most people have read them I guess, I don't really know. My library, who isn't big on science fiction has them at least.

A lot of romance books has the couple hating each other, it is like almost tradition or something. In a way, I am drawn in as always but I long for something new. Paranormal is dominating the market right now it seems, who knew vampires and werewolves would be hot? People do fall for each other and my hubby himself claims he loved me at first sight. Romance is not my natural reading material, rather I find myself reading it because there is just so much of it around. I'm told half of all books sold are romances and that is a lot of books. I like these books very much sometimes and sometimes not so much. Maybe it's me, but I don't understand some of them. I have no desire to be dominated by another, even if that other is totally beautiful and handsome. What I want is someone to talk to who doesn't mind laundry. Friendship and love together would be so much fun, I think that is what I want.

Asimov

2009-07-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

It was perhaps Asmiov who first got the idea that aliens would be more advanced than us and his idea is the one that prevails today. Asimov is no longer with us but he left a lot of books being one of the most prolific authors ever. He has a PHD in Chemistry but I guess he is known best for his robot books. He makes writing seem simple. He has said that the only thing he asks of his writing is that it be clear. His autobiography is not one but two books, "In Memory Yet Green" and "In Joy Still Felt". I read these books very fast, there is nothing to slow you down when you read Asimov because he does make himself so clear. He is so clear in fact that people think writing like he did is easy, that is until they try to do it. It is this that makes a struggling writer so frustrated, that everyone thinks it is easy. They don't think that way about other professions, I guess because everyone can put words on paper they think that anyone can do it. Writing has infinite paths and I think that is what confuses new writers so badly, how does one know what one wants to write about? You don't. Stephen King wrote 3 books before Carrie, it's like these first books are your education. It's an investment in time and it is working for nothing. What one does write is making future writing easier, as hard as that is for me to understand. I thought that if I had talent I could write a book quickly, and that it would be right the first time I wrote it. Where does one get these ideas? Why is it I was so convinced of all the wrong things about writing?

Writers want to be understood so they make it easy for us. They gently remind us along the way of things we might have forgotten that is important to the story, they tell us what someone is thinking when they do something. It is like a window into another person's mind because really and truly writing begins and ends with oneself. Yourself is all you know really. Intuition can take you a long way to understanding but it must have some sort of similiar thing going on in your own head, if you get my meaning. It was C.P. Snow who said we are alone, totally alone. I can't get my mind around it, but I just intuitively know it is true. That isn't something I want to feel anyway, alone. Writing joins us to a larger community because in writing we are putting forth a lot of ideas in a compact form. A first time writer is trying to express a lot, with a lot of hope and with a lot of hard work behind it, all the time making it appear easy, if they are any good as a writer that is. Then there is the entertainment value, when maybe you're writing some heavy stuff too. This is tricky to me, what entertains? Why do people read tragedy and horror? How can I know what other people think? How is the unspoken spoken to you?

I am a fan of Star Trek. What impressed you always was the love these people had for one another, their broadmindedness. They had made a world I wanted to live in very much when I was growing up. When I thought of things unspoken I thought of Star Trek. Here we have this Vulcan, this alien who is struggling with his human half. There is this feeling of so much love with these characters, who help each other and at the same time maintain space for each other to grow. This is evident clearly in how they handle Spock, telling him it is okay to feel emotions when his emotions get the better of him. When Spock is under the influence of a drug and turns human suddenly, Kirk is so funny trying to think of the right way to handle Spock as he is so changed. I don't watch the new Star Trek in it's many forms, being so impressed when young with the original. There was nothing like it on television. My twelve year old mind understood it perfectly though these concepts were adult concepts some of them, to love and lose, to face death bravely, to try to understand aliens who could care less and make them care. I think sometimes that my mind has been "programmed" by Star Trek, that this is what I want out of my writing, that this is the template by which I write. Okay, so many writers may have a book that started them out and charted their course, I have a television show. The guy who wrote Lonesome Dove was heavily influenced by "Don Quixoite" so it is interesting that such things happen, that one book influences an entire career.

The best advice may be simply to write every day and do it anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours. Many writers only write 2 hours a day I was suprised to find out. Your mind already has a template, you just don't know it yet. Deep inside, you already know how you want to write.

What Hillbillies Like

2009-07-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

(1) Hunting season.

(2) Squirrel and Dumplings

(3) Hats with pictures of trucks on them.

(4) Beagles who chase rabbits and run in circles and get dizzy when it is not deer season. Is funny.

Is not funny when it is deer season and dogs chase rabbit.

(5) When cars bounce in ruts in driveway, everyone knows you should drive a pick-up truck.

(6) Baths, so hard to take but okay when over.

(7) Soap and shampoo, same thing.

(8) Guns, guns and did I mention guns?

(9) Outside better than inside, don't like being surrounded by walls. Is dangerous.

(10) To see how many directions hair can point to, lotta fun.

(11) Camouflage.

(12) Foglights on top of truck. Cool.

(13) Family is great. Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh cousins all same. All cousins.

(14) Food in beard good, some for later.

(15) Country music is only music in country.

(16) Everclear is Windex. Clean windows. Yeah mine are dirty, so what?

(17) Pee on tire makes tire go farther.

Aries point Again!

2009-07-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

This is a Hubble picture of the stars at the very center of the galaxy. In astrology it is thought to be an important point at 26 degrees of Sagittarius but I am writing now about the Aries point. I am writing about where I read elsewhere and by no means am an expert!

The Aries point is a solar node, the nodes of the Moon are well known. The north node of the moon being what your purpose is in this lifetime, or what lesson you are supposed to learn. The Aries point is the very beginning, and is said to be "where the spirit enters reality". It can be anywhere in a chart. You ask, what house is my Aries point in? This is your eternal beginning for your birth chart never changes. I found this an exciting idea.

Mine is in the 4th house of home, and how I cling to my home and how I do love it! It seems I cannot write anywhere else, which is a bit of a downer. I can't concentrate well away from home.

When a planet or point conjuncts (is in the same place as) the AP then the nature and energy of that planet has the added thrust to express collectively.

Like, this is what you are remembered for.

Like, this is how the public knows you.

A point would mean the angles of a chart, the first, fourth, seventh and tenth houses.

I am known as a homebody. I never go anywhere.

I would rather be known as "Goddess and Legendary Writer" but never mind.

I am talking now about zero degrees of Aires though it's said zero degrees of any cardinal sign would come into play if conjunct a planet or point. The cardinal signs are Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Carpicorn and they correspond to the beginning of each of the four seasons. Aries is Spring. If we can know where we begin then maybe we can understand ourselves much better and maybe this will help us become who we want to be.

Bob Dylan's birth chart

2009-07-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth in May of 1941. He is a Gemini.

Moon in Taurus

Mercury in Gemini

Venus in Gemini

Mars in Pisces

Jupiter in Taurus

Saturn in Taurus

Uranus in Taurus

Neptune in Virgo

This is an example of what is called the final depositer in a chart.

Mercury is at home in Gemini, in the sign that Mercury rules and is Mr. Dylan's final depositer.

Right away you can see that he has no planets in fire signs and only one in a water sign, his Mars in Pisces. He would deal with life through his mental abilities and his heart and emotions would be extremely stable in the earth sign of Taurus.

It is easy to find a final depositer in a chart because it will always be the planet in the sign that the planet rules, if your chart has one.

Mercury is the planet of communication and it is Mercury that is the key planet in understanding Bob Dylan.

Sometimes a planet will "run away" with a chart because it is conjunct a fixed star. Sometimes a planet does this by being the only planet in an element such as Mars being the only planet in an water sign.

Career is often indicated by what planet trines (120 degrees) the midheaven. Dylan's Venus trines his midheaven which leads one to think of an artistic career. His Moon is in the 5th house of creativity. The Moon is said to show where our heart is and Mr. Dylan probably enjoyed his career.

I think it was something that I would expect that his final depositer would be Mercury.

Are People Good or Bad?

2009-07-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

My parents always thought that only the police and the consequences of society frowning on you kept people from breaking loose and doing all sorts of horrible things. I'm not sure why they felt this way but clearly there must be some traumatic experiences behind their beliefs. My father used to comment that people were aggressive and you had to protect yourself constantly. In spite of their low opinions they often socialized and were very good at it. People liked them and respected them. My mother when they were first married would tell neighbors my father would fix their cars, their furnances or their plumbing. My father was very talented at fixing things. She wanted people to like her, like a little kid giving all his toys away so the other kids would be his friend. My father liked it when he gave people the impression he was intelligent. They clearly wanted things from other people. There is a curious sort of blindness that people have when it comes to other folks. People do not like you because you do things for them, though I expect they feel obligated to be quite friendly. My father would say often that he didn't care what anybody thought about him, but the fact was, he thought about it all the time.

Poor Anne Frank who perhaps wanted no one but herself to read her diary made history by writing that she believed people to be "basically good". This pulls at the heartstrings. The Germans were painted with a brush so black that the German people are still reeling today. The Germans are people just like ourselves I believe. What they did, any people can do. When the German people were starving no one lended them a helping hand and they ended up going to war. I don't see this written about very much, the suffering of the German people and how nobody helped them. It brought out this terrible side to human nature I think.

A friend who was watching the aftermath of Katrina on television told everyone how this policemen said, "It's everyman for himself." This got me to thinking that society, any society could break down if people do not have the means to survive. I thought it funny that all these cameras were down there filming people with relish, getting all that good footage with very expensive equipment when people didn't have water safe to drink or a place to live or food. I found it touching when I heard of people who filled their car with groceries and drove down there. I kinda felt that the newspeople were so excited that so many people were watching them that they had quite forgotten that a tragedy had happened. This was just an impression of mine and just my opinion of course. They did nothing improper. It is rather a feeling I had based on nothing, perhaps it is me believing that people are bad just like my parents.

Because it does come down to belief doesn't it?

I know a churchgoer who tithes. She always gives the church money. However, she owns rental property that is quite dangerous for the people who live there. She throws them out if they can't pay their rent. Is it only me who thinks this is wrong? Well-respected and made much of by the community, her renters are the lower classes and no one thinks much of them. I rather think that these renters believe what she believes, that they are not worthy. They seem to think so. I think belief is very powerful. It makes me think of the Beatles.

The Beatles were quite upset with their fame and fortune. They had wanted to make music and they had wanted of course to make enough money to have a house and one day raise a family. They came from Liverpool and this city was working class poor. John Lennon even remarked that they were too famous and it shouldn't be that way. He remarked that they were more famous than Jesus and had people burning Beatle's records from coast to coast in protest. He didn't mean it they way people thought. He thought that their music was okay, pretty good, but he hadn't expected this wild insane craziness and these huge amounts of money. I think anyone would be a little disconcerted. The Beatles were not rocket scientists, though they had great intuition and wonderful minds they also had innocence. They would greet each other with secret handshakes and code words just to get over the embarrassment of seeing each other. I thought this fact adorable. They were quite vulnerable to the press that came to interview them. I think his words were twisted and they got a much needed lesson that you have to watch what you say. John Lennon was simply saying they were too famous. I was amused to see George Harrision in a television interview before his death stating that the Beatles, "were not that good". This was their belief, that they were pretty good but not that good.

Over the years John Lennon came to accept the idea that he was a musical genius. Their later music was not as memorable as their earlier music to most people though. I think that their innocence had been lost. I read that John put down his guitar for 6 years. I am a fan and I think this a great tragedy. Not only that but he was only 40 years old when he died. In this big bad world there is nothing more precious than innocence, they brought so much happiness to others. I was so excited to see Paul McCartney, just to see him. No one can get over how simple his songs were and yet how much they are loved and remembered.

Their beliefs were to change as people constantly contradicted them. The world is having it's effect on you whether or not you like it or even believe in it. It may be that they still thought of themselves as not that good, people often say what will please others and perhaps John Lennon was tired of the whole subject. It is a testament to them that they didn't believe for so very long what other people told them, they have this integrity and this basic decency. Fame and fortune didn't turn their heads and make them think themselves wonderful. Kudos to the Beatles!

In "Tuck Everlasting" the question is asked "Are people good or bad?" and the reply was "Both".

I think that pretty much sums it up.

Mars the Red Planet

2009-07-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

Mars doesn't actually look red, kinda orangey though. Mars is our drive and energy and it rules the Sign of Aries. There was a scientist who once found something called the "Mars Effect". After compiling a whole lot of charts he found that Mars was often close to the angles of the birth chart of career athletes. It was stated that this guy sort of hurt his career studying something as goofy as astrology. Well astrology is kind of hard to pin down and yet kind of obviously true too, ya know? There is a scientist in Australia who is getting a lot of press with predicting the final scores of soccer games but I can't remember her name though. I do remember she claims about a 70 percent success rate which is quite good. She claims that, with a lot of study of patterns in a chart, that she can predict when you will get lucky in Vegas. I wonder if proof of astrology looms on the horizon?

I think astrology will be like ghosts, belief being a matter of personal preference. I mean it is that way now anyway. Lucky for me I am not a respected scientist and if I did like astrology I would buy a hat and stick it under it. People say I'm a Leo so I have to have a lot of attention or something and I just cringe a little. Yeuw. I wonder why those who are interested never follow that interest, with the internet you can learn a lot. I'm the only nut in this tree I guess. Oh well, I'm bigger than the squirrels.

Mars may be the war god but Mars is much more. How do you go after what you want? The sign that Mars is in should tell you. If your Mars is in a water sign such as Pisces, Cancer or Scorpio then you like to swim or boat or vacation near bodies of water. If Mars is in a Earth sign it may be you're too busy making money to swim or anything else. If Mars is in an air sign you get mental abilities but a Mars in Gemini can't focus on one thing. Gemini can't stop jumping around with different ideas. I am Mars in Aries and my energy level is high 'cause Mars rules Aries. Mars is in the 4th house of home and it is at home I seem to get into arguments. Oh yeah, Mars is you asserting yourself and telling people not to mess with you. Transits of Mars are often predict when accidents may happen, I mean like falling down and breaking your leg. Mars in Aries means I'm always getting hit in the head, the signs indicate parts of the body too. If you had Mars in Sagittarius you'd always be getting bruises on your thighs I suppose. Mars is considered a malefic or bad news a lot.

And yet Mars is necessary and is ever renewing and rules the Springtime. Here at home is where I put my energies with my Mars in the 4th house of home. Mars is the drive to live and the desire to live and those things that drive us that we cannot stop doing. Mars is also the masculine principle in a chart.

If a man has Venus in Leo, then he will always be attracted to Leos. If a woman has Mars in Gemini, she will always be attracted to Geminis. I am always attracted to Aries, though I must admit I am often afraid of them. Aries bulldozes over other people and takes the lead and will not let go. Aries doesn't mean to, it's just that an Aries is ruled by Mars and Mars is about that part of us that is like a baby. A baby only knows itself. It knows when something hurts it but a baby doesn't know when you are hurt. Aries can be so remarkably selfish it quite takes ones breath away. Mars will have what it wants and everyone else will be pushed out of the way. What makes our blood sing that we must have it will have our Mars taking over! It is what makes someone work hard and long to achieve a goal, this drive, this unrelenting I will never give up no matter what, this will of ours to be ourselves, this eternal spring in which we grow flowers of our own making are just Mars asserting himself.

Strangely, Mars is also a nocturnal planet although Mars is masculine and all things masculine belong to the daytime chart. It is thought that someone made a mistake somewhere, to put Mars in the feminine night. This is called Sect, an ancient form of astrology in which Mars, Venus, and the Moon rule anyone born at night. The other planets will stay on the sidelines and not be very important if you are born at night.

Astrology has been handed down to us sort of piecemeal, we have lost a lot since ancient times. I tend to think that Mars is exactly where it should be, a night planet. It is like how do they know that people born in winter will be a fiery and extremely happy-go-lucky Sagittarian? We just don't know. Mars belongs to the night just like it belongs to our darkest and most secret desires.

The Aries Point

2009-07-11T05:36:00.000-07:00

There are four cardinal signs in your chart, Cancer, Libra, Aries and Capricorn. These are the signs who start things. These signs represent where we begin projects. Where Aries is in your chart seems to be particulary important. Aries is Spring and the first sign of the zodiac. For example Aries rules my 5th house, the house of creative projects. This is where I begin projects. I am not so good at finishing what I start I'm sorry to say.
The Aries point is zero degrees of any one of the cardinal signs. There are lots of famous people with planets at this degree. When I got ready to blog however I could not locate any chart except my own chart with a planet on the Aries point. If you have a planet on the Aries point there are those who say you have mystical powers, that you express this point to the world. Another place that expresses itself outward are the four angles in your chart. The dark lines that cross in a chart represent the angles of a chart, these are called "wide open doors". Any planet on this angle is expressed strongly and most purely. I can tell you of a celebrity with a planet on the Ascendant and that is Angelina Jolie. She has Venus as the planet in the sky when she drew her first breath, and Venus in the first house gives beauty both inside and outside.
As you can see I have Jupiter in zero degrees of Libra, and this is what I am supposed to be all about. It is supposed to give success and though I am not successful I think I kind of am in a way. A powerful Jupiter gives one an almost magical attraction for you from those in power, your boss will do all sorts of things for you and like you for no reason at all. I have been lucky that my superiors always seem to think I am great, to the point I feel a tad guilty. A great chart like mine, it seems, has influence but I think your mother and father are even more important. For those who say astrology says what must happen-think again!
I would say your chart has an influence of like 40%. There are those who overcame a very bad chart. There is an example, Patton. This military general has an awful chart! A good chart doesn't automatically mean success, in fact criminals often have very good charts. It is thought that things come too easily to them and so they never learn how to work hard for what they get. Oprah Winfrey has a chart often studied, she has a locomotive chart and the "steam engine" is Jupiter. She also has planets conjunct fixed stars. Jupiter is the planet of blessings and if Jupiter has aspects to all your planets, then you have luck in all areas of life. Oprah Winfrey has a great birth chart, and astrologers like to say success was guarenteed for her. Maybe this is so, I don't know, but I do know that she was raped when she was 12 and that she did suffer poverty and her life has not been easy. You could say she has been lucky now but she hasn't always been so. I think that the planets and stars have a sort of influence that is hard to pin down, it is here one day and the next day it is not. I would call it the study of opportunities. It is more like this "might" happen than what will.
What is more certain is the study of personality. I have a friend with Aries in the 7th house of partners and she is always starting a new romance. You will find Aries always where people begin things over & over again. In the 10th house you will always be starting a new career. This sort of thing can be relied on more than any assurances of success. My hubby however has Aries in the 12th, and this mystical house contains everything in the universe and you never know what he is going to start! Aries and the Aries point is not about success it seems.
What I do know is that Jupiter defines me. Jupiter in zero degrees of Libra is who I am. Libra is ruled by Venus, it is a social sign and a sign that wants to please others. Libras are the people who have the best parties, a party brings out the best in Libra. They want soothing environments and soft music and flowers, they want a world filled with beauty. John Lennon was a Libra. When people come to my house I work so hard that their visit will be a good experience, I bring out my best food and my best conversation. I want to make them happy. No matter what this desire is always with me, no matter whether I personally like the guest or not. Jupiter tends to make everything it touches "bigger" and I want to please more than a Sun Sign Libra. I think that sometimes people wonder what I want from them! Why am I being so gosh-darned nice? I think I give the impression I am such a lonely and needy person when I fact I love solitude and I have to be alone at some time during the day! No one entertains as much as myself in fact. I love to be alone to read and to write and to think. I love to think about astrology for one thing!
I read that some Nazis have the Aries point, that the zero degree can also be one of insanity. It is unstable and wild to have a planet at the Aries point. Whew! Also possessed by serial killers. This is when the Aries point is badly aspected and even then it doesn't make you a serial killer. It can also be a point of great creativity and success. It is a point where you can be famous and make a very strong mark onto the world. The Aries Point is good and bad, depending.
Do you have a planet exactly between your Sun and the Moon? This planet is a blend of your ego and your emotional side and is the perfect expression of you. Eleanor Roosevelt had Venus at this point. Needless to say, she was much loved by the public. When a planet hits this point by transit this can make for a very interesting day! Venus and the principles of love and beauty were what Mrs. Roosevelt was all about.
My Jupiter is at the midpoint between my Sun and my Moon. I guess you can see the narcisstic draw of astrolgy for me, my chart seems to have a lot of the important aspects astrologers talk about all the time, aspects of the rich and famous. I have a chart with so many aspects, an enormously complicated one. I started as most do by looking at my own chart and it gave me hope. It gave me hope that, in spite of all the odds, I might be someone that other people respected. I cling fiercely to this hope, that somehow I can escape a life that has few things to look forward to. The more I found out that astrology was true then the more hope I was able to hang onto. It made me believe in the impossible. It inspires me. It makes my future look bright.
No wonder I like astrology.
There is another way to look at your chart. The father represented by the Sun or midheaven, and the mother by the Moon or the bottom of the chart. My mother was a Cancer and my Moon is in Cancer. My father was a Virgo and I have a Virgo midheaven. As I have a square between Mars and the Moon there was tension between my mother and I. The Arabic part for mother is the same degree as my Moon. As the Sun and Pluto are trine in my chart so it was that my father and I had this great love for each other as soon as I was born. My mother was quite jealous of how much my father loved me. My Sun and my Moon are in opposition with each other, and my father and mother were openly opposed to one another. They fought often and in public. Looking at my chart, I think I was born with the purpose of bringing these two together. With my Moon in Cancer I would be attuned to my mother's emotional needs, and with a Virgo midheaven I would understand my father's needs for order and attention to detail. Instead my mother became violently jealous of any attention my father gave me and said that my brother was "her" child and I belonged to my father. My father was always gone and when he did come home he didn't want to interact with us, I understand that his job as a mathmetician was very, very difficult. He was old-fashioned and believed my mother should do everything for me, but she didn't want to do anything for me. This left me virtually parentless. My mother was always telling me I "did" something to her and that one day God would punish me. I always thought I was punished enough by not having a mother. God is perhaps punishing me for this mysterious deed I committed when I was a baby that I cannot remember. The hysterical meaness of my mother cannot be understood, least of all by me. Mars square the Moon is an aspect also of those whose mothers died when they were very young. My mother had a very low I.Q, one degree above retardation and you could say she could not help it. She had very little intelligence. She had been brain damaged by a violent fever at the age of twelve and appeared to be "frozen" at the age of twelve. I noticed my mother liked children at that age and had a lot in common with kids in that age group. Needless to say, I am not for the rights of the mentally retarded to have children that you hear about sometimes in the news. Then again, twelve is a strange age. I wouldn't want to be 12 my whole life. This is when my mother's brain stopped growing and the overwhelming emotion I have for my mother is pity. Anyway, I am wandering away from the subject at hand. I wanted it to be understood that my mother could not help the things that she has done. I have always loved her regardless.
At any rate the Moon rules my chart and perhaps that is why my mother is the greater influence on my life. As my Sun is drug down by the dark influence of Saturn 9 degrees away so has my father been drug down by depression and insomnia. My chart is so much aligned with my life it quite takes my breath away. My brother's name is Walter. There is an asteroid named Walter at the same degree as my sun, and so it is that my brother has always obscured the light of my Sun. So many coincidences I find in astrology! Are they coincidences or are the stars writing the story of our fate? That is one fascinating question.

The Aries Point

2009-07-11T05:35:00.000-07:00

Clouds in My Coffee

2009-07-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

If you are from my generation, you will recognize clouds in my coffee as a line from "You're So Vain", a song by Carly Simon. There is book out now about three of the biggest women songwriters of my time, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King. I find it suprising how these women's songs were so achingly familiar to me, how much their lyrics were in my head and how much these songs had shaped me. What was suprising to me was that their lives were like so far from perfect.

Joni was born with the name of Roberta Joan to a mother who was quite strong. She had so many fears that her career would be taken away from her, she'd been lucky to have been able to meet people who helped her out along the way. I guess I thought everyone just saw talent and fell all over themselves to sign her on, but that is not what happened. In fact it was Joni's first husband Chuck who saw to it that her songs were published by her own publishing company at a very young age. It was David Crosby who insisted that Joni has creative control of her recordings. Only by luck do we have this fantastic body of work by this great artist.

Carly Simon was a girl who had suffered so deeply in love affairs and yet she still kept on trying to love and trying her best. Carly was a rich kid, but she was turned loose with a small amount of money and forced to get a job in New York. Her successes sometimes happened with years in between of no hit recordings suprisingly enough. I guess I thought that she'd had a perfect life.

Carole King I know almost nothing about I'm sorry to say, to me the emotional pull comes from Carly and Joni.

For in losing they also won, they moved on to new loves and were loyal to their friends. They lost people that they loved and went on to love again. I didn't know how difficult things had been for these women that I used to wish I was like. I wanted to be them. The men in their life of these women that you think of as so very strong were so important, and yet it seems that often they were left to fend for themselves. Maybe that is how gifts are, fleeting, a light in the night that disappears with the sun, so delicate that it is quickly eroded by time.

Medicine

2009-07-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

I've often been puzzled by my doctor's inability to prescribe pain medications. It seems that people abuse these medications and so we can't have them if we need them. This seems sad to me. On the other hand, I've become very anxious about my health wondering if I will get any worse. It is quite funny to me that my doctor will give me all sorts of powerful anti-anxiety medications that have all sorts of reactions. I have been addicted to one, Zyprexa, because my doctor gave me free samples and no prescription. I did not know I had one of the most addictive drugs that there is, I only knew that it relieved my symptoms of anxiety though it did make me hungry. One day after taking 3 of the free bottles I ran out of these capsules. I did not think it a big deal. Soon, my hands started shaking and I couldn't stop it. My head was spinning with all sorts of wild thoughts and my stomach was churning with nausea. Somehow I knew what I needed was my medicine.

I called my doctor of course but I was told that I could not have an appointment for 2 and a half weeks. I told her about my symptoms and that I believed that I needed this medicine and she told me that the doctor had other patients besides me. She became very cross with me. I started to cry. My husband also told me that if the doctor gave me this medicine without a prescription then all of my symptoms must be hormones or pms or some other female hystera. He told me that the doctor would not give me something so dangerous without a warning. But he did. When faced with everyone's disbelief, I just started repeating myself over and over again. I looked up the drug on the internet but no one would look at the articles, telling me that you "can read anything on the internet". Soon however, as I spent time walking back and forth so much that I got terrible shin splints in my legs and I kept crying and throwing up so much that even my husband began to think I might truly be ill.

Finally, in desperation, my husband and I waited outside the clinic for my doctor to come to work. We were going to grab him before he entered the clinic and explain to him I needed this medicine or something to help with withdrawal if I couldn't have it. It was unreasonable to expect me to wait for an appointment for a couple of weeks when I was in such a state. The doctor was very nice and understanding and I was so glad that finally someone seemed to feel I wasn't crazy or lying. He validated that what was happening to me was what did happen to people after they took this drug for this amount of time. At last! I was so glad that my terrible experience was going to be over. When we went inside, the lady who makes appointments had such a fit I was very embarrassed! If I could I would've left right then I was so mortified. "She can't do that." she kept saying. She was so angry that I had met the doctor outside and she gave me such horrible looks. The doctor had to calm her, she was yelling that his whole schedule was ruined! I hated to ruin anyone's schedule with my health problems!

What was funny about that was, unknown to me, my period of withdrawal was just about over. When I got a prescription for Zyprexa it no longer worked for me at all, it just makes me tremendously sleepy. Zyprexa is a drug that changes an entire area of the brain, they often give it to anorectics because a weight gain of 10 pounds or more is common. I read in Andrew Solomon's book how he tried unsuccessfully for years to stop taking Zyprexa and takes it even now today. He wanted to stop because he would suddenly become so hungry that he fled his apartment in the middle of the night to get more food. The area of the brain that this drug works on happens to be next door to the hunger mechanism of our brains. It made him carry all this extra weight and he didn't want to be fat, but the withdrawal symptoms were so terrible that he always started taking it again!

I don't blame my doctor, my husband loves free samples and is like a kid in a candy store sometimes asking the doctor constantly for them. He likes free! When this new drug Zyprexa came out the doctor had a lot of free samples and perhaps he didn't know very much about the drug himself. It was funny that he would not give me pain meds because they are so addictive and then he gave me Zyprexa!

My step daughter uses a great deal of sarcasm. She said that it is okay if they mess you up, as long as you don't enjoy it.

I think that if someone had believed me and I had gotten a prescription that Zyprexa would have kept on working. Somehow going through withdrawal made Zyprexa a drug that will never work for me. This is sad as my symptoms of anxiety have gotten so much worse and there is this medicine that will help that I cannot take! I find it a hard cross to bear that people do not believe me. I do believe in strange things like reincarnation and astrology and karma and people mark me off as a flake. I quite like to think that we will live again, what a horrible world it would be if this was the one chance we got! So many people who are forced by circumstances to only suffer and die, all those who die young, and all those people who've lived horrible lives and we are supposed to think they may go to heaven and then they may not but anyway one life is your one chance? I hardly think a loving God would do that. My version of reality might be different from most peoples, but that doesn't make it wrong. (I do keep a great deal of what I think to myself these days) My family came from little towns in Alabama, where poverty was so bad that my father often only had wild berries he had gathered for himself to eat. (His father spent every dime the family had on whiskey) My mother became very ill during the Great Depression and doctors were only seeing the wealthy and so she almost died! My father was brutally raped by another man when he was very young, and he felt as though the whole world hated him and wanted him to die. No one was taking care of my parents and they hardly knew how to take care of children when I and my brother came along. We grew wild, we hit the front door early in the morning and didn't return until nightfall. We played in the woods from dawn until dusk and spent as little time in our own home as possible. If there is one thing I know it is how to endure, I can take a great deal of pain and a great deal of people being mean to me. In fact, all that is just normal. Still I wonder why the world has to be this way for me, now I am an adult and I pay my doctor bills and I have health insurance and I am still no better off than before. When pain does get bad I use medications to sleep through those bad days, I really like Nyquil cold and flu medicine!

The point I am trying to make is that it is a good idea to educate yourself about the medicine you take. We can no longer depend on our doctors. I once read "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can" about a woman who was told by her doctor to throw her pills in the toilet! She was going through withdrawal but had no idea that was what it was! She, like me, understood that the medicine she was taking had caused it, but she foolishly did what the doctor told her to do. We should understand withdrawal and the body's need for a drug that your body had grown accustomed to. Later she was told that if she had taken just one pill, it would have helped her awful symptoms a whole lot. She suffered needlessly, and she suffered even though she had wealth and a college education and paid a great deal of money for a doctor. She was addicted to Valium. Nowadays you cannot get valium except from a psychiatrist. When a new drug is introduced, sometimes it is a while before doctors know everything about it. I don't understand how this happens, I only know that it happened to me.

I went to the doctor and asked for something for pain just last week, and he told me that these drugs were much too addictive for him to prescribe for me! Is that funny or what??!!!!!!

Uranus

2009-07-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

Uranus is the planet of the unexpected. Uranus points to where we rebel. Uranus, quirkily enough, also rules insanity. (When badly aspected) I understood Uranus with 2 keywords, purpose and genius.
Whatever talents you may have are ruled by Uranus, and I call that important. Sometimes we are so used to being ourselves we don't understand that we have a gift at all. A genius doesn't know they are a genius until they finally come to understand that other people can't do the stuff they can, or they are taking much longer to get to the same conclusion. Sometimes, you just don't know. Everyone is a genius at something, and sometimes it isn't so easy to figure out what that something is. Stephen King started writing and no one was jumping up & down and calling him a genius, we had to find him through a circuitous route and now we recognize him. Maybe you are a great organizer or a great mother or a talented conversationalist or someone who makes other people feel good about themselves. You have a purpose and you have a talent. For most of us, this is the same thing.
For me I have to reach for it and work for it. For some of us it doesn't come easily. Once upon a time I thought that if you had a talent you just did something without having to work at it. I was wrong.
I have to write to reach my writing talent. I have to stop mid-work and sometimes mid-sentence and think hard about what it is I'm reaching for. In my tweens and teens I wrote millions of poems for myself. I would write something and then later try to figure out what it meant. It is just that way for me. Understanding comes after I've written something out of the blue that doesn't make sense and then I make it make sense. I wonder sometimes if anyone else does this, or if I'm as rare as a ghost orchid after they've built the malls and gas stations. People go through miles of dangerous mucky swamp to see this rare flower bloom. They say it glows. To me writing is like that, you've tried and tried and at the end you have something rare and of value only because it is beautiful. It's not supposed to glow but it does. It is worth more than the sweat and tears you've shed to get there. To me, the goal is to know.
Some people may have the goal in life to be noticed. Some may want to be important. Some may want to spend idle hours at some seashore working on the perfect tan. Some may want to be well thought of by others, my hubby wants this. I want to know things. There is nothing I want to gain from knowing, I just want to know. I want to know secret things, I want to know every thought someone thinks and exactly what they think about all the time! I've always felt the stain of being different, freakish, outside the norm. I think that is why I have something to contribute as a writer, because I've dug deep for secrets. I dug with some vague hope that I could reinvent myself to be like everyone else. I would learn to talk as everyone did, and do the things that everyone else did and in so doing fool everyone into thinking I was part of the group and not an outcast. I could make myself normal.
It didn't work but on the way I've realized I am not so different. Where I am different is the huge amount of thinking and studying I've done of people. Things happened to me to make me different that were beyond my control and now it's done. I'm me. This is what I focused on. This is my Uranus. My Uranus is this private study of people and the many meanings of words. If you use a word differently it suprises you and throws you off track. It is how poems work. Books work in much the same way, you want to know what will happen as the words disappear and you allow yourself to forget the fiction, the cleverness of the writer, the sleight of hand of the magician, and let yourself forget that it is not real. They call this suspension of reality. Still I think fiction is more real than reality, I'm adding here as a sidenote. Fiction writers often have very good memories and huge chunks of novels are literal truth. The people just have different names. I've come to learn this as I've studied writers along with what they wrote. The very best writers can make you forget you are reading at all, with simple words. They say, cut the adverbs on all the writing sites. They mean for you to achieve this leaness of prose, to imitate what successful writers do. I maintain that these writers probably just wrote first and asked questions later. Stephen King has said he didn't articulate how he wrote for years. Still I am told that writing is something that you can learn how to do, but I cannot fathom anyone taking that much time at writing unless they loved it. It's impossible. Writing requires so much, Mr. King says it is like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub.
How do you express your talent? The answer is supposed to be the Sign your Uranus is in. Mine happens to be in Leo. Leo happens to be very important in a chart, Leo is ruled by the Sun and the Sun represents us. Leo is where the vitality of the Sun is. Leo is our inner child, here is where we play. My talent is in fun and there it has always remained. I know it is different for other people but somehow I can't grasp this fact. If I am not having fun then work is like a trip to the dentist. Ask any of my former employers. If I am at all sick or even slightly unwell I find it tremendously difficult to work. Even the mildest of marital spats has left me unable to write at all, which makes me highly agreeable to my husband. When I am happy I will graciously work until I drop, I'm sort of unreliable though. I find that I must be optomistic or I shall soon die. I must always think the future contains great & wonderful things. If I become bitter at life I will be as difficult to be with as a person who has just quit smoking & craves a cigarette. I must think in a certain way. My chart is mostly fire, and fire represents inspiration. Leo is the sign of show business and is dramatic and so is my writing. This, I believe is my talent and my purpose.
Uranus rules the unexpected, and I'm told that I obtain luck through change. When Uranus is powerful you can expect the unexpected. Because Uranus is in my 9th house of long distance travel I am lucky in faraway places and foreign lands. Everyone has luck, all of us would like a clue as to where to find ours.

Lilith

2009-07-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

They say before Eve that Adam had a wife named Lilith. I guess that wasn't in the King James version of the Bible I grew up reading. There is a connection to the Moon in astrology, and no less that 3 Liliths. One is called the Black Moon, and one is a point in space exactly opposite your Moon on your chartweel and there is an asteroid named Lilith. She is the feminine energy and is often characterized as evil or jealous and the woman scorned. In the world us females may feel weak, but in astrology and in the cosmic world feminine is equal to masculine and in fact just as powerful. I grew up in a household in which females had little power and I was taught this was the way things were meant to be by my mother. Once when I was 18 she told me a great big secret, men have a powerful sex drive that they cannot control and makes it almost impossible for them to think clearly. What a lesson! Women, she said, were the people in the world who had sense.

While my mom was teaching me the superiority of men she was believing privately in the superiority of women!

Lilith's meaning may not at all be clear yet, astrologers are discovering her just as they discovered Chiron in the seventies.

For me with Lilith in the 3rd house of communication and daily activities I read that I have a messy house! I do indeed but is that the meaning of Lilith? Is she nothing more than bad luck?

Lilith does seem to show us one of our weak spots, my hubby has Lilith in the 7th house. He seems to have gone through life arguing and fighting constantly with the women he is involved with. The 7th is about our romantic partners and I am perplexed by this man who seems to think women cause all the problems in the world. Lilith is the woman who doesn't do what he wants her to do and yet at the same time he will have no other kind of woman than an independent and strong-willed woman. (His Venus is in Aries) I guess I was born for the purpose of teaching my hubby about women, because his ideas have changed radically over the years. I no longer think much about his education, I've drawn lines in the sand and he knows not to cross them with me. There is only so much you can do I've learned. I know things. I can tell you what I know, but your experiences have made a deeper lesson than any words can teach. For instance, fear is something you might read about constantly in books and see in movies, but you don't know fear until you're running through the woods away from a hatchet murderer. Your cells remember. What my hubby remembers is that women have hurt him and that I cannot change.

The 3rd house is the house of communication, it's opposite is the 9th house of higher education and publishing. Gemini is the natural ruler of the 3rd, Sagittarius rules the 9th. I believe Lilith to be a lot like Pluto. It is a point of strength and a point of weakness.

Lilith is where I am strong, and that is in communication. I can make complicated things clear and make simple things complicated, it must be a sort of talent but it's one that people don't seem to want to hear. Rather it seems people want to hear what they expect to hear-no wonder that people get bored! Maybe that is why people get drunk at parties, they can say the unexpected and blame it on the Tequila or the Jack Daniels!

I realize that there are more people than in my little corner of the world and hopefully things are different elsewhere, farmers do seems to talk of nothing but the weather!

Lilith is the wild feminine principal, she will protect her children with her life and not think twice about it. She is dark and capable of vengefullness and sarcasm and make someone's life miserable if she chooses but she is not evil. She is us, everyone of us.

10 Things I Hate About You

2009-07-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

!) You lie sometimes and don't even know it. A person should at least reach consciousness.

2) You may push me around and feel better for an hour or so but superiority has nothing to do with power - you just are or you aren't.

3) When you say you love me, don't make me slap you.

4) Everytime I bring home a dog I get a lecture about the cost of dog food and then you end up loving the dog so much I have to steal said dog away from you.

5) It's this way in this situation when you are in it, another way when you are not. This is not logical!

6) There are other things to eat besides french fries.

7) You talk to the television. The people on T.V. cannot hear you.

8) You never believe me unless it is what you, also, believe

9)You tell me to save money when you never do so yourself.

10) I can't owe you money if I am married to you.

Hubby does not read blogs, in fact, he doesn't do computers at all but will watch you across the room and feign disinterest as soon as asked about this.

How To Write?

2009-07-04T18:39:00.000-07:00

Wanna be writers are always asking published authors how they write, when they write, how many pages a day, and on and on and on. It seems we are seeking some secret formula, some kind of path to follow. Listening, I see there is no way to do it and that's that. I am still mightily interested in how someone does it, such a marvelous thing to do and how do they make it real what is mostly fiction?

If anything Stephen King seems to be somewhat down to earth at times and at others someone kinda wonderstruck himself. He has said many strange things, or what I would call strange. He has said that in writing something he makes it impossible to really happen, he has said that he has this freakish thing in him. Well I guess if you suddenly find yourself in possession of 3 million dollars in 3 years, you might be a little disconcerted. If I can put in my own 2 cents I would say it is precisely that he writes for himself that is the reason for his success. Can I do it? No, I'm saying that is what he did, that he had this mindset, this shy and reserved personality, and he found he could write and he did it and nevermind what anyone thinks. Horror was dead when he arrived but it is as old as time and campfires. Anyone, approaching from a new direction, can make new what was old in writing I believe. Wasn't the horror in Carrie really that fact that people are so awful to a few in school? Who hasn't known such people during their own school years?

It's interesting to note that there seems to be more writers writing in the morning than there are night owls. There are writers who have written entire books and never mailed them out, now that is interesting. There are writers who are combining genres and I think what comes of that is bound to be interesting. It is amusing how many books have been written on yellow legal pads (got to try that). It is amusing how older writers cling to their old typewriters. It is amusing how many How To Write books are written by those never published, and it is interesting how many writers go for a walk when they need an idea. Writing is a creative endeavor, and you don't need a high I.Q. to do it. Paper and pen and you're in business. I love that. Anyone, anytime, can try to do it. Here it is the 4th of July, and what can be more democratic than that?

Venus

2009-06-28T22:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-27T06:23:00.001-07:00

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.