Hi folks.... yeah, its been a while.

I have found myself getting deeper and deeper into herbal studies and being limited in my time have shifted away a bit from astrology. I am also in the long and drawn out process of moving to Australia and all the governmental hoop jumping that entails.

The vision i have for myself is that once settled i will once again throw myself into both my astrology practice and my herbal studies and the goal is to find the bridge between them. This prospect excites me, but as with any craft it will take time to master.

I hope that all of you out there who land here and contact me do extend patience with this entire process. I know that i have had to put some folks' readings off for a while and i hope to soon be in a place where time opens up for me to attend to you all timely. 

Until then, please keep checking in and Blessings all around.  

Hi Everyone...

Well, life just seems to grab hold of my face and keeps me busy. I am sorry that i am not writing posts. That does not mean that i am not open for business... part of what has been keeping me busy is that i have been doing a lot of readings! So thanks to everyone. 

...but all that just to say, even if this is old when you come for a visit, just email me (use the contact me link)... i am still here and happy to serve you! *smile*

blessings all around

Hi folks,

just letting you all know that i am of on holidays (hiking in Tasmania!) for the month and will not be "open for business" until about mid-March...

March is a very precious time and i hope to do a post on the new Moon that is coming, so please do check back in.

You can request a reading to get yourselves in the queue, but i will not be available to respond until my return.

keep on lovin!

So looking at this full Moon fast approaching and seeing the lives of people I know seeming to crumble around them, it is hard not to lose faith and wonder what it is that we are ‘supposed’ to be doing. Chiron and Pluto are still sextile each other, forming another yod with the finger of god pointing to this full Moon and thus the Sun at the midpoint of Pluto and Chiron, acting as a point of reference from which to activate the Moon.

Through Pluto and Chiron we are learning about different faces of our own woundedness. In its most elevated form, Chiron in Pisces is aiming to teach us about a spiritual wound. In its weaker face it speaks of a wound of escapism. I would suggest that they are in fact the same wound and thus the same remedy would apply to both. We live in an age where for the most part we feel often complete disconnect from god. We feel abandoned and forgotten. Our religions do not inspire us. Our priests and holy people shame us. We wake in the mornings more interested in checking our inboxes and our phones than in watching the sun rise or listening to the birds greeting the day. We feel disconnected and our lives empty. At the core, we struggle with feelings of confusion and loss, which we fill with stronger or weaker responses to this ‘wound’. Rather than pan out into a wider vista, we roll this feeling of emptiness and disconnect over and over in our minds, staring at it, watching it grow despite how much we stuff into ourselves in attempt to fill it.

Pluto in Capricorn is teaching us about a wound deeply held in the unconscious mind about sustainability and integrity. At a most fundamental level each of us deeply knows that the lives we have created for ourselves and the society we live in and the way we play out these lives on the planet is simply and utterly not sustainable. Faster and faster, more and more… just like Alice in Wonderland running and running and running just to stay in one place. And yet we are utterly terrified of stopping. All we can do is keep moving and at best hope it will pass or at worst that we will, before it all goes to hell. Our bodies, minds and spirits are each careening in different directions as we try to fulfill each of them as though they were separate and distinct things with individual agendas.  We know the bottom needs to drop out but we are afraid of being swallowed by everything we do not know and cannot conceive.

It is so easy to fall into despair at this point, it all feels so big and overwhelming and there is no place to turn. Perhaps because this is a time where we are not supposed to turn anywhere but simply stand and bear witness to everything that is crumbling around us. What would potentially shift if we did that? Can we open our hearts to it, really open to it? Can we let it in? Can we give all this change welcome?

The Moon is the aim here. It sits in Leo. It would seem a natural step to leap headlong into the drama of it all and become all the more narcissistic and self-absorbed. Let’s face it, there is ample reason. But that would be a rather weak manifestation of this energy. A stronger one would be simply to allow our hearts to shine – the way the Sun, Leo’s ruler does. To be fearlessly and unselfconsciously ourselves – the way a very young child is…. Or to be inspiring and regal, with dignity and respect – the way a true king is.

How do you get to that place from the honest reality of the Chiron and the Pluto though? Tricky for sure, but the Sun in Aquarius gives us a clue – it lends itself to consciously holding a vision of a more inspired, more egalitarian, more communal future. Aquarius is the visionary. Sun is consciousness. Chiron heals by becoming bigger than our own pain, by letting in a bigger picture and making space around our own suffering so that Grace might enter and through it, what we have learned from our pain becomes a Gift we give to our community. Pluto heals by honestly feeling our own deeply held fear and pain, as we allow ourselves to actually feel it, we allow what is trying to become conscious rise up and breathe a bit. It expands us, it helps us evolve. Ok, granted we usually need to get torn open a bit in the process, but birth is like that…. so let’s breathe into it and relax as much as we can around it.

I spend a lot of time in prayer. I talk to the trees and the sky and the dirt and rocks. I hear voices in my mind and in my heart talking back to me… yeah, sometimes it is my ego winding tales this way and that making things feel even more muddy, but I am getting better at hearing the other voices. One of the ways I can tell them apart is that Spirit never confuses me. It can scare me with its truth and I can feel pain at its honesty, but it never befuddles me. My ego will grab a strand of truth and ride off in another direction with it altogether dragging me into fear and anxiety or it will weave a sliver of honesty into a tale that leave me hopeless. Spirit never leaves me hopeless. At the same time, Spirit is never overly concerned with making me feel better about myself; it seems mostly to be concerned with teaching me how to be better in myself – to be more fully my true self.

I am lucky this way, I get a lot of support. Not everyone has that. I did not have this feeling of connectivity for a long time. I had to practice a lot – you know, just go through the motions; remind myself that I was a part of everything and that everything was a part of me… that nothing was apart. Then when that felt a bit more ‘real’ to me, I had to quite simply just get over myself - my fears, my worries, my anger, my grief. Mostly I just got tired of feeling hopeless; being angry was too exhausting, being scared was too tight and too small, feeling sad was too heavy. As I allowed myself to really FEEL how “too” this or that thing was in my life, I found myself praying to be helped to “let go” of it. When you’ve held onto something so hard for so long, your grip locks around it and the muscles that help you move in the opposite direction have atrophied. You have to be careful what you really and truly pray for, cuz when you put your soul energy behind a request it is invariably answered. Quite often things were torn from me, taking parts of myself with them and leaving me shocked and tumbling and naked. And yet, in each case something also rushed into fill that space. I did not always realize it at the time, but each thing that entered opened me a little more, expanding my heart and awakening me to my own inner light. I can talk to Spirit and I can hear it when it talks back because I am standing more fully in my own light – I have taken off some of the ideas that held me apart from my true self.

I can’t tell anyone how to fix what is broken. If it is broken, and you know it – let go of it. If you aren’t sure it’s broken, or don’t know how to let go of it, pray for help to let go of it. If it is not broken and it belongs, then it won’t go anywhere. The way I look at it is that the universe is trying to usher in a new paradigm. It needs a lot of ‘energetic food’ to do that. This hording habit we have gotten into really does not help, nor does the control thing where we hinder creation with this or that detail and specification. The way I see it, you gotta give birth a lot of room and a lot of food. If something is too heavy, put it down – offer it up to the collective rebirth. If something is trying to get away, let it – offer it up to the collective rebirth. If you want your life to be different, ask for healing… just that healing or growth, don’t have all these ideas of what that should look like. I mean come on… really, where have all your “ideas” gotten you up to now?

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, simply changed in form. Trust that the universe will know what to do with all your discarded “toos” and all your broken bits. Really FEEL what is moving around inside of you, that is real energetic juice. Allow yourself to feel it deeply and sound out your fear and your pain and your anger and your confusion, put the full force of your honest experience behind it and then with all the love you can muster, simply offer it up, let go of it asking that the energy of it be used in a way that benefits the whole. That really is the important part. It is the way you move out of the potential self-absorbed melodrama of Leo to the regal creative shining genius of Leo. By consciously invoking Aquarian ideals of dedication to community and interconnectedness it helps to springboard us from this place of woundedness and despair into something that takes responsibility for our own healing, by making the dream much bigger than our fears, and ultimately much bigger than ourselves. There are amazing possibilities standing at the ready, we just need to hold the desire for them strong in our hearts and let go of everything that is trying to change. By letting go we not only slough off what really does not fit our true natures, but we give the universe the creative space it needs and the energetic building blocks for that genius to create with. We have to just open to what is falling away and let the universe take us where it will. Trusting that it knows what it is doing. It’s been doing this a long, long time, and when I look around it seems to have been pretty amazing and ingenious thus far, and I see no evidence that it will cease to continue that trend.

Recently a book from the library found its way into my hands - like some of them do, you know... you go looking for one thing and that leads you to something else and then you find this completely other thing and "oh, let’s try that". Anyway it’s called "Food of the Gods" by Terrence Mckenna. In the introduction he writes:

"When habits consume us, when our devotion to them exceeds the culturally defined norms, we label them as obsessions. We feel, in such situations as though the uniquely human dimension of free will has somehow been violated.....

The obsessions of the ordinary person tend to focus on the here and now realm of immediate gratification through sex, food, and drugs. An obsession with the chemical constituents of food and metabolites is labeled an addiction.....

Habit. Obsession. Addiction. These words are signposts along a path of ever-decreasing free will. Denial of the power of free will is implicit in the notion of addiction....

And then "coincidentally" one of the astrologers i follow was talking about how the current astrological patterns highlights our obsessions and tendency to check out as things become more and more intensified. he urged not only examination of this tendency, but also simply to do what we can to move towards the things that make us feel truly good rather than simply numbing or distracting us.

So it had me looking at the upcoming “super moon” – which is when a full or new moon is closest in its orbit to the earth. 20 Jan will be a lovely super moon. Both the sun and the moon join together for it at 0 degrees 9 minutes of Aquarius - which in and of itself is saying something, for the zero degree mark of any sign acts as a kind of threshold and has the energy and potency of such. Being a new moon this is then double echoed as a time of new beginnings and new intentions. 

Aquarius is the energy of the visionary, it looks into the future and tastes possibilities not yet even dreamed of, and then it yokes itself to the task of translating that vision back to society, however resistant or unable they might be to hearing that message. Aquarian energy is often thought of as the medium through which the divine channels itself.

What though is being translated? 

Do you think its coincidence that other planetary bodies for this new moon form a configuration known as a yod - aka: the finger of god? 

Maybe it’s just that, a coincidence, but it is worth looking at....

A yod is basically an elongated triangle. In this case, Pluto (the energy of what is unconscious trying to become conscious) fuses through a sextile with Chiron (the wounded healer and teacher). Together they form the base - where the energy is coming from. The "finger" - the apex - points from this base to where it is "wishing" to go. That finger is Jupiter (philosophy and faith) conjunct Black Moon Lilith (our shadow and what we disown). 

The theory behind a yod is that the thing that is being pointed to, is notoriously difficult to assimilate from the perspectives of the base energies because they are at such incongruous angles to one another. The trick with a yod is to try and activate the midpoint of the base and use it to sort of catapult to that of the apex or finger. 

Interestingly we have both Mercury (communication and oracle) and Venus (love and compromise) conjunct at this midpoint. This is like having 2 angels standing and holding space saying "Here. Look here. This will help". When there are no planetary bodies at a midpoint, there is nothing to anchor the energy but our own intention. To have something there helps a lot.

Ok.... so that is the somewhat technical side of it, but what does it mean?

Who really knows...maybe nothing... but my personal take on it is that whatever we are carrying around that we are wrestling with that is both sticky and dark and more than a bit deeply held in our subconscious is ripe for some Healing (with a big H). We all know it. And yet we are having trouble manifesting it. We are caught in our own woundedness and haven't yet figured how to catapult into something that might actually help us to awaken to our own patterns and behaviors and actually commit to the intention of healing from them or at least not being absorbed and thwarted by them.

So how do we regain our free will from our personal cycle of destructive patterns and behaviors? …By embracing our own darkness through both faith and shifting our philosophies and preciously guarded ideas surrounding it. 

Each of us, every one of us carry around a belief in our unworthiness - some more insistently than others, but it is there in every one of us. And to support that claim, we point to all the things we 'do wrong' - often they are habits, addictions and obsessions - behaviors that we cannot seem to control and yet spring from somewhere inside of us. We feel trapped by them and secretly fear that they say something more true about us than anything lighter that we could point to.

Ok, so embrace our darkness and make friends with it somehow and stop viewing it as proof that we suck. Sure. Good idea, but how? Well, lean into love. Lean into the way that love allows for compromise. The way that love makes room, the way it invites in even the deplorable and the hideous and the scary and unacceptable. Try to love on ourselves this way. It takes not simply forgiveness and allowance but a kind of willingness to believe in something fantastical. Love on ourselves and try to look on ourselves from the point of view of the lover - make allowances for ourselves the way a lover would and then simply listen. Listen closely to the universe and see what sounds back.

There are no coincidences. We only think we are separate from the pulsing stream of nature in all its variety and possibility. We are not. Everything is speaking to us calling to us. We need to only listen for it, but we need to listen from the place of love if we are going to manifest what needs healing. 

Let’s face it, we all know that "listening" from the places of self-criticism and self-hate only push us farther into the desire to check out and escape all the confusion and tumult and demands of our life. So what happens if we listened from a place of love? What if we tried to open wider?

I don't know quite exactly HOW to do this, but i think that this upcoming new moon coming might be a good place to start. I think that it might provide some insights if we seed intentions along those lines. I say it over and over and i will say it again - every culture, every tradition claims that you must INVITE energies in before they can take hold - whether it be angels or devils, vampires or faeries. It is part of that whole freewill thing... we have to ask for help. We have to ask for guidance. It’s not complicated; we just need to take the time to do it.

So all that just to say, i am inviting you all to circle.... to take some time and do SOMETHING - it does not matter what, big or small, verbal or non-verbal... just do something for this new moon coming up and lets just see what happens. It can't hurt and if there is some remote chance that it helps well, wouldn't that just be grand?