Irish Lit

My husband said, real slow, after i'd been talking about his friend once again for almost half an hour, "ya know o......it sounds like youur in love."  His pitch rose just a tad on the 'L' word.  He's not nearly as perceptive as he sounds.  i told him i felt like i was in love months ago and he's probably forgotten.

When he said that Friday night though, i jumped on it, and said i have been for months, except when we had no contact, and then i could get him out of my mind.  but now he's back and I'm in love all over again and finally getting over it.  But that was before our visit today, and the book by Twenty Major.  And I'm back to where I imagine his wife must have been when she fell in love with him.

Mr. Llyrica.  I used to hate making up fake names, but that's all in the past.

Here's the clock time for about the moment I started reading out loud from "The Order of the Phoenix."

Nurse Grumpy had left us alone for 3 hours and we passed the time awkwardly as usual.  he kept turning the tv off, turning it on, turning the sound down and then turning it on when i said i can understand the game better with the sound.  soccer.  his favorite team from London was playing Barcelona.  Arsenal has been his team since he was a boy.

i have to drag this stuff out of him.  today i asked him if it is hard to make a sentence.  he said no but acknowledged that he doesn't talk as much.

now it is Monday morn.  my little phone keeps closing the internet down.  got a call from my old bf.  mad at his cab company boss, so i get to hear about him going to see Slayer, reading "The Prose Factory" and a book about Malcolm X and Mohmmed Ali.  He is calming down slowly he says.

these are all shots of the same chart for the moment i started reading Twenty Something over at Mr. Lyrica's yesterday.  it was sweet.  he was chuckling at the funny parts.  i am not entertaining company with Saturn progressed rising, so it was a real pleasure to stumble on this comic blogger turned book writer.

i really like that Pluto was in the house of fun when it happened.

i give up.  the cursor is like that silver ball with wings and a mind of its own in quidditch.  while it is cooperating it looks like i might be going with my husband to visit our son in Vineyard Haven.  i am waiting to hear back from him.  Friday was a big day.  Thurs night camping with Al Lyrica was sweet, then talking with his wife on Friday, then the call from my husband Fri night.  my hands were shaking pretty bad Thurs.  i do what i can to calm down and avoid more thyroid frying radioactive iodine pills.  one was enuff.

here tho now is the beginning tale of how i became sweet friends with an old friend.  every week since Feb we have goten together.  nurse grumpy slipped me 50 bucks yesterday.  she was happy when she left at 2 and all business when she returned at 5.  back to work, taking care of a man with a deadly craving to escape from what we can not know.  we are determined to keep him loved and among the living for now.  11:17am Mon and off to clean for a wonderful customer and her 90 year old mom "The Pistol."  she just wants to go up on the hill.  another soul we cling to because she is too beautiful to let go.

My Uranian Transit

it is really scary trusting my journal stuff to google.   i haven't written in my paper journal for weeks.  i sure hope this record does not get lost in the cloud.

i may be going with my husband to visit our 20 year old son in Massachussettes.  he is working on Martha's Vineyard for a company that builds and restores wooden sailboats.  in a phone call last week he told his dad we should come up to visit him and check the place out.  he has been there since this past November.  late november.  things came together for the job all of a sudden and he scrambled to get up there before it got winter awful cold.

when my husband said "us," about going up there i asked if he meant "me," as in just him.  i could not believe my son would want me up there.  but sure enough he had suggested we make the trip together.  we have been separated since my son was almost 9.  but we have made 1 day trip as a family- a few years ago, and it was very pleasant.

so i'm so excited i can't hold the tears back.  it will be a real gas to see the wonderful place our son talks about so much.  he brought a couple of local newspapers home for Christmas.  between his stories of work and island life in general it sounds like a very special place.

Uranus is now 19aries13.  my mercury is 20aries31.  a lot of stuff going on now is associated with mercury lining up with Sun near my natal Venus (28pisces).  i have been spending a lot of time with a friend recovering from a brain injury.  we have gotten together every one of the past 5 weeks.  we camped overnight at Jordan Lake Thurs night, the night before last.  i was hoping to see Opiuchus in darker skies, but cloud cover came in by 3am.  still Orion was pretty bright behind big moon light and we got the woods all to ourselves-there was not another camper in the 'primitive' New Hope Lookout section of the park.

i guess that's it for now.  just want these exciting events recorded for future reference.  The call with my husband was 7:12last night.  he called me a bit earlier and i called back as soon as i saw.  then i babbled for at least 20 minutes about my visits with our friend and the overnight campout, then came the great news.  we might be going in less than a week!

Knower and Knowable vs Same and Other

i put Venus on Far Side for the title of yesterday's post, but never explained why.  if you check the ephemeris you will see that venus was 30 behind the Sun Feb 8 and now it is less than 23 degrees behind.  That means it is circling around to the far side of the Sun from Earth.  In the chart, it won't pass the Sun till June 6/7.  When we see it passing the Sun in the chart that means it is full or lined up on the far side of the Sun with Earth.

one of my long term projects is memorizing the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.  i am on #40 of the first pada which is kind of like section or chapter.  i think they say pada means foot but i might not remember that correctly.  there are 4 padas.

this sutra #40 is one of the longer ones, about 10 words.  oops  i see it is sutra 41 not 40.  it goes like this:

 ksina (totally weakened)

vrtter (mental modifications)

     i think by mental modifications they mean something like thoughts

abhijatasyeva (naturally pure)

    i think abhija might mean without seed *

maner (crystal)
grahitr (knower)
grahana (knowable)
grahyesu (knowledge)
tatstha (similar)
tadanjanata (taking the color of)
samapatti (samadhi or balanced state)

i really don't get it but i believe i will.  what strikes me now is the similarity between this knower and knowable mediated by knowledge and the concept in Plato's Timeaus of the same the other and something that mediates the two.  i can't remember what it was.

this is an example of how Plato and Socrates seem like such spiritual guys to me.  i often see such similarities between their ideas and those outlined in the sutras.  even though they refer to Egypt (Plato and Socrates refer to Egyptian priests and their teaching a lot) i think they would agree that they learned a lot also from cultures even further east.

well i can't just dump that string of words without some explanation.  Here's the translation from the translation and commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda:

Just as the naturally pure crystal assumes shapes and colors of objects placed near it, so the Yogi's mind, with its totallly weakened modifications, becomes clear and balanced and attains the state devoid of differentiation between knower, knowable, and knowledge.  This culmination of meditation is samadhi.

My mind is like the mouth of a rodent with teeth always growing.  it has to ahve something to chew on at all times.  these yoga sutras are the perfect diet for such an appetite.

* I had bhija mixed up with bijam.  Bijam translates as seed.

Venus on Way to Far Side

I did't get up till first light today, 6am; so i missed finding more stars in Ophiuchus or Herculis, but i did take a new step in my viewings of Venus.

I've been watching Venus come up well south of east for the last couple weeks.  Ususally I hang around until Venus is completely invisible in the new light and look to see how much closer to east the orange ball floats up.  This morning i looked up the directions for 27Aquarius (location of Venus) and 20Pisces (location of Sun).  The Sun at 20Pisces rises only 4degrees south of east; Venus at 27Aquarius rises 15degrees south of east.  That difference of 11degrees looks dramatically bigger on the horizon.

I spent so much time viewing a virtual sky on a cramped   computer screen when i was using Stellarium.  the actual sky is so much bigger ....it is different also because you have to arch your head back, and then bend backwards to get a good look at the top of the 'vault.'  I guess the Hagia Sophia was like the Stellarium of precomputer days.  Course big community planetariums have domes too, but the horizon is still somewhat limited.

I wrote the above paragraphs before going to work this morn at 7:30.  Now i have been home for a few hours and had a little nap, taken care of the critters.  This is the first time in many months that I did not burn the devils feet and go in the clouds all day at the party house.  that makes it a very special day.

Ophiuchus the Phantom Healer

 I managed to get up at 4 this morning and take advantage of the moonless, cloudless predawn veiwing opportunity.  I'm trying to locate the stars in Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer.  They appear along the same 2 sidereal hours as Herculis (16-18) but Ophiuchus is around the level of the equator and Herculis is further north.  Both constellations are pretty faint.

I think i did spot eta, zeta and delta Ophiuchus in a line hovering above the current trio of Saturn,  Antares and Mars; but the rest of the constellation is as hard to spot as a shy ghost.

This is no problem-Ophiuchus will be rising earlier every night throughout spring and summer so there will be plenty of opportunities to map it out as it crosses the sky right after low lying Antares in the constellation Scorpio.

Once I get Opiuchus figured out i will have surveyed the complete, yearly parade of northern constellations with an understanding of how they fit in the ancient Greek scheme of naming.  The constellations along the ecliptic are zoological specimens.  the rest refer one way or another to a location above or below the glactic plane.

Ophiuchus is the hero at the gate to the underworld; we see it when we are facing the heart of the Milky Way and turning down to the bottom.  Orion stands where we face out of the galaxy and are turning toward the upper dome.  The myths are a lot more fun to me now that i see them as a system and can appreciate the wicked sense of humor behind the names and stories.

so if you notice Orion in the western sky at sunset during the next few weeks, maybe you will think about how we are turning to face the upper dome of the Milky Way, and maybe you will think about faint Ophiuchus high in the sky just before dawn's light peeks from east, and remember that we are heading back down to the galactic under world.

I got my first surprising event for my transit of Uranus conjunct my natal Mercury.  It came yesterday at about 12:50pm.  One of my customers, well i guess two since they are a husband and wife....they are moving to a retirement community.  At about 1:20pm i inherited a looonngg wall hanging called Mitternachtssonne by Emil Schulthess.  it is a series of 24 photos of the Sun rising and setting from the Island of Hekkingen, Norway about 70 degrees North latitude (within the arctic circle).

The lineup won't hit closest peak till April so there should be more surprises to come.  I am really enjoying my new wall hanging.  as i study it i remember back to the first time i cleaned their house many years ago.  they had a lot of interesting pieces of art that made me think i would enjoy working for them.  Some of the pieces were just fascinating and others were beautiful, and i have enjoyed being around them all throughout the years.  They won't be far away, but this is still a parting in the road for us.  it is wonderful to part company with people i have enjoyed coming to know over the last 20 or more years.  hopes are high for all of us as we look forward to our new paths.  well, the husband might be nervous but he's definitely signed up for this big move......hip hip huzzah for Uranus.   (at least for now)

Once Upon a Time

Yesterday was kind of a weird day. i expected some sort of challenge, but the urge to take offense and put up a righteous defense still took me by surprise.  I drove 30 minutes to Zebulon with a friend.  we were visiting Billy Odom, an old friend from the Thursday Night Open Poetry Reading days.  He has been confined to a wheelchair for some years and was recently moved to a new rehab facility.  I was denied permission to take him for a ride in the car with us because the legal guardian did not know me.

the chart at the end of this post shows Mars today in the 5th house less than 18 degrees behind Saturn in the 6th house.  (the image looks very fuzzy on my android.  i'll check it out at the library tomorrow and see if i can fix it.)

Mars is slowing down these days.  it will stop and turn retrograde  in March.  Then we'll go back over yesterday's troubles and get a chance to review them with even more insight than what was gained under the soft gravity of the Moon lined up with the planet of heroism and will.

Now the Moon is moving toward conjunction with Saturn.  The ancients would make a story about Psyche lining up with the corrupted Hero yesterday and then advancing to line up with the philosophicFather today.  we say Saturn, the father figure of our nuclear planetary family, is philosophical because he is in the sign Sagittarius this year and next.  Any planet located in the sign Sagittarius is seen from Earth just as the earthling looking heavenward is rising to the tippity top of earth mountian in their daily revolution on the tilted sphere.

every day whether the sun is shining or we are looking away into the night, if Saturn is on the midheaven we are shooting to the top like arrows in graceful arcs.  at this time of year we are able to see Saturn climb the night time sky in the 4 hours before the Sun in Pisces comes up and washes the discerning darkness away.  that means during this month we are completing our daily ascension just as the Sun rises.

Get a tilted globe.  put your finger on the town where you live.  standing above the globe rotate that point counter clockwise alllmost to the top.  Imagine the Sun shining from the side where your point is about to go down.  imagine little you seeing its first rays of the day just over the great bulge of the sphere that carries you on its back from before birth till after death.

imagine you speak greek and philosophy is a compound word meaning love of wisdom. that the word gnosis refers to the ability to read a marker, or gnomon.

imagine you are a child without inherited notions of what astrology is.  you have nothing but curiosity about the sky above you.

last night as i was sitting in the darkness reflecting on the difficulties of the day.... i had already been out to admire Auriga high in the northern sky and Orion and Canis Major to the south. i knew by these markers inherited from before the time of Plato, that Raleigh was turning up toward the Olympian dome of the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way stretched from Auriga west of the pole star all the way across the top of the sky to Canis Major east of south; because earth's north pole points just 27 degrees above the plane of the galaxy.  i wasn't thinking about that though.  wasn't thinking about what i knew.  gnew...i had turned off the lamp and was sitting in the darkness breathing and thinking of that breath....which they called psyche....the greeks did, once upon a time.

and i heard the voices of the two neighbor boys approaching with their mother.  she was telling them i might be in bed.  i turned on the lamp, got up from the couch and went to the door. the wooden door was open.  i opened the storm door made of glass.  "pasale!"  (come in!)

"oh we thought you were asleep said my friend, in spanish.

I was meditating!

the younger boy hopped onto the couch with his legs crossed and each hand resting on its given knee "like this?!"

i gnew he would do that.  i was ready for him.

no i can't do it like you do.  i was just sitting straight with my eyes closed.

they had seen something in the sky.  "show me" i said and we ran across the street to the parking lot of the neighborhood park.  but it was gone.  some kind of line in the sky.  "maybe it was from an airplane"

i pointed to the belt of Orion "see those 3 stars?"   Yes yes they did!  that's the belt of Orion.

I remember Orion from on the compter.  said the older boy.

"and that  star is Sirius and that faint trinagle down there is the rest of......"

the older boy was following the dots and the younger one was facing east and jumping up and down and dancing around "what do you see?"

I don't remember what he called it, there were also lights from two planes.  "that one is Jupiter!"  ohh.  they love Jupiter.  i do too.  who doesn't?

let's go in and find Orion and Sirius on the star map.  yes!!  we went inside, looked at the star atlas, filled out forms for an upcoming field trip and the mom and i visited.  it was almost time to go.  the older boy pointed to Procyon hanging half way between floor and ceiling on the western wall.  "which star is that?"  and we went back outside to see the little dog just east of the big one while the younger brother played with Lego's.

today as the Moon advances from Mars to Saturn

link to better image (i hope!)
-the Warrior is slowly moving toward the meeting a soldier must have every couple of years with its high ranking officer-today as the Moon goes from the soldier to the limit setter, the philosophical general/father......i am pondering yesterday's difficult confrontations with offensive realities.  i am facing the things i can't change, because they are results of past revolutions on this tilted sphere, and also recalling signs of progress generated by that same cosmic motion.

if i remember correctly Plato called Psyche the nurse of becoming.  We associate the Moon with Psyche because it is the nurse of Earth, ensuring that water is always moving, massaging the planet gently, as it lines up with one planet after another in the solar system, keeping Earth apprised of the changing relationships.

so yesterday the Nurse of Becoming reminded us of the upcoming meeting between the evolving hero and the evolving father.  they are both in all of us.

From the Philosopher's Pen

I love each of my customers for a different reason.  the one i clean today is every other week.  he lives alone, keeps a very clean, comfortable, well maintained house and his door is ever open to visitors from near or far with all the good food, music and drink any one could care to enjoy.

in this house i am always alone, except for the days when my friend comes straight home from work and i am still there after 8 hours.  it is only a 5 hour house, but i take 3 hours to enjoy his space in solitude.  today i picked up my favorite book of hnis and read this from the very beginnig:

"in the preceding books i have laid down the principles of philosophy; principles not philosophical but mathematical: such, namely, as we may build our reasonings upon in philosophical inquiries.  These principles are the laws and conditions of certain motions, and powers or forces, which chiefly have respect to philosophy; but lest they should have appeared of themselves dry and barren, i have illustrated them here and there with some philosophical scholiums, giving an account of such things as are of more general nature, and which philosophy seems chiefly founded on; such as the density and the resisitance of bodies, spaces void of all bodies, and the motion of light and sounds.  it remains that, from the same principles, i now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

from the first paragraph of Book Three  The System of the World(in mathematical treatment)  Newton's "Principia"

actually i opened to a random page in the middle where he was describing the path and other characteristics of Halley's comet.  that got me stoked and i went to the beginning.  the part about optics is a bit more tedious with all the diagrams.

any way thanks to my customer.  he knows who he is.

The Action of the Dragon

In November the muted Moon will turn from the bottom of the valley of diminished amplitude and begin its 9 year return to maximum.  Most of us are familiar with the North and South lunar nodes as indicators of where a luni/solar eclipse can occur, but another very fascinating quality of the Moon’s motions is indicated in the signs of the lunar nodes.  The South node is always opposite the North so I will just talk about the latter. 

When the North node, also known as the dragon’s head, is in the sign Libra, as it is now, we see the Moon well below the high ecliptic in Cancer and well above it in Capricorn.  At the bottom of this post the first Stellarium screenshot shows the Moon in Cancer for this month below the ecliptic.  You can confirm that it is above the low ecliptic in Capricorn 2 weeks before or after by downloading Stellarium and clicking through the days.

When we say the dragon’s head, or North Node is in Libra we mean the Moon crosses above the ecliptic in Libra.  Wherever the dragon’s head is located tells us where the Moon crosses above the ecliptic every month.  The wild thing is that 'spot,' marked with a little squiggly thing to indicate the dragon's head in charts, inches backward around the zodiac every 18 years.  This cyclic motion that appears against the familiar forward motion of the Moon and Sun is called precession.  There’s a good meditation right there for those who are inclined to go beyond the cookbook predictive recipes.  A good place to begin might be imagining a thread in a story that always plays through all the successive events in reverse.  How does that information gathered from the past inform the way we approach oncoming events?  

Aside from measuring events against this slipping cycle, another analogy could be imagining a character’s view of a parade if they run along the street toward the marchers approaching them.  The interesting thing is that as the dragon’s head backs from Libra to Aries and the Moon crosses above the ecliptic in Virgo (11-10th sidereal hours), then Leo (9-8^th), we see it start to climb up toward the level of the ecliptic as it passes every month through the Cancer high point.  

This is another one of those concepts that is incredibly simple but very difficult to conceive in our earth bound minds.  We have become so used to using clocks to measure time that we have lost the ability to imagine ourselves on a planet with a Moon that traces a beautiful path above and below our ecliptic.  I won’t go further into this here.  I do invite you to investigate further and allow yourself the pleasure of knowing the the amazing ins and outs and ups and downs of the Moon.  

One of the best resources for understanding the Moon’s cycle is the NOAA.  They have some great drawings to help picture the motions of the Moon with Earth and how they change over time.  Understanding Tides and the Motion of the Moon

Finding Out if Earth was Lined up with Sun and Galactic North Pole Oct 6 (2015)

This screenshot is for Oct 6, 2015 and I think it shows the Earth lined up with the Sun and the Galactic North Pole.  

Here is a link to one of the images that led me to this point.  The image is by Brian Fenerty near the bottom of the page linked here.  It shows the Earth going down and up around the Sun in the Milky Way.

And here is a wider view of the sky from the same time and place as the one above.