Beth Owl’s Daughter has tagged me with a meme, which is always an interesting diversion, so here goes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book to me is Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements by Stephen Arroyo, which I recently purchased through Amazon because I couldn’t find my ancient copy. This is one of the early books I read that sent me down the path to a more transformational metholody in astrology readings, and I recommend it to everyone at every level. An understanding of the elements and the way that channel energy through the personality is invaluable!

At the top of page 123 is a section titled “Over-Emphasis on Air and Fire, Lack of Water and Earth”:

This type at best represents an idealistic, aspiring, positive-thinking person whose intentions and motives are above reproach. Their approach to life is not particularly realistic, however, and they often find that they must learn about the darker side of life through hard experience and disillusionment. They often neglect the very needs and feelings which can give them more stability and inner strength.

Coincidentally, this book is available in the bookstore to in the left sidebar!! Now, it’s your turn: Neith, Jill, DR, JM, and Melody.

Yesterday I had the privilege of doing a reading for a woman who recently turned 80 and was going through the closing square of her third Saturn cycle. I began doing readings shortly after my first Saturn return at around age 32, and it took me a long time to realize that as we grow older we often learn to manage the issues in our chart so that they are no longer as difficult. In fact, the challenges that formerly caused us pain and suffering often become our greatest teachers.

The beauty of reading for older clients is that they often have experienced this evolution to a degree the rest of us can only dream about. If they haven’t become stuck in a cycle of dysfunction, they have learned to move through all kinds of cycles and find their center. I spoke with the client yesterday about the Saturn Return cycles, and we talked about her upcoming third Saturn Return which will arrive around age 87.

The first Saturn Return at age 28-30, as we know, deals with experiences where we leave our youth behind and enter adulthood, either willingly or kicking and screaming. The second Saturn Return is more difficult to predict since the result depends quite a bit on how well we have learned Saturn’s lessons since the first one. Regardless, during the second Saturn Return at age 56-58 we must leave our ripeness behind; we often discover that we are being replaced by the younger generation. We have lost our youth and are entering the third stage of life. We are middle-aged.

To answer my client’s question: “What can I expect at the third Saturn Return?” I pondered the meaning of Saturn at the age of 87, and it seems that one of the major experiences of life at that age is the gradual detaching from the physical world and turning to face the abyss. Saturn is, after all, the god of Time (especially in its role as Kronos) and its lesson is that time is short and life is fleeting. Saturn has been called the Lord of Karma, and by the age of 87 we have been through quite a bit.

The possibility of a third Saturn Return is a rather new phenomenon, since until the last century the second Saturn Return would have come close to the end of one’s life. It’s probably just the fact that Saturn sits right on my Sun, I have grown to see him as a friend rather than a foe, and also as life’s greatest teacher. I am grateful to this client for giving me a beautiful picture of what life can be like as we enter that fourth cycle!!

One of the things I believe we’ll be facing over the next few years as Pluto travels through Capricorn is the erosion of the structures that support our human lives on the planet. Bridges, tunnels, buildings – all are ruled by Capricorn and subject to transformation while in Pluto’s domain.

Governors meeting the other day with President Bush pushed for him to include funding for various infrastructure repair projects for their states, which were turned down by the President. Bush said that he would rather wait to see the results of his stimulus package, which consists mostly of tax cuts, rather than fund infrastructure projects which would put Americans back to work.

The American Society for Civil Engineers estimates that $1.6 trillion dollars is needed to restore the aging and unsafe infrastructure in the United States. The areas that need rebuilding include toxic waste sites, sewage treatment systems, dams, water treatment facilities as well as roadways.

Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation at the US Chamber of Commerce, stated last year:

America’s infrastructure is not only showing its age, but showing that it lacks capacity to handle the volume of people and goods moving today. From exploding steam pipes under New York streets, to record level flight delays in the skies across the country, it is evident that now is the time to move on a robust, thoughtful, and comprehensive plan to build, maintain, and fund a world-class 21st century infrastructure. There can be no more delay.

Washington’s Governor Grigoire said, “”In order for us to be able to avoid a Minnesota situation across America, we need a dramatic infusion of federal dollars throughout this country to rebuild our basic infrastructure.” The Canadian government added $2 billion a year into that country’s budget to repair their infrastructure, and the Indian government has funded infrastructure projects as well.

The billions of dollars we are pouring into the war in Iraq in a vain attempt to rebuild the infrastructure there before it is torn down again is robbing us from the opportunity to rebuild our own country. There’s nothing like a good swipe of Pluto through Capricorn to collapse a few dams and power grids to demonstrate where our priorities should lie.

Dharmaruci evidently hasn’t been swept away by Obamania as I have, so his post on Obama as “The Medicine Man” is a clearer-headed one than any you will find in this column:

The man creates a very strong impression on people. One of the strengths of astrology is that it can stand outside of strong impressions and look at the chart as an entity in itself, and reflect that back to the person. Whatever time he was born, he has Sun in Leo square to Neptune. And in the 1.06 chart (and for much of the day) he has Moon square to Pluto, and I want to run with this. This is HOT. The 2 most powerfully transformative planets – Pluto and Neptune – in challenging relationships with the 2 planets most central to the personality, the Sun and Moon.

He’s working at a heat that most of us could not withstand. Squares are very challenging and very creative, if you can handle them. And has the 2 most challenging squares of all. What you need to get them right is to have a healthy and steady Sun and Moon, to be aware of yourself, so that you can then be a channel for something bigger that has its own purposes. Obama is a channel, the squares give a strong dynamism and responsiveness in relation to the collective needs and desires of the USA. People sense this very strongly: here is someone deeply tuned into the collective.

The most powerful leaders will tend to have this. Hitler, for example, had the Pluto-Neptune conjunction of his time unaspected in his chart, in his case making him an undiscriminating channel for the desires of the collective: the lack of aspects meant this ability was out of control, and the darker desires of the German people had just as much say as the more creative desires.

So Obama also has this ability, he is a medium, a medicine man. He can be a focus for all the currents within the American nation, and in his case, because of the connection to his Sun and Moon, he can discriminate: something in him will tell him how to move all this forward, what steps to take that can unify and heal and move forward the nation AS A WHOLE. He is not just a Democrat: the outer planets address the entire collective that you are part of.

So I think that as he is at the moment, he can be trusted. Even though he lacks governmental experience, the outer planets will tell him what to do. But all the same, psychologically it is a knife edge that he walks on, it is a tightrope on which he is currently very sure-footed. More than most, he needs to keep his integrity, because the forces working through him are so strong. After say 6 years in Washington, how will he be faring? Because he is also an ordinary human being.

I love this take on Obama.

I will add my caveat, though that the 1:06 pm birthtime that DR uses has not been verified; it comes as a rumor from Frances McEvoy who has since died and cannot verify it, and the chart with this birthtime gives Obama a Scorpio ascendant. Because the ascendant is the part of the chart that we as viewers see, it is the easiest piece of the chart to guess. A Scorpio rising person is typically intense with a tendency towards being secretive and more concerned with amassing personal power than collaborating with others. And you will never see a Scorpio rising person with a smile plastered on their face like Obama has 99% of the time.

I’m working on a comprehensive post on Obama for my website that will put together some of the posts I’ve written here and incorporate some biographical data, but ALL of the anecdotal history of Obama’s career highlights his ability to reach across various viewpoints to build consensus. This seems quite obvious to me to be a Libra rising characteristic, which would mean a birth time around 11:30 am. This chart (which I can’t upload right now due to computer problems but will try to do soon) has a 10th house Sun which makes a lot of sense for Obama’s intense political aspirations, and an exact conjunction of the Sun to the Part of Fortune. But without any certainty of the birthtime, any discussion of houses is speculative.

update 2/26/08 at 7:00 am: Comments to this post suggest that my statement about Scorpio rising people not being big smilers is erroneous. I should point out that Obama, as a Leo, would have a great sense of humor and the opposition from Jupiter to his Sun, which bestows a great deal of confidence on him, also widens his sense of humor. Typically Scorpio rising also suggests someone who tends towards secrecy, and Obama is wide open with his personal life (some say a little too open). Unless Obama provides us with his birthtime, and til now he has not responded to queries, we may never know.

Here is a questionnaire from a sincere questioner who would like to determine whether astrology has any validity, but their only knowledge of astrology is from the “astrology” columns on the comics page. The only problem is – sun sign astrology will not hold up under any kind of scrutiny, much less something this well thought out. So we’ll end up with yet another curious seeker who never takes that next step to discover the real magic of astrology.

Some of you have written in support of “horoscopes,” telling me that they lead people on a quest for further knowledge and perhaps that is true. But wouldn’t it be better if the sun sign columns included an introductory paragraph explaining that the sun sign is only one part of a larger whole that includes a much more complicated picture? Perhaps then the true seekers would be stimulated to learn more rather than become disillusioned with the entire craft.

The other day I was talking to a few black gentlemen in their 60s about the possibility of a black president, and one of them said, “Yeah, but how long will he live?” For many years I heard from my black friends this kind of conspiracy thinking and it didn’t mean much to me until I began really studying the Kennedy assassination. Then I started to think maybe there was something to the rumors of the government flooding the ghettos with crack cocaine and other such rumors.

So it chilled me to the bone to read this article today:

Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department’s homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order — apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service — was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena’s vacant seats before Obama came on.

“Sure,” said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a “friendly crowd.”

The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment.

Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.

As a people, we need to remain alert and aware when this kind of thing takes place and ask the hard questions. Friendly crowd or no, it’s bizarre that the police would suddenly be ordered to stop the weapons checking. Maybe it wasn’t the secret service – there are all kinds of white nationalist groups that wouldn’t want a black president. Still, there is something here to keep an eye on.
(updated 12:20 pm)

quote is from Margaret Mead

There’s no doubt that we are seeing a shift on the world stage along with the shift of Pluto into Capricorn last month. It seems that people all over the world are thirsting for change – to break down (Pluto) the old establishments (Capricorn) and rebuild something better.

• Fidel Castro has stepped down as dictator of Cuba after 50 years of rule.
• Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia, deepening the rift between the West (led by Russia) and the East (led by the US) as nations take sides.
• Pakistan elections ousted Musharraf’s cronies and installed new Parliament members that will change the balance of power in that country.
• In the US, a call for change by Barack Obama is sweeping the nation.

It makes sense with Pluto in Capricorn that the desire here is for change simply for the sake of change. Capricorn builds the structures that society depends on: schools, governments, marriage, housing. Pluto seeks to transform those structures, and this hunger for change at this time is not very well directed. This is frightening to those who are entrenched in those structures that are about to change because with Pluto there is no way to control the rising tide. Change happens – the tornado lifts the house and you don’t know until the storm is over where the house will land.

In my work I have seen that Pluto acts as the “will of the higher self.” When we are in a Pluto transit, our higher self takes over and shows the way. We can’t control what is happening, but like the tornado experience we must simply let go and create an intention that the result be for our highest good.

In 1995, when Pluto entered Sagittarius, there was another burst of fervor for change as the Republicans took over both houses of Congress in the US for the first time in 40 years, causing a transformation (Pluto) in ideology (Sagittarius) that continued until the last throes of Pluto in Sag last year. The fledgling European Union had its first elections and expanded its influence, beginning the globalization (Sagittarius) process that continued for the next 12 years of Pluto in Sag.

Change is coming, and all we can do is watch and keep our intention strong and focused.