Blog
As I write these words, I am sitting in a hotel in Beijing, China. I am about to teach the second day in the first of a pair of seminars I am offering here. I’ve got about forty students. Many are now friends and familiar faces from my previous visits to this country. When I was a kid, I thought China was another planet. Times change: The concerns of my students here are not so different from those of people in my classes in America, or anywhere. And maybe I am not so different from them either: For one thing, I ate breakfast with chopsticks this morning! I did that while reading about the US government shutdown on my Android smart phone.
When I was a kid, if I had seen a picture of my future self holding a smart phone, I would have thought Star Trek had come true. To say I am living a life that my grandparents could not have imagined understates it. I am living a life that I myself could not have imagined not so long ago. And nowadays “not so long ago” might as well mean the Late Jurassic. That’s true for me, and also for my Chinese friends and students.
On Saturday, February 1, I am going to do something I had pretty much decided that I would never do—a Webinar. I will be talking intimately to my laptop computer. I will cling to the belief that somewhere out there in the vague world of electrons, ones, and zeros there are some actual human beings who are listening, watching, and hopefully getting something out of the whole enterprise.
I will also moan to myself about the absence of what I have always found to be critical elements in my teaching: eye contact, body language, and that whole critical, vague, rich territory we call “vibes.”
While I am doing all that, transiting Saturn will be standing just one-quarter of a degree from my Ascendant.
by Steven Forrest
Venus turned retrograde on December 21st, right on the Winter Solstice. Those two pregnant moments coinciding is a rare event and it tells me that we should pay a lot of attention to the strong Venusian signature on the coming year.
On January 11, that retrograde Venus conjuncts the Sun at 21°12' of Capricorn. It remains retrograde for the usual forty-day period, finally turning direct on the last day of January at 13°33' Capricorn.
The Sun-Venus alignment on the 11th is called an “inferior conjunction.” Despite the term, there’s nothing wrong with it! “Inferior” here only means that Venus is directly between the Earth and the Sun. On the other side of its orbit, Venus again aligns with the Sun, but this time with the Sun between us and Venus.
September opens straightforwardly with Venus in Libra and Mercury in Virgo. Each planet is in the sign it naturally rules, in other words. And that symmetry can be a bit bland, like a beige rug in a beige room. But then things get a lot more interesting. On the 9th, Mercury crosses into Libra where it resides for the bulk of the month, until finally entering Scorpio on the 29th. Two days after Mercury slips into Libra, Venus leaves it, crossing the border into the classic sign of its “detriment,” Scorpio, where it remains until the end of the first week of October.
It is this period from September 11th onward, with Venus in Scorpio and Mercury in Libra, that I'm interested in. Harnessed in an evolutionary way, this planetary combination can trigger conscious deepening, support both truth-telling and truth-hearing, and foster the resolution of tough, longstanding intimate conflicts. Experienced unconsciously, it can read like the script of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. People can tear each other apart in the name of love, in other words.
MERCURY
“When the pickpocket meets the saint, he sees pockets.”
Orbital Period: 88 days
Synodic Period: Approximately 116 days (115.87754 days)
Archetypes: Teacher; Student. Writer; Reader. Storyteller.
Rules: Gemini and Virgo
Core Concept: The reception and transmission of data between a person and the surrounding social, physical, metaphysical, and psychic environments.
Developmental Focus: Evolving perception. Evolving thought. Evolving speech.
Positive Subjective Response: Curiosity, wonder, open-mindedness. Alertness. Comfortable self-expression; good listening.
Negative Subjective Response: Mental rigidity, intellectual defensiveness; compulsive speech, running around in circles.
Existential Emphasis Under Transits, Progressions, or Arcs: New information; omens and synchronicities; key conversations; speedy, chaotic developments; education in any sense; physical motion. Contact with young people or siblings.
