First Post!

Hi. I'm an astrologer-in-training, and a writer-by-necessity. So, I thought I'd make a blog, in hopes of getting my life somewhat on track. I hope this will provide me with enough excitement to keep from wasting my time on other games. If you read my other blog at http://anotherunprofessional.blogspot.com, you'll see that I have an addictive personality when it comes to electrical systems to route myself through. I'd rather be an astrology addict than a gaming addict, so here we go.

My goal for this blog is to wake up around 6 AM my time (Mountain Time Zone) each day, make a cup of tea, write for about half an hour to an hour about the chart of the day as it relates to the collective uncharted feelings like water in the air, the shared baseline that affects us all unconsciously, and then to go about my daily grind.

The axiom for this blog - that there is a shared baseline that affects everyone - shouldn't be too literalized. First of all, it affects everyone differently, so of course the same baseline might be experienced by one individual as unprecedented blockages and difficulties, while it may help another feel freed and liberated. For some, endlessness helps to make sense of the world, while for others it feels gross, like being submerged in molasses or stuck outside a spaceship without a helmet. We all use different personal-energetic tools to make our ways through the world.

Secondly, astrology takes place at least one step removed from the world of actual phenomena that make up the concrete stories in our lives. This emotional baseline is sort of like fate, in that it can feel like the ocean which tosses us around. But ultimately, the story we make of our lives involves how we tack the sails, where we steer the ship, and, of course, what we're trying to accomplish out on the ocean. But still, it's nice to know how the ocean is going to move in order to help us out with our own story-making.

This is one reason why the snippets in the newspaper aren't that great. For instance, "Scorpio: Today will be a difficult day for your love life." There are a million and a half ways that my love life could be difficult. That doesn't give me any useful information about the ocean. At best it's written by someone who just picks statements out of a hat, and at worst it's all about manipulating people into hyper-emotional highs and lows and associating those highs and lows with the horoscope, which is all about fostering addiction.

This is also a criticism I have of new-age groups in general, and of the way astrology often gets practiced in circles dedicated to furthering Love and Light above all things. If the idealized telos is perfect happiness and if the only measure of success is how close to or far from perfect happiness one is, then divinatory methods are primarily used to judge oneself on this singular continuum, and they thus become addictive.

Interestingly, in most astrological methods, blue and red aspects (trines, sextiles, oppositions and squares) are the only important ones. This is indicative of the is-it-good/is-it-bad addictive dichotomy. Blue (representing stability, enjoyment) is seen as good and red (representing challenge, energy) is seen as bad. In the system I use, the traditionally "green" aspects (semisextile, quincunx) are elevated to the same level of importance as the blue and red. These aspects are all about searching, seeking, and understanding, and their inclusion provides an important break from emotional highs and lows that can feel obsessively overwhelming.

As a culture, we want everything to be commodified, to be literalized. If we can't understand it immediately, it must not be important. If we can't use it as a commodity to cause an instantaneous shift in knowledge/fortune/happiness, then it is, at best, "confusing." Green aspects are confusing by nature, because you have to be confused before you can learn anything.

So, this is more of a writing/translation exercise than anything else. I've studied astrology, had tons of conversations, written many papers, and now I want to see if I can create a daily relationship to the craft. Secondarily, I am very curious to see how it works a divinatory exercise. I'm a little skeptical of astrology still, even though I've sunk so many years into its study. Its worth as a language depends entirely on the understanding of its speaker, so hopefully this blog won't show me off to be totally ignorant! And hopefully I'll learn something along the way.

Perhaps...this just occurred to me. Perhaps I'll write two entries per day. One at 6 AM to predict the day, and one at 6 PM to reverse the day. Okay, yes. That is what I will do.