Taurus 4°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I have to start work on our Gemini themed show for this coming Sunday, which is actually a bit early—shows are typically the third Sunday of the month but as May started on a Sunday the third one is the fifteenth, when we are still in Taurus for another five or so days. That said, these shows really are hinged on the transition from one sign to another.

Aries was the premier masculine, objective, active sign, ruled by Mars, the planet named for the uber macho war god whose sigil, the spear and shield, also recalls the male genatalia, arrow emerging from circle. It’s motto is the self evident I am. Then we had Taurus, the premier feminine, subjective, passive sign ruled by Venus, the planet named for the uber femme goddess of love whose sigil, which can be red as a flower with petals or a hand mirror, also recalls the circular womb led to by a canal crossed with a hymen. The Taurus motto is the possessive “I have”. Aries, cardinal fire, is creation, the big bang the spark of life, Taurus is, fixed earth, the garden, Eden, which led to certain temptation.

Gemini, the third and a mutable sign, is a combination of these opposite signs that come before, the magical child, the literal offspring of male and female, the fertilized egg. Picking up from the Taurus flower, Gemini is the winged birds and bees, mutable air, buzzing about, picking up bits and pieces, cross-pollenating the planet with information. A combination of masculine and feminine forces, ruled by planet Mercury, named for the aptly winged god of communication, Greek Hermes from whom we derive the word Hermaphrodite, in that god’s coupling with the goddess of love. Mercury’s sigil, depicts winged capped head of Mercury on a cross, thoughts having wings, while it also recalls a an insect with antennaes attuned to both sending and receiving messages—active and passive; objective and subjective—at once. Gemini’s motto is I Think. Mercury is the mentally manipulative messenger god of communication and all such related words as community and committees, specifically the immediate sort. Immediacy being a commodity of both time and space—Mercury is, well, mercurial and can be nearly everywhere at once, in an instant—he is also the god of immediate surroundings, of brotherhoods, guilds, bands, the market place, the word merchant deriving from his name.

Robin Hood, named for a bird, flitting from tree to tree, and his merry men, is a legendary incarnation of Mercury; as is Robin Goodfellow, Shakespeare’s Puck, the messenger of King Oberon, as Mercury/Hermes is the messenger of Zeus/Jupiter. Peter Pan and his island of lost boys—boon companions. Jack Sparrow, Batman’s Robin, on and on we see this boyish character echoed through our consciousness.

In biblical terms, where as Aries is Genesis and Taurus is the garden of Eden, Gemini is the gift-curse of consciousness as resulted from biting into that forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil—duality!—the twins of Gemini. Good bad, clothed naked, mortal immortal. In biting into that apple we at once were elevated to god consciousness and yet fell from grace being doomed to live a mortal existence. I say why put a tree of forbidden fruit in the first place unless you want we mere humans to trip, stumble and fall from this grace. I’m just saying. It’s like the most obvious foreshadowing.

The Gemini of which we speak of course are the classic Greek Twins Castor and Pollux, one mortal the other divine, of course, same themology as the Judeo-Christian story. And more bird imagery, flight being symbolic of the immortal aspect of our nature, our soul forever taking flight. For you see these so-called twins, who weren’t actually twins with each other at all, were born, hatched from two separate fertilized eggs their mother Leda laid, after she was laid by Zeus in the guise of a swan. They each had twin sisters that hatched along with them however, Clytemnestra and Helen, ultimately, of Troy fame.

Castor and Clytemnestra were mortal and Pollux and Helen were immortal, one egg being fertilized by Leda’s mortal husband, the other by divine Zeus. Okay pin in that.

Myth. Greek myth. Bible myth. It’s all allegory. It’s all archetype. The stories being told are being told right here within us. And the Zodiac brings those stories down to us. The Zodiac, with its myriad mythic associations per sign, point to realities that live within all of us.

It’s not foremost about what Sun sign you are—you’re a Pisces, I’m a Libra—that’s the nitty gritty that we can get into with you on a personal level, but first, there is something, more sweeping, but most essential, about which the Zodiac teaches us about everybody—the underlying truths of all human existence, collective and individual.

Aries and the first house teaches us all, and this is each of us speaking, that: I am a spiritual warrior (for what is up to you); Taurus teaches us that: I have a garden of delights—talents, abilities, innate qualities (which we all have to cultivate); and Gemini teaches us that: I think a full range of thoughts, from the divine to the earthly to, potentially, something lower still, and that my ability to think is my divine power and/or potentially my diabolical undoing. Mercury’s winged cap shows that my thoughts, as an expression of my soul, have wings; but that these can also be devilish horns that can lead to our downfall, if not our damnation.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 3°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Oh wait, my intention in the previous Blague was to talk a bit about Kiki & Herb, whom we saw perform at Joe’s Pub on Friday. Now, there is a sort of embargo on talking about the show in social media and so forth but since three people are reading this I think it’s safe to say: we’re fine. Meanwhile I don’t plan on giving much, if anything away; other than the fact that I was so happy this show was what it was. I was a bit concerned about nostalgia—not so much the performers as my own—for a time when Kiki & Herb first hit the scene in New York, in the 90s, Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman arriving from San Francisco nearly a decade after we hit New York, and their being so very much older than we are.

That was a joke. Kenny is younger than we are and Justin Vivian and we are born the same year (v is still older though). Point is there was no nostalgia but for little lacings, enough to inspire knowing glances regarding bygone times; but mainly the act moved forward despite their eight year hiatus, the instigation of which I remember clear as day. In this new incarnation of K&H we have performers who, Time being what it is, look closer to the age of the characters, so while the visual joke of drawn lines on faces and depression-era antics still read, the marching on of that T-word does make a poignant play across the mind of a die-hard K&H fan.

So much has happened in Justin Vivian’s life in the past eight years—I don’t know much about Kenny’s trajectory (mainly because there was a time when being friendly with the H would have, and did, inspire the casual threat of wrath from the K. And to be fair, Justin Vivian is one of my dearest friends on the planet whilst I never really knew Kenny all that well. I do think that is mainly my fault and, well, it’s not really a point I want to hit that hard. I love them both. And Justin Vivian is unparalleled as an artist as well as a person of character; the very human moments we’ve shared as friends, though often smacking of the relationship between Margo and Karen in all about Eve, nonetheless only endears me to JV all the more.

But I was talking about v’s life experience and wanted to point out how she has litereally characterizes changes in v’s only life into fictional personages you don’t see, of course, but hear tell of. Such that, through the lens of Kiki, the octagenarian showgirl, we see various aspects of self, personified, as historical figures, friends and lovers and even grandchildren. It’s pretty brilliant. And the satire has become even more loosely warped over the years. The entire first bit of the show is a kitchen sink account of where K&H have been over the last near-decade. That bit of the show is all over the map in the truest and most brilliant sense of the word.

Anyway, I would suggest your’e going to see it but you can’t it’s sold out.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 2°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

So I’ve done the math and I have to write at least two Blagues a day for the next nine days in order to catch up. Fine. It’s my penance—for what I’m not sure—but being the middle class un-entitled under/over-achiever that I am, I simply assume punishment in any form.

I made a list of topics I could tackle but of course I’m not looking at them. Today is a beautiful Spring day and, not one to ever complain about the weather, I kind of like the fact we’ve had a chilly spring. The tulips and blossoms are still out and about in Boston, whereas in NYC they’ve been replaced by solid shades of green, for the most part. We were just in town to see Kiki & Herb. I saw town because I’m still a New Yorker in so many ways; and I’m so grateful I get to spend a good week a month there, for the most part. However I must say I’m also very pleased to make a, sometimes, hasty retreat, once the magic has worn off, back to our beloved Boston, which is very much its own city and yet a sort of bedroom community for us. After being in NYC, even for just a few days, returning to Boston seems like going to the country. I can stroll down the long avenues of the Back Bay for hours (or, if Stella is with me, she will tell me how many “steps” my stroll has translated to) without seeing or passing more than a relatively few other individuals, all of whom seem to have low blood pressure and a very open schedule.

New York on the other hand has become such a tourist city filled with people who walk out of buildings or stop in the middle of sidewalks or at street corners looking up, and not in an optimistic way because one suspects their posture is a recipe for getting hit by a bus. But New York has one thing over every other city and that is Synchronicity.

Things always “happen” to us there. We arrived at a hotel we found on hotels-tonight or whatever it’s called—I don’t arrange these things—not because I have a dutiful personal assistant mind you but because I have no technical acumen. I’m not even sure I have any apps on my phone. Anyway, we headed to the Dover Street Market named for the Dover Street Market in London which is actually on Dover Street. In NYC, it’s on 30th and Lex.

We entered and beelined to the Rose’s Bakery for coffee and polenta cake and our server, an adorable redhead with street-performing body language, came to take our order. There was a moment of recognition. “Are you Starsky + Cox?” You know the answer to that. And it turns out she’s this actress and aspiring astrologist who has been talking to our assistant expressing her want to meet us; meanwhile Stella has been watching her performance videos with interest and thinks she’s a great talent. Her name is Ruby. Which I thought funny because I was deep in thought and work, typing away as I am now, on the Limo Liner en route to NYC, and only really looked up once to see a sign and it said Ruby Road. Now I was listening to the Beatles and thought that was its own synchronicity, confusing in my pea brain lovely Rita with Ruby Tuesday. But never mind. Here was our first synch.

We strolled downtown. I had just shown Stella this picture I took in France of a grafitti which said L’Amour Est Un Art Martial” which means Love is a Martial Art, which I think is a great thought, and especially as a grafitti. As a resident of the planet that orbits between Venus and Mars, representing love and war respectively, I am, as should we all be, profoundly aware how one is a metaphor for the other and, I like the way this sentiment connected the two—martial art indeed. So, downtown, with ten minutes to kill before our dinner reservation, we popped into yet another new New York incarnation of a favorite shop found elsewhere, Resurrection, the vintage clothing store.

As you enter there is a large bookshelf with big art books. Within seconds a giant book jumped off the shelf and landed with a loud slap-thud. The freaked out sales girl was like this has never happened. The title of the book being some riff on Bowie’s Life On Mars. Fine. Book gets replaced. Half a minute later. It flies, not falls, off again. Whack-wham. And now other salespeople, who helped put the book up there, are all scratching their heads dumbfounded. Of course, we were a wee bit less surprised, explaining that we are familiar with planetary themes, and so forth, and stranger things have happened. But, as Cindy Adams says (once said…is she still alive?): “Only in New York Folks” does energy work in so specific, dramatic and synchronic a fashion. Then it turns on you quickly and you’ve got to get the fuck out of there.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

I stumbled upon this I wrote about the Cosmic Blague idea three years ago:

Taurus 1°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Revelation tends to be funny. Our ah-ha moments are typically also ha-ha ones. What makes up our lives? Actions, sensation, situation, perception, feeling, intuition, wisdom, evolution, synchronicity, enlightenment, possible ascension? Have we missed anything?

Like you, we have been many things. This has resulted in clumps of accumulated story. Think of your funniest stories. Do they not also carry some revelation? Typically, so.

Then there’s new experience. Oy. That stuff keeps happening. You can’t get ahead of it. Being blessed (from the French blesser: to wound) with a sense of humor, we employ it in our experience, even our self-realization, such that our own enlightenment is, at the very least, amusing.

Our notion of Entertaining Enlightenment, a phrase from which you can infer more than double meaning has always extended to the perception of life as one big, long blague cosmique (cosmic joke). The All isn’t a jester but an expert comedic artist. Existence isn’t metaphysical mayhem, it’s a carefully crafted monologue, what we call life.

The trick is writing yourself into the story, riding it like a wave, surfing being a skill not unlike finding the humor in it All. And seeing that, it’s the funniest thing, what is is a seemingly ordered plan. We laugh even through tears.

So, above as below, all any of us can do is interpret that cosmic link. Starsky + Cox can’t help but; whether conducting clients to increase their own personal connection or through our witty-wise books or columns or lectures, or in live performance as cosmic comics, we see the humor in there being no real separation between you and the divine.

That we all tend to find the same things funny, universality being central to any joke—we share laughs, we relate to, or are let in on, them—this speaks to there also being no true separation between (the divinity within) you and (the divinity within) others. Thus, we glean cosmic truths, even, deconstructing the role and effect of humor itself in our lives.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Aries 30/Taurus 0°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I am playing major catch up again. I suppose I could just skip days but my OCD doesn’t quite allow for that sort of leeway. So here I am. I’ve made a list of subjects to tackle. First I’ll start with the cosmic joke of: starting something new because old ways seem not to be working only to start getting messaging that people miss the way you did things, which they didn’t much seem to appreciate when you were doing it. I suppose some people don’t miss stuff until it’s gone.

These past two months we have been “performing” The Zodiac Club at Sid Gold’s in NYC. I put that p-word in quotes because after the past twelve years of writing and rigorously rehearsing and preparing scripted shows, including many at Joe’s Pub in NYC, we have mindfully departed from that to eopen up and experiment with these more improvisational appearances at Sid’s where we barely prepar songs, and writue up some random ideas, inspired by the loose themes associated with the various signs–and that’s about it.

The goal has been, well, no goal; certainly not wanting to create a great show but to let emerge a new form, letting whatever that might be bubble up from the serendipitous slime of just showing up and doing whatever. The inspiration has been our work with clients. Every day, in our proviate consultancy, we, I, unrehearsedly draw down the cosmic wisdom and direction we see outline in an individual’s astrological chart and transits. All my years of study plus my knowledge of myth and archeytpe, not to mention my infamous flashes of psychic insight, are there to serve me in uplifting and guiding the client. This is something we’ve wanted to do before a live audience, not so much performing a show, but having an experience together, with the only theme being to explore the “cosmic energy” of the particular sign we are treating in a given month.

So we’ve tried to just show up and do whatever because, truth be told, we have never sold out Joe’s Pub, for example, with our meticulously crafted shows with songs and sections and skits and segues and arcs and all the dramaturlogical fixins’. So we are happily deconstructing. But, go figure, suddenly people who have never seen us are like, “I am determined to come to your next Joe’s show”, etc. Like not just one person but like many. And I’m like, in my mind, “dude(ette), not only have I been carefully effing crafting shows for a decade and rehearsing the ef out of them, I’ve been promoting ad nauseum and you never effing come.” Now a warning? I hear Meryl Streep say.

On top of that, the folks who are coming, those who maybe only saw us once or twice before, and even those with whom we’re performing are suggesting we do this [formal thing] or that [formal thing] i.e. the exact same things we’ve done before—wherever did they get those ideas—also missing the point. We don’t want to do a show up on a stage right now. We want to be ground level and relate to you and be imperfect. We don’t want to sing more than a few songs. We want to talk about the secret power of the zodiac. And I just want to have a ground level experience. There is no ticket price. Just a donation to the Afterglow Festival which is a very worthy cause. Anyway….I need to write a catch-all blurb for the Sid Gold’s website: I’m thinking something like this:

The Zodiac Club. Celebrity astrologists and performing artists, Stella Starsky and Quinn Cox, collectively known as Starsky + Cox, present a year-long event of twelve appearances in exploration and celebration of the dozen divine energies of the Zodiac signs, in turn, the third or fourth Sunday of each month at the endlessly chic caberet venue, Sid Gold’s Request Room in New York City. The couple named “Psychics to the Stars” by Vanity Fair, renowned for their international best-selling book Sextrology—Starsky + Cox will be joined each month by musical director Brian King (What Time Is It, Mr. Fox?) and special guests born under the star signs of the various months.

Part musical-comedy show, part consciousness-raising seminar, part social salon for the high-vibrational set, The Zodiac Club explores the metaphysical power of each of the twelve star signs. Starsky + Cox draw down the cosmic energy of the signs to illustrate their power and purpose in all our lives, providing extra starry sugar to those celebrating birthdays in the given month. Claiming the Zodiac to be “the original twelve-step program”™; Starsky + Cox have long wished to unlock its cosmic secrets for a groovy, aspirational audience, regaling gatherers with their signature wise wit and rousing song.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Aries 29°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Beyond our individual work as humanistic astrologers and even the more generally specific Sun sign astrology, we are gathered here together understand and benefit from what we call Natural Cosmic astrology, that is to say what the Sun in each sign means for us during the 12 months of the year, each cycle of the Moon, which is where the word month—moonth—comes from, one moonth, corresponding to the Suns journey through each of the 12 signs and their natural houses of the zodiac. Funny and beautifully cosmic that our two luminaries, the Sun and Moon, seem to illustrate the same cosmic reality based on that most divine of numbers 12. It’s so much a no-brainer that we don’t even think about the fact that our own journey around the Sun takes twelve cycles of our moon; perhaps 12 is the key, the formula for life itself. Maybe other planets orbiting other stars have life too if that simple mathematically equation is in place. It just might be that simple. The zodiac is lousy with simple realizations like that which we take for granted. And, like the golden mean, the Zodiac with it’s 12 iterations, seems applicable to all aspects of existence. Not just the twelve months in a year, but the twelve hours on a clock, an individual hour made up of sixty minutes, a derivative of twelve, sixty seconds in a minute, not a mathematical system of 10, but a cosmic system of 12. The zodiac’s twelve signs and houses can apply to the individual span of a life, each house ruling a spate of 7 years, suggesting we should all live to an approximate age of 94, give or take; whilst it also expresses the span of all of existence, expressed in myth and biblical legend and through comparative religion, the world over. Let’s look at it through a biblical lens: Aries, cardinal-fire is the big bang, Genesis, creation; Taurus fixed-earth is the garden, Eden; Gemini mutable-air, is conscious, duality as characterizes the Fall, Cancer, cardinal-water is the Flood to wash it all away; Leo, fixed-fire, is the book of Kings and the Age of Miracles; Virgo, mutable-earth, is the human conscience, humility, Chronicles and Job; Libra, cardinal-air, the poetic Psalms; Scorpio, the meaningful Proverbs; Sagittarius, the philosophical Ecclesiastes, Capricorn, Prophets, Aquarius, the New Testament leading to Revelation of eternal life of damnation, the opposite-facing fish of Pisces with its new golden age of Peace, thirteen being the number of new order. There are only 12 thrones in Olympus just as there were 12 Titan thrones before that; and when Dionysus, the new-order god shows up at Olympus, one of the gods, Hestia, relinquishes her seat, and go sits and tends the hearth fire in the center, like the Sun through the twelve houses. Likewise, in the book of Revelation, the “Woman”, clothed by the Sun, with the Moon at her feet, has twelve stars circling her head. Also in the book of Revelation, the wall of the City has twelve foundations (one for each apostle).

There are twelve apostles; and even the original roundtable of Arthurian legend, that of his father Uther Pendragon, had twelve seats, with an additional left blank for Judas. There had to be twelve apostles, too, as Matthias replaced Judas, one of the original twelve..There are twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve sons of Jacob. Twelve stations of the cross. Twelve days of Christmas, ending with the feast of Epiphany, the new-order adoration by the Magi, the first to “recognize” Jesus as the new messiah. Twelve is a higher vibration of three, the trinity, taken to the four corners of the earth; and it numerologically reduces to 3 (1+2).

Aries 28°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

As we enter the sign of Taurus:
Stella and I are, for the most part humanistic astrologers, and there are about 80 documentable forms of astrology. We practice, we have a private practice whereby clients come to see us. That is our day job. And, as humanistic astrologers we treat the whole person, pointing out their patterns, their pitfalls and their superpowers as outlined by their natal charts. And we look at other charts to. Each individual’s chart is unique, and the way the planets in the various signs and houses operate and interact with each other is unique. Even identical twins with nearly the same chart will express vast difference based on the nuances and the polarizations they embody with each signature in their charts. The Sun is just one planet, we just all know in what sign the Sun lies in our charts, because it’s our Sun sign, determined by time of year. But we all have all the planets somewhere in our charts which are made up of the entire wheel of the Zodiac. We all have all the signs and astrological signs and houses in us. We are all made up of these twelve slices like a pie. People are pies.

But let’s get back to just our Sun signs for a second. When we write our books on astrology, Sextrology being our major work to date, we are dealing with Sun sign astrology which, though general, allowed for far more specificity than had ever been explored or recorded on the subject. For starters, Stella and I had always maintained that men and women of the same sign were actually different signs or sub signs—that they draw on different archetypes. This was something we bonded over when we first met. We both had astrologers and metaphysicians in our families, so when we met at nineteen, yes we met at nineteen, astrology was something we shared and it became first an ongoing conversation than a shared profession. And so we set about looking deeper into these gender signs, male and female, twenty-four instead of twelve, and that became the main thrust of Sextrology, sex as in gender, first and foremost, sexuality being a close and important second. And of course the archetypes further break down according to gay and straight and bi and trans, and the Zodiac, that pictograph of images inextricably linked to the profound richness and multiplicity of myth, led the way. The more we meditated on that mandala, the more it revealed and it continues to do so, and shall, we imagine, long after we’re gone, by others who would take up that baton.

Carl Jung of course was big into archetype and astrology and we are of course fascinated by the esoteric, not so much the occult, per se, that’s probably more the domain of other colleagues of ours. There is a school of astrology called Esoteric Astrology, one of those 80 brands, and it makes its way into our work. Whereas humanistic astrology treats the person here and now, in time and space; esoteric astrology treats the soul, on its journey, through many lifetimes; reincarnation being more accepted a phenomena than not on this planet. Even Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth and comparative religion who always reminded me of Snagglepuss, he had plans to tackle the subject of astrology, next, and then unfortunately, he died. Surely he would have legitimized the subject in a way others haven’t been able to do. We try of course. Okay so back to Sun sign astrology: The Sun placement in our charts really is of prime importance. So, although Sun sign astrology is general in the sense that a twelfth of the population, or thereabouts is born under your sign, it doesn’t take away from the fact that the Sun placement in your chart is most concerned with identity and, we say, the hero you’re becoming. Campbell’s famous book was called Hero With A Thousand Faces; well we know from astrology that there are at least twenty four main ones; and actually as man faces as there are or ever have been people alive in the history of life. But that’s a bit heady. The point our own Sun sign determines our primary archetype, the main cosmic energy that we embody. What is an archetype? It is most often an personification of an energy. That’s what the classic gods and goddesses, of which there are thousands, and all the saints and devis and angels and devils in all the world’s religions and spiritual systems really are. Personifications of energy. And guess what so are we. So are we. We are living-breathing representations of the universal cosmic energy, channeled through the Kaleidoscope lens of our own solar system, from our geo-centric, that is to say Earth-centric perspective right down to the country, the city, the town, the hospital, the bed, or back of the taxi, in which we were born. We are the end result of the stars projects down onto the planet in a spark of life. Not to mention the fact that we are physically made up of the exact same stuff as are those infinite stars. We literally are made of star-stuff. We are star dust. And we are golden. And, today, especially, we are going to get back to the garden—that Edenic metaphorical landscape which the sign of Taurus expresses.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Aries 27°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I woke up to this very vivid dream that I couldn’t much figure out. Stella and I were outside some fancy club late night. It felt like being in Portland Square in London and also uptown around Studio 54. It was like we were waiting to hail a cab but were in no rush. It was a warm night with a perfect breeze. We kept hearing voices of people behind us exiting the club. Stella asked, “is that Tony’s voice?” And I said “no”, dreamembering that “Tony Randall’s dead.” To which she replied “he is?” “Yes.”

Then suddenly near the curb where we were standing poured a couple, post club, arranging their clothes, he was refitting his white sports jacket to his frame. They were both very tanned; and I realized it was Sean Penn with a small round faced “date” who had thin blond hair piled on top and minimal make up and very down to earth looking like Kaley Cuoco. Stella sort of stage whispered to me who she was and how she came to be with Sean Penn, but apparently too loudly; because the date confronted us. “Yeah that’s right….that’s who I am and that’s how we met” confirming anything that Stella would have heard in the gossip columns or what not was true.

We apologized profusely and assured the twosome that we weren’t in for that sort of thing; that we weren’t mongers and didn’t care and we apologized for commenting on them too loudly. They immediately disarmed and the date connected with Stella, now apologizing to her for overreacting; at the same time Sean was now shaking my hand, which he would do periodically through out the dream, each time trying to get the grip more precise and make it more heart-felt it seemed. Anyway we were soon the best of friends and decided to go back into the club which was super snazzy and of the supper variety I now realized and we were ushered through to an outside space with tables and metal patio furniture and we sat at a table meant for about eight people, which was fine, because folks, other famous or at least fame-ish people kept popping by and plopping themselves down. Sean and I were locked in conversation as was Stella and the date who said she didn’t much feel like drinking but she wanted to smoke dope. Cue dream reality: Suddenly I’m like I have this bag of the best green and she grabs it and fills herself a bowl and smokes it as Sean grabs some weed to and is rolling a joint in what seems like nori, you know, for making sushi.

He explains that he lives up north with a nod. And I’m like where? The Hudson Valley. “Nah,” he replies. So I’m like…Woodstock? And he’s like “Nah.” And he makes a more precise movement of his head in what would be a diagonal across the Hudson River and I guess, “Where? Pompton Lakes?” and he says yes near there. So he passes me the nori joing which is as thick as a Cuban cigar and suddenly a waiter, a very professional crisply uniformed Asian waiter—all the staff are wearing dark green trousers with white shirts and sort of striped dark green, black and white vests and black bowties—and I’m thinking I have to hide the joint under the table while the waiter puts a huge bucket filled with two or three bottles of champagne on the table but sure he smells it but he doesn’t much seem to care; at least he doesn’t care on behalf of the establishment but I get the distinct sense he doesn’t much like the smell himself or the practice of smoking weed in general.

I explain to Sean that I come from that part of New Jersey and he says how much he likes it. And his date politely asks if I mind if she takes more weed because she really loves it and wants to fill another huge bowl which she does with the weed pouring over the top of her pipe and Stella, of course (even in dreams) isn’t smoking the pot but I suspect I should open the champagne, not just for her, but for those of us who are surely on the brink of having very dry mouths. And I want to say to Sean that I know Robin Wright (I don’t really, I’ve only sort of met her) which I do in the dreamreality, but I decide I better not drop her name just in case it triggers some emotional reaction because I am on tinderhooks knowing he’s got quite the temper. But right now he seems to be my best buddy and he’s kicking back with his black shirt open exposing his very bronzed smooth chest and I think he either blends the bronzer really well because there is no glitch between his face and his neck and he’s a bit glistening with sweat but still has on his white sportscoat. While across the table the date looks very comfortable and happy and as if the temperature is just perfect for her though she’s wearing a sort of think silk jumpsuit with some kind of jungle pattern, batik or bamboo or zebra printed but in a pale giraffe color scheme, and I don’t realize (until now) that this might be significant.

I’m awash with the feeling that I’m enjoying one of those rare moments in life where relating with a fellow, a decidedly straight, guy doesn’t feel like a lot of posturing and posing and heterosexual-male performance art of clipped speech and sideways relating out into space with zero eye contact. It instead feels—and I am aware how rare a feeling in the dream—like the easy kinds of male-to-male bonds guys enjoy nearly totally more readily as a boy or young man before the trappings of the world set in and separate us only to reunite us in approved settings such as golf courses and at dinner parties where we slip away to some billiards room. I feel at home with this guy. At home with him as I did with my dearest, and some dearly departed, friends I knew from childhood into my twenties, the ones who knew me like brothers or cousins would, and who would laugh at my comments or actions with a loving eye roll that would say “Oh man, that is so you,” preempting the end of a story with an expression that says “Oh man, I know where this is going.

And I’m happily aware that the date and Stella are likewise bonding and laughing and exchanging knowing expressions of soul-sisterhood and the dream goes on and on like that and i can feel the metal chair against my back and ass and have to keep shifting because it’s hurting my lower spine and I can hear the scrapes the chairs are making on the slate patio from all the tables and it’s a dark night with no moon, a new-moon night so we are relying on what are outdoor chandeliers—are they hanging from trees—and I’m so blissed out and so comfortable and so relaxed and so at ease and so pampered and still young and I’m not stoned or drunk but I’m a little bit of both, so everything is heightened, Sean’s orange tan against black shirt and white jacket, the black wrought orion mesh table with the dark green padded leather ice bucket with bottle green bottles and the waiters in their dark green and black and white. Green, black and white and crystal light from dull gold chandeliers and it’s London, New York and I have a beautiful wife and I’m looking and feeling my best and I have a new best cousin friend who is famous but I’m unaffected by that as the standout quality of the burgeoning bond is our seamless like-mindedness and I feel for the first time in a long time or ever that I’m not floating or waiting or hoping or expecting or biding or negotiating or debating or hedging or trying or watching myself in any way shape or form. I am. I have. And the night is going to last forever. It already has.

I awoke from this dream, for the day. And was happy. My whole body self was suffused with a blissful feeling of elan and acceptance. I was still (and still am) wrapped in the dark emerald green of the world which, I neglected to say, was appointed with lush greenery—trees and shrubs and ferns and bushes shaping and dotting the private patio—and also perfumed with various notes of wisteria and bearded iris and eucalyptus and other fragrant flowers, not to mention the primo weed; and it dawned on me, increasingly throughout the day, that this private gardened emerald city-club, lush and heady, luxe and overflowing with finest champagne, was a Taurus landscape wherein no self-consciousness could reside. That I had entered into my own version or vision of Eden which apparently includes a negligent chic form of formal seating and service. I scratched my head. So my ideal best friend is Sean Penn? And now I realize that Sean Penn reminds me of my first cousin Gary, some six years my senior, whom I never knew very well; but he has/had that same blotching irish, orange, bronze, loose leathering neck and upper chest as Sean Penn and, moreover, a surpassingly tough-guy persona—both my Irish mother and her sister married Italians and my uncle Gus (Cosmo) was not only my godfather he was, by all accounts, a godfather. He spoke, as his kids tended to, and certainly Gary did, with what we used to call a “dees, does and dem-y” accent. If you don’t know what that is too bad, I don’t feel like working that hard.

I could mine this dream forever; and I probabably will in my own time, but I’ll stop wasting yours here with my realizations. The only one you need really take in is the Taurus landscape of ease and acceptance with no second-guessing of any sort. I did ask Stella what she thought of the dream as we made coffee this morning; before she could answer I said, “you know, isn’t it ironic: because back in the eighties and nineties Madonna would factor into my dreams a lot in a similar manner where we were fast friends, no questions asked, seamlessly connected; and I always too those dreams a signal of ensuing or desired or some form of success, fame and acceptance on some world stage.” To which Stella replied, in a gossipy, on the q-t tone that, well, didn’t I know that supposedly Sean and Madonna are back together, that they’ve been seen together, and are probably dating. And I thought how weird. I mean, maybe the blond in the dream was some sort of reborn and decidedly rejuvenated Madonna who has finally “got it” and no longer needs all the flash to feel good about herself because she got what she wanted, what all the desperate need for attention was actually a subsitute for, the love of Sean Penn. That might be true. And despite the fact that, in life, the two of them are probably totally bonkers and are perfect for slash will end up killing each other, the Sean of my dream and his confident and friendly and unapologetic date were just the kind of good-time Sal and Sally that suited that Taurus environment. But then again, she was wearing something jungle print and Madonna, like Sean, with his big bad tawny-orange skin, is a Leo. And real-life Sean and Madge, should they be reunited, would spend a good decade being the King and Queen of this crazy global jungle in which we live; and like dream Sean, real Sean would surely prefer to hang out and buddy with me in the private garden patio of our favorite exclusive London, New York supper club than be barraged by paparazzi a string of whose lights, like those draped through the trees of my emerald dream, he would spend that decade, undoubtedly, punching out.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Aries 26°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Some days you wake up and feel like getting back to basics. It’s a feeling that befits the sign of Aries I believe. Yes the world has changed, and not only for the better; and when you’re 21 and it’s the 1980s and having $2K in the bank feels like more than enough to live on, buy clothes, eat out and party like 1999 feels a long way away, ones being, starting with ones physical body feels very much at ease. I carried a hard agnès b. briefcase, bought a straw hat in Bologna, wrote in a travel diary, social smoked Stuveysant Bleus and didn’t expect, nor want, the world to change much from the F. Scott Fitzgerald vision I had for it. Computers were ugly, beige, with blippy green lighted letters on a darker green screen. And then came the permutations. The epidemic. The oversized neon t-shirts. The pleas to Be Happy. Some pretense of be New York Fashion. The windows on 42nd Street turned into galleries for a brief moment before Disneyfication. The closings. The cupcakes. The gaggles of SATC foursomes. Hotels. Smartphones. Worship culture. Comparison equaling spiritual death for all but those who had spent a lifetime already amassing worship for copying and pasting and grafting and cloning. Thinking ahead to the next wave to ride: Transportation. Hypocrisy—bemoaning mainstream culture and its refusal to accept you at the same time. Wanting everything you blame others for having. The pooh-poohing of people who don’t dress like Sean Young in Blade Runner. The sinister need for clicks. The inability to sit and talk anymore over dinner. The sobering up; the slipping into alcoholism. The throwing under the bus. The pleading for more. Knowing when enough is enough. Waking up, grateful, you don’t have too much. That all eyes aren’t on you. That authenticity, autonomy, anonymity is still possible. Choosing to go back to live under the radar. To reread the Upanishads, Vedas, Bible, Gita, Yogananda, Shakti Gawain. Needing nobody to know—anything—about what you’re doing. Taking a permanent break. Forgiving those who trespassed as you eat GF only most of the time. The cooking, the cleaning, the carrying, the chopping. The shopping for the t-shirts and underwear you really need. The bicycle, no watch, phones off, riding into the sunrise.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Aries 25°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Maybe you’ve some experiences with the Taurus male and thought, though I am a take charge individual, I do expect a lover to get on top sometime. But it really does go with the whole pretty-boy Taurus scenario. They are total nature boys. Pretty boys. Not the rugged macho men or bratty bad boys we saw in the sign of Aries, no. They are very much the Adonis, and certainly the Narcissis-ists, personifying the archetype of those flower gods who, myth would have it met their fates because they were so damned passive. And just think of the Taurus men born under this flower-god archetype. Rudolph Valentino, was widely adored; Robert Pattison, is pretty passive; and George Clooney, total narcissist; Henry Cavill, he’s prettier than most girls; David Beckham, his voice is higher than most girls; Channing Tatum, “look at me, look at me”; Daniel Day Lewis, he wears pretty earrings; Jamie Dornan, oh well ok, no argument there; Enrique Inglesias, “I’m Mrs. Inglesias”; Peter Frampton, classic, nearly cartoon nature boy; Pierce Brosnan, elegant, James Mason, swellegant, Tyrone Power, all pretty boys, ever single one. All born under the passive nature boy archetype. And no wonder: The archetype of Adonis was such the fleur that he turned Venus, Aphrodite herself, into the aggressor and that never happens. I pissed off her boyfriend Ares, to no end. Well, yes an end—he killed Adonis.

And what about the female Taurus who draws on the archetype of the nymphs. Well the weird thing is, Taurus ruling the ages of 7-14, that many young girl stars, Hollywood nymphets, have been born under the sign of Taurus, making their mark on the masses early in life, not always between the ages of 7-14, but sometimes, and sometimes even earlier: Shirley Temple, Kristen Dunst, Valerie Bertinelli, Sandra Dee, Ann-Margret, Janet Jackson, Amber Tamblyn, Lena Dunham, Sophia Copolla, Audrey Hepburn, Cher, Barbara Streisand, Lily Cole, Adele, Yvonne Craig, Kelly Clarkson, Tracey Gold, Tina Yothers, Danielle Fishl, Eve Plumb, who is one of those people whose names fit their archetypes. I’ll explain:

The most famous of all the myth’s nymphs is probably Io whom king of the gods, Zeus, turned into a snow-white heifer to hide when he was caught messing around with her by his wife , the “cow-eyed” Hera, queen of the gods (to whom Io was a priestess no less!) who, being no dummy, was like oh, is she a gift for me, thanks I’ll take her, and then, when Io escaped, Hera sent a stingy gadfly after her that chased her ass all the way to Asia Minor across her namesake Ionian sea. In fairy tale this story comes down to us as Snow White who was similarly persecuted by the scary beautiful queen. Even that scene where she turns into a crone to give her a poison apple, that is lifted directly from mythological stories of Hera who likewise disguised herself and offered up her “magic” apples which grew in Hiera or Eire or Ireland, that emerald green isle, the color of the sign of Taurus. Fun facts. The movie is basically a retelling of the same myth where Eve is trying to assume the role, on stage and in life, of the queen of drama, Margo Channing. Ann Baxter, of course, is that insidious Taurus sycophant. And really, what are all these stories about? Io is the maiden form of cow-eyed Hera; just as Eve is Margo Channing, who probably did the same exact thing to get where she is just as, at the end of the film, Eve is now cast in the role of Queen, finding a new nymphet, Barbara Bates, is coming to steal her fire. Hera is trying to teach her younger self Io a lesson. Snow White’s Queen is trying to do likewise. Bette Davis just wants to find her key light and avoid wearing a bra. She’s an Aries (in life) after all. These older women have learned the hard way that playing the innocent nymphet will only lead to some kind of personal fall. That’s why she is named Eve. The biblical Eve is Io as well, living in her garden in a state of ignorant bliss until some snake in the grass puts the bite on her.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.