I was just reading back yesterday’s post and boy was I cranky. Something about that pot of gold image really set me off. I may go back and add to that one, giving the oracle more meditative consideration. Or then again, maybe I’ll just leave that post with it’s Garfield attitude as is. Today’s symbol is quite the opposite in energy. A Widow At An Open Grave is the oracle for Taurus 5°. I suppose I deserve this image today for my bad attitude yesterday. Then again, such things being paradoxical, I see more hope and experience more revelation that that pot of gold offered. And the relationship between these two symbols does suggest that yesterday’s treasure was something of a fairy favor; it wasn’t real and/or it couldn’t last.

The abyss of an open grave. Well both figuratively and, often literally, this is waiting for us all. The great democracy is death. And you can’t take that pot of gold with you. Perhaps you can take spiritual treasures with you, depending on your beliefs. But the truth of the matter is that life is ephemeral and all material bonds, and those even with whom we share a great love, are most sadly going to come to a natural end. It sucks. I don’t think I’d want to live forever if it weren’t for the great love relationship of my life. I’m not attached to things—I’ve never been a materialist—and comparatively speaking, vis a vis my friends and colleagues, I am a person of very few possessions and very little terrestrial attachment. But the notion of being without a true love is really too much to bare. Probably no other reality has more inspired belief in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation, even, with the hope, in either case, that you are reunited with those you most love in the world. It is a notion that is eternally debatable. But there are some comforting thoughts on the subject:

For one science does tell us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; and I’m not just speaking of the spiritual energy that animates us as humans; but also of the love we share. As well, there has been some ethereal evidence in my experience of human connection transcending the boundary of life and death. Working with clients we frequently get a sense, and often a name, of someone who has passed being quite invested in the living individual. That’s all I will say about that.

I believe this oracle is about the difference between love and attachment. As emotionally wrenching as it is we must strive to find a healthy detachment from all things that shall pass. And there can be some comfort. For instance, my mother was ill with Alzheimers for years and was also under the care and/or control of my one sibling who purposefully kept contact between us estranged, which in large part was for the best. The awful truth is that I didn’t see my mother during the last three years of her life. So when she ultimately passed I actually had, have had, more a sense of connection with her than during the last decade of her life. It’s as if she is more accessible to me now than during her final years.

Let’s discuss death metaphorically though for a minute, separate from the fact that we are all literally dying from the moment we are born—an ultimate paradox. We experience death of situations and relationships all the time. We don’t know when it’s coming, typically, just like the real deal. There’ll be a call (or my favorite: an email at 5 o’clock on a Friday) that a job or gig that you’ve had, and upon which you probably counted, for ages has suddenly bit the dust. Or somebody will get a bee in their bonnet about something and snuff out your bond with them. Well the subject of this oracle isn’t the grave, really, but the widow; and that suggests to me that we are meant to meditate on what becomes of her. We are all widowed by experiences like the examples above. Things end all the time. The question is, what do we do next? Whenever there is a real or metaphoric death we start over, in a sense; and we typically try not to repeat the mistakes of the past—when taken metaphorically—just as we might understand we can’t replicate a relationship with a loved one who leaves us. We can have new relationships, but we’ll never have that one; perhaps because we’re still having it and we’ll always have it. In the case of a real death of a true intimate, I think it’s very rare that we would want to bond again so deeply; instead I think human nature dictates that we involve ourselves more detachedly should we find love again.

Surely, this is true when we stay in metaphoric land. We will not repeat the mistakes we made in a job, say, if we find ourselves suddenly fired from one. In simple terms we might say we won’t let ourselves be hurt that way again. But really, we are inspired to transcend and to invest less personally, next time, in like situations. The pain of losing a job or opportunity is invariably felt by the ego. But herein we learn the lesson of letting go lightly. All that we experience with our senses is impermanent, which is why eastern philosophies often characterize so-called reality as the illusion. What if anything is permanent one wonders. Eternity is the self-evident response, but what is that? Is it something that we can participate in. I would say yes. But you shouldn’t listen to me. You would have to experience such a connection for yourself to know. I suddenly hear a parody of a pharmaceutical company in my head: As your metaphysician if Eternity is right for you. Side effects may include transmuation into pure love and light, transcendence of time and space, expression of your full divine nature, and Oneness.

 In astrology the eighth house rules death, sleep and sex, among other key attributes. Why these three elements hang together is because they fall under the larger concept of regeneration. The diviners of our ancient Zodiac believed death to be a means via which the spirit achieved rebirth, just as sleep rejuvenates the body and sex reproduces life. It does reflect that scientific view of indestructable energy. So I’m going with that. Still we feel the pain of the loss of personal attachment and I don’t believe we’re meant to transcend those feelings completely, especially when we leave the realm of metaphor in considering the message of this symbol. And yet, we must continually make our peace with saying goodbye to the past. And really, who among us is really that good with goodbyes?

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Today’s symbol for Taurus 4° is The Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Rainbow and I’m just not feeling it. Maybe because it’s such a trite image or maybe because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I had imagined the rainbow two days ago when writing about the electrical storm and now here it is. Just seems a bit convenient and cliché. Also I feel like the messages of these oracles are starting to repeat a bit. If today is about linking the earthly and the divine via that rainbow, I feel that we have done that. But I do like the idea of a pot of gold. I could use one of those right about now. Who doesn’t want some kind of an assist like a bolt out of the blue. Being a self-starter who lives by my wits, I’m not given to magical thinking when it comes to money. But, again, I think I woke up in a mood; and I was just thinking how nice it would be to not have so much responsibility and just be taken care of for a change. This is so unlike me to say; but I think because I don’t have any family in either direction, I don’t have the luxury, really, of letting others take the wheel or just crawling back into the bosom of those who might cradle me, metaphorically speaking. Just for a day, I’d like to be like a kid again, and not have to shop or cook or clean or pay a bill. I would just like to be coddled a bit. Does this have anything to do with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Probably not.

But that’s all I got today folks. I need a little breather.

Postscript: In a twelve-fold sequence, this symbol would fall under the rule of the sign of Capricorn, which is the goat-horn of plenty, in effect that pot of gold. The rainbow is a connection between our earthly existence and heavenly experience, mortal and divine existence. True bounty being spiritual bounty. And, yes, this alone is a solid interpretation of today’s oracle in that we have daily opportunities to amass spiritual riches. It is indeed far easier to do so than it is to make material gain. Living by the golden rule, for starters, is the easiest way to fill our non-material coffers. In mythology, the goat-horn contained the nectar of the gods, that which nourished their divinity. And with every kindness, good deed or thought, we find our own divine nature being fed and sustained. Capricorn is the sign of active faith, acting in a manner that expresses belief in our ultimate bounty, our personal resource. It’s motto is I use, that is to say I do not waste or squander said resources but employ every fiber of our being to insure my ultimate fulfillment. This is the opposite of leaving anything to chance. “Luck is the residue of design.”

 That pot of gold is wrought from faith and filled with the collateral of our actions. The rainbow isn’t a road lined with good intentions. It is a revelation of spiritual innuity. Faith is the highest form of feeling, the ultimate emotional investment being in our self-fulfillment. The pot of gold isn’t a fairy favor, it’s the sum total of our commitment to and confidence in ourselves. It’s the resulting manfiestion of our employing every fiber of our being to become the highest version of ourselves. The pot of gold might have real coins in it, ultimately. True bounty doesn’t distinguish between material and non-material wealth—on this rarified level, value is value and its own reward. Still, those who recognize their own worth, and leave no stone unturned in their aspiration to fully realize it, rarely want for anything. The pot of gold is not the goal, nor is it something given, it contains the measure of our merit and is something we ourselves carried into this world. It has always been with us and shall ever be.

 Take stock of your actions and your endeavors. Are they adding to your pot of gold? Are they illuminating a path toward it. Or are you squandering your gifts and talents and time and energy? You decide what adds up or not to your ultimate fulfillment. It is the same as that which inspires faith in yourself. Faith isn’t automatic, it isn’t a fleeting feeling. It is, along with prosperity, a sustained emotion. We cannot manufacture this feeling. We invest it in our right actions, it suffuses them and endows them with enduring energy. Faith is our ultimate resource and we just might find, when we get to the end of that rainbow and gaze into that pot of gold, that what we mainly see there, glittering back up at us, is a giant heap of that self-same stuff fear-vanquishing stuff: The residuals of a faithful design.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Today is a totally Taurus image: Natural Steps Lead To A Lawn Of Clover In Bloom is the oracle on day 33, Taurus 3°. The Sky God of yesterday has apparently fertilized the Godess Mother of two days hence and now we are bearing fruit in the form of flowers that will feed the bees and create honey. I suppose Natural Steps are a metaphor. To be in clover is one in itself. Especially if it’s the three-leaf kind, la fleur du lis, the trinity originally signifying the triple goddess, here, in triplicate. This is day 33 at 3 degrees, and in my estimation, this oracle is ruled by Sagittarius the 9th sign of the Zodiac. The trinity also points to the mind, body and spirit in us. So I guesstimate that we should endeavor to find that connection today. And to find that connection, I suppose, we need to proceed by steps. Dan Rudhyar describes this oracle thus: The gradual expansion of the individual consciousness after a fecundating experience. So assuming you’ve had a hot fecundating experience, your sense of expansiveness should be happening gradually. Fantastic. Let us hope they don’t take the form of warts or worse. Because, really, I think it begs the question: what have you been fertilizing, lady? We are in the sign of Taurus now, after all, and we must never underestimate the power of Bull shit.

In order to attract bees to us us, we must have something to market. So we’ve been asked to pinpoint our natural talents, and we’ve allowed for some genius ideas to strike us, now we are ready, in a sense, to brand ourselves. And we must do so in a careful step-by-step roll out, ever mindful of what is sweet about what we have on offer. We will remain humble in this process without undermining our self-esteem. That is, after all, the sweet spot in any display of personality. Yes we must be diligent and determined, but never desperate, knowing the full value of what we possess and present. Today does feel like it’s pencils down time, a day where were should present our ideas and display our wares.

For real, I awoke last night to the sound of thunder around 3 a.m.. There’s always the what was that? element to hearing that premier crash and roll of reverberation each Spring, as if one is hearing it for the first time, unawares. I know some people dread that sound, but I find it so exciting and invigorating, as if the very air is shot through with possibility. So imagine my synchronistic surprise when I stumbled to my computer to find that, for today, at 2° Taurus, the Sabian Symbol du jour is An Electrical Storm! We’re told this oracle stands for “cosmic power able to transform all implications of natural existence.”

Dane Rudhyar sees this image as being in contrast to yesterday’s mountain stream, a powerful ambient display versus a lovely mountain trickle; I’m not sure I fully agree that there is a contrast in power, only in the manifestation of power. If yesterday was all about the Mother Source, I see today as a demonstration of Father Sky, thunder and lightning being the estate of chief gods like Thor and Jove (Zeus/Jupiter), for which Thursday (Italian: Giovedi; French: Jeudi) is named. The show of male power might be more blustery and obvious, but let us not forget that mountain stream’s ability to carve through stone in its enduring development, perhaps, toward becoming a great raging river, something which might be harnassed to make that self-same electricity. The point is that the feminine expression of power is, horizontal, over time; while the masculine demonstration is vertical, instantaneous, in a flash. All too often these dynamics are played out in the intimate interplay of the sexes. You know who you are.

An electrical storm is rife with potential of a different sort than the mountain stream. The latter symolizes what is innate, latent, even dormat maybe, lying on the inside, emerging slowly with an eye on endurance; while the former promises, or indeed threatens, to impose a power of realization or perhaps genius upon us. Unlike the mountain stream which is the full expression of our true existing nature, the electrical strom may empower us by transforming us into another version of ourselves.

In a twelve-fold sequence, today’s oracle would be under the influence of the sign of Scorpio, which is the so-called opposite sign of Taurus (really they are higher sextaves of each other). Transformation is surely the keynote of the Scorpio experience and its rule of the 8th astrological house. We might liken the shock of an electric bolt to the sting of a Scorpion, but really, to be honest, I can always find connections, even where none exist. Still we can’t deny the potential transformative power of today’s oracle. We may be struck at any moment and, as a result, we won’t be the same. The shock to our system might turn on a few cartoon lightbulbs over head, but it might very well short-circuit what pathways, if not pathologies, we have already established. Remember the deep grooves made by the mountain spring—they may represent our nature, reinforced by habit over time. Well, now we might find ourselves being completely rewired by some outside force, if not a divine intervention or visitation. We have all heard stories of people being struck by lightning and thereby gaining certain gifts of prophesy or healing as a result.

And whereby the mountain stream is the bubbling up of emotion, the gateway to our spirituality, the electrical storm’s production of a thunder or lightning bolt would be a cosmic imposition specifically working upon us, aimed at our mind. In astrology, water symbolizes feeling and air connotes thought and ideology. We must look at the electrical storm as a release of stored or pent up energy. Something is brewing and the atmosphere is charged. Funnily enough, here on the eastern seaboard it does feel that way outside today. But metaphorically speaking, let us look upon this day through the lens of there being electricity in the air that will come to some culmination. Something’s gotta give; and in the releasing of energy we not only provide building pressure an escape, we find inspiration in the process. What I like most about today’s image, versus yesterday’s, is that we needn’t take any internal inventory. Rather we can participate in, commune with, the buzzy, potent atmosphere

I’m reminded of when I first graduated university in Boston. I decided to spend the summer in town before heading off to Paris in the Fall. I had already taken a job at the end of my senior year at the Cafe Florian on Newbury Street. Being back in Boston the space now holds the Thinking Cup where I do enjoy morning coffee, post yoga. It’s funny to be in there. Back in the day it was owned by an older Hungarian couple and the menu consisted of caviar omelettes, vichyssoise, goulash and an assortment of pastries includie sacher tortes. They served wine and beer and in summer the other waiters and I would drink Pilsner with lemon. Our manager was called Ed who had the affectation of starting many a sentence with a drawn out “uhhh;” after our shift we would sit in the restaurant and play a drinking game where everytime we heard Ed say “uhhh” we’d have to take a sip. Oh the simple ways we used to amuse ourselves.

One day I was meant to work the outdoor cafe, arriving at 4PM for my evening shift, but I had a social opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. The weather looked and felt a little like it does today. I was sharing a huge apartment in Allston with mostly absentee roommates. I decided to do an experiment. I stood, arms akimbo, in the living rooms giant bay window and I attempted to “gather” the energy of the atmosphere into something of a rain storm. Now of course this could be coincidence; although witnesses to the fact seem to feel this actually happened: I poured every fiber of my intention into becoming one with the air and I found myself do all sorts of automatic movements and the wind did begin not just to blow but create mini tornadoes on the street just below the window and the sky suddenly blackened and it began to pour. A friend phoned a store next to the Florian and asked if it was raining there. It wasn’t. Then he phoned The Magic Pan which used also to be on Newbury Street, up the block. They said it was just starting to drizzle. Sweat was beading off my brow as I continued my new wave rain dance; and I gave it one more powerful thrust of intention and movement for power and called the Florian myself. Hi I’m supposed to work the cafe but it’s absolutely pouring here, how about there? It was torrential and I was let off work for the night. I hung up and within minutes the sun came out and there was a rainbow and I slapped on some Kouros (probably), threw on some Matinique outfit and set off for my sanctioned evening of social activity. Ah the days of no cellphones and minimal accountability and blessed anonymity.

So, witches, though today is about a release and intervention from the heavens, you might just be able to participate in its formation and its purpose. But mind you don’t do so too selfishly, as I believe I might have done that day. I do think someone who needed the money too my shift so I don’t think there was any karmic retribution. Still, if I were you, I’d focus straight on the rainbow!

It’s the first day of Taurus 1°, and this date has gotten a bad rap due to one of the world’s most evil people ever being born on this day. But enough about Ryan O’Neal. I’m going to force myself to be brief today as this can be quite consuming, more The Blob than the blog. So thankfully we have a real fresh unadulterated it-is-what-it-is (don’t you loathe that expression) symbol in the form of A Clear Mountain Stream, which that cut-up Dane Rudhyar says denotes the pure, uncontaminated and spontaneous manifestation of one’s own nature. Let’s go with that. We entered Taurus. We shouldn’t have to work so hard, now, right? After all that Aries activity (cardinal-fire) we get to sit back a bit in Taurus (fixed-earth) and let said nature take its course.

A mountain stream is sculpted out of earth over time. The groove is deep, which might even be a modern way of expressing something being profoundly ingrained, as in an individual’s character, personality or, yes, nature. I am what I am. Which isn’t any different from It is what It is. Tautology. Or rather, as William Safire coined it, a tautophrase as in, a deal is a deal or boys will be boys—the repetition of an idea making it irrefutable while obscuring an evidence of the fact. Wow are we ever in Taurus. Self-evidence is all the explanation needed here. And, again, it’s pretty relaxing not to have to come up with any logical answers or justification, just letting manifestation speak for itself. Hey, let’s try that tack today—no prefacing, preambling or setting the scene. If people don’t get what we’re on about then they don’t get it. There we go again—a bit of circular logic, which I also think is emblemized in the moutain stream. Presumably it’s fed by the melting winter ice and snow, running down the hill to some warmer clime, where it will evaporate into the atmosphere, forming clouds that will rain down and ultimately freeze again at the top, only to repeat the cycle ad infinitum. That’s how it works. It’s not broken and you can’t fix it.

Rudhyar is careful to bring up the concept of their being a source, a spring. That, too seems logical, and any student of mythology knows that this is an expression (literally) of the mother goddess, the mountains being the ample breast—mata horn, Matterhorn— from whence her sustenance flows. The goddess Rhea (who took the form of the goat Amaltheia with her horn of plenty) a/k/a Cybele was the great mountain mother, her palace estate perched atop Mount Ida, her coronet a turret, a nod to her walled hilltop fortress. She is Rhea-Cronus (old Mother Time) which again nods to the slow, steady formation of the pathway for that stream, which symbolizes the “release of potentiality”. The sign of Taurus rules sustenance, Time (as a commodity, like money), and potential, latent or otherwise being expressed. And as we are at the seventh Libran point of a twelve-fold cycle, we are feeling a double whammy of Venus energy, that female planet ruling both signs, Taurus on the Earth plane, and Libra on the astral.

Mountain Mama, Take Me Home

Though Taurus is the sign of the masculine Bull, it is a feminine (earth) sign; and though Libra is an inanimate sign associated nonetheless with the Lady of The Scales, it is a masculine (air) sign. We see combined in both signs, in polarized manners, the merging of these energies. Taurus is passive (fixed) or attractive, seeking union, and yet the bull will charge if provoked; Libra is active (cardinal) and yet it acts to harmonize and balance, also seeking perfect union. Here earth matter (Taurus) and light energy (Libra) are unified. We are here to employ our substance (Taurus) in service of our dharma (Libra), “right” way of living in keeping with cosmic law and order. Of course we know that matter is energy at its core; and Rudhyar stresses how this oracle also suggests the opposite being true, “energy being matter at its source;” that is to say particles I suppose.

I believe today’s symbol begs the questions: What is your undeniable nature? What is your true potential? Are you unleashing it and how? And if you’re not channeling into a mindful stream of sustenance, where is all that potential going? Today we must feel our readiness to perform whatever lifework we feel it is our dharma to endeavor and accomplish. Stella often speaks with clients of flow, a state of being whereby ones love and passion for an endeavor is equal to ones talent and ability to manifest it. When those two ingredients find union, we enter the flow state and we find ourselves working tirelessly with no concern for time nor space; it’s as if this union of elements transports us into an infinite realm in which we glimpse eternity. It is the realm of Rhea-Cronus, that grand mother archetype who has come to us, in modern times, in various forms—as Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, as Mother Goose, even as “Bewitched”‘s own Endora, a name that connotes her enduring spirit. And really she wasn’t so bad after all; au contraire: she simply couldn’t condone anyone, let alone her own child, denying her true nature.

So think about it: Where in you do the elements of desire to perform a task and talent to do so find an enduring connection? There may be more than one point, but try to pin down the most potent one. It is at this union of energy and ability where your pure, unadulterated nature will be best expressed.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Wow that went fast. At 30° Aries, I am one-twelfth the way through this first year’s Cosmic Blague. I am using the Sabian Symbols which express the energy of each degree of the zodiac slash day of the year, give or take five days, as a sort of guide, because I do believe that archetypal energy can get very specific, not just sign by sign, month by month, but day by day and probably, ultimately moment to moment. But I can explore that next year. These Sabian Symbols are also kindling for me, letting the thoughts and feelings they inspire trigger some metaphysical insights all my own and even some storytelling from the annals of my advancing years. As an aside: despite being layed out by a severe injury by way of t0 much type-A personality yoga, I have never felt more vital or younger; I know people say that but, honestly, I feel more spry and youthful now than I did at nineteen. For real, as the kids say. Still, I woke up at 3am because sleeping isn’t my strongsuit and after tossing and turning I figured I should just get to writing in the palace at 4am.

After yesterday’s oracle of The Music of the Spheres, today’s symbol at 30° Aries is A Duck Pond And Its Brood. Cute. The first thing that comes to mind is that yesterday was As Above while today is So Below. That is to say that we went ultra celestial and rolled around the concept of Cosmic Order on a grand scale and now we have the opposite experience of a small pond emitting quaint quacks. And though the contrast is extreme, from the sound of an infinite universe to that of some daffy ducks, I believe we are meant to see the connection between the two. Also, yesterday we were asked to listen to that celestial music as being expressed by our inner voice—so the notion of inner space and outer space were paradoxically merged—while today we want to be aware of the here and now and the simple habitat of the natural world. It’s as if the quacking ducks have snapped us out of our meditation, our mystic crystal revelation, and we are made to witness how that cosmic order we’ve gleaned is naturally expressed in our organic experience.

You know it’s very easy to be a transcendent spiritual person living, say, cloistered in a monastery with no outside-world distractions, spending your days in silence, harkening to that celestial music, offering up prayers, performing simple tasks, living in a community that will provide you sustenance. But in society, as in the natural world, we don’t have that ironic luxury; we are focused on the rituals of survival and making a living, of building our own lives and relationships and making our way in the world, without any semblance of retreat, and so keeping an ear to the celestial music sung by our inner voice is actually more challenging. We have to hear it in the cacophonous quacking of the other characters living in our pond, big or small; in the uptalking clone with the Goyard tote bag; in the wheeling-dealing junior partner in driving mocassins bellowing into his bluetooth, in the jackhammers and catcallers, in the sirens and sycophants and solicitors. Challenging; but doable. Indeed, what it takes for us to find the still small voice inside us, remaining unruffled, amid the business of our real and metaphoric brood, is an inner peace so profound that the seminarian priest might never achieve. It’s like the difference between Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism, the former being reserved for sequestered nuns and monks who seek to become arhats, perfect saints (laypeople can only hope to be reincarnated as monks or nuns) while the latter form is available to everyone, living their lives in the socialized world, and their goal is not to become arhats but bodhisattvas, saints who have also become enlightened but delay nirvana to help others achieve enlightenment.

And so we get a sense of what this oracle might mean by Brood; that is to say the entire family of man. In our transcendent even glimpsing of enlightenment, Music of the Spheres in Sensaround, we then return to whatever our pond might be to inpsire others to experience it as well. Not to sound grand delusional but, in our own way I believe Stella and Itry to do this—I say try because it is all we can ever do. Yoda was wrong. We even have a tongue-in-cheek catchphrase for this: Starsky + Cox, Changing The World, One Creep at a Time. We do like a little levity in our levitation toward Nirvana, after all. And as yuk-yuk as it might sound, the humor belies a serious mission on our part. You’ve heard me say, we are devoted to uplifting spirits. Entertaining Enlightenment™ et al. And we do employ humor as our spoonful of sugar to make the metaphysical medicine go down. And, being radically imperfect (speaking for myself), I am forever being administered medicine by others, mentors, as we all play the role of teacher and student, both simultaneously, to each and every other quack on the pond, which is also a metaphor, I believe, for our contained, I won’t say limited, consciousness.

Dane Rudhyar speaks on this oracle in terms of limits and natural boundaries. He feels this symbol portrays how our glimpse of yesterday’s Cosmic Order and its message of harmony must be brought down to our own “karmic” field of operation. He says, “Peace and inner contentment with one’s essential destiny (dharma) is required to meet the everyday world. The mystic may experience flights of imagination and transcendent vision, but he must return to the concrete earth and to his task in his social environment.” I’m down with that. Expecially if my task in the social environment just happens to be sharing my flights of imagination and transcendent vision—then I’m totally down! But yes, the pond of everyday life is where we make it all happen and we must accept that reality and, as would-be bodhisattvas, take others by the hand, as they take us, and try to take solid action that outwardly reflects, as would a pond, the larger harmonious state of cosmic being that we divine. We have to find our right environment and tribe and, no matter our occupation, perform our tasks with a modus operandi that contributes to creating that much more heaven here on earth. We have to have a focus, let alone a purpose. We have to live in the world and be a catalytic agent for harmony and peace. Even though we may want to kick those sycophants down a flight of stairs, rip the blueteeth from bombastic ears, muzzle the uptalkers, knee the catcallers in the nuts, scrap the Kardashians for parts, lynch the 1%, what have you, we cannot.

Acceptance is the other major message of this oracle. We cannot resist the way things are. Actually to change, to redirect things in the right direction we must first fully accept. I think of certain martial arts. When an attacker strikes, we accept the attack and the assailant’s momentum first and then redirect that force into our own action. It’s like saying “Yes, and..” in comedy improv. I have found this dynamic works in the smallest ways in combatting annoyances. For instance, if I’m riding the subway and some d-bag, within whom I see divinity, sits next to me with his legs splayed out, touching mine, I don’t recoil. Instead, I send an internal, mental message to the point of contact for increased contact, accepting it, welcoming it, and every time, the divine d-bag recoils. Or, say one of those telemarketing solicitors chooses the dinner hour to call, I don’t just let the phone ring or pick up, complain, and hang up on them. Instead, I take it as an opportunity to launch into some soft-core phone sex. What are you wearing right now? Nothing gets you off a call list faster. In fact, it’s been awhile since I’ve had a telemarketing call. One creep at a time, one creep at a time.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To be honest I was sort of hoping for an easeful image today on which to meditate. I’ve been happily spending time each morning writing this blog, and I’m in a phase where I can simply write for hours because it’s so fun and such a release. And I’m feeling very balanced now, day 29 of 365, between expressing my impressions of the Sabian Symbols, the conceit and starter kit to get me writing this Cosmic Blague, and my personal tales from my life journey so far with an eye on my experiences that suggest there is more to life than what we can sense here on the terrestrial plane. My ego hopes you’re liking the blog and finding my writing amusing and uplifting. Entertaining Enlightenment™ is the Starsky + Cox catch phrase after all. But my capital-S Self isn’t so concerned; it is seeking simple connection, meta though it may be, with the All (that includes you) via this daily devotion.

And Joy: Today’s oracle for Aries 29° is The Music of The Sphere which is music to mine ears, this symbol’s keynote being: “Attunement to Cosmic Order.” Amen. Yesterday we were presenting ourselves, and rather imperfectly, to a Large Audience; today we are hitting our singular note and joining the infinite chorus of voices all together. Again, I’m in awe of the fact that these symbols were divined randomly and yet they follow a natural order and progression. And Order is the order of the day. And I have to say this Libra baby of Balance, Harmony and Order is in need of the Peace these principles portray.

Attunement. Can you dig it? It’s such a relaxing concept. We needn’t manifest and certainly not manipulate. We just need to align. Yesterday was the realization that we had a part to play and we best be prepared to play it and, why not, to the hilt. Today we realize the part is written in a sense, we simply have to assume it. There seems to be no stress in performing in concert with others. We are lending our voice, which is all we are ever doing. I think this important for people to know; especially those who either feel that they don’t express themselves enough—let’s dispense with the notion of making a mark— as well as those who are constantly trumpeting and telegraphing their express achievements—there really are no soloists, standouts or headliners in the one true celestial orchestration. We are all weighted equally. That’s real order and democracy.

Dane Rudhyar imposes/divines a five-fold sequence running through the symbols. As you might have gleaned, if you’ve been reading the Cosmic Blague consistently, I’m inclined to go with a twelve-fold sequence instead, simply, letting the smaller wheel of the zodiac, with it’s twelve signs and astrological houses, roll over the larger cosmic wheel of the year. I feel that twelve is the number of Cosmic Order; and it’s division into the 360° of a circle/cycle gives an equal-house weight of 30° to each of the astrological signs. Though there are 365 days in a year is fairly negligible but in metaphysical terms those extra degrees/days represent the evolution of Universal Law and Consciousness. Otherwise, there would be no progression, of the equinoxes or otherwise, and we would be a static collective entity, not a dynamic one. If you didn’t get that don’t worry about it. The point is, there is an element of growth and expansion intrinsic in existence that belies our need to pin everything down perfectly. You can’t. Not with circles. They cannot be squared. If you haven’t got your brain as far around the concept of Pi as you possibly can then this would be a good time to refresh your understanding of: π.

Meanwhile, in my theory, today’s oracle would be under the celestial influence of the sign of Leo and the fifth house which is knee-jerk labeled the house of Creativity. But actually it is that of “co-creation with god”, an assignation that carries a connotation of creativity being something of a collaboration, an attunement, with the All. That is to say that creativity and indeed all of creation has its own set of principles and we cannot change them or impose anything new; our own creativity is that of existing creativity being expressed through us. How else could my opening a piano result in it telling me what to play (read yesterday’s post)? Because it’s already written. And why, and I’ve asked this before, do most great artists describe their creative process as inspiration working through them. What is inspiration? It means spirit entering in. We are thus moved to express in harmony with creation—we ourselves are both creature and creator, so  we are natural conduits. It’s a notion akin to one of my favorites being: That we are the consciousness via which the Universe might perceive itself. Where is that rampant ego of yours now, hmm?

The Music of the Spheres isn’t audible exactly. We are really talking about vibes here. And, with another nod to Pi, it all comes down to Math. It is the length of a string for instance that determines the pitch of a note. Vibrations are of course measured in wave length. We live in a polyphonic universe of infinite notes which all still harmonize. They can’t not. Our purpose is to understand and take our place in the vast concert of evolution. Before we utter, however, we must listen. We must listen for the greater polyphonic voice of the Universe in our own inner voice, as they are, in effect one and the same. We must truly listen in. That is how we attune. The call is coming from within the house (your inner being). Ego or any form of personalization plays no part in this. Your voice and your vibration are an integral part of the Whole. And also: Your voice is the polyphonic voice of the Whole and your individual lower-case self can actually get in the way of that expression of Self. You are at once a tiny part and representative of the All. Perfect paradox. Singers are wind instruments. Sound is vibrations traveling through air. We are not the sound we emit a sound. Sound, here is a metaphor for vibration.

Your vibration is at once a tiny part and an essential one. Your vibration has penultimate meaning. In our work with clients I have heard Stella say that prayer is speaking (singing) but meditation is listening. So let’s start there. The oracle today isn’t about your voice. It is about the Isness of The Music of the Spheres. Let us simply tune in today and hear what the Universe is going on about.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Admittedly, the symbol for 28° Aries, A Large Audience Confronts The Performer Who Disappointed Its Expectations is a nightmare. And not just in the figurative sense; this is the nightmare of anyone who performs on a stage. Typically it doesn’t include being confronted by the audience, good gods. But the not being prepared part, please. Surely you’ve had some version of this dream. In a way it would almost be a relief to be confronted by the audience. Then you could sort of dialogue about it. But to disappoint an audience and have them sort of politely slink away—”the lighting was nice”—is just the worst. Or is it? My pal Justin Vivian Bond used to advise, and probably still does: “Dare to Suck.” And I gotta tell you those words have buoyed me on a number of occasions when I wasn’t quite sure if my idea of what I could do matched my ability, on stage, or in other settings requiring a leap of faith in myself. Of course it has to be a large audience, as if this wouldn’t be intimidating enough. Some performers I know would just call it an interactive workshop and own the censure as part of the experience. I’m not that clever and I’m way too sensitive. I like to be prepared. And the times that I haven’t been my best on an actual stage or a metaphoric one aren’t my favortie memories. But even they were learning experiences. My most favorite acting teacher of all time (it wasn’t Uta), Edward Morehouse used to warn against trying to wing it. It never works. There is a difference between daring to suck and winging it although, to the untrained audience eye they might be indistinguishable. If I’ve been over tired or over served and didn’t give my best performance on a stage that’s my bad because it was my responsibility to be prepared. If I was indeed prepared and stunk up the joint, well then, my side of the street is clean and I can just shrug that shite off.

Speaking of joints: I used to love to smoke marijuana. It relaxed me. I could do anything while high. Everything except act. I would never in a million years touch the stuff if I were acting in a play. And, in those couple of times I was lucky enough to be on Broadway I saw actors who would be high for rehearsals, if not performances, and it would give me panic attacks; and this was years before smoking pot myself resulted in my own actual panic attacks. Yes, there came a day, one exact moment, when it all turned on a dime and smoking weed switched from encasing me in a giant white comfy cotton ball air-conditioned parka in which I could walk to setting off bright electri red-orange lighted alarms of seizing terror. Just like that. But wait where am I going with this? I think I’m circling back. Am I? Let’s see.

Acting was a craft. It was always sacred to me. And though hardly anybody I now know has ever seen me at my craft, it really was something that I once lived and breathed. And I prided myself on being a good actor because I was always prepared. Always. I employed every fiber of my being with every amount of technique I honed, and that allowed me to fully inhabit characters in a safe, real, open, honest, accessible way. Performing was a different story. And I always made the distinction between when I was acting on a stage and when I was performing on a stage. Doing sketch comedy or improv or singing a song, even, back in the day was performing. Acting was something else. Though I don’t act really anymore—I mostly perform—when I sing now I don’t perform, I act. I wouldn’t be able to stand up and sing any other way, really, because I’m not a singer per se. I absolutely love to sing; but in order for me to sing in front of people I have to prepare the song the way I would take on a role in full-length play. Then what comes out will always be right. Even if it’s wrong it’s right. If I don’t approach a song like it’s a juicy monologue my character is compelled to communicate it falls short. Trust me, I’ve tried. I can’t put a song across on musical chops alone. I’m not an instrument that way.

However, if you know me, or if you’ve been reading this Blague, you might have come to realize that certain forces have been known to move through me. But if that’s ever happened in my work as an actor it would have taken the form of the thinnest membrane because even if I’m playing an out-of-control character, as the actor, the real me, William—not Quinn really—is in full control of what’s happening. But I have had other performance experiences where I’ve been a total instrument for those sometime friends of mine, the unseen forces.

Back in the early 1990s I worked as a waiter at the Bell Caffe on Spring Street, in New York City, while so many of my friends, now, would have been at Don Hills, literally spitting distance away. If you were around there then and remember the Bell, but didn’t realize I worked there, you are probably revising your whole concept of me. And well you should. Because on any given night as your waiter I might have been wearing a vintage micro-mini real Hawaiian print woven cotton bathing suit with oversized workboots, a hooded zip windreaker and some kind of beany as my uniform, and there would have likely been a joint hanging out of my mouth while I was taking your order. I loved waiting tables. Most waiters have nightmares that they can’t keep up with a slew of tables—see, another performance anxiety dream just when you need it—while I would dream that I had to wait on the entire restaurant by myself, which would be a very good dream indeed. Actually I could handle an entire restaurant by myself back in those days. I would love when people wouldn’t show for work. That just meant a bigger challenge to keep the entire restaurant happy and buzzing without missing a beat; and of course more cash for Billy. It is my name don’t wear it out.

So the Bell Caffe would be packed to the rafters with hipsters before there were hipsters. It was a perfect melange of punky, hip-hopping, hippy, biker, fashionista grungesters. You know, the 90s. So of course we had a live middle eastern jazz trance band on Friday nights that would come in and set themselves up in a circle right in the middle of the restaurant through which you already couldn’t walk with any semblance of ease, unless of course you were me, coursing through the place serving up a storm. Against the wall, right near where they circled up, was an old out-of-tune upright piano that looked like it was from, oh I dunno, 1910. I good quarter of the keys didn’t work at all and nobody ever played it. But one night, as the band began to play, people packed in like sardines, a thick cloud of smoke infused with garlic and pot and patchouli and incense and steamed vegetables and sweat and love and coffee and indifference hanging in the air, all my tables happy, nobody wanting for anything: I opened the piano.

I can see the keyboard now, its white keys were, wait, colored?, in my imagination—pink, blue and yellow—the black keys still black; and the music, this exotic form of jazz, was swirling and quickening into an improvisational froth, and the color-coded keys, like the sometime blueprints in my mind, urged my fingers to them in certain combinations. And I began to play. Now, as I child I took piano lessons, but it was all by rote, the Fur Elise, the Sonata in C or whatever—pieces I tried to learn and through which I only ever stumbled. But now I was in it. I was part of the band. And the piano was telling me what to play like a spool in a player piano in reverse. And I just kept forming chords and running up and down the ivories and trilling here and well, to be honest, I’m not really sure what I was doing. I was gone. Gone, daddy, gone. And the song went on forever. And I remember the hangnail I had began to bleed and I could feel the keys missing ivory scraping my fingers with raw wood edges, and on I went and it was wild and spectacular and I came as close to being possessed, and happily so, as I have ever been in my born days. And it got faster. Crescendo. Lightning speed. To beat the band. Like dancing the Alley Cat as a kid. Me and this band behind me, whom I never saw during any of this, together in a fever pitch, faster and faster and faster and then, stop, all together on a single note, done.

I was a bit out of it. Transported. My fellow waitrons were like what the fuck, why didn’t you tell us these past two years working here that you played piano? I don’t. And the band on their feet hugging me and slapping me on the back; and customers, some I knew some I didn’t, asking me when and where I would next be performing; did I have a band? did I play solo? “How can we see you?” You can’t. I don’t exist—this I.

I remember that night flashing back to another night long ago when I was a freshman in high school inappropriately attending a party of seniors where there was a band made up of bad-ass graduates who were never going to college. I was some version of drunk I’m sure; but very lucid, I recall. Still I had the pluck to join the band’s open invitation to anybody, anybody who would like to come up a sing Sweet Home Alabama. Yes that’s right. I started too high. I was in that weird strained part of my voice the whole time. However, I was working it. Showmanship up the wazoo. The full on Mick Jagger cum Bowie, with maybe some Tina thrown in, experience as applied to a Southern rock song. Sure, why not. Except that people were absolutely appalled. I would go so far as to say livid actually. When you’re fourteen giving raw androgyne glam to a room full of long-haired nineteen year olds who spent all four years of high school in auto shop, and their girlfriends for whom feathered roach clips are the de rigeur hair accessory in 1977, it’s a bit awkward to say the least. People may have thrown things. If not bottles then at least they flung the liquid contents at me. I was a shaking outcast as I left the “stage” any liquid bravado that had gotten me up there having evaporated in my spine. And then this girl grabbed me. I forget her name. But she was one of those sort of earth-shoe stoner girls, hair too thick and kinky to work a feathered roach clip. “You were great” she said, and it was clear she meant it. I began to mumble some kind of disclaimer but she interrupted me. “I know, I know”, referring to the popular opinion of my performance, banishing that pervasive thought-form with a dismissive wave of her hand and a modified Bronx cheer. “These people don’t know anything; that was great, that was truly great.”

So what have we got? We have me being possessed by the spirit of some piano jazz great; and me being universally reviled but for one individual dissenting from the Large Audience Confronting The Performer. In neither case was I prepared. When I took over one of the three roles I was understudying in a Broadway production of The Seagull back in the early 90s for a few weeks, I was on stage a good amount but basically had one key line. I was universally praised for what was considered my compelling albeit silent physical life on stage; and yet Jon Voight, who was in the cast, would come to my dressing room after the show to give me a line reading or make comment on my tone, projection or modulation (on my one line!). It was so embarrassing and so infuriating. And being a sensitive young soul I thought well he must be “representing” everyone in the production and he’s been elected to come and correct me. I am ruining the entire three act play with my two dozen syllables. I wasn’t. He was just a blowhard. And apparently he is notorious for giving other actors line readings. He’s like Cloris Leachman with a overlarge dinner plate for a face and a penis that creates incestuous offspring. Gosh that felt good to say. But I am aware that I am being self indulgent in this reading of today and storytelling without much exploration of how this oracle applies to all of us. Or am I performing for a Large Audience and have I Disappointed Its Expectations. You decide.

The Bell Caffe had let me take a hiatus while I did The Seagull. And when I first went on as The Cook for the great actor and artist John Beale, Stella was attending the wedding of our closest friends, in France. The wonderful Maryann Plunkett who was in the cast made a very sweet announcement wishing me luck over the loudspeaker that piped into the dressing rooms—something I shall never forget—and after the curtain I was so keyed up with nobody to celebrate with or vent on. So I called the owner of the Bell, Krt Williams, from the backstage payphone! to see if he and other staff were still hanging out and could I come down for a drink and unwind because I was so shot through with adrenalin I could have scaled the Empire State Building. He said they were. Great. I cabbed it down to Spring Street. Meanwhile Krt had gone around to every table in the still packed restaurant telling all the customers—eek gads I’m getting teary—that I’d just gone on in this role. So when I walked into the Bell the entire room shot to their feet and applauded my entrance. I can’t tell you how amazing that felt. It was like being in an old 1930s movie. But I’m still on about me, aren’t I?

The oracle, the oracle: Preparation. That’s the key element. We can’t just be hopeful. We can’t leave it to chance. We can’t expect to be possessed of a spirit. And we can’t hang our hopes on the exceptions to the rule—we have to consider the Large Audience, which symbolizes everybody, really, all of humanity. All the world is a stage. We are all players. Everybody else is the Audience. We all have a part to play and we better know that shite cold. We have Responsibility, literally: ability to respond. To what? Our purpose and our calling, so many of the themes we’ve been touching on thus far as we cycle through these Sabian Symbols. Great expectatons and Hope are not enough. So we are Confronted with the fact that we have promised more than we’ve delivered. Hope, Promise, Deliverance—these are all themes of the sign of Cancer which, in my estimation, governs this oracle. After the Fall of Gemini (duality) as befitted yesterday’s oracle on failure, we have the Flood of Cancer, the cardinal-water sign, with its’ ark (promise) to carry us to a new shore (deliverance); but it isn’t automatic, we have to prepare the vehicle for our own deliverance. Everybody, all of mankind and all life depends on our putting in that work. And, really, if it’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights you might as well stay in, put your head down, power through, and prepare! So here, as this oracle says, we haven’t done so, and we are going to be read hard by a critical mob. Good. At least the mob has the courtesy to read us instead of flinging rotten tomatoes or complimenting us on our costume with a forced smile. I think that Large Audience, as daunting as they are, are doing us a big favor. If they’re taking the time to critique us we are probably being given another chance to deliver. If they care enough to tough love us in this way then they must have seen a glimmer of hope that we do possess the right stuff to deliver. Dane Rudhyar says it comes down to “how to handle this situation.” Indeed. I think slapping on the notion of “It” being a workshop is a good one. Yes we are performing and though we mightn’t be prepared, we are preparing. And guess what, Large Scary Audience, you’re all a part of it. Maybe Jon Voight was right, maybe my tone was off, maybe he was trying to help me, maybe he’s not a face-plate after all, maybe I really learned something via his criticism, and maybe I did appreciate the fact he cared enough to come to me and try to help me. It could just as easily be that as it could be he’s a blowhard. The perception is better for me. Forget about him or any audience. What reparations are we willing to make in the process? None? Okay, then, good luck with that. But don’t expect an Audience to care enough next time to Confront you. Meanwhile it’s your responsibility to deliver; to get the job done. It’s your sacred duty to be the best most prepared You you can be. We are recovering, repairing and being delivered all the time. Every day some Audience has something critical to say; and the truth is we can always benefit from said criticism. There is always something we can learn from it. Even if the lesson in patience in enduring the criticism and still looking at that critic as a teacher, a guru. You have high expectations of others to deliver. Why shouldn’t they have high expectations of you. Maybe they think you are capable of meeting them. Isn’t even their disappointment a compliment when you think about it? Think about it. And once you have: come back more prepared and show us what you got!

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Today’s oracle poses at bit of a challenge. At 27° Aries the divined Sabian Symbol for the day is Through Imagination A Lost Opportunity is Regained. So lets ask ourselves, quick, what pops to mind as our lost opportunity(s), first thing off the top of our heads. And then we can set our mind to creatively revisit the so-called failure and find a new inroad. I remember some years ago, we accompanied our friend JK Rowling to Harvard where she was giving the commencement speech, which of course was brilliant, and entitled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” In it she speaks of how what she considered her own epic fail stripped away the inessentials to focusing on the one thing she wanted to do most, write novels. It’s an inspiring read. And it’s most fitting given today’s oracle which asks us to allow loss to inspire our creative imagination. If you’re like me, more than one opportunity pops to mind but, perhaps, also like me, they may be of a piece, falling under a larger umbrella.

I started writing a paragraph about the history of specific failures but deleted it. Seems the wrong tack. But let me cite a few examples: For years we wrote horoscopes for magazines and their websites. It was quite lucrative and was our bread and butter. We had really high-profile gigs like Paris Vogue and The Daily Beast, which never had a horoscope before and not since. But as publishing changed and print magazines began to shrink in size or fold, horoscope pages were the first to go. So the column idea “failed” as a means of income. We thought screw this. We will write a horoscope for free every week and just offer it up as a tithing to people. As a result our weekly Haute Astrology column is very popular and though it doesn’t pay financially I know that it benefits us in other ways; if nothing else it keeps us connected to people interested in our unique perspective on astrology and planet moves.

The failure of our column business—at one point we were writing upwards of six to eight different daily, monthly, weekly horoscopes at one time—also freed us to explore our talents as personal consultants. And now, a decade on, this is the most thriving aspect of our professional lives; and nothing gives us greater joy than helping people in their journey of self-realization. It has also cultivated those extra-sensory gifts of ours to which I’ve alluded in this blog. So that’s a big win-win.

And, speaking about that umbrella under which seeming disparate things might fall: I realized that our nighttime pursuits of performing in clubs and theaters, and even the founding of the Afterglow Festival, which we did in collaboration with John Cameron Mitchell and others, and our quite serious private consultancy with clients all fell under the larger heading of “lifting people’s spirits.” And whenever I feel that I’m wearing too many hats or stretched too thin or teetering into Libran dilletantism I check myself with that phrase. Is what you’re doing lifting spirits? If the answer is yes than I’m on the right track.

We had a decent success in publishing Sextrology and I’m most encouraged by the fact that it still hasn’t achieved its “tipping point”; it’s a boon to know someone hasn’t heard of the book because that is a potential new reader. That book is a success story against all odds. People say publishing has always been a nightmare industry; I entered it with the whole fantasy of getting a great advance and writing out at the beach, which we managed to do. We like to say we got the last real advance in publishing before the polarization occured whereby only celebrities (in whatever field) were given money and others peanuts or worse. But this celebrity obsession is true across the board. And when they are famous for nothing? Why do we care if some junior Kardashian got her lips plumped up amid denials of plastic surgery. It’s like we always want superficial people to complain about. Shouldn’t this sort of thing have ended with guillotine-ing Marie Antoinette? Did I mention Stella is related to she who lost her head?

I’m rambling today. But I don’t care. This subject inspires rambling. Rambling is the form my creative imagination takes. Back to books. We were hardpressed to write a second book. Or as our agent said: “you need a second widget.” I should have known right there that this was a bad idea and ran far, far away. The world had changed. There were no more good advances for the non-famous. What was meant to be a sidebar to Sextrology was then poured into our second book Cosmic Coupling but it was chopped to bits and we weren’t “allowed” to give gay relationship chapters equal length. “The book can’t be too long.” Don’t get me wrong, people love this book, but there is a worlds better version of this concept waiting to be published. But how to do it? Despite the fact that Sextrology is an industry success story, you’re only as good as your last book and our highly abridged sophmore effort (which maybe would have been a huge seller had it contained all the content we intended it to) pales in comparison to Sextrology. Well maybe we should take a page from Amanda Palmer’s (actual) book, The Art of Asking which was her Ted Talk and an art she has perfected, admittedly, amid some rumblings. The point is one might say we have at this junctured “failed” at book publishing or have “missed opportunities” in that field but I don’t think so. I think the way that industry treats non-celebrity writers is criminal and it should inspire my creative imagination to find a way to get our work out there in spite of traditional publishing that takes the lion share of profits. Oh, to be sure, HarperCollins has made millions off of Sextrology and though our royalties are stellare compared to most, we assuredly have not. One silver lining was our “prediction” that ebooks would be a thing and a decade ago we had those rights reverted and recently published the Sextrology ebook under our own steam. #pleasebuythisone

I know we will, via use of creative imagination, find a way to publish the (at least) dozen other books we have on our virtual drawing board. And, in so doing, I have a feeling, we will trailblaze uncharted territory, paving the way for other writers to do likewise. This is a gut instinct. We know where we’re going and so we needn’t be in a a rush to get there.

Read Sextrology?

Television has been another “epic fail” for us. We have been approached by innumerable producers and networks and even Oscar-winning movie stars with their own production companies to develop a show. We also have a menu of ideas for the making of a great one. But oy. Publishing is like a neighborhood playground compared to the snake pit that is the television industry. You’ve seen the program Episodes, right? I wish I could say that the most exaggerated characters on that show were caricatures. They are not. If it’s challenging to retain the integrity of ones work in publishing, it’s near impossible to do so in television where every promising conversation and agreement devolves. It is truly comical. Just this past year, after several years of saying no to offers, after several years before that of “going out”, both in the US and UK, with sure-fire (not) show ideas: we were working with this one production company that swore they were only interested in a classy, elevated, artful concept that we could pitch to some high-class networks only to package the “sizzle” they shot of us to appeal, seemingly, to one TV exec who wanted us to host a late night sex show where we basically critiqued people fucking. Yeah no.

Yet we know that our effort isn’t for naught, just as we know energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It will find an outlet. That will be up to us. Not that either one of us have any burning desire to be on TV—we so don’t. But should the failure of these past approaches creatively inspire another way to represent ourselves, in our best light, in that or a similar medium. Well then yes bring it. I think what we are meant to glean from all of this, actually, is that failure is for winners, only regret is for losers. Dane Rudhyar gives a nod, with this oracle, to the relationship between guru and student whereby the guru sets tasks for the initiate that are designed to fail so that the novice finds a unique inroad born in his or her imagination. I would say that the guru is mimicking the action and purpose of Life and the Universe. If we achieved everything we set our mind to, we would never be inspired and we would never grow. We would never divert from the norm.

Remember how evolution works. There must be a mutation, an offshoot from the norm, via which new life thrives. When we hit a wall, we find a new way around, not just for ourselves but for others too. No is Yes. So next time someone slaps you with the former, hear the latter and find a new way. Yes is the word of creation. When others succeed where you have failed be inspired by them not resentful. When your greatest hopes are dashed realize you’re probably being saved from distress. Other’s success isn’t your success. You can’t have what other people have. You can only have what you have and you can only want what you have. That includes success. You are already successful. Don’t look at the successes you haven’t achieved. Look to the ones you have achieved.

Anything denied you isn’t yours. If it was meant to be it wouldn’t be denied you. You won’t regain that loss. You’ll gain something else. That loss was only meant to inspire your imagination—so-called loss is indeed the most powerful fuel for your imagination. In this way we not only weather, we welcome, it. A closed door of opportunity speeds your path further down that great hall toward rightful success and fulfillment. But that’s the byproduct really. What is being cultivated all the while, during this process, is your unshakable Faith, not only in yourself, but in the workings of the Universe. If you feel you could achieve a) success or opportunity, but find it denied you, why wouldn’t you move to b) or c) all the way to z) and around again to aa)? You had faith in achieving a). Is that all you could achieve? Just a)? No. We don’t keep going back, beating our head against a wall trying to succeed under hardship or duress. Success should be worlds easier than that; so we thank the “loss” of opportunity for saving us the struggle and speeding us toward more natural fits of opportunity where success comes naturally and readily. I don’t know who said this originally but Stella utters this phrase quite a lot: There Is No Loss In Divine Mind.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Things are getting spooky. Cue Jude Law on the High Hat: spoo-ka-key, spoo-ka-key. This morning I woke wanting to tell you a story that involved dreams and psychic premonitions but I thought, too soon: I just yesterday related a tale from the road paved with synchronicity and I should spread this shite out. But then, I read what today’s Sabian Symbol was and I am now compelled to relate my story. Today, at Aries 26° we see A Man Possessed Of More Gifts Than He Can Hold which is sort of the shadow side of the oracles of the past few days. For today, the potentiality might be too great. And indeed our minds are often confronted with an as yet unexperienced type of potency around which we can’t quite yet get our conscious noggins. We might get caught up, carried away by this power. And Dane Rudhyar boldly italicizes the fact that today’s energetic message is: a warning against undertaking more than it is as yet safe and sound to attempt. So here’s my story and we’ll circle back to the oracle:

Just blocks from where I now find myself in Boston is the Hotel Eliot where we had always stayed, for over a decade, whenever we would come to town. In fact the suites there remain the model in my mind for the perfect pied à terre (plus a small separate kitchen), something for which I’m always on the lookout in any of the several cities of the world I fancy living. I think it was the winter of 2004-5, we were staying in town overnight and I had a dream that was seemingly banal but very vivid and thankfully I verbalized it in the morning to Stella or else I would have been stuck in my own head with this happening. I told her upon waking that I had a dream of being in this underground parking lot and there was a small dark indigenous looking man washing a wall with a fire house and that he tried to speak to me but then I woke up. I might have even brought the dream up in context of an ongoing most-boring-dream contest we had with each other and some close English friends, one of whom had a dream she was vacuuming; I had once had a most boring dream that I was sleeping and not dreaming. Think about it.

Anyway, we decided we’d take in a movie after checking out. I believe it was Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which was playing in Kendall Square which is a very open, unpopulated part of Cambridge, especially in winter, characterized by renovated old warehouse buildings and sparkling new hotels and office buildings. It sort of reminds me of some of downtown Los Angeles. When we got to the theater, which was part of a sort of building complex, it became clear that we didn’t have to find street parking it was provided and we followed the blue P sign. This started leading us down an incline and I got a flash. And then we went over a pretty remarkable bump for which there was no warning, and I turned round to look at what we had run over and it was a meaty fire hose. I immediately broke out in a cold sweat and my heart started racing and I desperately blurted out in rapid-fire machine-gun style: this is the dream; when we get to where we’re parking we will see a small, dark man hosing down a wall and he’s going to want to talk to me and I can’t, I just can’t. “Calm down,” came the response; but I was already in full on panic-attack mode as we circled, down and down, going over another bump. As we turned the corner we saw the doors marked elevator to theater and to our right, for some inexplicable reason, in the middle of winter, the temperatures well below freezing, there was the tiny dark native of somewhere looking man blasting a wall with a  fire hose. As we passed I heard the water turn off. And I repeated: he’s going to want to talk to me we have to get out and just walk really, really fast to the elevator. We parked, and slammed the doors and bee-lined and, of course, after us came the compelling voice in broken English: “Hello, excuse me, please, excuse me, sir, please, hello.”

No effing way. That’s all I could think. Whatever he has to say (for some reason) I do not want to hear it. Move, move, move. I can still see him coming towards us as the elevator doors shut. Now, needless to say I was shaken. First of all, I had never had so vivid or so ridiculously immediate a manifestation of a prophetic dream of this nature. I laughed the dream off as being a contestant for most boring but the moment I knew, upon entering that parking lot, that the dream was being born out in reality it did not exhilarate me, it freaked me the ef out. And yet, I have to say, that this trip to Boston, and we talk about this, ushered in a spate of pretty bad misfortune that lasted more than a few years. As these things go, this period was character building but I still say: we didn’t need it. Regarding the little man so desperately needing to tell me something: I’ve had to live with the fact that I didn’t let him. Sure, at first, it was a very great relief because my instinct was Run. So I felt as if I had dodged a bullet; for awhile. Then it slowly crept in: What if he was trying to tell me something helpful, useful—what if he was trying to warn me about some horrible things on the horizon; and would it have helped to know about them?

I have a mystic friend called Margaret. She douses. That is to say she has a special talisman on a chain that she swings over you via which she reads your energies and removes any unwanted, shall we say, entities. The first thing she told me was that…hmm, I hesitate to write this for some reason…how to say: I have a positive entity that watches out for me and helps clear my path, energetically. She said he was an Indian man with a certain weapon which made me think American Indian for some reason. I never asked which. But then I wondered, sometime later, after the dream cum parking lot incident if she didn’t mean a man from India; because, though I refused to really take a good look at him, it is very possible that the man with the big hose (ha, ha) was Indian and therefore most directly analogous to my description of the dream man being indigenous. I’ll never know. And as the decade marched forward I came to actually regret not stopping and heeding what this creature had to say. I probably would welcome the experience now. But I’m not the same person I was then. And that’s the point. So yes maybe he was going to issue a warning and that’s why today’s oracle seems apt, but I suddenly have another theory.

My feeling as gives rise to my belief, upon reading the energy of this Sabian Symbol, is that the entire experience, not simply what the man may or may not had to say, was the warning. And my gut now says it was right that I ran. I wasn’t equipped to handle whatever knowledge or power was going to be imparted—I was not equipped to have my dream of prophesy fully born out. I couldn’t have handled that. It would have been too much. So for the first time in nearly a decade I don’t regret not stopping to listen. I believe I did the exact correct thing. It would have blown my own cosmic circuits perhaps. I didn’t want to know that I possessed such a power. I was scared. And fear can be a great guide. I recognize that over the last decade I’ve slowly accepted that I have certain gifts and I’ve explored them gradually and in a way that has, with a few exceptions, been comfortable and not crazy making. Remember, I had that experience with the superhuman strength and the Sherlock Holmes-like blueprints appearing in my mind, mathematically outlining every physics possibility to every action, back in 1987. That was too much a break with reality as we know it (though it opened me up to other realities) for my tender mind and body at that time. There is a monstrous manifestation of unseen power that can threaten to undo us lest we learn to harness said power in such a way that folds it into our present reality, gently, like whipped egg-whites into batter.

Rudhyar says: “The mind which finds itself confronted with a totally unfamiliar and as yet unexperienced type of potency finds it difficult at first to adjust to its new world of perception and possibilities of action. He may rush ahead excitedly and lose his bearings. He should try to reach a state of calm watchfulness, and to learn that at this level too there are limits and restrictions, i.e. laws expressing this new type of “order.”

Needless to say I wasn’t in a state of “calm watchfulness” that winter day in question. I mean WTF? who hoses down a wall in freezing weather and why did that man want to talk to me, specifically, so urgently. At that point I had major limits and restrictions and today’s oracle has helped me understand that this was probably a good thing. I don’t think it was safe (for me at that time) to hear what the little man had to say. I’ve encountered little men before, I might add. One of whom spoke in tongues, but that’s another story for another day. Meanwhile, I can’t help think of the little man in the top hat in J.D. Salinger’s Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, as he does suggest a mystical presence which wouldn’t have been lost on Buddy or any of the “Wise Child” Glass children. I know it’s not unusual or a even un-pompous to relate, as I did as a young teen, to members of Salinger’s fictitious family. In my youth I fancied myself something of a Zooey who, despite being one of the brood, embodied a certain skepticism which I now realize was his assured way of hanging onto present reality in a world, and in a family, in which those around him were forever shifting the “limits and restrictions” thereupon. I’ve become less the Zooey as I’ve gotten older and am more the Buddy now, a character, I feel, who operates from that vantage point of “calm watchfulness.” Let us all take a page from Buddy’s book today. Let us be the observer. Let us not leap at opportunities to bite off more power than our fragile psyches can handle,

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Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.