As the message of yesterday’s oracle was to be as open as a window into which can blow some divine expression of abundance; now, being thus open we glean The Possibility For Man To Gain Experience At Two Levels Of Being, the Sabian Symbol for 25° Aries. We today begin the third round of twelve signs circling their way through this giant circle of a year. As such, we are dealing with another first-sign influence: that of Possibility. Aries, ruled by Mars whose “spear and shield” symbol is that great celestial erection ever ready to plant a seed: here of new potentialities. We are not guaranteed that wo/man can fire on two consciousness cylinders at once, but we are to believe that it is doable. Certainly s/he will have to keep wide open that window of a mind. We’re talking faith here folks; and the power of belief in any possibility being the key factor in realizing it. Dane Rudhyar says one “can only truly experience what he deeply believes he can experience.”

The motto “I believe” belongs to the sign of Pisces, the womb-tomb of the zodiacal twelfth house of non-material “spiritual” existence. From that womb we emerge again into Aries, whose motto is “I am.” So too does manifestation, existence ascend from the vaporous mists rising off Pisces’ primordial soup. Belief and Imagination are as interwoven as that of the sign’s Fish. Belief is the knowledge than anything you imagine can be made manifest, no matter how impossible it might seem. We never lose our ability to experience life at the pure energetic, non-material or “spiritual” level, but our facility in doing so is immediately bred out of us at birth. So to fire on both cylinders, living a terrestrial and spiritual life at once, we must acknowledge and claim this dormant ability in us. Sometimes we are called to do so. Perhaps yesterday’s cornucopia shaped curtains were something of a calling.

I’m not talking about religious life here. I’m speaking of experiencing life on the level of pure belief, imagination and magic. To understand the world as both a physical place set like a gem in time, and also as wholly energetic experience that is beyond time and space. So many great scientists, let alone mystics—although I’m always most interested in those in whom the twain shall meet—have meditated or stared into space or at a dirty wall to “come up” with their greatest ideas, theories or breakthroughs. Come up from where? Exactly. To gain experience at two levels of being: That phrase alone implies a sort of internship or apprenticeship. We are not being asked to walk on water or turn it into wine. We might just imagine what it would take to do such things. We might only be asked to believe that such things are possible. Or to take a less Christ-y tack, we might explore how science fiction of the past becomes science fact in the present. So what might we imagine, here and now, in our non-material fiction that might some day manifest as fact?

I think of the X-Men because, well, we know that we are indeed evolving and that evolution actually happens via mutation. The freak, the quirk, the deviation is what spearheads a new pathway for life to survive. The avant garde becomes the old guard. The freaky voice in the wilderness, John the Baptist, the Waterbearer (Aquarius) paves the way for the new messiah, the Jesus Fish (Pisces), who told the doubting Thomas that you have it backwards if you need to see to believe. JC was all about believing to see! And look, since we are all evolving, I’d like to believe that my personal evolution is characterized by the endowment of certain abilities in which I must believe in order to embrace, access and utilize them. If I didn’t believe in what might be deemed my own psychic abilities I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to employ them. If I didn’t believe in synchronicity as a certain synching up of these two levels of being I wouldn’t recognize and experience their astounding reassurance and, as the Cosmic Blague suggests: humor.

I have a funny story: We had written Sextrology and was promised, even shown a marketing plan that included a multi-city tour of book signings. Well just after the book came out the head of marketing quit at Harper Collins and she had fabricated this entire tour—none of the bookstores at which we had scheduled appearances had even been contacted. Being a corporation run by the devil (Rupert Murdoch) our publishers and editors made up all kinds of excuses for this and tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug. But, if you’ve met us, you’d know that doesn’t fly. After tearing the glib, smug PR and other people involved in the fictious promotional tour of our book new ones, I petitioned the publisher for a budget, which we received (it wasn’t a lot) and we launched our own mini tour that included Book Soup in LA and Booksmith in San Francisco. At Book Soup a coven of witches came to our event and bought a book for their “friend Tori” who turned out to be Tori Amos who then wrote (in her book Piece by Piece) how our book inspired the writing of her song “Goodbye Pisces” which Stella has been known to perform. But it gets weirder, which we love right?

In San Francisco we were interviewed by the Chronicle by a fantastic journalist who really understood what we were on about and wrote about us in a very respectful manner that really set the tone for other newspapers and magazines to take us and our subject seriously. Then, at Booksmith, we didn’t realize that this venerable bookseller has the tradition of making “author trading cards”; so there we were, a stack of Starsky + Cox cards, each with our picture on one side and vital statistics about us on the other. Having never been the type of boy who collected baseball cards my closest point of reference was Partridge Family cards which I did obsessively collect, as I did Wacky Packs, to whom I submitted a number of suggestions (I was already branding) some of which they actually used, though I can’t remember what they are anymore. Oh, wait, Poopsie instead of Pepsi was one!

So morning after the Booksmith event it was time to head to the airport to fly back east. And we were staying at a sister hotel to the Triton, the name of which escapes me, and they had piped in music in the rooms which you could turn down of course. We were running a bit late and Stella was downstairs dealing with checkout while I finished packing and I turned up the music for some added pace and motivation when suddenly I Woke Up in Love This Morning by The Partridge Family came blaring through the speakers. I couldn’t wait to tell Stella this had happened thinking that was the end of the synchronicity. It wasn’t. For, at the airport, through check-in and, now, at the gate I needed to hit the mensroom and who should be walking in at the same time also heading to the urinals? Well Brian Forster who played (the second) Chris on The Partridge Family of course. So as we’re peeing, I am thinking how do I say all this and not seem like a crazy person. Somehow I managed to let out two streams simultaneously, the obvious one, and one made up of short, succinct sentences that managed to hit the important points: author, Booksmith, trading cards, Partridge Family, I Woke Up in Love This Morning, now him. (Did you know that Brian Forster is Charles Dicken’s great-great-great grandson?) As we zipped he said those three magical words: “That’s So Weird”. I know!

I remembered, hey, I have my trading cards on me. Of course after washing and drying my hands and hearing how Brian lived in the Bay Area and was a race car driver and something of a techie, I handed him a Starsky + Cox trading card and said, here, as someone who collected your trading cards it would be a hoot if you take one of ours.

Okay, holy crap. I just went to Wikipedia to check to see how many great-great’s Brian is from grandfather Charles Dickens….and get this people…..TODAY is his birthday. The synchronicity continues!!!

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To Be Molded by Transpersonal Forces is how Dane Rudhyar, sage of all things Sabian, characterizes the energy of the day, set forth by as the symbol for Aries 24°: Blown Inward By The Wind, The Curtains Of An Open Window Take The Shape Of A Cornucopia. My immediate reaction to this image is the Cornucopia being formed by a team effort of curtains, wind and an open window. Curtains, Wind and an Open Window. Sounds like a new millenial transpersonal cover band of Earth, Wind and Fire. And, like most anyone, I’m totally up for a horn of plenty being blown unto me.

The curtains may represent the veil between our inner world and that of spiritual forces, symbolized by the wind, making inroads therein. We find ourselves at the intersection of mystery and manifestation, natural force and human intelligence, spiritual influence and our own power of belief. Imagine yourself, some windy Spring day, lying backwards on a bed, your head slightly overhanging. And there’s a window, draped with white curtains being caught by a sudden gust so strong it blows the curtains, back, into your room and the pattern is remarkable enough to label it a Cornucopia. We are experiencing Nature enter into our man-made interior to deliver a message of abundance. And its a promise of more than material gain. Our consciousness has been infiltrated by cosmic influence bent on communicating a generosity of spirt.

Yesterday we spoke of fruition leading to harvest, and today we get an ethereal Cornucopia which is the very image of the harvest complete. Spiritual bounty will make itself known, crossing the boundary of our rational mind and impressing itself upon our receptive psyche. Something is in the air. Presumably, it’s not the only abrupt and pointed gust of wind to sitr this day—something has been brewing—and it culminates in this moment of realizing that divine Nature is reaching out (into) us just as we might be seeking it through our attempts at transcendent experience. Transpersonal can refer to a spiritual brand of psychology; even to entertain that concept of a spiritual psychology one would need to have an open mind. Through an open mind, that window, we make ourselves available to beneficial unseen forces, especially those that give rise to our creativity.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

At 23° Aries the Sabian Symbol is A Pregnant Woman In Light Summer Dress. Well it’s not summer so, reading this metaphorically, we are speaking about fruition, not just with the pregant woman but with summer being the time of harvest. I don’t have a lot to say about today’s oracle and apparently either does Dane Rudhyar or anybody else by the dearth of opinion regarding this on the interweb. So maybe that speaks loudest. What can you say about a pregnant woman in a summer dress? It’s both banal and miraculous an image. Banal in the sense that we’ve seen this image before in life and typically it inspires a sort of pity that said lady is pregant in the summer which can’t be all that fun. Miraculous in that the image is so stripped down to reveal the simple mystery of life being created. But I am struggling a bit here.

I’d like to think that today was about recognizing what it is in us that is incubating and coming to fruition. What magical child are we about to give birth to? What bun do we have in the oven? Rudhyar speaks of today as the culmination of the male pugilist of two days ago and the garden, of yesterday, which he likens to a woman. So today we have a baby brewing. Okay, well, that seems logical. But I’m not blown away by this image. It seems all too natural perhaps. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the fact that we really can’t take credit, as human individuals, for the most important, elemental occurances in life. Nature runs its course through us and it’s not a feather in our cap really. Any species can procreate, no big deal. So maybe it’s about the humility of being employed, if not used, by nature. That we are just temporary pawns in Nature’s larger plan to create life in general but that we, as specks of singularity, really don’t matter much and certainly not for very long in the scheme of things. It’s always about what or who is next. There’s always somebody new waiting in the wings, or in this case, the womb.

Okay let me find some personal connection here….let’s get back to pregnancy being a metaphor for possibility, which given this image, seems imminent. What are we bringing to life? The image of a pregnant lady in summer was nowhere more harrowingly portrayed than by Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. She was rocking her summer shift dress and short seasonal hairdo. She was lugging around a suitcase through New York in, what?, the full glare of August? She was also carrying something she didn’t count on bringing to light. But in the end she was going to care for it, despite it being a diabolical outcome. I always thought that Rosemary giving in to mothering her demon spawn was the very image of “owning it”. I like children. I do. But I dare say I don’t like the offspring of bad parenting, no shade on the kiddies, but a major Bea Arthur look askance at the parents who obsessively focus on their children, revolving everything around them. Nature did not intend for your child to be the center of the universe and certainly not the centerpiece of my dinner conversation or the prime mover of every plan of action. I feel for kids with overly attentive parents almost as much as I do for those with neglectful ones. But let’s swing back to metaphor land.

Let’s say the bun in the oven in this oracle is the creative plan you’re hatching. Can you give it life and leave it enough alone? Or are you going to obsess on, and kill, it with your constant tampering? One of the things I feared and am now loving about doing a daily blog is that I don’t have the luxury to make it perfect. I don’t know what I’m getting each day—I have no idea what the Sabian Symbol is tomorrow just as I didn’t know what image today would bring until I sat down twenty minutes ago. I have to just give birth and then move on. So that means I have to be as mindful as I can be in the birthing process. Once it’s out there I’ll probably never look at it again. It’s true with most creative ventures—ask any filmmaker, musician, novelist, etc.—typically once they’ve delivered the product they were longing or commissioned to create, they scarcely look at it again. I don’t think I’ve read Sextrology since I last had to for editing purposes. Once the bun is baked it’s pretty much what it is. Yes you provide a happy, nurturing environment for your child, just as you might promote your album, book or try to get your film into Sundance; but if you made as much of your creative output as modern day parents tend to make of their children with ridiculous names you would be labelled nuts and narcissistic. The irony being that narcissism should only be about you. Being narcissistic via your offspring because maybe it’s your only point of pride in life, well, then you’re the devil, Rosemary; you’re the devil.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Upon arriving in America for the first time and asked by journalists what she thought the most important thing in life was, Madame De Gaulle said “Happiness”. Now remember, she was French, with a very thick accent, and she would have pronounced the word with a silent H.; so, you can imagine what those journalists thought she was actually answering…

There is a suggestion of the erotic given today’s Sabian Symbol for 22° Aries, The Gate To The Garden of All Fulfilled Desires as it promises to be, in part, a garden of earthly delights. But my sense is that we are speaking of desire on all metaphysical levels, and what is meant by fulfillment here is that which cannot be achieved through an ephemeral brush with pleasure. We are, again, looking at the realm of perpetual Joy. Now, over the course of the last twenty-four hours, Stella and I have been slapped with signposts about Happiness. Suddenly, this simple word is a major theme being taken up by various artistic media and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a story on Happiness as a cultural theme to imminently appear in, say, The New York Times—oh, how that once Gray Lady loves a piece that cites, at the very least, three examples of a theme being culturally explored or exploited in various ways simultaneously. It’s their thing. I would point to a certain TV program premiering on Showtime; a semi-how-to book just launched by a semi-known comedian; and I might point to a certain burgeoning branch of psychology that is Stella’s area of academic expertise. But that’s just me.

Today’s oracle is primarily focused on the Gate to the Garden which we presume is open to us. That being the case it would be open to many if not all of us. And so we equate happiness and fulfillment as being “a place” you get to, not through individual struggle (yesterday’s pugilist comes to mind) but from the perspective of shared abundance. We are not in the wild—it is not a jungle out there. We are in a place that is cared for and cultivated by the collective; and the joy lies in our ability to gather there with others. As someone who doesn’t label himself much of a joiner, I nonetheless recognize that Happiness is Others just as much as Hell can be. It really comes down to casting. I’m also the rarest of the Myers-Briggs personality types, married to the same type, who forms friendships mainly with others of that very type, valuing quality of relationships over quantity. I set the bar very high on friendships, all too easily finding solitude to be a quite enjoyable state of being. I’m incredibly idealistic when it comes to relationships and place great expectations—I’m a pip that way—on what personal bonds should provide. If they should fall short, which most often they do, I’m fine to forgo friendship all together, a willing Rhesus monkey. I’m not saying this is good. It’s just the way I’m wired. The weird thing is that I tend to make incredibly deep and longlasting friendships with others who take a similar view.

Again, I emphasize that we really might just be talking about the Gate and not the Garden itself. There is the suggestion of entree being given, but, you know, it might be like Grammercy Park where you need a key. But the gate itself is a symbol of optimism—what brand of heaven awaits on the other side of it is entirely up to us and the company we keep. Stella and I often say that people are divided into two categories—those who celebrate us and those who tolerate us—and we likewise look upon others one of these two ways, if we had to be honest. My notion of the Garden of All Fulfilled Desires is exactly that: it’s an emotional place or mental space we get to when we have fulfilled our own desires, given ourselves all that we long for or at least fully embraced the longing. We can’t, for instance, give ourselves a Grammy-winning singer-songwriting career; but we can write a song and sing it if we so desire. There really isn’t much we truly desire that we can’t give ourselves. We might not be able to own a mansion, but we can feel rich and abundant and secure in the knowledge that whether we are rich or poor we can only ever live in one room at a time anyway, whether we have a chateau or a studio apartment. Abundance stems from wanting what you have; if you do then you can imagine, and even long for, other experiences you’ve yet to manifest. But what is key to unlocking the Gate to the Garden is the feeling of bounty. We say to clients that “prosperity is a sustained emotion”; it’s up to you how you feel. Whether or not you have a cool mill. doesn’t determine the nature of your feeling.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

There is nothing subtle in the energy today at 21° Aries, characterized as A Pugilist Enters The Ring. We have to fight to win in whatever arena we find ourselves. This is an image of total commitment and vigilance; we have presumably prepared for the task at hand. It’s all about survival of the fittest. But how do we judge fitness?

We attended a charity fundraiser at the Rainbow Room last night as guests of our friends. It is pretty fair to say that the place was filled with the richest people in New York. Fitness, in that setting, was measured in wealth and in the influence it provides. This was not my ring. In my experience, typically, fitness is measured in creative output and success in and validation for artistic expression. That is more my arena. At least I think it is. This oracle makes us realize we should have some fixed field we can enter to pack a serious punch. Moreover we have to be totally convinced of ourselves in this milieu. It certainly makes one think and wonder if we are trained enough to be up for the task, whatever that might be.

Sometimes the things we’re good at aren’t necessarily the areas in which we wish to excel. Dane Rudhyar talks about the fighters as yin and yang. But I think he’s off base on this one. There is only one fighter in this story. Perhaps the other is waiting for him, but maybe not. Victory might be assured, by default. There may be no risk of defeat or disfigurement. This is a singular fight. And I believe it’s a symbol of readiness to take on the world. We just have to ask ourselves….are we similarly prepared to do likewise.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

At 20° Aries we encounter A Young Girl Feeding Birds In Winter. As many of us still still cope with Winter in Spring, we have perhaps felt compassion for those birds, unlike our migrating geese, who have had to remain and endure the elements. Little wonder Dane Rudhyar speaks of this oracle as “overcoming crises through compassion”. Today we think of helping others survive through difficulty. A young girl might be more prone to sympathy for gentle living things—unlike boys they aren’t prone to hunt and kill. The feminine spirit is one of a nurturing source of life, in contrast to masculine energy which can seek conquest and dominion. We are distinguished from the animals for our charitable natures, accepting the guardianship of all living things. There may be an unconscious understanding that helping the helpless is ultimately helping ourselves. It certainly doesn’t cost us. We can’t control Nature but we can employ a higher principle of Love to ameliorate her negative effects.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Sometimes you just have to detach in the face of circumstantial drama. One gets the sense of things becoming complicated, on many fronts all at once. Maybe things seemed all to be going right, and your attitude was sanguine and focused on all the positives you could affect moving forward; and then there is a sense of an unraveling. Problems with people, places and things begin to creep in—suddenly everything seems like a bit of a chore, or that nothing is working, and you can’t capture that same rosy outlook for powering through. You just want to chuck it all. Welcome to 19° Aries and the Sabian Symbol of The “Magic Carpet” of Oriental Imagery. It just seems to scream “road trip” whether it be a real journey or a metaphoric one of transcendence, if not escape. We need to feel the magic of life today, so the slings, arrows and rotten tomatoes you might be ducking can be viewed as inspiration to take a flight of fancy. When we’re feeling down or persecuted we can overcompensate, in a good way, reaching heights we never would have achieved if all was going swimmingly. “No Manure No Magic” was the theme of that great film I Heart Huckabees by that awful human being David O. Russell—and I say awful from first-hand experience. Being pushed to new heights by negative experience, even abuse, was the theme, too, of the recent film Whiplash, but sometimes abuse is just abuse, like Russell in the below clip with Lily Tomlin during the filming of Huckabees. You’ve probably seen this? He’s such an asshole.

But there are a lot of assholes out there. In fact, sometimes, you can see nothing but them. It’s always about money and status. That’s what’s usually driving the mean-spirited of the world. And living in a culture where social and financial competition are so prevalent can really wear on a kind person who isn’t designed to approach life as if it’s some kind of fight for fame or money. Not to say that success isn’t a goal for kind, compassionate people who might be more type B. It’s just that in a world filled with so many grabby sharks running rough shod over others, those who are quietly and selflessly getting their life are obscured by those who are more cut-throat Machiavellian in nature. But you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that those people rarely experience any magic at all. How can they? Their vision of life is too myopic, fixed on their own narrow need to succeed. And it’s a disease. Enough is rarely enough for people for whom life is a competition on every seeming level.

Up until recently I maintained a (one-sided) friendship with a fellow who had become fairly successful in business. We knew each other when we worked at restaurants in the late 1980s in Boston, when I was fresh out of college; and circumstance threw us together once again and it seemed that Fate had more in store for us to work through together. Well, what struck me about this person was his compulsive need to play games, actual ones, nearly incessantly, and his sinister desire to win at them, which he would cheat to do at the drop of a hat. He approached life and human interaction the same way. If he differed with you on a matter of opinion, he would go to great lengths to try to discredit your position, subjective though the challenge may be, because he had to win every argument. He had to be right about everything. This tenacity in competition masked a serious lack of confidence, of course; and resulted, too, in overt social climbing and an increasingly superficial character. Gaining the reputation for being condescending and cruel, he systematically alienated friend after friend over the years, the only people remaining in his life being those in his employ or ones who feel that somehow his worldly success will rub off on them; so they suffer his abuses for that sake. It is a losing battle.

There is a difference between those who may be your enemy and those who are your nemesis. The goddess Nemesis, was that of divine retribution. And in life we may view others as nemesis when they represent the non-you; when we might silently whisper to ourselves “there but for the grace of god(s) go I.” People and circumstance that we deem negative, or blatantly negating, are our cue to go higher, despite the pleasing worldly trappings they represent, or indeed due to them. The “Magic Carpet” of Oriental Imagery, is that of our own mind’s ability to imaginatively transcend the world of appearances and its dualistic dynamics of illusory hierarchies and terrestrial competition. We give over to the knowledge that there is more to life than that, and we leave it to the unimaginative minds to fight for scraps on the ground as we go rise up. The Oriental Imagery points to geometric patterning as figurative portrayals do not factor into Arabian art. And so we know that the carpet is woven with our own abstract designs for living, our thought forms making up the fabric on which we may soar. We’ve been dealing with a great deal of weaving metaphors these past several days and it all seems to add up to taking flight now on what we’ve fabricated for ourselves. We must detach (with love) from static situations and allow our dreams to manifest more fully in our waking life, letting those choosing to play on the ground amass and hoard all their earthly riches and rewards like dragons bound up by avarice and self-loathing, ever fearful that their treasures will be taken away. Those who live in constant fear of being cheated or taken advantage of are always those who cheat and take advantage of others.

But we have the ability to transcend notions of competition and contention; there is nothing holding us down but attachment itself. We don’t need anything. And once we feel we do we risk being incarcerated by that need. Today we are reminded that there is no strife if we don’t struggle. We can’t hang on to anything in the end, so why would one seek to do so in the process of life. We must let go loosely, all the time, not only of material things but of our limiting thoughts. King Solomon had a flying carpet with which he could transport his entire retinue; and yet, if he exhibited excess hubris, the carpet would give a shake and scores of his people would fall to their demise. Pride is forever threatening to bring about our falls. Dragons get slain, the greedy miser loses all he loves. The flight of the Magic Carpet is a selfless one. I liken this image to a lucid dream. When we awake into a dream, knowing we are dreaming, we are tempted to make something we want happen, but expressions of selfish want dissolve the dream. If we are aware we are lucidly dreaming, the way to keep the dream alive is to relinquish any need to impose our wants on it and to, simply, go along for the ride. This is challenging of course but worth the non-effort.

Life is truly but a dream so it’s more than mere metaphor to extend the notion into life. Magic is belief in the unfolding. How can we participate in life’s unfolding if we are viewing life as a competition we must manipulate and “win”—that is anti-life. So step off and hop on the magic carpet of your own soaring participation in life as a dream. Be swept away on the winds of your total faith and belief in the power of your own imagination and design as it is one and the same as that of the divine plan unfolding its patterns. Let go of your wants and so-called needs that keep you in static status quo. And by all means take a road trip of sorts if you can, even if it’s a short hop and a skip to stare at something scenic, or an inner voyage, closing your eyes, allowing your mind to wander, perhaps, through an inky landscape of twinkling stars, feeling yourself fly through outer space to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Let yourself go.

Read Sextrology?

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

So I’m coping with a bad injury and also with the disappointment that I didn’t get to complete my thirty Bikram classes in thirty days. Got to twenty-seven, but I couldn’t do more than a few postures, can barely walk, and the pain in my hip is excruciating. Went for a massage it didn’t help. But this forum isn’t for complaining so I will take my lumps and soldier on. The theme today, as magically happens, is recuperation, in part. The image for 18° Aries is An Empty Hammock Stretched Between Two Trees. The fact that it is empty means that this isn’t actually a time to rest. The would-be inhabitant (us) of the hammock is off doing what needs to be done. But we get the sense that s/he knows that repose is waiting; meanwhile, the image represents the relaxed state of mind in which the “off-camera” action is taking place.

Our dearest friends bought us a hammock as a house-warming present when we first moved to Cape Cod. And we did indeed stretch it between two trees. And, though bitter sweet to think of it now, that image is never truly far from my mind. I would put the hammock out in the morning and go about my busy day, knowing, at any point, I could stop and just stare up through the trees. It’s an image of savasana, the “dead body pose” where one gets most benefit from lying completely still, letting the body absorb the action performed in other active postures. We have to know when to let the body’s intelligence take over, and mindfully release all our tension, which can be an obstacle to natural recuperation. In Bikram, one does savasana pretty much after every set of every posture. There is a natural rhythm to it, where you exert effort and then receive the benefit of it. The hammock reminds us, in the midst of our busy life, that it is unnatural not to include repose in the process of our industry.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In the last throes of my thirty-day yoga challenge and I am somehow injured. My left hip is in agony and my entire left leg has been spasming for the last twelve hours not stop. Me no like feeling defeated or powerless or mortal for that matter. I was planning on working through it and just going and doing what I can but today’s symbol is giving me pause. Two Dignified Spinsters Sitting in Silence is the oracle of 17° Aries. Today seems to be about embracing a certain renunciation and not only accepting the things of life that passed us by, but somehow finding the meditative serenity in that. I think of the Miss Allens in A Room With A View—they were dignified but they surely weren’t silent. Still, there seems to be an elegance and yes a dignity that is reserved for the spinster, as if her station is by choice rather than chance.

The fate-goddess assignation to the term spinster is endemic, since, spinning wool was the only profession available to unmarried women of yore. And, like Jean Brodie and, to a certain degree, the character of Aunt Charlotte, also from A Room With a View (both portrayed by Maggie Smith), spinsterhood was often the result of having an over idealized view of love, or perhaps a very realistic one, knowing that the state of marriage would only disappoint, in the literal sense, of disempowering. In this way the spinsters can be read as co-conspirators of feminist freedom whose serenity stems from choosing their own life path and not being subject to the legal confines of contractual partnership. They are paired nonetheless and who knows what love affairs their memories provide.

 Rudhyar points to this image having a narcissistic character. That may be true. But I interpret their silence as more than mere self-reflection; I get a sense of meditation or prayer. They figures are inwardly focused their energy isn’t vacant or dormant, it is centered and probably purposeful. I believe they are powered by their renunciation. Like saints or ascetics, they might be offering up usual worldly trappings in sacrifice and dedication to something larger. Nuns wear black because they are absorbing all the negativity of this world on behalf of us all—that’s the concept anyway—just as they or monks, whether Christian or Buddhist or what have you, pray for the salvation of all mankind or enlightenment of all sentient beings. They’ve not escaped life, they’re working. I feel that to be true with our spinsters. They have a plan and they’re hatching it. Like Obie Wan sacrificing his life to make the force more powerful, these ladies are affecting more positive change in their stillness and silence than they could have done in the typical dance and drama of life.

It’s Monday so this uncelebratory image is rather fitting for the day. I think the oracle cautions us against too much activity, especially that which we feel is expected of us. We can sacrifice some of the usual shenanigans and approach the day, more, as a silent meditation. Let’s not junk it up with overcommitment. We may demur, even, in a dignified manner. We can be self-possessed and not only live with our sadness or rejections, we can see them as choices; we are not victims of circumstance. We often tell our clients to repeat the phrase I Want What I Have (another Starsky + Cox mantra for you!) all different ways, emphasizing this word and than that. The Spinsters are saying something similar: I Don’t Want What I Don’t Have seems to be their message to us. And they are not alone. They mediation seems to be synchronized as to make it all the more resonant. We hear you sisters!

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Yay! The image for 16° Aries is Nature Spirits Are Seen At Work In The Light Of The Sunset. So it’s not just me seeing them. Phew. Actually, I saw them as a child (as did a tall Baroness I know), an experience that peaked at the turn into adolescence, and, yes, it was typically around sunset, in Spring or Autumn, when they’d come to light, peeking out from their habitats, usually below exposed roots at the bottom of hillsides, along a creek. That’s where I sensed them most. I kind of love this supernatural oracle happening on Easter because, really, I don’t know what’s wilder, a savior rising from the dead, or hmm-hmms (as we call them in our house) going about their biz. Today’s symbol points to our ability to attune with nature and the power of unseen forces. Way ahead of you.

I know Stella will think of Ireland. We got lost in the West one day, where the road signs were suddenly all in Gaelic. We kept going in circles and we knew we were being toyed with by the hmm-hmms (we dare not use their real names); so we employed a trick we learned from the film Hear My Song, ever seen it? You should: We pulled the car over and turned our shirts inside out and started on the road again, and around the very first curve, we were stopped in our tracks. I kid you not: Standing along the road, some holding hands, were what appeared to be seven children, the “oldest” of whom was, I’d say, ten years old, tops. And they were all in order according to height, the littlest one appearing to be about two. And get this: in their non-clutched hands they were holding tiny metal tools. That’s right. A little spade, a tiny axe, wee mallets, all very antique looking. These “children” were positively diminutive, as if ancient Pictish blood ran strong in their veins, the oldest tallest boy, one would imagine, being an Owen Meany of sorts, compared with those his age. And how to describe their faces. Like slices of strawberry shortcake. Big round white poreless faces with cheeks shot through with ruddy flushes, not chubby but wide with strong broad cheekbones, their some dark and some sandy hair swooping across their brows, stuck, sweaty, to their skin. Because apparently they were working. And they seemed to be waiting for us, because they flagged us down, not we them.

We cautiously rolled down the car window and a collage of curious heads came into frame. “Are you lost?” Asked the boy whose button-down shirt was tucked taut into his trousers hitched by a thick leather belt, the skin of his lower calf exposed where his socks had fallen down and his pants had grown too short—as if that were possible. All their shoes and socks were muddy and they smelled of grass and peat. None of the others uttered a sound, as if they were one collective organism, clinging here and there to itself, with one workable mouthpiece, the others appearing to be purposefully shut tight. We explained that yes we were lost and told them where we were trying to head. And the boy wiped his Dondi swoop of hair from out his crystal blue eyes, a trait the collective shared, and said “Now…” launching into a series of directives pinioned with Gaelic names of this cnoc or that beleach. Glazing over at the musical guidance, we didn’t jot anything down, but just took it in, until the medusa of dirty, sweet, sweaty, and some snotted, faces all began to smile gappily, and nod their noggins, only one of which, apparently, was capable of thinking in English, we were sent on our way, the wee ones waving, again draped in a line across the road, holding hands and tools, in our rearview mirror.

Gleaning from what our friend Dane Rudhyar has to say (he took on that name from the Vedic god Rudra, the regenerator—it’s ruddy implications befit his sign of Aries), which isn’t ever easy to do: The sunset symbolizes fulfillment, as in “the day is done” and it is at that time when we can “see” these nature spirits, which would be hidden from us if we were too focused on achieving, in life or in the course of our work day. He also defines these spirits as being the harmonizing, balancing, guiding agents of a natural biosphere. That is to say, viewing the Earth as a living organism, the way each individual is, the spirits are likened to the endocrine system, or better yet, the chakra system of the body. The purpose of today’s oracle is to open us to the possibility of “approaching life in a holistic, nonrational, intuitive manner.” I’m down with that. Who’s with me? Rudyhar hastily adds, ‘what this means also is the process of “becoming like a little child.”‘ And of course he is quoting our main man Jesus who said “be ye like little children,” that is to say open to the wonder of the world because you will then witness it.

We flipped our shirts inside out and we summoned a whole gaggle of children, like seven dwarves or rather hmm-hmms hi-ho’ing off to work. Later in our journey we ended up at an old estate that had been turned into a beautiful inn, on a cool blue lake over which we glided in antique rowboat, and with a delicious restaurant on the premises that served world class cuisine. Our waitress, we will never forget, was called Bridget; and she was almost as tiny as the leader of that merry band we earlier encountered on the road. She had minute hands and that white-light clairvoyant far-away look simple, special peoplepossess. We have ever since thought of her as Saint Bridget, an ancient Pict of a little person over whose head our sophisticated jokes might fly, as she innocently and benignly smiled at us and served us over the course a few days with her contemplative mien. She might have been a young auntie to those children along that lush country road, they were so similar in look, with the same flushed cheeks and damp brow; and one could easily expect that at some point during her visits to our table she wouldn’t be bringing a smoked fish appetizer or a cheese course but matter-of-factly displaying a freshly materialized stigmata.

The name of the inn was Ard Na Sidhe which translates, but exactly, to Hill of the Fairies.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.