Ten Years Later...

As much as I do not wish to contribute to the cult of 9/11 hoopla as far as exploitation and fear-mongering are concerned, I do feel compelled to convey some of my feelings about where we were ten years back and where we are now.

I very much wanted to share with you two astrology posts I wrote ten years ago for PlutoRising.com, which I founded and managed via Webseed, a long-defunct dot-com publisher that did not survive the dot-com bust of the early aughts. Unfortunately, I cannot open those two Word files, because they are from an earlier version of Word and I was unable to make head or tail of how to allow my 2007 version to open them. Fortunately, I can remember the gist of the weekly post I wrote for the week of 9/5 to 9/12: that with the Moon in Gemini strengthening the recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, criminals would prevail.

On September 11 itself, I may have gotten the last available cab going down Second Avenue in Tudor City, where I worked then. I remember gently pushing a few sobbing fellow legal secretaries from the office into the the same cab, which dropped them off at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge after letting me off at the corner of Tenth Street. I rushed up to the roof of my building, where a few of my neighbors were congregated. The view was unobstructed. It looked as if someone were erasing the South Tower from top to bottom. Everyone on the roof was uttering the same thing: "Oh my God."

The only person who was able to get through to me on the phone during the next few hours of horror and disbelief was my friend who lived thousands of miles away in Berlin. I had the TV on; after numerous viewings of the same surreal images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and people jumping out windows, I started packing a bag, even though I knew full well that I could not escape, as the city was in lockdown mode. I decided the only thing to do to keep sane was to post a live update on my astrology blog. Even though I could not get through to anyone on the phone, my dial-up connection worked like a charm; I was able to post without delay.

The Saturn-Pluto opposition, denoting cruelty and extreme abuse of power, obviously bore monstrous fruit that we have been digesting ever since. For a brief time, it seemed the US had the sympathy of much of the world; yet we squandered that goodwill so quickly. The War on Terror, which included hunting down Weapons of Mass Destruction where there were none, invading Iraq, and so on only hurt our global reputation -- and deservedly so, in my opinion.

The city did feel different for a short while after 9/11 -- quiet, if not completely beaten down -- and somehow unified. When the wind changed direction on the 12th or 13th and I could smell death out my kitchen window, I remember feeling "one" with strangers on the street, on the subway. Some people moved out of the city as a result of the mass tragedy downtown, but most stayed. Parties for a certain subsection of singles in the city got wilder, while families cocooned.

Despite the fact that Osama bin Laden is now fish food, the havoc wrought from 9/11 remains. In a sense, the terrorists won: witness the decline of US civilians' personal freedom in a nation built on that very premise. The mantra of the past decade has been "Security above all." We are all now presumed guilty until proven innocent -- in airports, in wiretapping. And many individuals now act like "sheeple" and are willing to be passively herded en masse to whatever new indignity the TSA or the feds have concocted. Security above all.

As a person who also happens to be an astrologer, I do not believe we are any "safer," just more afraid and oppressed. Pluto moving from freewheeling Sagittarius into conservative Capricorn has made so many sheeple afraid of rocking the boat...of becoming unemployed...of being thrown in jail without just cause...or just put on some sort of watch list.

But ready or not, the Uranus-Pluto square (aka "2012") is coming, and with it the ultimate karmic shit may finally hit the cosmic fan. It may only be after the square, once the ashes settle from another explosion, that we will actually be able to break the 9/11 chain. But if not, then we may be even deeper in the collective toilet bowl than I dared imagine.

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on US civilians on their home soil, we are approaching the Full Moon in Pisces (exact on Mon. 9/12 at 5:27 a.m. EDT). This is also the Harvest Moon: a time to reap what we have sown. With this Full Moon, there will be plenty of self-criticism and attention to detail and ritual (Virgo) combined with high emotion, fantasy, sadness... and possible forgiveness. Beware of those with martyr complexes, or those who call upon you to sacrifice for their own benefit.

Full Moon in Pisces: Purification Via Tsunami

It's a damned good thing I practice astrology, or else I'd be convinced I was going off my rocker. For the past day or so I have felt the energy of the Full Moon in Pisces, and this lunation is exact at 12:03 p.m. BFT (Brooklyn Freelancer Time).

Full Moons always bring a culmination to the lunar cycle: for the past two weeks, whatever has been building in yourself as well as the outer world will reach its maximum form of energy. A Full Moon can shed much objective light on an important situation and provide excellent, creative release if you use its energy wisely. Otherwise, the energy curdles, and the next two weeks of the waning Moon may be spent wondering, "Where did it all go wrong?"

Full Moons also illustrate a very important principle in astrology: polarity. Instead of thinking of twelve separate signs, living and dreaming in their twelve separate zodiacal boxes, think instead of six poles, each consisting of a particular sign and its opposite. You may think that opposing signs are truly opposite and have nothing in common; nothing could be further from the truth. Opposing signs always share a "quality," i.e., cardinal, fixed, or mutable, and also occur in compatible elements, i.e. Fire/Air, Earth/Water. Visualize the beauty of the yin-yang symbol: two interlocking black and white paisley shapes, each sporting a drop of the oppposite color. In astrology, each sign contains its opposite in seed form. Much, therefore, can be learned from your opposite sign. Interestingly, the astrological aspect that concerns relationship issues is the opposition! In other words, without the opposition, there would be no awareness that "the Other" exists...I am not just talking about relationships between people, but between objects, words, numbers...the world of abstractions.

For the purposes of this particular Full Moon, which is a "pure" one because no other planets are aspecting it, I shall concentrate on the Virgo/Pisces polarity. Both of these signs have unusually heavy karma attached (the other "heavy" of the zodiac is Scorpio). In the case of Virgo, the stage of self-consciousness has been reached; the self needs to be purified in order to enter the realm of relating that self to the rest of the world. Virgo is considered the final "personal" sign, which does not mean the signs that follow are impersonal; however, the second half of the zodiac generally is pulled toward shared resources and experiences, which culminates in the universality, empathy, collective unconscious, and dissolution (and unfortunately disillusion) of Virgo's opposite sign of Pisces. The Full Moon in Pisces urges us all to consider how healthy we really feel, and this is not limited to our physical body, but how we are getting along with the planet Earth (remember that Virgo is an Earth sign!), and our mental health. Some of the difficulties that can surface during this Full Moon include:

- Extreme perfectionism and dissatisfaction over only being human, leading to beating yourself up (Virgo) or fatalistic "I give up" depression (Pisces)
- Hypochondria
- Psychosomatic illness brought on by constant worry and anxiety
- Indigestion, often due to bad food/drink choices
- Insomnia
- Addictive behavior (if you have a strong Neptune in your natal chart, you may find that you are particularly vulnerable to the energy of Moon in Pisces)
- Reaching the breaking point in terms of services rendered: "After all I've done for (him/her/the world), THIS is what I get in return?" (Slam door, brood, and retreat for the rest of the lunar cycle)

If the above list leaves you shaking your head and wondering if there is anything good about the Full Moon in Pisces, here is another, admittedly smaller list of its more positive manifestations:

- Insightful creativity in the arts, especially writing, film, and dance
- True selflessness that encourages you to serve without expecting a reward
- Increased environmental awareness
- The ability to synthesize trillions of bits of information and, in so putting some metaphoric jigsaw puzzle together, understand the whole
- Setting more reasonable "shalt nots" and "shalt dos" in your life, especially those that affect your physical and mental health

Catch the wave!