Hokusai’s Great Wave print (1831). Watch the wave. Water is pulled up into its belly. Some pushed forward from the ocean and some sucked backwards, pulled against the tide, across sand and shingle. The energy gathers. The wave grows – higher, stronger, faster – for a moment it seems to [...]
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As a resident on earth, you are a member of a family, a tribe, a nation, a world; you’re a lover and fighter, a child, a worker, a friend… We are all connected and disconnected. Articles on love, marriage, nature, society and more.
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Astrology of now: Pay Attention to Your Dreams
Here in Oxford, we are having an extraordinarily beautiful autumn. The leaves are lambent red and gold, yellow and bright green. The air is very still, slightly damp and shining. It is unusually warm, so the light is not crisp and sharp, but gleaming. In short it is like a dream. I cycled back [...]
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Venus in Scorpio: Passion and Pain
A Man and A Woman (1966) Venus is the planet of love and money; two things it’s good to at least try and get right. And two ways in which we fall into horrible, relentlessly repeating patterns. After a certain time, we can look back at our lives and discern these themes and variations [...]
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Equal Rights for Goddesses?
As you know, there are seven heavenly bodies in traditional astrology. The boys – Sun, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The girls – Moon, Venus. Five against two. Now does that seem fair to you? Does that even seem like life? Ceres, goddess of fertility, is sometimes assigned to [...]
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Nobody’s Perfect: the astrology of Curtis and Monroe
Two kids from the wrong side of the tracks play pretend. Norma Jean Mortensen teaching Bernie Schwartz how to kiss – one of the sweetest scenes on celluloid. That great movie Some Like it Hot. still makes me laugh. Of course, Norma Jean and Bernie had blossomed into Marilyn Monroe and [...]
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How being an astrologer is like being gay
Because at some point you have to come out of the closet, being an astrologer has something in common with being homosexual. “What do you mean “in the closet”?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s like this – most sensible people think astrology is a truckload of [...]
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The Subtle Knife
Whenever I go past the alley of trees in this picture, I think of how somewhere between them may be the Sunderland Avenue, North Oxford, Summer 2010.gateway to a parallel Oxford. In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman‘s fantasy trilogy, Will Parry, the boy hero, creates an invisible [...]
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Synchronicity, dreams and a case of exact astrological aspects
I’m going to tell a story that starts off badly and ends up well. Last night I dreamt that I was the only person left in the world and I could not find anything with which to kill myself. I woke up abruptly, terrified, with these words going through my head: “The world will not [...]
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The generation that won’t shut up
Gustave Doré’s Red Riding Hood. Usually, conversational gambits at the school gates go something like this: “How is Ermyntrude settling in?” “Isn’t the traffic awful?” “A bit nippy this morning eh?” Not the most thrilling set of references. So [...]
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A few more examples of Jupiter and death
Redeemer? After my last post, I thought I’d check to see what Jupiter was doing at some famous demises. Naturally, the psycho-analyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) came to mind. He had some interesting ideas about the end of life. In particular, he was of the opinion that we were quite [...]
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David Cameron, Jupiter and death
David Cameron with his first son Ivan in 2002. Ivan died in 2009. It’s remarkable how often in families a death and a birth happen in quick succession. Poor David Cameron lost his father today just weeks after his wife gave birth to that darling baby. My wise friend Judith, who has seen [...]
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Harvest
Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. The Garden, Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) [...]
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How I struck oil on holiday
On Winchelsea Beach, the mud is dark sable. Sometimes, you slither across the top of it. But sometimes your foot sinks right in, mud spurts between your toes. And sometimes, you sink much deeper, over your ankles, up to the knees. When that happens, your feet encounter another texture, silkier [...]
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Times are changing
This is from an old copy of the defunct magazine Punch. I can never see the joke, but it does seem appropriate. We had dinner with an entertainingly gloomy Irishman last night. He’s clearly enjoying the credit crunch a lot – because it means that he can wallow in deepest pessimism, [...]
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When it rains…
I’ve been looking at pictures of the Biblical floods in Pakistan, listening to the statistics – more people affected by this than by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Is this possible? So I found a map and realised that the area being flooded is the Indus Valley itself, one of the [...]
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Hear the lion’s roar
The Sun’s gone into the sign of Leo now. It’s full summer, the time of the Lion, as hot as it gets in the Northern hemisphere. Leo is a fire sign of course and its ruler is the Sun, by far the brightest thing in our solar system. No wonder Leos have a reputation for […]
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Take a vow
You know what, we big picture people are not the only ones to heave a huge sigh of relief when Saturn finally gets into Libra for a good long stretch. (Personally, I can already feel the pressure easing. ). Saturn himself is jumping for joy and kicking his heels in the air. Why? Because [...]
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Vampire Squid – Pluto vs Neptune?
I was taking a shower this morning with my five year old and she started to play a game about a “vampire squid” which was attacking us around the curtain. (Yes, apparently there is such a thing.) That’s a pretty scary monster, right. Well, it also seemed rather a good image [...]
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