Like all things astrological, a Mercury retrograde is both unavoidable and, yes, manageable. A [...]]]> People with a passing interest in astrology tend to know that “things go wrong” during a Mercury retrograde. They come wanting to know when it’s going to happen and how to minimize the pain of it — or how to avoid it altogether.

Like all things astrological, a Mercury retrograde is both unavoidable and, yes, manageable. A horoscope reading can help with the management of this and other  passages because it allows you to see how a Mercury retrograde, a Saturn return or some other cycle fits into your particular way of being in the world.

Recently, a friend experienced a series of disruptions to her life in the space of just a few days: a fender-bender, an insurance mix-up, a miscommunication with her son’s teacher. She was concerned that things were going to get worse and worse, that this series of mishaps was just the forerunner to greater strife and trauma.

The events started just after Mercury went retrograde — but although we often advise caution during these periods, not everyone will have such a run of low-grade bad luck during a Mercury retrograde. I looked at my friend’s horoscope chart and, sure enough, Mercury was passing back and forth right over her Sun-Moon conjunction. Sun and Moon form the core of our awareness — desire and need — and Mercury was playing havoc with this part of her life for a period of time.

But what purpose does this serve? We often joke about Mercury retrograde: It’s an excuse for misspeaking, or a lighthearted warning; and it seems rare that truly serious traumas arise from this transitory period (barring other astrological factors coming into play). But I’ve often thought that times like these — when the insurance company “accidentally” drops you, or you have a little fender-bender, or you put in 3 cups of sugar instead of the 1/3 cup the recipe calls for — are designed to get our attention.

We usually, out of necessity, walk through life with one eye closed. We drive the same route day after day without realizing it. We say, “Fine” when asked, “How are you?” We eat the same thing for breakfast, expect this co-worker or that client to act a certain way, buy the same color lipstick year in and year out. We type without looking at the keyboard.

On a typical day, Mercury helps us absorb and assimilate all these rote ways of being, all these under-the-radar ways of getting through life. He operates in in-between spaces, provides the connective glue that lets life go forward, brings together people and things and information to make sure things can happen. It’s an extremely important function; without it, we would have too many decisions to make anew each day. We wouldn’t be able to move from the small decisions to the big ones. We would be paralyzed.

But on an atypical day — when Mercury turns on its head and appears to be going backwards in the sky — those little rules and traditions and habits get a bit twisted. Mercury is not just a facilitator but also a trickster who gets bored easily. He needs variety and newness, so old habits are a prime target for messing with. The road you usually drive to work is closed; your faithful old vacuum cleaner breaks down; telephone lines get crossed; the store is out of your lipstick color; the Monday meeting you’ve had for years is suddenly changed to Tuesdays.

These aren’t dramatic or traumatic changes but they do require alertness, small decisions, flexibility, fluidity and awareness of what’s really important. Mercury demands that we not be too fixed, too attached to a certain way of being. When he goes retrograde, it’s a reminder that we must not be too stuck in our ways, that we have the capacity to roll with the punches, keep our priorities straight and make sure our sense of humor is alive.

If you can adapt quickly to drive a new route to work, get a new lipstick color, sweep instead of vacuum, respond with humor when a co-worker throws you a curve ball, then you have a good capacity for dealing with Mercury retrograde.

But if you’re like another friend — who, when I called to cancel a lunch date, wailed, “But it’s in my DayTimer! What am I going to do now?” — then it’s time to work on your relationship with Mercury in your chart. The trickster will visit us all. The most you resist him, the more disturbing his visit will be.

Mercury is retrograde from Sunday, January 11 through the end of this month. What mishaps have befallen you? And more importantly, how have they made you more conscious, more flexible or more humor-filled?

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I expected the holidays would make my posting sparse, but I didn’t plan on being absent for four-plus weeks, and I’m especially sorry to my regular readers. The reason for my long silence is that we had a tragedy in our family — an unexpected death, a death by [...]]]> I know. I’ve been gone a long time.

I expected the holidays would make my posting sparse, but I didn’t plan on being absent for four-plus weeks, and I’m especially sorry to my regular readers. The reason for my long silence is that we had a tragedy in our family — an unexpected death, a death by suicide.

I want to say that Brian’s death left me at a loss for words, and in many ways that is true. In the face of intense shock and sadness, and in the midst of my surviving family members’ pain, words just simply escaped me. I suppose this was, on one level, because everything I thought to say rang hollow, trite or simply inadequate to the hugeness of what happened so close to home.

But there is more to it than that.

Of all the words that make up my language of astrological psychology — words like love, conflict, aspiration, tension, learning, fighting, defending, reaching out, needing, limiting, ego, boundaries, dissolution — death is both the most ubiquitous and the most out-of-reach. It is very nearly ungraspable in its absoluteness and in the way it brings everything — everything — to a standstill. I just couldn’t, for the last four weeks, grasp Brian’s death enough to form words around it. And since it was all I could think about, I could hardly write about anything else.

But now that I’m back home, with the burial and the memorial service behind us, and a semblance of daily life returning, my first tentative thoughts are taking shape. Here they are.

We often choose death, each one of us, in the course of our daily lives. Of course, the death we choose is usually not literal: It is the death of a relationship, or the end of a job, or the close of a day, the drop into the dark, unpredictable waters of sleep. A door closes and that is that. An ending has occurred, from which there is no return.

Today, I feel sure of very little in life, but I do suspect that the ways we experience the little deaths of the everyday help guide us toward how we handle the final end, when it comes. And yet, although we choose those everyday deaths, in many ways we feel as if we are not, in fact, in charge of them. And so when someone chooses to end their own life, literally, it feels shocking. How could he do this? we think. And: I could never do that!

And yet, we do it too — yes, in a pale-by-comparison way, but we do. Often we blame others for our little daily deaths: I wouldn’t have quit my job if my boss weren’t such an ass. I would have stuck with the diet if things weren’t so stressful right now. I would have chosen strawberry if everyone else hadn’t chosen chocolate.

I don’t mean to be flip, but that kind of thinking — on any level — wraps us up in the Plutonian dynamic of control: Who is the dictator of our lives? Who ultimately decides whether a relationship dies, or a job ends, or a bad habit is over and done with, or even if our life is coming to a close? If our sense of control lies within, we can take responsibility for those endings that prepare us for the final end. But if we see ourselves as the victims of other people’s control, we feel unable to take charge of ourselves, of our destiny.

I’m not trying to analyze Brian’s life. I don’t know how in control he felt or didn’t feel. I’m certainly not advocating for suicide. I am, instead, asking each of us to examine to what degree we give over control of our choices — especially the choice to end something — to other people. Is it always true that others make the choice for us? Or do we instigate that choice sometimes, even unconsciously? And in cases where we truly aren’t in charge, what grace can we see in that?

It is not that we always need to be in control of what happens to us. But choosing to take charge, or choosing to let go and allow the universe to work its mysterious magic on our lives, is, in the most ideal world, a conscious process that advances the work of our souls. For each ending we choose is a distant echo of the Big One, of the final death that will ultimately end our own life as we know it. How do we handle the little earthquakes? Is it the same way we want to handle the big one, when it comes?

This question is often overshadowed by the bigger mystery of death — the what happens next?

Maybe the not-knowing is the most maddening, the most frightening, the most mysterious of all for those who remain. What is Brian experiencing now? Is there a Brian to experience something? The framework of the horoscope chart tells me that yes, there most certainly is — that the circle of life continues spiraling; that time continues on; that his essence has crossed over a particularly transformative point in time/space but that it continues on in some way, being shaped and made evermore whole with each passing day.

In his seminal work Suicide and the Soul, the brilliant scholar and archetypal psychologist James Hillman notes:

If one stands for psychological life, as the [psycho]analyst must, physical life may have to be thwarted and left unfulfilled in order to meet the soul’s claims, its pressing concerns with redemption. (p. 23)

I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I’m fighting it alongside my family. But I am trying to find the place in myself where I can respect it and honor it, where I can hope and believe that Brian’s soul is more whole and alive now than ever before.

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Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just [...]]]> Astrology is the study of patterns as they play out through time.

Sometimes we get caught in an unhealthy pattern and call it a bad habit or an addiction. Other patterns grow into rituals that mark certain moments: beginnings, endings, transitions, the rhythms of the seasons. Still other patterns become routines — neither healthy nor unhealthy, just the usual way of doing things, until something comes along to change, upset or improve old standbys.

It’s pretty easy to tell when something’s a routine as opposed to an addiction, a rhythm as opposed to a habit. Though each word means essentially the same thing, we can feel it in our bones when the pattern is unhealthy, or comforting, or neutral. But the etymology of these words can give us further insight into how the things we do repeatedly — Saturday morning chores, for example, or singing a particular lullaby to a child, or that six-pack you just can’t get through the evening without — affect the deep psyche.

Addiction comes from the Latin root deik-, which means “to show or pronounce solemnly.” From the same root grew words like dictate, ditto, indict, verdict and jurisdiction, giving “addiction” the feel of a judicial, gavel-banging, authoritative pronouncement. The addict is indicted. The verdict is dictated. It’s hard to escape an addiction, or fight it, or squirm out from under it. We can only get off for good behavior.

In the horoscope chart, we might look to the fixed cross — the 2nd and 8th houses, the 5th and 11th — to understand our unhealthy repetitive behaviors: how we embody Sysiphus in our own lives, and what healing god we might call upon inside ourselves to get out of our addictive cycles.

Ritual comes from rite, which is rooted in the basic Latin ar-, which means “to fit together,” and which spawned all sorts of English words including arm, art, order, reason and rhyme. A ritual, then, is like a piece of the puzzle falling into place, making sense of something chaotic. It is a small part of the larger whole, a connector that helps us make elegant the empty spaces of life, that infuses our days and weeks with meaning.

Ritual may be the other side of the addiction coin, the bright face of addictive darkness. Perhaps addiction is a expression of the search for meaning, an expression that took a wrong turn. Like addiction, ritual appeals to the senses and meets a need for soothing. But done authentically and practiced faithfully, ritual — unlike addiction — should lead to order and connection instead of chaos and isolation.

There are, of course, rituals that become meaningless or unhealthy, for example through overuse or misuse or because the act of placing the puzzle piece has continued long past the need for the puzzle’s meaning or message. In this case, the ritual may become an addiction because lack of courage, or lack of creativity, prevents a person from seeing life anew, from building new rituals that reflect life’s current rhythms.

In the horoscope chart, we can again look at the fixed cross to understand how to recreate addictions as rituals: what rituals might meet the need that the addiction is currently fulfilling. Of course, there are other elements too — the planets and signs and other houses as well — that must be considered depending on the nature and need of the addiction.

I got into this whole train of thought intially because I’m reading Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Nurturing Our Children from Birth to Seven by Barbara J. Patterson and Pamela Bradley. The book describes the Waldorf educational philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms in children’s lives. Rhythm comes from the Latin root sreu-, which means “to flow.” In the Greek, it’s rhuthmos, meaning “measure or recurring motion.” The word is also related to bodily flushings such as diarrhea and catarrh; the rock rhyolite; rheuma (the humors of the body); and possibly to the Russian struga, meaning “a deep place.”

What strikes me about rhythm is that its word associations encompass so much: fluid, cyclical motion and the stillness, the hardness, of rock; the humors of the body and their occasional purging outbursts; the plain, mundane task of measuring time and the shrouded, sacred mysteries of life’s deep places. There’s a yin-yang feel to this word family, a sense that rhythm must include both external expression and internal pondering; both silence and noise; both stillness and motion. In fact, Patterson and Bradley suggest that preschool days should be ordered in an external-internal-external-internal “breathing-type” rhythm so as to encourage children’s exuberance while also preventing them from spinning out of control and becoming enslaved to the barrage of sensory input all around them.

The book also makes the point that rhythms come from without and within. If we are attentive and aware and not so out of control in our lives, we internalize the external rhythms that surround us. Our bodies and senses can respond with rituals that anchor the beginnings and endings of each rhythmic cycle — rituals that mark the turn of morning into noontime, the fading of brash summer into more ponderous fall, the growth of child into adolescent into adult. The word “ritual” often carries a religious flavor in our culture, but it doesn’t have to. Its importance is in placing a puzzle piece in such a way that meaning and connection are forged in the life.

Keeping that caveat in mind, psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung famously wrote to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous:

[The] craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness … You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (Source)

If we are attentive to the rhythms that order the physical universe around us, we then, perhaps, do not need addictive behavior but, instead, meaningful ritual to order our lives. Rites that give physical space, plenty of time and honored acknowledgment to change, growth, loss and newness can go a long way to connect our souls to the larger rhythms of life, to feel how we ourselves are pieces in the larger puzzle of the universal order. We do not, then, need addiction because our spiritual thirst is slaked by something else.

Rhythms are patterns, ways of ordering our time and our senses, that emerge from authentic depth, from time-tested processes, rather than from our own momentary behaviors — based on anxiety, desire or compulsion — injected into the matrix of time. Disconnected from the rhythms of life, we seek addiction: something dependable, comforting — yet ultimately disconnecting. When we are in touch with those larger rhythms, though, we can then connect with others, with the world, with the Divine — and with ourselves. That connection can be achieved and expressed through ritual, through the placement of the ordered pieces into the big picture of life.

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Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a [...]]]> I don’t use astrology to predict events. I use it to help make sense of life.

Of course, I have other tools, too, like feelings, family, friends and faith. Astrology isn’t always the first place I go, especially in the midst of tragedy, but I often end up there, searching for clarity, groping toward meaning.

So when a dear friend was killed this weekend in a horrible accident, my first reaction was gasping disbelief. Second came a deep and jagged grief. Third, a need to connect with other friends who loved her. Then, as the reality coursed through me, came numbness, and emptiness.

This morning, because I am who I am, I awoke yearning to understand the senselessness of her death through the perspective of my craft of astrology.

Why does it hurt so much that she’s gone?

Why can’t I grasp that she went the way she did?

What are we supposed to do, anyway, with grief?

I’m not pretentious enough to claim I found answers. But below are my thoughts, the small bits of meaning I glimpsed as I pondered the sudden, premature, tragic death of a beautiful, life-loving woman.

I wrote on Friday about the way astrology views the usual cycle of energy that guides an event, whether it’s the blossoming of a flower, the unfolding of a life or the movement of seasons. There is output, then enjoyment, then — usually; hopefully — slow shifts that dismantle the old order and prepare for the next cycle. I pointed out how important it is to take time when contemplating great changes to an old way of being, how rushing change could lead to crisis. I thought I was talking about politics, and money.

The suddenness of Heather’s death interrupts our sense of how time unfolds. Life is supposed to spin out evenly from its spool, one long flowing arc at a time. When it doesn’t, we say things like: “How can this be?” And: “I can’t believe it.” And: “It just doesn’t make sense.” A sudden, tragic end to a life doesn’t fit into the expected patterns of our mind, nor the gently sloping pathways of our hearts. Life is supposed to allow us some time to get used to change, to learn what we need ahead of time, to shift our gaze toward the next phase. It’s not meant to thrust us into loss all at once. At the very, very least, life is supposed to allow us a bit of time to say goodbye.

When death comes unanticipated, we don’t know what to do with ourselves: our hands, our voices, the alarm rising up in our chests. Our minds: What are we supposed to even think?

Often, then, not knowing what to do, we turn to the specifics of the departed person herself. This is the other way I can look to astrology to make sense of this loss. Because it occurred to me that, while astrology views each planet and sign as a symbol of an internal personal trait, other people in our lives also carry some traits for us — especially, perhaps, the ones we’re not able to manifest well ourselves. We need them to show us the way, the proper expression of laughter, or confidence, or drivenness.

I kept remembering, yesterday, how much Heather simply embraced life — how deeply she drank in the pleasures of the world all around her. She seemed always engaged, passionate about everything from coffee to music to movies to the people she loved. She laughed easily. She teased and admonished and was always good-natured. She seemed to let troubles roll off her back, shooing them away like flies.

Other traits might stand out more for other people, depending who they are and how they related with her. But whatever the specific experience, in relationship generally, each person brings something that the other needs in their life. Sometimes it’s the thing that drives us crazy; sometimes it’s the thing we most admire. Sometimes we don’t even notice the trait till they are gone. And when they are gone, we are left holding our hands out, waiting for more of what they brought: that passion, or that teasing, or that laughter. And when it doesn’t come — again, we don’t know what to do.

We have, then, to find her elsewhere — not to replace her, but to fill the emptiness her death leaves in our lives. Maybe, hopefully, we find her gifts in ourselves.

So my questions now are: What gifts did Heather give me that I could not accept when she was alive? What traits did I unconsciously ask her to hold that I could not yet make a part of myself? What do I need to become, now that she is no longer there to be it for me? I look at the list above and know immediately.

And so to celebrate Heather’s life, and to defy the tragedy of her death, I promise myself, and my family, and my friends, to cling less fiercely to worry — to let it go — so I can sink much more into each delectable moment life hands me, the way I saw her do.

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For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.

I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning [...]]]> Last night I dreamt I shaved off my beard — a stylized goatee that came to a perfect point at the bottom, the sides curving around my jaws like little arms.

For the record, I don’t have a beard in waking life.

I awoke in the full mood of fall and went about the tasks of the morning without thinking much about it. But when the boys were gone, NPR was turned off and the dishes had settled in their stacks, the dream came back quietly.

In essence, I think, it was about shedding what had grown: saying goodbye to the old, getting ready for the new. It was an appropriate, if funny, dream for the change of season.

Even though it’s not officially fall yet, the summer cycle is definitely closing: Ask anyone who has school-age children, or arthritis. Last week on our midwest visit, there was talk of sweaters, hayrides and apple presses. Even here in southern California, the air is a little crisper and the traffic much thicker than last week. And Starbucks has mercifully brought back its pumpkin spice latté.

This is the time of year when, in my quieter moments, I tend to remember the ancient myth of Persephone, who picked a flower and was whisked away into the underworld by Hades (Pluto) himself. Persephone’s mother, the earth goddess Demeter, mourned the loss of her child and withheld the harvest from the people until Zeus (Jupiter) brokered a deal: Persephone would stay in the underworld with Hades for one-third of each year and reunite with her mother during the remaining eight months. The separation, disappearance, change in cycles was necessary for the growth of both mother and daughter.

There are more complexities to the story, but its core truth lies in these simple details; and we see that truth reflected, also, in the horoscope chart. Bruno and Louise Huber identified a way to interpret the chart as a “life clock” — starting with birth at the ascendant and spending six years in each house. At a certain point in each house, people tend to turn inward. They feel their active energy thwarted or stilled. They are forced to take stock and turn the season of their life toward the next more active, more outwardly-effective cycle.

This internal period can often be felt as a crisis point — the point where, like Demeter, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot get what you want. Waiting is necessary, and that can be frustrating. It can even feel like death — like being dragged into the underworld against your will, like being taken away from everything light and abundant and familiar.

But the Demeter story, and the Hubers’ work, and astrology in general remind us, each in their own ways, that life happens in cycles, and thus the underworld period is essential. Shortcuts and bypasses are decidedly not advised.

See: The flower germinates; it blossoms; it dies. The school year begins; it proceeds; it ends. Babies are born; the family coheres; the children grow up and move away. Before the third phase of each cycle, we must catch our breaths, because in truth that third phase is just the preparation for the next cycle: As it dies, the flower must seed the next crop. As the school year ends, the student must make ready for the next. As they grow up and move away, our children prepare to give birth themselves.

I know a lot of people who say they feel nostalgic every year as fall begins. Maybe some of the nostalgia is a longing for eternal summer, but there’s something deeper going on there, too, I think: a wistfulness for the cycle that was, perhaps; an uncomfortable acknowledgment that time always urges us forward; a wish for the familiar footprints we’ve already put down. We know that place behind us. Why can’t we just stay there, or jump forward to the next activity? Why must we power down a bit now?

And yet we know the fall, too. Its familiarity, it smells and its slower tempo are ancient and comforting. Its darker days cloister us indoors, where we are forced to face the internal. We survive the cold, and the dark, and the frightening because we must — and because our fiber is thicker and heartier than we give ourselves credit for in the bright sweat of summer.

Yet it’s often as surprising to remember our own strength, and our own tenacity, and our own depth, as it is to dream of a woman shaving off her pointed goatee to prepare for what’s next.

Go to Meditations for the End of Summer

Photo credits: Bearded lady, life cycles, autumn

But first, these crows didn’t showcase the bloodletting and bodily trauma normally associated with accidental encounters with cars. [...]]]> I’ve come across two dead crows on my morning walks recently in the Los Angeles foothills. In years past I’d just shudder a bit, step aside and let the faint whiff of flying-rodent death wisp away on the breeze.

But first, these crows didn’t showcase the bloodletting and bodily trauma normally associated with accidental encounters with cars. And second, Alan had informed-slash-reminded me that mysteriously deceased birds in these parts could be indicators of West Nile Virus.

So I regretfully interrupted the obsessive ruminating I love to do on my walks and, instead, repeated to myself, for the last 10 minutes of my walk, the address where lay this morning’s particular dead bird. Neatly decapitated, if you want to know the truth. As if a polite coyote had removed the lid from the tureen to see what kind of soup was inside, then gone on his way when he saw what it was.

When I got home, I Googled, then telephoned, the state’s vector control hotline. The kind lady on the other end took my name, address and phone number, then asked the location of the dead bird, its color, its size, how long it had been there. I could hear the clickety-clack of fingertips on keyboard as I gave her all the information.

Then she said, in a foreboding yet lilting voice, “Would you be willing — ”

And I knew what she was going to say. And I wished I’d given her a different name, address, phone number so I couldn’t be reached when I hung up the phone quickly.

Which I didn’t do. I let her keep talking. ” — to take a double plastic bag — ”

No, no, no, no, no. Dammit. I knew it. It’s not that I’d never seen death before; in fact, Alan once gently reprimanded me for bringing home a dead snake from a walk. It was flat. I thought the patterns were pretty.

” — and return to the location to pick it up?”

I thought, I could say no. What were they going to do?

But I didn’t, because I am a Good Citizen. I got a certificate in sixth grade that said so.

“Ummm…sure,” I said. She gave me further instructions, and I wrote them down, even though my mind was already back at the streetside, the bird — mysteriously — in much gorier condition than when I’d left it.

When I got off the phone, I gathered a rake, a dustpan, thick rubber gloves and — not a double plastic bag, not a triple plastic bag, but, yes, a quadruple plastic bag. I threw my provisions in the back of the truck and drove the half-mile to the bird.

I left the car running and the driver’s side door open because, you know, I might have to make a quick getaway from the dead bird. I worked quickly and quietly, all business. I threw away the rubber gloves when I got home and washed my hands three times in near-scalding water.

And then I went to look at my horoscope. Because that’s what astrologers do: Feeling depressed? What’s up with Saturn in my chart? Feeling confused? What’s got my Neptune? Dead bird on the porch? Check out the 8th house!

Of course, it’s never so simple as all that.

My collaboration with today’s transits (Aries Moon transiting my 8th House in exact opposition to Uranus, sextile Mars in Aquarius in my 6th and semi-sextile Saturn on the MC) might have been less institutional, more impetuous, had I not that looming specter of Saturn perched high atop my natal chart like — well, like a crow screeching from a treetop. Were it not for that Saturn, and a couple other things like, I don’t know, my solid upbringing, I might actually have hung up on the hotline when I had the chance. Or I might have just plucked it up with my bare hands on the spot, tossed it into the nearest trash can and forgotten about it.

What I love about astrology, yet what makes it so frustrating for people who want it to be simple — A plus B must always equal winning the lottery — is that it has room for complexity, diversity and that fearsome wild beast called free will. A Moon-Mars-Uranus ambivalence figure (as the Hubers call it when an opposition, sextile and trine form a triangle) might manifest one way for me, another way for you depending on transits, progressions, other factors in the chart and things like upbringing, environment and beliefs about the self. Which, of course, are all reflected in the chart as well.

So although picking up the dead, possibly virus-infested, bird grossed me out beyond belief, I’m glad — now — that I didn’t hang up on the hotline. When Saturn gets out of balance, it’s so easy to crawl under a rock and give into fear or a sense of inadequacy. And I’ve certainly done that plenty in my life. But Saturn also comes with conscience, and with an awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.

The incidence of West Nile in L.A. County is way up from last year. There are kids in these parts, and other vulnerable folk, who just can’t put up a winning fight against it. I had to figure out a way to do what I had to do to support my conscience, distasteful as it was, instead of my disgust.

Saturn, in the Greek tradition, was called Kronos. That “Kr” element is enough to remember me to karma. Say what you will about nature taking its course — it’s just not good karma to let deadly viruses fester in your neighborhood.

And so there I was, this morning, with the rubber gloves, the quadruple plastic bag and the excessive hand-washing.

Ah! Saturn lives.

Photo credits: Crow, Flag, Telescope

Day 5: Jenny and I had coffee with friends in the morning, then headed out to Griffith Observatory for the afternoon. In retrospect, it was a fitting way to braid together the sensory indulgences and the intellectual intakes of the previous four days.

If you [...]]]> Part Three of a Three-Part Series
Click for Part 1 and Part 2

Day 5: Jenny and I had coffee with friends in the morning, then headed out to Griffith Observatory for the afternoon. In retrospect, it was a fitting way to braid together the sensory indulgences and the intellectual intakes of the previous four days.

If you know something about astrology, you might associate an observatory with Jupiter (the great eye, the long view, the wide view) or Neptune (the boundlessness of space) or even the Sun (the shining core of our little circle of planets, our awareness, our self-understanding).

But what I saw was Saturn. Not Saturn in the traditional malefic way, the way of stripping you bare and paring you down. Saturn in the way that energy becomes matter and integrates and tells the story of deep time.

It started with the rattlesnake signs in the hillsides above the observatory: a warning of our mortality, of the instantaneous ability of forces beyond our control to swiftly and unequivocally define our time on earth. In the flash of a fang, poison mixes with blood, commutes to the brain and stops the body dead in its tracks.

Okay, so maybe that’s a little malefic. But it didn’t feel that way so much as injecting a little more somberness, a little more awareness, into our day. We didn’t turn back because of the sign, but our attention turned a bit from the hills, the Hollywood sign across the bright canyon, the little blue birds sailing in the foreground, and toward our feet on the ground, the fraying fabric there, the careful placement of each step.

After a few minutes of slow climbing, we picked our way back down the trail and were confronted again with the dead: a sculpture featuring notable contributors to the long train of wisdom flowing out behind modern astronomers (left: Galileo and Copernicus). They were reminders that, with the proper application of energy, ambition and integrity, we could stretch ourselves out past the bounds of our body’s time here on earth. We can each leave a legacy in our own achievements. We can be the giants on whose shoulders future humans stand. I was reminded of the horoscope, the 4/10 axis, the long climb from the bottom of the hill to the summit, the process of coming from one’s ancestry and going toward one’s future.

Inside the hall, the historic building welcomed us with a giant pendulum that swung slowly, always aimed at True North, while the clock below it turned with the motion of the Earth. On one side was the Hall of the Eye; on the other was the Hall of the Sky. These exhibits house more traditional — more Saturnine, if you will — information on astronomy: navigation, telescopes, phases of the Moon and other such expected features. But plunk down a side staircase and you enter the building’s newer spheres, which debuted in 2004 after the observatory’s extended closure.

At the bottom of the stairs, you turn right to enter the “wormhole stairway,” really a simple channel taking you one more flight down into the basement exhibits. Jenny and I joked that the wormhole ought to have been graced with some more interesting features if they were going to bother with a name like that: spooky music or ghostly lights, perhaps. We opted to go straight, instead. And were glad we did.

Because by going straight, we entered the Cosmic Connection, a hallway featuring a simultaneously whimsical and profound timeline that traces the development of the universe from the Big Bang until today. Below the traditional horizontal layout of the unending march of years is pinned a long, sparkling river of more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry that look like stars, moons, comets and other astronomical ingredients. The pieces were contributed by a longtime donor and associate of the observatory, who had collected them over more than four decades. It was fun to walk the hallway and try to figure out from which era different bracelets, pendants and earrings hailed. Jenny and I called to each other: “Look at this hairclip!” “I want that necklace!”

But the jewelry, cool as it was, was really just a Venusian side note to the Cosmic Connection itself. The hallway curves — maybe like space, maybe like time — so that just a few feet in, I started to feel a little disoriented, a little overwhelmed. Large-scale photo-quality illustrations of the Big Bang and other cosmic developments reminded me both of own sense of smallness and of my intimate connection with every particle of dust floating by. Randomness and order converged. I could almost hear the grand symphony of the spheres tuning up, gathering in, pausing, breathless, before the conductor’s baton sliced downward, setting the great wheel of time in motion. I thought, How could anyone look at these photos and not believe in a god, or a goddess, or a marvelous dancing troupe of deities?

Even though the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, the Cosmic Connection made me feel like it’s right next door — like its long shimmering arms still reach around us, holding us, rippling through us, getting caught in our mortal webs, pushing us to grow upward and outward, while yet holding us to the bounds of its physical laws. Its motion is like the ripples of a pond where a rock has just been thrown: concentric undulations, moving out, and yet in, at the same time. Its long arms seem, to me, to reach back in time to gather up the detritus of our origins, then bring them forth to us in offering, asking us to repurpose the very material from which we came, so many billions of years ago, to put it to good use for the next step — outward? upward? inward? — on our long, curving journey through time.

Photo credits: jewelry, Big Bang