14 September 2016 – Astro-Weather: How soon after sunset can you see the Summer Triangle? Face east. Vega, the Triangle’s brightest star, is practically at the zenith.  Deneb is the first bright star you encounter to Vega’s east-northeast. Altair shines less high in the southeast.

***

We are the echo of the future ~W. S. Merwin (Thanks to Chris Manvell)

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Feast of the Cross – According legend the True Cross was discovered in 326 by Saint Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, during a pilgrimage she made to Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was then built at the site of the discovery, by order of Helena & Constantine. The church was dedicated nine years later, on this same date, with a portion of the cross placed inside it.

Other legends explain that in 614, that portion of the cross was carried away from the church by the Persians, & remained missing until it was recaptured by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 628. Initially taken to Constantinople, the cross was returned to the church in 629.

1321 – Deathday of Durante degli Alighieri – known as Dante

1486 – Birthday of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, German Occultist, theologian, astrologer, & alchemist

1723 – Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena lays down the first stone of Fort Manoel in Malta. de Vilhena, a Portuguese nobleman was the 66th Prince of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Unlike many other Grand Masters, he was benevolent & popular with the Maltese people

1741 – George Frideric Handel completes his oratorio Messiah

1752 – The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2)

1901 – U.S. President William McKinley dies after an assassination attempt on September 6, & is succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt

1940 – Ip massacre: The Hungarian Army, supported by local Hungarians, kill 158 Romanian civilians in Ip, Sălaj, a village in Northern Transylvania, an act of ethnic cleansing

1943 – World War II: The Wehrmacht starts targeting several Greek villages death toll over 500 people

1959 – The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it?

1960 – The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded

1960 – Congo Crisis: With CIA help, Mobutu Sese Seko seizes power in a military coup, suspending parliament & the constitution

1969 – The US Selective Service selects September 14 as the First Draft Lottery date

2008 – All 88 people on board Aeroflot Flight 821 are killed when the plane crashes on approach to Perm Airport

Lectures by Rudolf Steiner on this date

***

Bernhoft

My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~I burn & radiate

In the empty space

Where fire appears blue

A jolt of essence

A glow of ether

A passion for stars & stones

~hag

***

Cloud Gazing

A very interesting meditation cloud gazing; part Rorschach, part cosmic divination. Recently I have felt called to watch the sky every day. Even for 5 minutes much can be revealed. I remain watchful & act as witness to the messages – in the formations, in the wind, in my body, in all of nature.

How is dawn speaking today? What will dusk want? Noon brings its own power. The robin’s song this year seems particularly urgent, yet lonesome. The milk weed is running with bright orange beetles. The cardinal couple talk & sway on the long stalks of the Joe Pie weed eating seeds. The golden rod are bursting with buzzing mason bees. O look the Michaelmas daisy’s are huge this year. And my goodness the way the spider web catches the light…I send out gratitude & love, & listen for the echo of the elementals.

Moving through the clouds, is that a choir of Angels, see it there…?  They seem so active & willing to connect with those who are keen to look up & read the starry script, to intuit the augury without falling into illusion, to witness without judgment, to get out of the way, & yet to participate fully.

Was it Ben Franklin who was an initiate in weather watching?

The etheric realm is an open secret for those who have eyes to see. Look up & join in the co-creation of our evolution.

See you there

~Hazel Archer Ginsberg 

12 September 2016 – Astro-Weather: Mercury will pass very close to the Sun in the sky as its orbit carries it between the Sun & Earth.

This occurs once in every synodic cycle of the planet (116 days), & marks the end of Mercury’s appearance in the evening sky & its transition to become a morning star over the next few weeks.

At closest approach, the Sun will outshine Mercury making it totally unobservable for several weeks while it is lost in the Sun’s glare.

Mercury will also pass perigee – the time when it is closest to the Earth – at around the same time, since it will lie on exactly the same side of the Sun as the Earth in the Solar System.

for a more esoteric take see this from the Astrosophy Research Center

Also tonight the Moon shines straight under Altair at dusk. A finger-width above Altair is Tarazed, Gamma Aquilae. The name “Tarazed” comes for the Persian for “balance beam,” referring to the pattern it makes with Altair & fainter Beta Aquilae on Altair’s other side.

***

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.~ Martin Luther King

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

The Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

In Our Lady’s time, Aramaic was the spoken language. In Hebrew, the name Mary is Miryam, Meaning:  “Bitter Sea,” “Myrrh of the Sea”, “The Enlightened One,” “The Light Giver,” & especially “Star of the Sea”= Stella Maris.

One of the local traditions holds that this feast day was commemorated in Vienna by the creation of a new kind of pastry shaped in the form of a half-moon (the croissant) The feast is also a counterpart to the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

The entry in the Roman Martyrology about the feast: The Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a day on which the inexpressible love of the Mother of God for her Holy Child is recalled, and the eyes of the faithful are directed to the figure of the Mother of the Redeemer, for them to invoke with devotion

1492 – Birthday of Lorenzo de’ Medici

1740 – Birthday of J.H. Jung-Stilling, German poet & mystic, his nom de plume Stilling, derived from the characterization of German Pietists as “the still people in the countryside” Stillings acquaintance with Goethe at the University of Strasbourg ripened into friendship, & it was thru Goethe’s influence & assistance that Stilling’s first work, was put to paper & published (without Jung’s knowledge) in 1777.

1857 – The SS Central America sinks east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning 426 passengers & crew. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush

1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction

1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy & self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia

1940 – Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.

1940 – An explosion at the Hercules Powder Company plant in Kenvil, New Jersey kills 51 people & injures over 200

1942 – World War II: RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers & Italian POWs is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks with a heavy loss of life

1943 – World War II: Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, is rescued from house arrest on the Gran Sasso in Abruzzi, by German commando forces led by Otto Skorzeny

1959 – The Soviet Union launches a large rocket, Lunik II, at the moon

1962 – President John F. Kennedy, at a speech at Rice University, reaffirms that the U.S. will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade

1974 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, ‘Messiah’ of the Rastafari movement, is deposed following a military coup by the Derg, ending a reign of 58 years

1977 – South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko dies in police custody

1992 – NASA launches Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission. On board are Mae Carol Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese citizen to fly in a US spaceship, and Mark Lee and Jan Davis, the first married couple in space

2003 – The United Nations lifts sanctions against Libya after that country agreed to accept responsibility and recompense the families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

***

~What does not serve we burn

Thru the ashes we will learn

~hag

***

Miguel Tio

Most folks can remember where they were, on that September morning, 15 years & counting ago.

It was autumn, & the new school year had just started. The Perseid meteor showers had been weak in 2001. Yet Michaelmas was on my mind. My husband & I had slept late that day. My morning mediation was scattered, distracted. I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, my daughter, who was not yet 2 years old, was playing up in her room, when the phone Rang. It was my friend Rowan. She was crying & whispering, ‘Turn on your TV’ she said. I laughed & said ‘Rowan what is it? You know we don’t watch the tube”. She said ‘O Hazel, honey just turn it on’.

We were in shock. I don’t have to go into what we all felt at that moment.

We tuned off the TV & I called to see if school was still in session. The folks at the Chicago Waldorf School said, yes, stressing how we all needed to keep the media away from the young ones. In a daze I got the girl ready for our parent/child class. While the children played, the parents sat, quiet, nodding to each other, holding the sacred space for the innocents, speaking only with our eyes about what we had seen.

When I got home my husband said the 2^nd tower was hit -The horrendous images repeating in an endless loop.

For many days after, when I would take my girl for walks, or where ever I was, at work, at the market, I felt a deepened connection to my fellow human beings. People looked each other in the eye. Folks were kind, helpful, really considerate, even in traffic, brothers & sisters bonded by this world altering event.

We were all united that day.

In trying to make sense of it all, I thought, perhaps this horrible tragedy would become a catalyst for true change. I saw it as a loosening of our collective etheric bodies, providing an opportunity for the angels to work with us, opening humanity to a threshold experience, an initiation, preparing us for the brotherhood of the next epoch.

Remember how still, & quiet it was under clear blue skies in those 1^st few days, after it happened, when all the air traffic was halted? Peaceful, heightened, open.

But soon the shock & vulnerable open eyed connection gave way to patriotic rhetoric; hateful & boiling it radiated out infecting the planet with fear. And anyone not jumping on the war wagon was called trader/unpatriotic/’conspiracy theory’ quack, & roundly silenced.

Lies became truth. Phantoms became reality. Blood was exchanged for oil. Corporations became people. Our civil liberties were bought & sold. Homeland security invaded our right to privacy -The human soul oppressed by systematic illusion.

Never mind that VP Dick Cheney was running the largest war-games exercises at the same time as the ‘attacks’. Never mind the connection of the Saudi’s with the Bush dynasty. Never mind the mind, for thinking had been outlawed.

You probably don’t remember, but in November 2001, the Leonid meteor storm gave us a record high display. It began on Sunday morning, Nov. 18-19, when Earth glided into a dust cloud shed by comet Tempel-Tuttle (the comet cycle began in 1666)

The fallout from 9/11 will continue…& perhaps with time, more truths will surface that will bring change & healing…AND there is always help from the ever present spiritual world, if we look for it. Michael will continue to pour his cosmic iron into our blood – but it is up to us to use it to fight the dragon.

“For once, therefore, a man woke up and saw that what mattered was not to proclaim democracy but to see the full reality, not to follow slogans, but to see things as they are. This would be particularly important today, for people would then realize that the events which reign with such blood and terror over the whole of humanity are guided and directed from just a few centers. People will never realize this if they persist in the delusion that nation is fighting nation, and allow the European and American Press to lull them to sleep over the kinds of relations that are said to exist between nations.” ~Rudolf Steiner, Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, : Lecture 14: Into the Future, Dornach, 28 October 1917

With love

~Hazel Archer Ginsberg