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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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~What does not serve we burn

Thru the ashes we will learn

~hag

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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 

8 September 2016 – Astro-Weather: The Moon this evening forms a roughly vertical lineup with Saturn and Antares below it, while brighter Mars glows yellow-orange to their left.

Although September is typically a slower month for meteors than August, be on the lookout for a relatively new shower called the Epsilon Perseids. The shower peaks late this evening, though the best views will come after midnight once the Moon has set & Perseus rides high in the sky. So perhaps tonight before sleep you might make the intention to spiritually tune into this opportunity to receive this Michaelic gift of cosmic iron to fortify our blood.

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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history… It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.” ~Rachel Carson

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary – Mary’s birth has ‘officially’ been celebrated since the sixth century -A September birth, with the Sun in the constellation Virgo. Also noteworthy-the Eastern Orthodox Church begins its Church year in September, with the feast of the Immaculate Conception nine months earlier on 8 December.

The apocryphal book of James gives us this account: Anna & Joachim are infertile but pray for a child. They receive the promise of a child that will advance God’s evolutionary plan for the world.

St. Augustine connects Mary’s birth with the work of The Christ. He tells the earth to rejoice & shine forth in the light of her birth. “She is the flower of the field from whom bloomed the precious lily of the valley. Through her birth the nature inherited from our first parents is changed.”

“Today the barren Anna claps her hands for joy, the earth radiates with light, kings sing their happiness, priests enjoy every blessing, the entire universe rejoices, for she who is queen and the Father’s immaculate bride buds forth from the stem of Jesse”

1504 – Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Piazza della Signoria in Florence

1565 – The Knights of Malta lift the Ottoman siege of Malta, the climax of an escalating contest between a Christian alliance & the Islamic Ottoman Empire for control of the Mediterranean

1637 – Deathday of Robert Fludd, a prominent English Paracelsian physician & occultist, an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist & Rosicrucian apologist.

1900 – Galveston hurricane: A powerful hurricane hits Galveston, Texas killing about 8,000 people

1941 – World War II: Siege of Leningrad begins

1949 – Deathday of Richard Strauss, German composer

1978 – Black Friday, a massacre by soldiers against protesters in Tehran, provoked 700-3000 deaths, it marks the beginning of the end of the monarchy in Iran

1988 – Deathday of Dr Rita Leroi a few days before her 75th birthday. She attended the Stuttgart Waldorf School as a child. She went on to became a Clinical Assistant at the Ita Wegman Clinic in Arlesheim. She developed a deep interest in cancer & the Iscador treatment of this disease. In 1954 she married Dr Alexandre Leroi who was the leader of the Society for Cancer Research & Director of the Hiscia Research Institute in Arlesheim. It is here that Iscador is produced & researches into the many problems to be solved in developing it into an effective remedy are undertaken. In October 1963 the Lukas Klinik, devoted to the care & treatment of cancer patients, opened in Arlesheim & Rita Leroi became its Director & selected to be President of the International Anthroposophical Medical Association

1989 – Partnair Flight 394 drove into the North Sea, killing 55 people. The investigation showed that the tail of the plane vibrated loose in flight due to sub-standard connecting bolts that had been fraudulently sold as aircraft-grade

1994 – USAir Flight 427, on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, suddenly crashes in clear weather killing all 132 aboard; resulting in the most extensive aviation investigation in world history, altering manufacturing practices in the industry

International Literacy Day

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~The simple thrill of a sparrow’s song cuts the twilight

Opening the colors to dawn

I carry this melody in my belly-O-dee

Close to the egg of silence in my womb ba

& so it is

That I give birth to Today…

~hag

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The Virtue for the month of September: Courtesy becomes steadiness of feeling.

Even though today it is still hot & muggy here in the Heartland, Autumn awaits, breathing in behind the rain black clouds, ready to break into the midst of the light-headedness of summer’s high flight, bringing sobriety & the resolve of the harvest.

Now the time has come when the contemplative Virgin of the heavens approaches, to gather us up in her blue mantle, like ears of corn, we are brought home from the fields of Summer.

The constellation of the Virgin has always been regarded in the ancient mysteries as the bearer of the bread of life -Full filled at the ‘Tuning Point of Time’ in the ‘miracle of the loaves & the fishes’, as well as the ‘Last Supper’.

If cosmic provisions are to become nourishment for the “I”, we must make a connection with the powers of the depths, which lie opposite the Virgin along the axis of the Zodiac, in the constellation of Pisces, the sign of the Fishes. With this balance of Above & Below we can truly feed the “I” – & say as St. John did: “I am the Bread of Life”!

This begs the question, which our current culture has to answer: How can the food of life, which is so often taken in unconsciously, in greedy gulps -instead be taken up & internalized with a wakeful & reverent consciousness?

If the Bread of Life is to be fully digested by the “I”, then what is required is the destruction of our selfish desires, making us ‘virgin’ again, that we may give birth to the ‘Christ in me’, to preserve & focus the activity of the will, freeing the “I” from outdated husks, to feed the Christ self.

In the social realm, the royal virtue of courtesy brings the giddiness of summer’s unconscious expansion back into a steadfast feeling of thoughtful care. A soul hygiene that brings the pendulum into right relationship, just as every out-breath is followed by an in-breath -The austerity of the Virgin leading us into the balanced scales of Libra in preparation for Michaelmas.

This must be developed in the practice of our social life. If we practice this high ideal of courtesy, not just a surface, conventional politeness, we can acquire the right heart-felt feeling, which awakens an inner organ that can reveal to us the true being of the other person, as well as opening our connection to the elemental beings, that look to us to release them from the withering blooms.

“If the sheath-bearing Virgin, who draws near with golden rays of autumn sun, in the blue firmament, is to nourish you with what she provides, you must take up this food that is the Bread of Life in your innermost being.

That you can only do, when you develop not only your senses, but with them, open up the spirit of your soul to the world around you, & deepen in your heart the fruits of your life, that you gather, shape & organize. Only the right heartfelt tact gives you the possibility of recognizing the human being in others & of becoming aware of your own human nobility!” ~Rudolf Steiner

In the lap of the BVM with you

~Hazel Archer Ginsberg