18 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: So did you see the Moon last night! Did you feel the almost eclipse this morning?

Alex Grey

Have you been following the Summer Triangle? Although Saturn reached its peak in early June, it remains conspicuous on August evenings. You can find the planet in the south-southwest around 9pm CDT when it forms the vertex of a another sweet triangle that includes Mars & Antares

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“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” ~Winston S. Churchill

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

According to Rudolf Steiner’s Original Calendar of the Soul:

Birthday of Joachim, Father of Mary

274 – Feast Day of Saint Agapitus a martyr saint. According to his legend, 15-year-old Agapitus, was thrown to wild animals in the local arena at Palestrina. The beasts refused to harm him, & he was beheaded

326 – Feast day of St. Helena, the consort of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus & the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great. She is an important figure in the history of Christianity & the world due to her major influence on her son & her own contribution in placing Christianity at the heart of Western Civilization. She is traditionally credited with a pilgrimage to Syria Palaestina, particularly to Jerusalem, during which she is claimed to have discovered the True Cross

670 – Feast day of Saint Fiacre of Breuil, who built a hospice for travelers in what is now Saint-Fiacre, Seine-et-Marne in France. Fiachra is an ancient pre-Christian name from Ireland. The meaning has been interpreted to mean “battle king”, a derivative of the word fiach “raven”, found in ancient Irish folklore, such as the Children of Lir.

849 – Deathday of Walafrid Strabo, an Alemannic monk – historical, poetical & theological writer

1227 – Deathday of Genghis Khan

1587 – Birthday of Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke – the first English child born in the Americas

1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England & finds his settlement deserted

1612 – The trial of the Pendle witches, one of England’s most famous witch trials, begins at Lancaster Assizes.

1634 – Urbain Grandier, accused & convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France

1735 – The “Evening Post” of Boston, MA, was published for the first time

1774 – Deathday of Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. There is still doubt as to whether he committed suicide or was murdered?

1783 – A huge fireball meteor is seen across Great Britain as it passes over the east coast

1868 – French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium

1891 – Major hurricane strikes Martinique, leaving 700 dead

1892 – Secret military convention to Franco-Russian alliance

1894 – The Bureau of Immigration was established by the U.S. Congress

1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers

1917 – A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless

1920 – Women gain the right to vote

1939 – Deathday of Karl Heise a German writer, of esoteric & conspiratorial works. He became known as the author of the book The Entente Freemasonry and the World War II (1919), in which he revealed a Germany conspiracy of Freemasons  who were responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. Rudolf Steiner wrote the forward to this book!

1940 – World War II: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain. The largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides

1983 – Hurricane Alicia hits the Texas coast, killing 22 people & causing over US$1 billion in damage

1990 – The first shots were fired by the U.S. in the Persian Gulf Crisis when a U.S. frigate fired rounds across the bow of an Iraqi oil tanker.

1991 – An unsuccessful coup was attempted in against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Soviet hard-liners were responsible. Gorbechev & his family were effectively imprisoned for three days while vacationing in Crimea

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Fuddling in the muddy puddle

I grab onto a Rolly-Polly curled up tight

She carries me like precarious egg light

Silent with the pregnant pause of possibility

I grow within

The ball of silence

Waiting to unfurl in her release…

~hag

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Edward Burne Jones

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” said Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

His advice might be just what we need to hear right now. I ask you:  Have you struggled to change a stagnant situation that has resisted your best efforts? Is there a locked door you’ve been banging on, to no avail? If so, I invite you to redirect your attention. Reclaim the energy you have been expending on closed-down people & moldering systems. Instead, work on the unfinished beauty of what lies closest at hand: YOURSELF.

What do you typically do just before you fall asleep & right after you wake up?

These rituals are important for our mental/spiritual health. Without exaggeration, we could say they are sacred times when we’re poised in the threshold between the two great dimensions of life.

What would it be like to give special care & attention to those transitions in the coming week?

Perhaps, as much as possible, to avoid watching TV or surfing the Internet right up to the moment you turn off the light, & what about not leaping out of bed the instant an alarm clock detonates. How about not using the alarm clock?

Become primed to receive special revelations, even ringing epiphanies, while in those in-between states.

Can you manage to be both highly alert & deeply relaxed? Could you be wildly curious & yet also serenely reflective? Can you imagine yourself being extra hungry to crack life’s secrets, but also at peace with your destiny exactly the way it is?

If you can honestly answer YES to those questions, you’ll get a lot of help in the coming week. The universe may even seem to be conspiring to educate & heal you. You will receive a steady flow of clues about how to get closer to living your dreams.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, & thinking what nobody has thought.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift, is to cultivate mental & emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

* a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

* a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, & worries about the future;

* a trust in “the ever present help of the spiritual world” over our time-worn beliefs & old habits;

* a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast & tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner’s mind fully engaged;

* and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease & teach us.

Together, in our own individual way, we can become prime for an enduring, simmering & steady brand of mindfulness — a state of being more-or-less perpetually in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone…

See you there

XOX

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg 

16 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Mercury reaches greatest elongation today, when it stands 27° east of the Sun. The innermost planet hangs low in the west after sunset. Be sure to keep an eye on Mercury, Venus, & Jupiter during the next two weeks as the triangle they form grows tighter.

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“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Rembrandt 1634

Abraham receives Isaac back from Yahweh, according to the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, GA 117

1705 – Deathday of Jacob Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician & theorist, founder of the calculus of variations. His most important contribution was in the field of probability

1744 – Birthday of Pierre Méchain, French astronomer who studied of deep sky objects & comets

1841 – U.S. President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history

1842 – In New York City, the U.S. government took over operations of the City Despatch Post. This was the first congressionally authorized local postage delivery

1888 – Birthday of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) British colonel & archaeologist

1899 – Deathday of Robert Bunsen, a German chemist, discovered caesium & rubidium, pioneer in photochemistry, & did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry. He developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use

1948 – Deathday of Babe Ruth

1906 – An estimated 8.2 MW earthquake hits Valparaíso, Chile, killing 3,886 people

1913 – Birthday of Menachem Begin, Belarusian-Israeli Zionist politician, 6th Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Prize laureate

1923 – Carnegie Steel Corporation put into place the eight-hour workday for its employees

1960 – Cyprus gains independence from Britain

1977 – Deathday of Elvis Presley

1989 – A solar flare from the Sun creates a geomagnetic storm that affects micro chips, leading to a halt of all trading on Toronto’s stock market

1999 – In Russia, Vladimir V. Putin was confirmed as prime minister by the lower house of parliament

2005 – Deathday (murder) of Brother Roger Schütz, founded the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy, France

2012 – South African police fatally shoot 34 miners & wound 78 more during an industrial dispute near Rustenburg

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Golden Hexagram –

Raw Geometry –

Viscus wax

In sticky sacrifice…

~hag

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Today I challenge myself to: Be honest.

And I ask: Have I had any of the following symptoms?

1. Lack of interest in trivial matters & a yearning for big, holy mysteries.
2. Unfamiliar but interesting impulses rising up in me demanding consideration.
3. Fresh insights into people & situations I’ve known a long time.
4. An altered sense of the flow of time.
5. Out-of-the-blue recall of long-forgotten memories.

Ok, so I am asking these questions because I know I can say YES!

And I continue to ponder, taking an inventory of all my inner voices, noticing both the content of what they say & the tone with which they say it. Some of them may be chatty & others shy; some blaring & others seductive; some nagging & needy & others calm & insightful.

Today I welcome all the voices in my head into the spotlight of my alert attention. I ask them to step forward & reveal their agendas.

Imagine that your life is a detective story. The goal is not to solve a crime, but to solve the mystery of why we’re here on earth, so we can carry out the special mission we’ve come to accomplish.

Sometimes we go for months without even looking for clues.  We sleepwalk through the world, reacting blindly to the tricks that the gods use to try to wake us up.

Then there are those phases when hot leads, fresh evidence & opportunities, pop up all over the place, convincing us beyond a doubt that spirituality & magic are the fundamental properties of reality. Could this be one of ‘those’ times?

Through some cosmic intervention, a sad or bad or mad story will get tweaked prior to the final turn of the plot. Just as I’m getting ready to nurse my regrets, an X-factor or wild card will appear, transforming the meaning of a series of puzzling events. This may not generate a perfectly happy ending, since I know life is a process, but it will at least result in an interesting & redemptive epiphany.

What is the precise nature of that X-factor or wild card?

Perhaps a big secret will be revealed or some missing evidence will arrive or a mental block will crumble. And it’s likely that I will have an inspiration about how valuable my ‘problem’ has actually been.

I’m reminded of Jung’s formula, which is that we don’t so much solve our problems, as we outgrow them. We add capacities & experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

Here’s to insightful growth & creative living!

XOX

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg