Aries Full Moon, Libra Solar Festival 2012
Welcome to the September 29, 2012 Autumn Equinox, Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival edition of the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast. Warm greetings from your Editors, Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry.
Happy Harvest Moon!
In the northern hemisphere, the Moon will rise around sunset tonight--and not long after sunset for the next few evenings. So the days are much shorter and nights longer.
Farmers working before the advent of electricity at the time of the Harvest Moon could see that as the light faded in the West, it began to illuminate the Eastern horizon, as the full Moon began to rise.
Northern farmers who are working long days to harvest their crops before winter take advantage of this phenomenon, which is what gives the Harvest Moon its name.
The Harvest Moon traditionally provided a period of grace for the farmers at a time they needed it most! But despite many stories about how the Harvest Moon is bigger than other Moons, we can rest assured this is surely a mere legend.
Try looking at the Moon Saturday when it's rising in the east.You will see that the low-hanging Moon looks very big. The horizon Moon appears up to twice as big as the overhead Moon. This is one of the sky godess’ most beautiful mysteries.
There are many theories to explain the appearance of the huge Harvest Moon. Scientists say this is a trick of the eye known as the "Moon Illusion."
You can conduct an experiment tonight or tomorrow night to see if the Moon is actually the same size no matter where it is in the sky. Using a key or a ruler, measure the Moon's width at the horizon. Next month and the month after, measure the Moon’s width as it rises in the sky. Record the measurements in a full moon diary. Then compare the measurements you get over several months. Compare the width of the horizon moon to the Moon's width when directly overhead.
You will find that the size of the Moon is constant, as is the Northern Hemisphere’s ongoing love affair with the Harvest Moon, traditionally a time of joy and gratitude.
Jane and I are celebrating this joyous time of year by giving thanks for the super-abundance of fruits, veggies, flowers and love in our life here in the East San Francisco Bay area.
Jane has been creating mouth-watering jams from the most amazing peaches and plums we’ve ever eaten, courtesy of nearby Frog Hollow Farms, fruit purveyor to Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ famous SF restaurant. We are getting two varieties of super-creamy autumn pears this week in our CSA share from Frog Hollow along with the sweetest green plums I’ve ever tasted, two kinds of gorgeous grapes, and more!
Now’s the time for peak tomato harvest too, and Jane has some advice for everyone across the country who is inundated with tomatoes. “It’s tomato season! Slow roast some tomatoes!” says Jane, who offers her own yummy easy recipe this month.
Here in the East Bay we are surrounded with late-blooming flowers including giant crepe myrtles, oleanders and more! They seem to bloom for half the year! In our back yard, anonymous large shrubs are filling out with brilliant yellow flowers, marigolds are peaking, and roses just keep running wildly throughout our area.
Here in Antioch, we are enjoying cool evening dinners in our back yard, but we are hiding indoors during daytime this Full Moon weekend, because of a predicted several day heat wave with highs around 100°!
So it may be officially fall, since the Autumn Equinox occurred a few days ago, but it’s been a scorching month for us.
Jane and I have been out of town four of the last five weeks, and as we traveled around the country we just kept going from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.
It was super-hot here when we left for Oregon a little over a month ago, to visit our friend Lawrence Stoller, America’s most famous and talented crystal cutter and crystal artist, at his studio in Bend, in Oregon’s high desert. Lawrence's work is in museums & collections worldwide. He has created a magnificent centerpiece for American Express's Eleven Tears World Trade Center Memorial.
Lawrence spent several days teaching us how to cut and polish crystals, and Jane and I can tell you it is SUPER hard, dirty work indeed. We doubt we will ever be very proficient at this craft, but we are delighted to have the experience, which makes us ever more grateful to the fine artisans from all over the world that produce the crystal and gemstone creations we sell and use in Reiki, meditation and crystal healing sessions.
The last several days in Oregon were challenging, hot and it was hard to breathe. We went a mile high to an observatory near Bend where normally you would see five or six tremendous peaks in the distance, each around 12-14,000 feet high -- but the entire landscape was obliterated by thick brown smoke from wildfires that were consuming 10-20,000 acres of forest nearby.
It was apocalyptic to us, but the roads were bumper to bumper with tourists in SUVs with bikes and boats, and lots of folks in colorful spandex outfits pumped their mountain bikes up incredibly steep roads with no evident concern for the fires.
“We are used to the fires,” a local told us while waiting on us one morning in a breakfast spot in Bend. “Everybody in town has been evacuated at least once already, so this is no big deal.”
Jane and I found it challenging to be outside hiking however, because it was hard to breathe. I’m not sure we would ever get used to the yearly summer burn-off that chaparral forests need to thrive, and so I’m not sure we’d ever feel totally at home in such a landscape in central Oregon or Southern California.
The fires continued the entire time we were in Bend, and as we left on our airplane, we could see that the smoke was roiling 20,000 feet in the air!
Jane and I flashed back to another apocalyptic scene as seen from an airliner. Two years ago, as we flew into Austin, we could see that Lake Austin was receding, down a couple dozen feet or more, and the city was entirely surrounded by a circle of smoking fires.
These are the kind of spectacles that baby boomers who grew up on the East Coast or the Gulf Coast, like Jane and me, simply have a hard time comprehending.
There’s a reason for that difficulty. And sure, there are wildfires in the American West, but something more dramatic than seasonal wildfires is going on.
We are no longer living in the same geological age in which we were born, and geological ages are measured in the tens of thousands of years, the millions of years! That’s how much life on Earth has changed in the last two to three centuries. Scientists have a name for our new geological age of accelerating global warming, caused by the activities of human beings. This new age is called the Anthropocene.
“The word Anthropocene was coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen about a decade ago,” veteran environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert reports in National Geographic magazine, in her article Age of Man.
“One day Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds, was sitting at a scientific conference,” Kolbert explains. “The conference chairman kept referring to the Holocene, the epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, 11,500 years ago, and that—officially, at least—continues to this day.”
"'Let's stop it,'" Crutzen recalls blurting out. "'We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene.' Well, it was quiet in the room for a while. When the group took a coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation. Someone suggested that Crutzen copyright the word.”
“Long after our cars, cities, and factories have turned to dust, the consequences of burning billions of tons' worth of coal and oil are likely to be clearly discernible,” Kolbert reports. “As carbon dioxide warms the planet, it also seeps into the oceans and acidifies them. Sometime this century they may become acidified to the point that corals can no longer construct reefs, which would register in the geologic record as a ‘reef gap’. Reef gaps have marked each of the past five major mass extinctions. The most recent one, which is believed to have been caused by the impact of an asteroid, took place 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period; it eliminated not just the dinosaurs, but also the plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and ammonites. The scale of what's happening now to the oceans is, by many accounts, unmatched since then. To future geologists, [British geologist Jan]Zalasiewicz says, our impact may look as sudden and profound as that of an asteroid.”
How did this happen?
It seems humanity has just experienced a true Icarus moment. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the Greek artisan who built the famous Labyrinth of King Minos that was used to house the dreaded Minotaur, half-man, half bull. Daedalus gave the woman Ariadne a ball of string so she could help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, escape the Minotaur, and Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son in the Labyrinth.
Daedalus supplied Icarus with a pair of wings made of wax and feathers. Icarus escaped using the wings, and became the first human to achieve flight. But Icarus became drunk with power once airborne, and flew too close to the sun, despite explicit warnings from his Father.
His wings melted, he fell and he drowned.
Icarus is a prime example of the Greek concept of hybris, which means a dangerous variety of pride, particularly an overbearing pride in one’s power and accomplishments, leading one to overestimate one’s own abilities, and thus suffer a tragic downfall.
Humanity has literally learned to fly, and now we seem to be in a kind of climatological freefall. Our wings, our technology, which had seemingly freed us from the constraints imposed by the laws of nature, now seems the instrument of our destruction, because we have overestimated our own prowess and underestimated the primal power of the forces of Nature.
Humanity’s short moment of peak oil industrialization made possible a staggering rate of human population growth over the last hundred and fifty years. Some scientists have compared the relatively recent quadrupling in human population on Earth to the rate at which bacteria reproduce, and point out that nothing comparable has ever been seen among primates or other large animals at any time in our planet’s history.
That explosive growth in human birth rate overwhelmed the tens of millions killed in World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the many other smaller wars of the same time period, extending into our present day.
And as technological progress accelerated during this period of explosive change, every year a greater percentage of humanity’s teeming billions have achieved a level of industrialization that has brought American living standards within reach of the great nations of Asia, which collectively house the vast majority of human beings alive today.
This technological miracle, which allowed humanity to feed and clothe its spiraling population and even raise living standards around the world, also accelerated oil and gas production and consumption and has now produced alarming spikes in global warming trends tracked by climatologists.
Not to mention the Long Hot Summer of 2012, which has scorched our land from sea to shining sea.
After a moment at home, enduring another mini-heat wave, we continued on to Houston to visit my Father, who is in a nursing home. Houston was muggy, humid and super-hot. No relief there. The sweat just clings to your body and never evaporates. The drought continues in Texas however, proof you can stay continuously covered in sweat while the bayous shrink, the grass turns brown, the trees shrivel and your home slowly but surely desiccates and becomes a Dust Bowl.
After experiencing this different flavor of the new, hotter normal weather in America, we went back home again, to the usual hot days/cool nights, and then right off to Denver for the annual Gem and Mineral Show. It was also surprisingly hot in Denver, in a state which has suffered this year from disastrous wildfires and extreme drought, and didn’t feel like autumn at all.
So we are looking forward to next week, because by Thursday or so, we are supposed to enjoy a couple days of potential thunderstorms, the first rain we will have seen in months here in Antioch.
Harvest Moon Cosmic Weather Forecast
It's fall! Archangel Michael comes armed with subtle fire and a sword of iron, to redirect Universal Life Force Energy on planet Earth upward, lending support to all spiritual practices, and offering the promise of accelerated spiritual growth in the season to come.
We invite you to join us in an Archangel Michael Meditation to celebrate the recent Autumn Equinox and this weekend’s Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival.
We offer in this meditation a call upon Archangel Michael to help us complete a comprehensive scan of body-mind-aura combined with a karmic recall of all woundings of consequence, so that Archangel Michael may release us from the emotional, mental and etheric “hooks and cords” that bind us.
This is a powerful meditation indeed!
We begin by saying, “I call upon Archangel Michael for protection against all detrimental energies in my environment, and I ask Michael to use his sword of light to cut the cords that bind me to all those individuals and sentient beings, in the material and spiritual worlds, that transmit negative emotions and thought-forms to me or who take my energy without my consent.”
What follows is a detailed visualization of the entire process. We recommend you read the article and then simply sit, call upon Michael, and meditate.
Here we are engaging in an activity that beautifully reflects the Aries-Libra polarity, drawing clear boundaries for ourselves, and adjusting the balance of power between ourselves and the most significant others in our environment with whom we have an imbalanced energy flow.
The weekend of the Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival is an ideal time for this Michael Meditation. May we all have a successful meditation, release from the energetic cords that bind us to our egoistic impulses, and a felt sense of the presence of that great Spiritual Center we call Shamballa.
“If 'Libra admits the soul into the world centre which we call Shamballa', then the tension of the T-Square in this full moon horoscope certainly encourages that potential. Libra is a sign of Decision,” says Esoteric Astrologer Phillip Lindsay. “The configuration of this chart promotes decisive action, its the push that comes to shove. But its the right decision that chooses 'the Way that leads between the two great lines of force'.”
In this month’s article on the Aries Full Moon, Libra Solar Festival, Phillip discusses the connection between Shamballa, Libra and The Law, explores the connection between the Libran Lady of Justice and the Weighing of the Soul described in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, discusses the current “Paradoxical Cycle of Conflict” which features Libra with Mars in Scorpio, dissects the spiritual relationship between religious reaction and righteousness, and warns of an astrological “window of danger” for Israel, explores the ways that our current placement of Jupiter in Gemini could save the day, and describes the current Libra Full Moon T-Square: Sun-Uranus, Moon and Pluto, along with its astrological implications for the Cosmic Weather Forecast. Wow!
This weekend, the Harvest Moon occurs in Aries, the sign of the individualist, and coincides with the Libra Solar Festival, celebrating life lived in relationship, along with community values. The challenge for each of us at this sacred time of year, when seasons shift, and farmers deliver the yearly harvest in the Northern Hemisphere, is to balance the needs of the individual and of the community.
This is the perfect time of year to balance gratitude with humility, and to reflect upon how each of us needs to redefine the balance between our own individual hopes, dreams, needs and desires, and the community’s need to reduce emissions of global warming gases. Scientists tell us we have only a couple of decades to slow down this process, to swiftly soar closer to Earth, before the Sun singes our wings and we fall and drown.
There will be more messages from Mother Nature like this year’s droughts and runaway wildfires, seen from coast to coast, and more strenuous tests devised for our political leadership and for all of us around the world in the coming months and years.
These tests are designed to stimulate the emergence of soul-perfection within our species, and to provide a strong impulse toward collective action and co-operative community that can transcend the drive toward increasing individualization which has been the primary task of humanity’s spiritual evolution for the last several hundred years.
The emergence of individuated consciousness, which is the great gift of Western civilizations, and which has been the primary lesson of history over the last few thousand years, has enabled humanity to transcend the relatively unconscious collective awareness that was typical of the Neolithic priestly cultures, and their descendants, such as the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian dynasties with their absolute ruling classes and their rigid hierarchical class distinctions.
In facing the difficult tests before us, while we must continue to evolve as individuals, our primary goal must be to establish a harmonious group consciousness. It is up to us to maintain our individuality and yet to set aside our differences with others with whom we form our spiritual, familial, professional and personal communities in pursuit of common goals that benefit the common good and transcend our own petty egoistic personality needs and desires.
The coming extreme environmental events, and the potential war of all against all that could be unleashed by water shortages, food shortages, greed and lust for power during the end of the age of abundant, cheap oil can only be averted or mitigated by the emergence of a group consciousness that honors the Earth and simultaneously maintains the welfare of all individuals.
Those of us who can successfully integrate these communitarian impulses into our psyches and our lives, and find common cause with those who share our goals, but who may have different belief systems and values, will be richly rewarded by the Universe, and will be given the tools enabling us to work together to ameliorate the coming global troubles in our immediate vicinity and around the world.
We all create our own realities, to this extent. We all are responsible for our own actions and our own spiritual development. We all have free will. Working together, in alignment with our Higher Purpose, and in concert with our friends, family, neighbors and chosen allies, we will find ourselves uplifted during the turbulent times to come.
However it is only human to feel some degree of fear when faced with the need for urgent civilization-wide change in the face of environmental catastrophe.
Fear is in fact rampant throughout the world, and the collective thought-forms and actions of humanity’s political leaders reflect that rampant fear.
This is perhaps one of the most difficult and important tasks we are given this season of change. We must face our deepest fears and we must seek to overcome them.
Fear is the soul-destroyer, the tool of the oppressor. Love is the antidote for fear. Love leads to the perfect sacrifice, the sacrifice of the ego in service to the Higher Self, in co-ordination with the Divine Plan of Love and Light. Let us ask for an abundance of Love in our lives!
Let us ask our Spiritual Guides and Teachers to help us recognize the golden opportunities for service that are sure to present themselves to us in the new season we are entering.
This Harvest Moon marks the beginning of a new yearly cycle in human spiritual evolution, which makes this Full Moon symbolically like a new moon, marking the promise of what is to come in addition to reaping the harvest of what has already been sown.
The cosmic energy which has been expanding throughout the physical world, radiating from the Earth into the atmosphere and out into deep space during the season of growth and harvest now stands poised to contract into the Earth during the winter season, when cosmic energies are consecrated to the germ, and the auric pattern or morphogenetic field surrounding the seed is imprinted with the patterns of growth that will manifest during the following spring season of birth and new life.
As we celebrate this time of fulfillment and of new beginnings in our own lives, we can become more aware that our activities, our thoughts and our emotions are having a profound and unique effect on the quality and quantity of life in the future, shaping the patterns of new cycles of work, celebration, and love for us all and for the natural world around us.
To each of us according to our true desires will come that which can make us whole, according to the true needs of the soul.
This is a time for profound meditation upon the process by which we create our own realities and how those realities impact the environment, our community and our future.
Our trip to Oregon sensitized Jane and me to the fragile beauty of the Northwest, and when we got home we were greeted by a beautiful article called Postcards from Eastern Oregon by a young farmer named Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume.
Kollibri and his farmer friends found themselves landless as a result of the current economic meltdown, and the article recounts their subsequent journey, a kind of a 21st century Vision Quest.
“This journey took us to Eastern Oregon to seek out Finisia Medrano, a.k.a. Tranny Granny, a Shoshone elder who knows the ways of The Hoop, an ancient tradition of food gathering and cultivation that sustained the Native Americans and the land in good health for thousands of years until being violently disrupted by the European Invasion,” Kollibri recounts. “The Hoop is not dead but, as we were to see, is severely threatened.”
“Granny is of Irish extraction (a people she called, ‘carrot-headed, fat-cheeked, pus-gutted son-of-a-bitches’), but was adopted into Native American culture at an early age,” says Kollibri. “The tribe grandmothers became her grandmothers and gave her much knowledge and perspective. She has been following The Hoop for three decades, on land both private and public, over several states, and has watched as what little remains of the native food plants — and of the Native rights to harvest and plant them — has been suffering ongoing assault. She is one of a handful of people keeping the practice alive, only some of whom are sharing their knowledge.”
“Long House says it is time to open the bundles,” she told us. “Not everyone is opening their bundles, but I am, and that’s why I am showing you these things.”
There is so much more to this important story about The Hoop, and we urge you all to click through and read it online!
Here we’ve got a story about how diversity and creativity hand in hand. This eye-opening story sensitizes us to viewpoints about food and the environment that diverge massively from consensus belief systems.
By opening ourselves up to new and foreign worldviews, we stimulate our own creativity and realize the limits of our own existing mental maps of the world.
Here we learn that there are many possibilities for growing food on Earth, that our present system of industrialized agriculture is only one among many, and that other, elder systems of agriculture did not disrupt the environment, much less destroy the delicate balance of forces that sustain human life on Earth in the current climatological comfort zone.
This Full Moon weekend is a time to honor individuality in sync with community. We honor the diversity of realities manifested by our friends, neighbors, allies and enemies upon the Earth, and we envision that diversity coming to flower, knowing it to be the very substance of Human Destiny, the prerequisite for humanity’s spiritual evolution.
This is the time to visualize humanity’s web of inter-relationships as a beautiful mosaic, a melodious symphonic air, a spontaneous theatrical performance, and a self-conscious spiritual revival.
This time of year provides us all with a marvelous opportunity to honor the varied ways that different cultures and religious traditions mark the autumnal turning point in our yearly seasonal cycles.
This time of year we see the celebrations of Michaelmas, Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan and Navratri, as Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus all celebrate the Libran virtues of community, such as compassionate sharing at harvest, along with the more spiritual Libran virtue of the liberation of the mind, which occurs thanks to the swift sword of Michael and the many weapons of many-armed Durga, who slays all demons.
Read our article on The Libra Festivals for an overview of these fall festivals, their spiritual meanings, the correspondences between them, and their underpinnings in the ancient discoveries of seasonal change, the precession of the equinoxes and the rise of large scale agriculture.
This weekend of the Aries Full Moon and Libra Solar Festival is the time of year to visualize humanity achieving a new understanding of the limits of individual power (Aries) and creating a new balance with the environment (Libra). For this is the most pressing task for humanity in the coming years.
Nothing less than a complete revolution in human society will do.