Times out of Time

…….flying north over the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau in saharan Algeria at the beginning of the year you would have been forgiven for thinking that the plane had been diverted via Sweden, assuming you were in a plane…..at the exact start of the Chinese New Year Algeria saw heavy snowfall along with several other areas of the Sahara and the Middle East – in fact, at that particular time, or so a little bird told me, Algeria saw more snow than had fallen in Sweden up to that point in the year…..not so unusual in the long run of things, what made this especially note worthy is the fact that the last time Algeria saw snowfall of this kind was at the start of the Chinese New Year…..in 1952, exactly sixty years ago – and, as now, ’52 was also a Water Dragon year! mmmmmm……..

Hi Folks – its been two months since a post appeared at Owlmirror and thats too long – so, I want to say straight from the heart, a big thank-you to all of you who have been visiting and dipping into the archives over this time; thanks for your patience – and, more importantly, to all of you, deep apologies for keeping y’all in the dark. Guess I should say whats been going on behind the scenes!

Simple truth is a whole host events and challenges ranging from building websites and tending to readings and requests, to helping my family relocate, which alone has been all-consuming on many levels……fact is, Life took the reins and I have had to follow!…….and in this particular instance that has led to the good ship Owlmirror going into dry-dock for a refit and stock-up on vittles ahead of our setting sail once again for the vast unknown.

So, with a fair wind picking up, carrying the smell of the open sea and horizons new, and  having a small window this evening to pick up the beat, I felt it only right and good timing to break out the charts and say something about the course were setting and where we are heading over the next few months once we weigh anchor….

…….however, in the time honoured tradition of this particular vessel, there is actually a little more to it than all that…….it began back at Samhain.

Did you notice something change back then, a subtlety perhaps about the shape of things – we noted here in the astro readings the lingering thinning of the veils, a deepening call to clear out unwanted baggage and cleanse our relationships, especially with the ancestors, in preparation for whats coming. And, beneath it all, underpinning our sense of the future was an influx of something new, a call to draw breath before shifting gear and to take the opportunity to re-orientate our goals; seems like a lifetime ago that the Moon’s North Node was conjuncting the ‘Great Attractor’, but, with eclipses and solstices swinging open the doorways of opportunity, I truly believe we saw a novelty, a ‘kink in our timeline’ so to speak, kicking in…..be interesting to know how its been for you too! Right now we are in the end zone of that November eclipse’ sphere of influence, before the next one arrives very soon in May, so, its time to tie up all the loose ends from this last six months of change….as ever, the planets have been encouraging us in this.

When we finally saw Mars station in late Virgo (exact on this astrologer’s natal 10th house Jupiter and close by my MC!) and start swinging back over the section of the sky he’d been sweeping during much of this time an implosion of detailed scrutiny began to take hold and, as if in answer to the Saharan snows, the weather just about everywhere has been pretty crazy…..along with the earth’s magnetosphere (Virgo = mutable earth), telluric and tectonic pathways became energised setting off a building cluster of EQs, and Venus received a direct hit from an as yet unidentified interplanetary traveller, as well as a scorching plasma wave, and, yes, the Sun started dancing, showing new forms in its coronal holes and manifesting a series of spikey sunspots and solar tornados – we’re still seeing the rippling out of the uptick that began as the Sun opposed Saturn….as above etc, and all in a galactic days work?

The big underlying theme then as now has been increasing novelty, and inward pressure for change – and, without a doubt the catalyst has been a major reality check and re-assessment of goals. The very laws of nature seem to be up for re-configuration. But, only seem mind; thats the tricky place we’re in. Infact, it seems that lawsuits are popping uplike spring daisies at the moment, eh Monsanto?! Did you catch the ‘trillion dollar lawsuit’, and can you be sure you know what you are seeing there, eh Mssrs Wilcox, Fulford, Wood et al?!……seems, many devisive rip-tides are trawling the depths at the moment in the politico-economic realms, not to mention the media, eh Mr Murdoch et al?! So, while the mundane world re-organises itself with trailers to a false flag global movie, what we may well be seeing are mock manuevers in anticipation of the upcoming seven episode ‘Uranus Square Pluto Show’…..and that is no joke at this time, eh Mssrs Ahmadinejad, Assad, Obama and Netanyahu et al?!

In plain speak, with solar and earth events hitting the ‘all-change’ button, ‘the world’ we are being presented with through the media appears to be slowly going crazy…..and, in the immortal words of Rupert’s Sun newspaper, ‘We Love It’……except, for the fact that the vast majority don’t – in reality its the usual crass, heartless entertainment to your average hack, but, it is carrying an increasingly high tariff to dodge the ‘Truth’ in this time, especially when the bullets are flying in your direction and there ain’t enough food to go ’round. And it might well be worse than that – the dematerialisation of virtually every sacred cow under the Sun is the calling card for Uranus and Pluto’s upcoming re-write of his-story…….perhaps not surprisingly the scientists are revolting and a noticable split is opening up between the orthodoxy and the avant-garde – theres some  divine jesting at work here too as, amongst the really juicy advances now being made in science, there are some real jokers telling us this is not where the real action is……look up said beautiful truth loving Venus – ‘Yeh! Do that…’ came the echo from, er….NASA?!

Life, as we know it, within the solar system is changing rapidly and our complicity with and awareness of these changes is increasing with it, quite literally – cosmological news and daily updates on the prevailing spaceweather are seeing an upsurge across the internet, many independant observers now utilising our enhanced access to solar and planetary science and its technologies via the http://www.  We find regular reports on the state of the Sun, planetary weather-forecasts and the health of our planet’s inner and outer bodies (most of which can be found posted on youtube and at various ‘scientific’ sites on the web (1)). So, it came as a point of some amusement when NASA announced that following the ‘spaceweather’ is going to play an increasingly important role in this, our terrestrial life from now on – as innocuous a statement of the obvious as we might expect from the scientific orthodoxy, but, noteworthy for it having been flagged up nevertheless, it pays to read between the lines with these guys, regardless the fact that their erstwhile identity as a branch of cosmic estate agents dealing in celestial real estate and out-sourcing is barely hidden these days.

The speculative grapevine that surrounds the idea of ‘earth-changes’ is directly feeding this info into the metaphysical and cosmological discussion and the memes are flying. Its everyday now we’re seeing a whelter of new alerts (predominantly via youtube vids) to ‘evidence’ of our immanent arrival at a new state of being, ‘proofs’ of our ascent towards a higher level of consciousness and notions of our ‘return’ to the cosmological community. While there is some serious and ground-breaking science emerging and fueling the debates now,  Entertainment Value within these networks is at an all-time premium…..but, is it true?! Stepping back……

We might well ask as, meanwhile back on earth, the vicarious gravy-train of ‘official’ media and ‘alternative’ news fueled versions of Reality seem to be in confluence and the flood is in full flow. Yes, as we are now fed 24/7, everyone now utilising the very same media of mass comms, endless updates on mounting defections, arrests and ‘trillion dollar’ lawsuits and political wrangling within the financial sector, global upticks in EQ activity, flooding and crazy weather, wars, political scandals, revolutionary struggles and ecological disasters and a marked increase in the visibility of the ‘transhuman agenda’ notwithstanding, the irrelevant and random juxtaposition of this cornucopia of the usual ‘news’, meta-science and conspiratorial knee-jerking with the race for the Whitehouse, obsessively voyeuristic ‘intimate’ details scooped from the lives of celebrities and the latest sports results are conspiring to create an exotic and yet anodine cultural chaos. Even if there is an overriding reality that we cannot ignore at this crucial moment in time, this itself is becoming drowned out by the maelstrom of high and low frequency noise we as a species are creating for ourselves as the soundtrack to our journey through 2012. Its also noteworthy that it has been in the latter stages of the Piscean age, in the overlap zone where  Aquarian influence has been impinging on Piscean ideals, that we have seen the rise of high tech and the internet – and Neptune’s transit through Aquarius has seen its greatest period of innovation and expansion. We are now revisiting the idealogical basis of this upsurge in creativity with Neptune firmly ensconced in the Piscean side of the overlap zone – could this be at the root of the game of charades now being played…..it has become obvious that each of us must look to our own reality for the answers.

So, how are you doing in the midst of all this craziness…..here at Owlmirror the point came where this became the over-riding question…….and the answers?!

We left off last time with a straight piece of counsel that in some very real ways was a direct response to this question…..’making good the shrines’……and, taking up this advice, Time was called and before you could say ‘hyper-space anomolies’ we were pulling focus and had been summoned to the inner sanctum of everyday life closer to home. Sometimes you have to simply call a halt to the madness…….

How unsuspecting are we of the consequences? It is true that Owlmirror has also been flagging up the increase in ‘novelty’ and unpredictability factors at work in our local arm of the planetary matrix for some time, but, that is the easy part – about which, it always intrigues me how little hindsight is paid by astrologers to their forecasting, checking the facts against prognostications, and this itself became an open question that quickly snowballed, Algerian style .

It had not been the crew of this ship’s intent (at least not mine – ed.) to batten down the hatches and unplug the public address system here, but, a diviner’s life, if it is to be lived with fidelity to its ‘sponsors’, is never entirely their own…..and, while our home reality is the only place that really matters, responding to guidance is the whole point. For all the increasing interest in divination, astrology and the unseen that is currently at large in the world, media influence or not, and, while there is always a place for the jester’s wit and wisdom in the midst of our courtly madness, we are at least to some extent sovereign in our own lives. We do well to play our cards carefully now, and trivialise such matters at our own risk……we can also miss opportunities and great beauty. If trivialisation of Life is to be the joker’s card that leads to the denuement of humankind, and if all this noise is actually a reflection of Neptunian fog descending over the Piscean oceans of collective mass media generated archetypel infection, then ‘making good the shrines’ is, without a doubt, a trumping maneuver and major antidote.

It may be a truism, but, in reality, Life is not divided into compartmentalised sectors. It serves us well to be reminded that Life is holy and sacred, even in the midst of the clamour and pressures of the everyday and, if it is your calling to work with the unseen, the shrines may also be that place where the noise of the world drops away, and a connectedness prevails that, while it may have higher energy levels in some ways, is imbued with a sense of timelessness and rich fruitful quietude –  sanctuaries of sanity. In that place we can hear the world and sense its great turnings much more clearly. When the shrines are ‘made good’, our Hara lines strengthened as Ishtar put it in her comment to ‘Pearl Fishing’ (much appreciated), the energy rises and we can hear the big wheel turning as we re-align and balance…..and, sometimes it calls us to go stand beneath the stars and wonder.

Around the time of the our last posting here a thing of great beauty was unfolding in the heavens – Venus was joining in close conjunction with Jupiter close by the Pleiades star cluster. Venus has increased her luminousity in recent times and, while undergoing great changes, like all the planets in our neck of the galactic woods (notably, it has also been recently observed that her axial rotation is slowing and her day has lengthened by a significant degree in current time), her presence has become powerfully magnetic, her luminescence scintillatingly electric. Combined with Jupiter’s brilliance they brought a gift of benevolent beauty from the night skies, further deepened into a rounded sense of time and place and symbolic resonance once the crescent Moon joined with these irridescent beings beneath the stars.  Awakening qualities that could be truly felt if we gazed upon their vibrant luminousity their gift became manifest through bringing many, perhaps for the first time, to turn their gaze skywards not merely to ‘look’, but, to partake in celestial contemplation.

There is a magic of the highest order at work in the celestial realms and if we take our bodies to meet with them it becomes possible to expand and deepen our lives, to begin once more to sense our place within the cosmos and get a sense of perspective – it may also provide us a glimpse of the greater presence of the worlds beyond this world. Such is the nature of star gazing – one of our innate ancestral impulses, ancient beyond our imaginings, it is also where astrology and astronomy reveal their common root, our common roots, within the star nations of the eternal dreamtime……I like to think that the astrological interpretation of such an event is superceded by its direct experience, not least of all for the fact that this is exactly how the very stories belonging to the star nations and celestial family of our solar system came to be with us. Those stories colour our use of the craft with all the mesmerising influence of the archetypes they seem to portray – but, as Sistertongue, another of our esteemed commentors here, has pointed out Neptunes story, for example, doesn’t hold the same kind of water as it used to……

For all the analytical musings and mythopoetic interpretations that accompany the current practice of astrology, the ground of experience is paramount. Checking back upon the fruits of our insights gives us the psychological and intellectual grounding – but, no description can match the direct experience of the planetary and stellar matrix for unifying and integrating the energies of the celestial plane and its inhabitants within our being. There are gateways here for that grounding to manifest, not only as a source of nourishment, but, through which the deepest memories of our source, our true nature and home within the cosmos may became activated. This sense of perspective is intrinsic to astrology and has been since the beginning. Just as our ancestors embraced this the larger reality of the cosmological life we too, first, by virtue of our physical senses, when we quieten enough to allow it of ourselves, can experience our intimate connections with the greater Life as a star-born unfolding moment bringing heightened energies and expanded awareness into our physical being – this is palpable if given enough attention, and if we are prepared to take the further step, towards the second level of attention, and allow these generative energies to work their magic within, we can still discover beyond those gateways, hidden in plain sight, the unseen vibrant lands beyond the physical planes. These are the origins of the Dragon Paths. They are also the source of the very stuff of Life.

Present with and around us in the terrestrial as much as the celestial, Nature is abundant with these gateways. Our souls are resilient by virtue of their eternal presence and the, once regained, familiar eminations of celestial energy, the stars and planets, that have never left us within the soul realms, are as old as Time itself……even now, if the calling is heeded, there is the opportunity to go test this out. Perhaps you will hear the Earth spirit awakening with this knowing and resonating with the expanding frequencies of awareness that are flowing within the cosmos. As esoteric as all this might sound it is good health to do so.

Within the earth realms their energies manifest at frequencies discernable within the physical frame of our bodies, both giving access to the celestial spectra and dimensions, and reminding us of the reality of our physical being. We know that the sacred sites are both sacred and sited upon this foundational interdimensional web – within our realm, our density, their expression finds profound resonance in sacred geometry and gives us the harmonic template for co-operative manifestation of their potential. This is divine potential in its origin, its energy and geometry is at the heart of astrological practice – the stars are here brought to earth; we never left them.

As an astrologer working with these energies is essential – the practice is simply indigenous, however much in contemporary clothing it might be figured and shaped. But, star-gazing is its foundation – the technologies of spirit are its natural expression and extension.

As an astrologer bringing this home makes the practice ‘soul-work’, beyond psychology and archetypal metaphor, and, in my view, is nothing less than the mind of Nature finding its voice within us. We need the quietude and fruitful darkness of our inner sanctum to hear it…..and, once the shrines have been made good once more it indubitably will call us to embark on that greatest journey of all and navigate by the stars a way home to ourselves.

Which brings us back to Owlmirror. The next phase of this journey is deeply tied up with this experiental reality as well as those Dragon Paths – their currents lead us into uncharted territory; remember seeing those places where uncertainty and the unknown reside being marked on the charts and maps of the ancient mariners with that most evocative of sayings – ‘here be Dragons’?!

They will be guiding us to look into the use of astrology as a mutli-valant navigational aid – the journey around the Wheel of Life is writ large in the zodiac, its correspondences with the physiology of our human frame, the knowledge of the medicine people of old and the connections between the perrenial knowledge, the transcendant potential we literally embody and the energies of the Dragon Paths themselves, all will be a part of the course we take. The journey is going to take us out beyond the divination practices openly employed here so far at Owlmirror as well – indigenous divination has many forms and, as well as discussing how the ancestors brought the stars to earth and worked directly with the energy of the Dragon Paths on the earth plane, we’ll be bringing in one of the main forms of ancestral divination that I have been trained in and work with in unison with astrology – it originated in north Africa, not so far from where the snows fell at the opening of the Chinese new year, but, more on this later……

I thought long and hard during this time-out about how I could best develop and realise the potential that Owlmirror’s journey has opened up over the past couple of years.  It became obvious that alongside the expansion of the divining ‘toolkit’ here there is also an opportunity for a deeper discussion of the art itself.  In the coming months I will be offering readings, both on a personal and topical basis, that bring the focus to particular astrological events in real time – this will provide a platform for investigation of the reality of the practice. There will also be articles where methods can be explored, an opportunity go much deeper into the art and craft of astrology amongst the many other practices of divination. We will be looking at the charts of individuals who have had a profound influence in our world and on the craft, starting with the Elizabethan mage and astrologer John Dee. Opportunities to learn and develop our divination practices will be coming as the year progresses as well, and this will be taking place both off and on-line. Altogether the aim is to follow the calling, work with the opening Dragon Paths and bring a more developed and personal flavour to Owlmirror, one that brings home the beauty and purposefulness of the diviner’s world, how it touches our individual lives, as well as the extra-ordinary times we are alive within. We are all in this together…..

The craft is changing and our art needs to change with it.  And, speaking of arts and crafts, I have a new site that is nearing ready for launch that features the artwork itself, much of which will be work not yet presented here alongside new work as it arises. As an online portfolio/blog it will have its own tab in the header crossbar here. I will be introducing this next time with an article on a commission that came up shortly after Samhain and which came to fruition over the solstice time through the work of my dear friend Rowan Jacqueline. She is an inspirational artist and medicine dancer who has developed a body of work of great beauty weaving the dynamics and presence of the earth, our bodies and indigenous wisdom into an approach to self exploration and realisation that is much needed in our times – Rowan was called to bring her work to (you guessed it) Sweden at the turning of the Sun and commissioned a special carving that was at the center of the solstice ceremony there……this saw the birth of the ‘Sunchild’, the subject of our next post. Theres much to look forward to as the great wheel turns….

……just one more thing; if you were wondering about Venus’ enhanced brilliance just now, she has a long cycle of increasing luminousity that invariably culminates when she journeys through Gemini – she’s traversing Gemini now and will soon be crossing the face of the Sun – this is a rare event as only seven such transits have occured since the invention of the telescope. Nevertheless, this was well known to our ancestors, infact, without her presence and their stargazing observation of Venus much of our calendrics would not have come into being – if ever there was a measure of time……and what better reason to go star-gazing at sunset……..

(1) Although many of the online vids and sites appear to escape critical assessment, peer review and validation, many being based on personal views and interpretations, amongst them are some which resonate with a real sense of veracity – it is up to all of us to be the judge of this, especially as so much of what passes for ‘information and fact’ is recycled from other sources, given a new spin and lustre. But, having said that, the sheer scope and breadth of information and groundbreaking thought alone that they represent is a sure indication that we are undergoing a major transformation at a collective level of consciousness that may well have some grounding in our own experience. And, while in respect of this discernment is very much the name of the game, it always pays to keep some judgement in reserve……experience will tell.