Mercury turned direct this past Friday and the final reverberations that usually occur for a day or two after a planet turns direct should be subsiding. We still have a retrograde Mars in the fixed fire sign of Leo and retrograde Saturn in the cardinal air sign of Libra, so all does not feel as clear or move as freely as we might have hoped. World focus is on Haiti right now and the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. The new moon and eclipse energy in the sign of Capricorn on the 15th amplified the square between Saturn and the Pluto/Mercury conjunction, and the moon drew in energy from the retrograde Mars at the time of the eclipse. Whenever I see a Mercury and Mars retrograde happen at the same time, I think of sudden death because my father passed suddenly during a time when both those planets were retrograde. Perhaps retrograde Mars and Mercury open a door for leaving the planet suddenly. At the time, I had been planning a vacation and was unable to get a flight for the day I wanted to travel (Mercury retrograde, of course), but despite being able to scope the ephemeris and know it was not the “best” day for me to travel, I took the only day available. That day, while driving to the airport with my family, my father died of a heart attack on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Despite my astrological knowledge and my own reservations about traveling during difficult planetary energy, I was not able to foresee my father’s death; however, upon looking more closely at the planets and our respective charts after the event, the writing was on the wall, as the expression goes. We tend to see something only when we are looking for it.

Many other astrologers, intuitives, and channelers made mention of stressful energy in January 2010, especially during the new moon time period, that heralded upheaval, cleansing, releasing, change. So, what else is new? It can get a bit old reading the same predictions again and again, month after month. Many of us feel like it’s time for it all to be over already. We can attribute that feeling to the Saturn/Pluto square. Saturn = heaviness, restriction, limitation, time, and Pluto = intensity, transformation, life/death issues. How many saw the disaster in Haiti beforehand? Now the channelings, etc. are focusing on the “why” of the disaster and the good side of it. I’m not sure the why has any spiritual component to it at all, except for, “There but for the Grace of God go I”. Our planet is a living entity with frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Sometimes they happen where people live. If the planet communicated clearly to enough intuitives and gave a clear warning of the quake in Haiti before it happened, would we listen? Believe it? Act on it and get everyone out? Most likely not. Thankfully, despite the planetary stressful energy, we also have some true blessing and support going on with Jupiter, Neptune, and Chiron in Aquarius, and people are doing what they can to help each other and to help people in Haiti. On the 20th, when the sun and Venus enter Aquarius and Jupiter moves into the empathetic water sign of Pisces, I believe even greater awareness of world poverty and efforts to eradicate it will come to the fore. If there is a “why” behind the disaster in Haiti, I would consider the influence of Saturn, the teacher and taskmaster, retrograde in Libra. Libra is a sign of polarities and, as an air sign, intellectualizes, examines, and questions right/wrong, me/you. It is also a Venus-ruled sign and much prefers to see only the pretty, good, and pleasant whenever possible. I think Saturn square Pluto is manifesting as a tool to reveal and destroy what is ugly, rotten, or intolerable in our world. The “how” of this tool in operation is not necessarily something we can always foresee or control.

Looking at the rest of the month and keying into my own personal feelings, I have some general apprehension about the state of Mother Earth. I feel another major quake or volcanic eruption is in the works, perhaps before the month is out, when we have Mercury in direct motion returning to the eclipse point around the 26th (rebounding energy), and a full moon on the 30th making a conjunction to the retrograde Mars. I sincerely pray I am wrong. In our daily lives, I would advise everyone to take care when traveling or operating any machinery during the last week of the month as we approach the full moon. Mercury may be direct, but the Mars retrograde will intensify the heightened emotions that come with a full moon and put people on edge. Leo can be quite stubborn and aggressive. This energy mix can increase the chance of accidents or simply stupid mistakes.

Lately I have been noticing the odd synchronistic doubling that happens from time to time. Some people notice it with numbers, seeing double and triple digits repeatedly. That happens for me, too, but I also see the same words, expressions, or pictures pop up. I still haven’t figured out quite what this means. I think I am in a flow state, or where I should be, or it is a message of energy alignment, like breadcrumbs on a path guiding my attention so that I can find the way. I first noticed I had stepped into this kind of energy a few days ago when my family and I watched G-Force. One of the Guinea pigs was named Darwin. That same evening, Charles Darwin popped up in a novel I was reading and again while I was online.

Today I found a comment in my e-mail from a blog reader that was full of links to videos about a Crystal Child. Most likely, they found me based on a search, because I have written about having a Crystal Child. I began to open some of the links and discovered a series of videos featuring a young woman named Jessica Schab. The videos are in a series and the main topic is 2012, something of interest to almost everyone. I was curious to hear what she had to say, so I began listening. By the beginning of the second video, I began to get a bit restless and considered moving on (My, how high-speed information has jaded me – it takes something really good to keep me on any site past 10 minutes.) when the phrases “tip of the iceberg”, “sonic boom”, and “earth’s core” and “hollow earth” came up. The other day, for no reason I could think of, I remembered a time about 24 years ago, when my daughter’s father and I were walking around a park with our daughter in her stroller. We experienced what must have been the aftereffect of a sonic boom, although I can’t recall hearing any sound – just feeling and seeing a freight train of energy that moved through and past us quickly. I shared the memory with my daughter and it prompted me to do a search on sonic booms, where I learned what we had felt and seen is known as a boom carpet. Something inside me has always felt it was related somehow to UFO and ET experiences that began during that time period. In the last few days, my daughter and I had a discussion about the earth’s core and I had expressed the feeling that it is probably hollow and filled with people. And yesterday I posted “the tip of the iceberg” in my blog post. So, when all these repeated themselves, my spidey senses tingled and I decided to listen further. I got to the end of the fourth in a series of videos and couldn’t find the next, so I followed the link on YouTube to Jessica’s website, which has me sidetracked now from watching more video content while I explore her site a bit. Then I decided to type up this post before my attention wanders further. Here’s Jessica Schab’s site – enjoy!

Thank you to Congreso de Ciencia y Espíritu for sharing the videos of Jessica Schab.

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This morning I booted up the computer and headed to Yahoo to check an email account. The first thing I saw was this article about destroyed merchandise in trash bags a young woman named Cynthia Magnus discovered in Manhattan behind H&M store and a Walmart on 35th street. The story made the New York Times.

Recently, during a family shopping trip to our nearest Walmart, I looked at the stores we were passing – Target, KMart, Old Navy – all touting deep after-Christmas discounts, and thought of all the unused, unsold clothes, shoes, etc. still sitting on shelves and racks. I said to my daughter, “I wonder what happens to all that unsold stuff?” To which she replied, “Big Lots.” I said, “No, Big Lots doesn’t buy up all that stuff. Maybe some of it gets sold in bulk to third world countries. I hope so.” I then recalled the trashed merchandise I had seen in my own time. Slashed shoes in the dumpster behind the Fayva Shoe Store in Riverhead, New York. Books with their front covers torn off in dumpsters behind book stores. For all I know, this practice continues, because I still see notices in some paperbacks informing me that the book may be considered “stolen” if I purchased it without its cover. The book sellers remove the covers and return them for a credit when unsold and then trash the rest of the book. And I personally worked for a company that followed the same trashing practice. In the 1990s I worked for Waldbaum’s Supermarkets on Long Island and saw massive quantities of perfectly good food sent down the garbage chute, including an entire refrigerated truckload of turkeys after one Thanksgiving. When I asked the management why all this food had to be thrown away rather than donated to people, I was told it was due to insurance regulations. Tropical and decorative plants from the produce and floral departments were also trashed. Now, concern over donating some outdated food that might be spoiled and sicken someone, leading to a lawsuit has some validity; however, where do tropical and decorative plants figure into that equation? Often, I attempted to take home the plants and despite the fact that they were being tossed into the trash, I was repeatedly told I could not take home the trash plants!

So, have H&M and Walmart been “caught” doing something new or unique? Absolutely not. Cynthia Magnus just found a small tip of the greed iceberg. I do not dumpster dive and trash pick as often as I used to, but I assure you that anyone who has some time to peek into dumpsters behind shopping outlets will see the same thing Cynthia Magnus saw. Over the years I have noticed dumpsters becoming more and more inaccessible and secure. Many are connected to a building, rather than being freestanding. Many have locks. Most have notices warning that it is forbidden to dump trash in them unless it is trash specific to the store itself. My old pastime of peeking in dumpsters for goodies has probably faded away due to these deterring factors. I used to think that the problem of people dumping unauthorized trash was the reason behind tighter trash security measures. Now I am thinking the business world would rather not have the consumer seeing what becomes of the merchandise. Could it be?

“Oh, but if we give the stuff away, then no one will want to buy stuff and no one will be needed to make all the stuff and no one will make stuff and no one will work and no one will make money and no one will get paid and, and, and…”

Here’s a radical thought – every day, for ten minutes, imagine a world without money. None. At all. Let your imagination really play it out without listening to the monkey babble. The world might just be a better place and everyone might just have what they need and everyone might be happier and healthier. Imagine that. What a blessing whoever created us and put us here on this incredibly abundant and beautiful planet didn’t charge us for the soil, water, and air or send us a monthly bill for the time rental on our lifespan, eh?

Well, why did we make too much in the first place? And why throw it out when people who have no money may benefit from it? There are still enough people in the world buying things who are driven to spend money on the next new thing and wouldn’t WANT something for free – to them, it is the price tag itself and the spending of money that is part of the entire shopping experience. When I think of all the unused merchandise that is trashed, I think of the spurned lover turned murderer dynamic – “If I can’t have you, nobody can!” Bang, bang, stab, stab – lover dies. Megastore says, “If I can’t exchange these goods for cash, then nobody can get them!” Slash, slash, trash, trash. Who dies when this happens? We all do, we just refuse to see it.

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Today is the birthday of artist Henri Matisse. Today is also New Year’s Eve and a blue moon – the second full moon of December, 2009.

When thinking of what to write for this auspicious event, I decided I would search for an image relating somehow to the blue moon before beginning to write. While doing so, I discovered it was the birthday of Henri Matisse, so I began looking through images of some of his paintings. This blue moon occurs in the feminine, nurturing sign of Cancer and has a strong goddess vibration. I was initially drawn to a painting titled Blue Nude, which is certainly fitting for a blue Cancer full moon with a partial eclipse. Then I saw this photograph of the artist himself working on a painting of the Madonna and child and I got goosebumps. The youthful masculine energy and the mature feminine energy seemed to speak to me of the eclipse. The Madonna herself, as we think of her in her heavenly blue robes, is truly the Cancerian energy of this moon. It is also fitting that the artist himself is pictured holding his brush, representing man’s part in the co-creative process.

Coincidentally, I am reading a book I received from a dear friend that ties in with my thoughts around this moon. The book is Sylvia Browne’s “If You Could See What I See – The Tenets of Novus Spiritus”. Sylvia Browne is not just a well-known psychic, she is also the founder of a Gnostic church called Novus Spiritus. Tenet 19 reads, “We believe in a Mother God, Who is co-Creator with our all-loving Father God.”

Last night I read the chapter explaining Tenet 19 and realized that although I have a firm belief in goddess energy as being all around me here in the feminine aspect of nature and I have always felt a strong pull to the Virgin Mary, despite not being a Roman Catholic, I have never truly communicated with a female Creator Being. Sylvia says that the female Creator – Azna – works miracles and that we can pray to her. Last night I meditated and asked to know her. I was filled with a beautiful calm and opened up my heart concerning many things. One of the things that felt unsettled to me was resolved instantly this morning.

The astrological energy today is an opportunity for everyone to open up a direct line of communication to the Divine Feminine Creator. Take the time today to open your heart and share all your desires and hopes for the New Year and a renewed life. Blessed Be.

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Happiness is, indeed, a decision and a choice. As feeling, thinking people, our strongest power is our ability to choose what to think and how to feel. However, we all get knocked down now and then, and it can be especially difficult in the current world energy to maintain a positive outlook. Denying our negative feelings and burying them doesn’t make them go away and can undermine our attempts at maintaining a cheerful outlook. I recently received a wonderful free 12-minute audio that I would like to share that can help you to raise your vibration. It was recorded just before Thanksgiving, but can be used any time. It requires a basic understanding of “tapping points”, which you can learn more about here.