2011 Year of the Leap: all the ONES: 01:01:11

Ice follies 2010-2011

We just passed solstice: solar ‘standstill’, the point when the Sun appears to come to rest at the center of the galactic plane. It seems to stand on celestial equator, pausing in time, moving neither north nor south.

Two more winter solstices to go and we shall again coincide with Galactic Center on December 21, 2012, when the Great Cycle calendar of the Maya comes to full rest; pause; restart.

This year’s solstitial preparation for the New is a good time for pausing. For all of us:

To contemplate how much we shall change in the coming year — because the Human Race is changing fast and we have changed radically in the past year —

To give thanks for the road that brought us here to this point in space and time and for this moment — before plunging into the maelstrom once more —

To bless all those immediately around us NOW — as well as our loved ones far afield — “absent friends” — and family gone to fresher fields —

A time to remember and a time to look forward —

[Refrain of Auld Lang Syne here optional]

New Beginnings
ღ♥ღ *♥- ҈ -*※ HAPPY DAKINI DAY ღ♥ღ *♥- ҈ -*※
Yesterday (December 30) was also, by good fortune, a pan-Buddhist Dakini Day: the eleventh moon of the eleventh month of the lunar calendar of Metal Tiger Year.

Time to wish the Buddhist prayer to all —

Having reached the ultimate wisdom of the spontaneously accomplished four visions, may we be enlightened in the primordially-pure Youthful Vase Body.

OM MANI PADME HUM

May we dedicate all positive words to the enlightenment of all sentient beings in Six Realms of Cyclic Existence

To attain pure awareness which is displayed in the Skull of the Absolute Expanse, may we invoke the variegated desirable qualities of rainbow rays and may the Orbs of the Six Lights shine.

Return of the Dinosaurs -- or was that Minneapolis?

On December 21st, the Sun entered the third earth sign of the zodiac — Capricorn — at 3:40PM PST 10 days ago: ‘beginning’ winter in the Northern Hemisphere, according to old tradition. Recent earth changes and climatic trends, however, have made winter begin a lot earlier annually for most of us.

Astral Weather Vane, a division of the excellent Humanity Healing voluntary organization, gives this prognostication for solstice 2010 and oncoming year of 2011:

The festivities begin with a Full Moon (activating 30 degrees of Sagittarius and Gemini at 12:15AM PST 21 December).
Adding more significance and potential turbulence to this start of a season is Mercury in Sagittarius square to Jupiter in Pisces (5:00PM PST).

Astral Weather Vane says:
If this sounds familiar, the reason is Mercury and Jupiter already made this square pattern in the heavens on November 25 and they will do so again on January 11, 2011 [close to the time of another lunar eclipse Ed.] This is all due to Mercury’s current retrograde cycle from December 12th to 29th.

Mercury 90-degrees to Jupiter can equate with tensions in communications and disruptions to travel schedules.*

For the solstitial and New Year period, Humanity Healing recommends sending out healing thoughts and prayers to people in need, humanity and the kingdoms of nature. “Uplifting and enlightening our entire home planet is a keynote of every solar-lunar, monthly high-cycle. Individual and group meditations are advised.”

World weather Hogmanay 2010/2011, courtesy weather.org

*I empathize with this announcement, as I was personally involved when Northern Europe was in the grip of an ice storm December 9th (when I attempted to escape the wintry blasts only to be thwarted and held captive in an Amersterdam airport hotel overnight — in order to APPRECIATE the full weight of snow I was escaping). The freeze lasted until well after the solstitial eclipse.

In the coldest December for a century (since records began in 1890) Great Britain made a series of unprecedented individual payments of GBP25 per week to residents for the whole month of December. The ‘cold-weather payment’ was paid by the British Government to needy elderly frozen residents — over five million of them — for four weeks of December 2010 ‘when the temperature averaged 32ºF or below for six successive days and nights’.

Britain remained in the Big Freeze until only a brief brush with the Atlantic Gulf Stream’s northwesterly drift (December 28-29) through Cornwall, Wales and western Scotland allowed the coastline to hold the shores (and airports) open over Hogmanay.

Hogmanay
This last night of the Old Year — in case the strange tradition of the emergence of male Scot inadequately clad in freezing temperatures is an unfamiliar one — is traditional but freezing time for Scots to emerge from hovels/caves/pubs/boozers to booze some more in the freezing streets while singing a jolly Hogmanay blast of song. Once again re-entering the cave/pub/drinking establishment for the rest of the wee hours until January 1st is well and truly ‘welcomed in’.

While a temporary temperature reprieve has set in for a few days — Edinburgh streets are still paved with snow — the storm moved (again uncharacteristically) west. The northerly airflow hit the northern Atlantic waters and Northeastern Seaboard of the USA was next to receive the Nordic blast – storms and temperatures plummetting in high jet stream shivers across the Atlantic and freezing in the northerly states of Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where only a dusting is usual.

Of course Minneapolis/St Paul is having its usual subzero delight of Northern Winter. We’ll temporarily ignore Minneapolis/St Paul. The Pacific NW continues balmy.

Asterisk Saga explanation

Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's ship the 'Terra Nova" waiting for his return from the South Pole January 12, 1911. He never returned.

*I, for one, am more than grateful to be where I am at this very moment. Not only have I braved, Capt Scott-like, Antarctic-clone snowdrifts on my Grampian hillslope in early December; sledge-and-suitcase strapped to manoeuver a farmtrack totally infilled with nine-foot swathes of swirling white: to reach a (patient, angelic) waiting taxi at the farm one mile below in the black whitescape at 4a.m. —
— only to be turned back at the airport — by officious and insensitive airline officials who seemed unaware that Aberdeen was the only airport operational in Scotland at the time — and I was three minutes late for the gate —

— to be re-routed (at great expense) to Minneapolis/St Paul — which was the very last place on the planet I wished to go to — only to be carefully mismanaged by the same officious staff, I take it, to arrive too late in Amsterdam to make a Mineapolis/St Paul connection. Thank you, Snow Angels.

To be cossetted and carefully and gently and kindly assisted by KLM staff (endless compliments here) and rerouted to my correct destination, San Francisco, one day late, but hotel, sustenance and accommodation/internet efficiently and freely given, while making very little drama out of a crisis.

And not — at that time — being aware that Schiphol Amsterdam was the ONLY OTHER airport open in Europe.

Two days and several continents later, I arrive to relative balmy winter of rainy northern California and am grateful to leave Europe and its frozen Angst behind.

Thank you Jupiter square Mercury.

Runup to solstice.

Silence.

Run up to New Year and the January 4th partial lunar eclipse which will serve as a signal that some of the Angst may be over… but don’t hold your breath.

wild snow wolves... or just wild snow...

At solstice the Earth goes through one of its two sacred time shifts in its annual orbit when the Sun appears to stand still on the Celestial Equator.

Time for hibernation: or meditation: or both. To prepare for what’s to come:

The leap into 2011: all the ONES: 01:01:11.

This year of 2011 may be the year we as a species make that quantum leap. Are you ready? I think we’re in for a wild ride.

Space Weather 30-year Storm: Earth fights back

Frozen in mid surge

I need hardly remind residents of Scotland that we have only just weathered the thirty-year storm. Most households living through four solid weeks of sub-zero temperatures in an Atlantic weather zone (even with the miracle of central heating) will remember this winter (and last month especially) for many years to come.

Fortunately our civilization has advanced enough so that we experienced minimum electrical ‘outages’, despite heavy snow, icicles and ice on power lines. There were, however, multiple power ‘surges’ and computers countrywide were frozen in mid surge. Mac and pc-owners and related computer businesses are still counting the cost. Curry’s have been doing a roaring trade in replacement laptops!

It seems to have hit a lot of young ones harder than they might have thought: not that closing schools and cancelling bus and train services are a hazard; more time to make snowmen, play and enjoy winter sports, you might think. Lack of reliable public transportation, however – counting on any public services, in fact – four weeks without refuse collection borders on neglect, were commuters’ and householders’ concerns. Abandonment, remoteness and surprise at being cut off suddenly are what hit the teens hardest, I think because they are unaccustomed to having their social life curtailed by ‘weather’ and few had experienced conditions such as these in their young lives.

Some of us older oldies remember the winter of 1981/2 with shivering empathy; electrical failure, power cuts, snow drifts higher than houses; evacuating and rescuing neighbours, birds frozen overnight in trees. But that was back in the Thatcherite era, before the internet, when we didn’t EXPECT everything to run on time, snow ploughs to get through, petrol in cars not to freeze.

Human culture has changed in nearly 30 years: Even in the modern backwater of Aberdeenshire, the County of no motorways, the self-styled Oil Capital of Europe.

Tea Clipper Thermopylae was built in Aberdeen by Walter Hood for the White Star Line

For those unfamiliar with our ways, this corner of Scotland – the Northeast triangle between Rivers Don and Dee and the balmy Moray Firth – has always flourished, but more than that, it looks after its own. Rather, I suppose, like Geordies idolizing their working-class heroes that went ‘down the pits’ or Scousers joking ‘don’t bomb Iraq; nuke Manchester’. Parochial in the extreme.

Unlike some other lesser-urban metropolises, however, (Dundee, Perth, Stranraer), Aberdeen has always pulled through its hardest times: Dundee used to be known (an age ago, when the world was young) for its Jute, Jam and Journalism. Now it is home to none of these; but it has Robert Scott’s ‘Discovery‘, the Tay Bridge and it’s on the way to St. Andrews, which every golfer in the world has heard of; i.e. it participates peripherally in tourism, but some of its poorer districts are in appalling shape.

Perth floods every year and millions of national money poured in to rescue low-level housing has been a nightmare. Stranraer we won’t go into. It’s no longer on the way to anywhere.

Then there’s Aberdeen.

Perched on the westernmost limb of the North Sea’s mild Gulf Stream current, its dry climate (usually, rain from the west is captured by the Grampian mountains before it reaches the plain) and its remarkable latitude (57ºN2ºW ), akin to central Alaska, give it a climatic anomaly. Its farming hinterland was rich in Neolithic times and has grown richer.

Tall Ships Race reenacts 19thC sailing contest in the Clipper tea trade

A century and a half ago the city was hub to a thriving fishing industry; its harbours built, housed and skippered trawlers, tall clipper ships, deep sea schooners and whaling vessels. Thermopylae and Elissa were built here. Names like Alexander Hall & Sons, John Lewis and Sons, the Devanha Fishing Company sprang from everyone’s lips. As a merchant marine capital it was second only to Glasgow in Scotland and Liverpool south of the border.

Aberdeen, however, was never one to have only one egg in one basket: it was also the sole exporter of granite to needy growing urban centres: London streets were indeed paved with (Aberdeen granite) gold. Craigenlow quarry at Dunecht supplied the English capital with tons of its ‘cassies’ or granite sets – hand-cut granite blocks the size of a gingerbread loaf – to meet the demands of a city experiencing growing Victorian traffic problems. If they had but known…

At the height of Georgian expansion, Aberdeen city burghers were so wealthy, their coffers overflowing from the ocean tea trade, the Baltic route, their fishing ports supplying Europe’s tables (nowadays it’s the other way around), their granite exported the world over; that they chose to beautify: and the mile-long boulevard known as Union Street was built in 1801-05. This grandiose gesture – a feat of engineering which levelled St. Catherine’s Hill and carried the extra-wide thoroughfare across arches built over the previous lower Denburn and ancient market Green – almost bankcrupted the burghers, but brought the city fame to add to its already growing fortune.

Danzig Willie's Craigievar

As early as the mid-18th century, Aberdeenshire’s famous Baltic merchants continued to bring their fortunes back home; so the county continually thrived, regardless of the ups and downs of a world economy. Robert Gordon (1688-1731), founder of the Robert Gordon Hospital, now RGU, was famous for lending money made in the Danzig trade to Aberdeen businessmen who needed large working capital at even larger rates of interest. ‘Danzig Willie’ Forbes ploughed his fortune from the Baltic trade into the building of exquisite Donside château Craigievar between 1610-1625 on the family estate of Corse, when he was already landowner of Menie estate on the Belhelvie coast north of Aberdeen. John Ramsay, an Aberdeen merchant in 1758 built his palladian mansion at Straloch. Others followed suit. The county is today littered with stately Renaissance piles and Georgian mansions more appropriate to the valley of the Loire, the home counties or the wilds of Gloucestershire.

Within this mix stir a couple of ancient universities – one founded in 1495, the other in 1593, both fostered and supported through the centuries by Aberdonian merchant success.

The world joke about the Aberdonian who watches his pennies is not entirely untrue. And the tradition goes back farther than the fifteenth century.

Aberdeen Harbour shipping with ice floes in the 1920s

Even more relevant to the characterization, perhaps, is the fact that Aberdeen Harbour (presently run by the independent entity Aberdeen Harbour Board) is in fact the oldest running business enterprise in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, having been founded by charter signed by King David I in 1136. The business head of the kingdom resides on the edge of the North Sea.

But the bell tolled. The fishing industry worldwide killed its own small fry: when container ships and tankers beheaded sailing vessels, similarly Icelandic and Norwegian refrigerated freighters signalled the death knell for trawlers and owner-operated fishing boats; and Aberdeen’s shipbuilding days were over.

In the early 1970s, Britain was experiencing the three-day-week, unemployment stats for the country were the highest then known, and even the granite industry declined. Its clients metamorphosed from those who appreciated polished stone to faceless ‘councils’ and ‘road departments’ which required the precious quartz and gneiss resource to be ground into dust-like fragments which could be mixed with tar and spread in increasing quantities on the nation’s arteries.

It looked as if Aberdeen, like every other Scots city, might founder on the rocks of history.

North Sea Oil baled Aberdeen out on the death of shipbuilding and fishing

Then, lo and behold, along came oil. Bubbling up from below the North Sea in 1971, another industry was born. And the ‘silver city with the golden sands’ was perched on the shoreline, ready to receive it.

It is said that because of its very geographic isolation the county learned to take care of itself. And its humour has a lot to do with its character.

Now that there is talk of worldwide recession and dwindling of the oil resource, the current Aberdonian humorous response is ‘oil goes out, Donald Trump comes in’. This refers to the New York entrepreneur’s £1 billion golf course resort where sand dune reinforcing work has just begun on the very landholdings of Menie once owned by Danzig Willie. Aberdeenshire is not averse to turning full circle. It has so far weathered many storms through centuries of change.

So how did we fare in this last Great Storm? How did the planet fare?

Greece had 100ºF temperatures at Christmas and Abu Dhabi and Dubai had HAIL the day before the launch of the 2,717-feet Burj Khalifa tower in the first week of January.

Scotland and Aberdeenshire in particular were at the time experiencing the grip of an Arctic winter, with traffic on all roads down to minimum and gritting and snow-ploughing said by Council spokesmen to be ‘impossible’. While they reported worries that supplies of salt from the Cheshire salt mine might be exhausted, citrus orchards throughout the state of Florida were hit by snow and frost lingered long enough to decimate their total citrus crop for 2010.

At the same time Mount Nyamulagira in a sparsely populated area of the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted, threatening an enclave of rare chimpanzees.

Eureka and Haiti had 6.5 and 7.2 Richter earthquakes respectively, while inland Northern California and Southern Oregon, usually inundated with snow, received not one drop. States of emergency were declared for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Francisco and Siskiyou counties and as the rainstorm headed east, floods swamped the Arizona desert, threatening homes and killing migrant birds. Las Vegas, Nevada had more rain in two days than for the total year of 2009 (1.69 inches). Alligators in the Everglades froze to death.

France’s Mistral blew early this year, wreaking havoc and damage to vines and vineyards in southern départements of Lyon and Provence; the Riviera harbours of St Tropez and Marseille suffered damage to private yachts.

Since the snowmelt arrived in Scotland in mid January, it is superfluous to mention that the resulting floods have routed gutters and drains in cities and country towns and overflowed ditches in outlying country areas. Perth (again) and Inverurie, Huntly and Kintore were unable to cope with the deluge. These levels of precipitation bring Aberdeen’s rainfall statistics for the year 2009 to mid January 2010 to 101.23 inches, for a county normally experiencing 33.6 inches per annum.

The Earth doesn’t like what we’ve been doing to her in the last thirty years. She’s beginning to fight back.

2010 Odyssey Two: Space Weather

Festive gingerbread 'helpers'

The cookies are baked, the turkey/veg-burger (goose) is cooked, the Christmas pudding has been scoffed and the Festive Season is still with us. Not only that, Mother Earth seems to be taking charge, so we may have to stock up on a few more supplies and stores to see us through: it may be some time before this cold snap is out.

I am being a little self-driven here, but the temperatures in Northern Scotland recently have been a little more akin to Estonia and the temps in Estonia rather more like Scotland. Estonia had a rapid freeze over Christmas, but by Boxing Day it was blazing sunshine and thawing. We in the northern isles, on the other hand, had a solstitial temperature of -16ºC (approx. 25ºF) and more snow descended. One day of sunny plus degrees and then a refreeze. It’s down to minus something awful again tonight.

It all has something to do with that great author Arthur C Clarke who first predicted a new civilization with his 2001: A Space Odyssey and then followed it with the lesser-known sequel 2010: Odyssey Two.

Or, it could just be that dreaded winter high pressure over Iceland.

All summer long we prayed, begged, cajoled the elementals in Mother Earth’s atmospheric arsenal into giving us a high pressure over Iceland. These little devas may have been listening but they weren’t about to hand one over. A high pressure over Reykyavik in July and August just about guarantees the eastern and northern portions of the Scots peninsula temperatures like you would not believe!

We did have one tiny blip; I do remember. It came and hovered over this long-forgotten plain for two weeks around the time of Wimbledon. I remember this because when it’s Wimbledon, they are serving strawberries to the punters in the interval while the rest of us are craving the taste, the whiff of that red juice; our gardens are trying their best to ripen the much sought-after fruit, and it usually comes two weeks later after everybody has forgotten who won.

Not this year.

When Wimbledon was being served strawberries, the huge luscious berries in my strawberry bed were at their ripest. They were more delicious than any I can remember. So, some of us poor misguided souls thought the summer of 2009 was going to be another nine on the global-warming scale of one to ten.

It was short-lived.

I am not ungrateful. Those berries tasted so delicious, I can sense the tingle in my mouth even now. But two weeks after Wimbledon, two weeks into the height of strawberry harvest, we in Scotland were plunged into rain. And it rained from the end of July until the end of November and then the snow came. I think you might call that a little unfair of Santa’s little helpers in the department of the stratosphere over Iceland.

I should explain.

Stylized Jet Stream flows

The jet stream, just like the Gulf Stream, whooshes perennially by these shores. It arrives from the west and comes in a kind of wavy motion, following the temperature boundaries where, for example, cold from the polar Arctic region meets warmer air masses from the tropics. Jet streams are caused by a combination of atmospheric heating – solar radiation – and the earth’s rotation on its axis. The main commercial relevance of the jet stream, naturally, is in air travel, as flight time can be dramatically affected by either flying with or against the jet stream.

Meteorologists use the location of the jet stream as an aid in weather forecasting. But, as we know, weather is no longer predicted as you and I do it, looking at the sky and feeling the wind change; cloud-watching; most weather forecasting nowadays is predicted by computer with numbers on charts.

Forecast for the first week of January 2010, courtesy Unisys

But there is something comforting about looking at a temperature gauge or a barograph or barometer and seeing the wavy line change from low to high. If the movement is rapid, excitement is tangible: good weather is on its way.

This is where the high pressure comes in. High pressure attracts warm and warm brings clearing skies and clearing skies make clouds disappear, dissolve, evaporate and we get that yellow glowing thing in the sky called the solar orb, sunshine. I know, I sound as if I haven’t seen it since July. It is almost true.

A high rotates as a cyclone with isobars travelling in a clockwise direction; northerly air stream (wind from the north) heralds the end of a low pressure and the start of a high; ; So when a high pressure sits overhead, in the cyclonic centre it is a still, clear day. High pressures centered over Iceland tend to sit; generate another friendly high and sit again. So the northern isles of Great Britain benefit by osmosis. By contrast, if the high pressure of June, July and August lingers (as it did throughout the summer of 2009) over the Bay of Biscay, then the edge of the high is too far away from our northern shores and all we get is the edge spin, suggested above: the following edge of a counterclockwise low drags after it a high; and conversely the following edge of a high brings an anticyclone low. Bay of Biscay high equals northern Scotland low, low low. That translates as cloud: rain, rain, and more rain.

July through November the lows bred more lows and hung over us like a meteorological hangover.

Arctic illusion or high pressure reality: snow in the North

Now, rather late on the scene, the high pressure has arrived; and because it is winter, those clear open skies are so clear and open we are receiving Arctic conditions daily. No cloud to keep the temperature from falling. Below zero freezing conditions more usual in eastern Europe at this time of year. Snow-clad landscape; white mountain ranges sparkling in clear air fifty miles distant.

At times like this our forebears would gather round the fire after a splendid seasonal feast and tell stories. Nowadays, of course, there is tele: and after New Year, if the snow is still with us (forecast is for it to continue) there will be more TV: for our American cousins and for those with satellite reception it will be Rose Bowl season: days on end of watching the sport of bling: football. I don’t begrudge the fans: we all need something to exercise the mind when the body is hibernating and adjusting to the rigours of winter.

We as a society have become near-immune to what is called in meteorological circles ‘severe weather’. But let’s think about that for a moment.

We have been subject lately to some pretty severe space weather. I heard (but it’s only a rumour) that another solar surge is on its way. We know that during the current solar minimum sunspots are infrequent, but, like the unexpected flare which took us by surprise on July 7th this year, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can play havoc with our geomagnetic systems. Now that we are (practically) all on the same grid (electrical, telecommunications, satellite, computer, transport, GPS navigation), power-driven systems are extremely susceptible to solar storms. It’s not just snow freezing the light cables and clogging the plumbing: a mass power failure would not be a good thing while temperatures are as low as they are at present. We might suddenly come to the scary realization that the wall is very thin between us who are dependent on our winter heating systems for warmth and the homeless man lying wrapped in newspaper under the freeway.

Let’s look, just for example, at the strongest geomagnetic storm on record: the Carrington Event of September 2nd, 1859.

Auroral oval over Europe

This CME is named after British astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the solar flare with unaided eye while projecting an image of the sun on a screen. Geomagnetic activity triggered by the solar explosion electrified telegraph lines, shocked technicians and set fire to their telegraph papers. Aurora Borealis, (Northern Lights) spread as far south as Cuba and Hawaii; auroras over the Rocky Mountains were so bright, the glow woke campers who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.

God forbid we should have another Carrington Event. We are ill-equipped as it is. In Northern Scotland, where there is no such thing as a motorway, autostrada or freeway, it takes council services all their time to grit icy roads to fragile outlying communities. People’s boilers and gas central heating break down and service technicians can’t reach remote districts because roads are impassable. This is what our society now expects: instantly accessible power; we are failure- and breakdown-intolerant. We do not expect the unexpected and yet the signs around us all point to Mother Nature giving us a shakedown.

I consider myself to be one of the fortunate ones: in that I have a winter store of homegrown vegetables, chickens that lay when it’s not too bitter, and an accessible supply of wood and (dare I say it, that politically-incorrect fuel): coal. If we get a severe storm warning, either earth weather or space weather, I shall, with angelic help, get by. I am not so sure about the flimsy-skirted, T-shirted commuter driving home in her mini without her winter boots, a hat or gloves, who gets caught out in the snowstorm or marooned in a drift.

If the devas are showing us signs of natural occurrences as we enter that long-heralded epoch beginning in twenty-ten, to keep us on our toes, may I suggest we prepare ourselves for what might be a year to remember.

Astrological Giants move us through our Changes

Jupiter the giant ruler of Sagittarius

In the Western zodiac, the month of November is often one of change: the early part of the month is ruled by powerful Scorpio, the life-and-death sign with a sting in its tail. It is an ancient symbol of huge changes and upheaval – fixed water, or ice – and almost totally unforgiving. If you’re not ready now, November will make you question everything you’ve ever been taught, heard or assumed was real.

This year the heavy burden of change in earth’s systems, world governments and weather patterns is sometimes laid at Scorpio’s door. But a much greater force was at work: Saturn, the great planet of sidereal change, slowly and inexorably moved out of the communicative and meticulously-ordered earth-sign of Virgo, where he has ruled, written in stone, made careful lists and acted in a predictable manner for the last three years. On October 29th 2009, he entered Libra, the zodiac sign of partnerships, cooperative ventures, balance and – above all – change.

Changes at the end of the year are expected as we in the Northern hemisphere descend into winter; but Saturn’s influence is huge. Just as the moon affects earth’s ocean tides, the ringed giant’s great orb reaches from its distant position in the sixth solar orbit to touch and move this little world of ours in the third planetary belt round the sun.

At the beginning of November this huge astrological catalyst of change had already joined forces with the sun in Scorpio and world mayhem, freak weather systems, and cultural upheaval were apparent: floods, tsunamis and out-of-season storms added to wars and conflict, famine and a breakdown in communications in both Old and New worlds. We are only now recovering from the effects of drought and starvation in some African regions and deluge and homeless scenarios in the North.

Saturn the planet of change and upheaval

Saturn’s move to Libra affects physical, mental, emotional realms. We were being given a nudge of giant proportions to move out of our physical, earthbound concepts and into the spiritual.

It is a surprise and relief when, following the double Scorpionic portion dished out to us in mid-November by the New Moon, that Saturn’s new position in Libra should be accentuated by the sun’s transition on November 22nd into jovial Sagittarius. This zodiac sign is ruled by abundant Jupiter. It allows us a respite, a time to remember our place on the planet, our blessings, our way forward. But it, too, heralds change.

Sagittarius is a fire sign, sent to melt the icy waters Scorpio dragged in with its lethal tail. The archer, sunny of disposition and sending arrows presaging abundant flow to come, allows the glow of Thanksgiving and a glimpse towards the festivities of midwinter, but he reminds us that more work is round the corner as we are moving into a New Age. It helps to know, however that his ruler, Jupiter presently stands with Neptune, the planet of change and the spiritual, the mystical and unknown in forward-looking Aquarius; so our path, while difficult, is overseen by angels.

A trusted astrologer friend says:
“November 22-30: This is a highly creative time. Pay attention and focus on the little signs. Push the boundaries of what you perceive possible. Stretch your imagination. Resist the temptations of the status quo. Ask the right questions, ‘why not’ and ‘what if’. Be brave.

“Mostly just be in your own spirit, take time to meditate, try to remember that the Universe is ordering things in right timing; that in moving from a place of trusting, your own ability and power to create will open up. Spend time with others you like to be around and keep cutting clutter and non-essentials from your life.”

As the month draws to a close, we are being challenged to seek even greater clarity and depth of meaning in life, in our relationships, in our day-to-day interaction with others, work colleagues, family and strangers alike, so that we start to evolve in spiritual understanding of our place on this special planet Earth.

And at month-end, as we move into December, Mercury aspects challenge us to release stress and restore clarity of thinking. Mercury the messenger and communicator-par-excellence may get us through the hard part.

December begins with a powerful double-whammy: a Full Moon in Gemini on December 1st coincides with giant Uranus’ turning direct.

Changes and new directions are on the cards – in spades.

But we have help. Angels and giants are around to help us through.

This is an occasional astrological blog posting, as we move through the year. I am aware that many are familiar with the Western zodiac and its implications. However I hope to encourage a friend who understands the ramifications of the Vedic astrological system of the Indian sub-continent to join me in the next blog post. It is a fascinating system, with many parallels with Western and even Chinese texts. I think it will be something to look forward to.