First the good news: Yesterday’s opposition between Jupiter and Saturn was the last of the series. What started in 2000, when the two giants conjuncted in Taurus, has now reached it’s fruitional stage — which is what any opposition connotes. A seed is planted at the conjunction, development occurs as the two planets move apart, and then reaches a crescendo at the opposition. Which was yesterday.

OK, so the ‘Where’s my Xanax’ news? Traditionally the years that follow the Jupiter Saturn opposition are years of attrition, stymied growth and stark rationale for modest optimism. Traditional astrologers attribute a growth phase to the first ten or eleven years that follow the conjunction (from 2000 to 2011); Jupiter has jurisdiction of this phase. But the period following the opposition, which starts today, is Saturn’s. Picture Saturn rummaging around his tool shed, looking for his pruning shears. Now begins the cutbacks, the trimming, the ‘nose pressed to grindstone’ phase. A balancing and correcting period that will give a ‘reality check’ to whatever grew and gorged turning the eleven years post the conjunction. Read more

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates every other consideration.”

— John Keats‘ letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.

You’ve no doubt heard about tomorrow’s Full Moon SuperMoon. What’s that about exactly?

Occasionally the Moon misses the Earth a little too much and decides to move a bit closer to us during her new or full phase. That’s what will happen tomorrow. Astronomers call this a lunar perigee. But a guy named Richard Nolle coined the term SuperMoon to describe the proximity. You can read his explanation here — a nice clarification because it dispels a lot of misinformation about the SuperMoon too.

Because of the curve of the Earth (and the crazy curve of your mind during a Full Moon), the SuperMoon appears gigantic once she’s slid above the magnifying effect of the horizon. She’s so humongous that you start to worry that your roof will be damaged as Luna glides across the night sky. That’s a metaphor, actually, to let you know that this Full Moon might take the top of your head off. Read more