Anne Whitaker's Blog, page 16
April 24, 2016
The Astrological Houses: which system should I use?
From my back catalogue over at Astrology: Questions and Answers, whilst I am on a short break: some musings on the Houses, a topic which can always be relied upon to cause heated discussion!. This post was also published on The Mountain Astrologer blog in November 2015.
Sooner or later, it dawns on the student or budding astrologer that the method of dividing the inner space in a horoscope into twelve sectors or spheres of life, known as Houses, poses some problems.
To read more, click HERE
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100 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: "as above so below", astrological houses, astrology, horoscope, The Mountain Astrologer magazine (USA)
April 13, 2016
“I am the Soul of Nature”…
There are very few clear evening skies in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. If you’re rushing up Byres Road on the way home on one of those rare nights, especially when you cross the Queen Margaret Drive bridge, look out for a small woman standing still, gazing at the sky. That’ll be me, admiring the wonderful, fragile beauty of the waxing New Moon.
Even in the city, in the increasingly hurried pattern of 21st century life, it is possible to maintain a connection to the cycles of the seasons and the rhythms of nature. It’s increasingly recognised that regular contact of this kind is an important component in establishing and maintaining the kind of inner balance and peace that promotes happiness.
One of the many advantages of living in a small country like Scotland is that access to the great outdoors is not difficult – half an hour out of Glasgow, for example, it is possible to disappear into lovely countryside and forget the existence of the city very quickly. Try it !
It doesn’t matter how stressed you are, how much angst you are carrying. A couple of hours of tramping across the hills, often in rain and wind, focusing on nothing more complex than where you put every footstep in order to avoid disappearing up to your waist in a bog, is guaranteed to purge out at least some of it.
Over many years of walking, I have offered the hills both my joys and my sorrows, and have found validation for the former and solace for the latter. In homeopathic medicine, broadly speaking, you treat an ailment with a very dilute form of the toxin which caused it.
I have found the homeopathic principle works very well with bleakness of the soul or spirit. That condition can be effectively treated by choosing weather and landscape to match your mood, and immersing yourself in it for a few hours. Meeting bleakness with bleakness has a powerfully cleansing effect.
Complementary to this is the powerfully life-affirming effect that natural beauty can have.
“I am the Soul of Nature….”
Standing on top of a favourite hill on a sunlit day, looking at stunning panoramic views, listening to the joyous song of a skylark, feeling at one with the wind and the landscape, has on numerous occasions made me feel so glad to be alive that I have wept for joy.
These experiences may fade in the face of the rigours of an average life. But if you repeat them often enough, you develop a sense of being part of the great round of nature, where joy and sorrow, youth, maturity, decline, death and rebirth all have their part. You also learn, slowly, the importance to being a happy person of being able to “grasp the joy as it flies”, celebrate the moment, “seize the day.” “
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ENDNOTES
(This is an edited version of an article first published in “Self & Society”(The Journal of Humanistic Psychology) (UK)Vol 27 No 5, November 1999, then http://www.innerself.com : Innerself Magazine (USA), and most recently – March 09 – in ‘ The Drumlin’, the Newsletter of Glasgow Botanic Gardens as “Happiness and the Healing Power of Nature” . )
550 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: "as above so below", "I am the Soul of Nature....", carpe diem, Glasgow Scotland UK, Waxing Crescent Moon
April 10, 2016
Surprise, surprise! Our communities prefer grass to concrete…
Following the North Kelvin Meadow/Children’s Wood campaign’s recent great success in having New City Vision’s plan to build on our precious piece of open community land in Maryhill, Glasgow, UK, “called in” by the Scottish Government, an important part of the campaign’s thrust continues to be the establishing of links with diverse grassroots initiatives in order to connect and share ideas.
Save our wild land!
I very much enjoyed reading Priya Logan’s account of her trip to Copenhagen in March to help further this process. Do have a read! It’s inspiring – and a great antidote to all the grim politics and general doom and gloom around at present.
InTransit Copenhagen Trip
100 words copyright Anne Whitaker/Priya Logan 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: "as above so below", "Dear Green Place" Glasgow UK, Copenhagen, grassroots initiatives, North Kelvin Meadow/Children's Wood campaign, Scottish Government, wild land
April 3, 2016
Waiting for the Aries New Moon – as the zodiac year ends…
Every year, the time from the New Moon in Pisces to the New Moon in Aries can be seen as the 12th House phase, the Moondark time, of the entire zodiacal year..indeed, a time of “dying back in preparation for the new.”
Image of Moondark
To read more, click HERE
50 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards, Uncategorized Tagged: "as above so below", astrology, horoscope, Moondark, mundane astrology, Writing from the Twelfth House
March 30, 2016
An Aztec prayer: celebrating our loving connections with one another in a time of darkness
Like most people with any humanity at all, I have been caught up in the ripple of horror, grief, fear and utter disgust which swept the world in the week leading up to and including Easter 2016, which revealed once again the depravity of which humanity at its worst is capable.
At a personal level, too, life has been tough: not for me, but for close family and friends. We spent the last days of Lent waiting for death to release a suffering family member. A close friend fell, cracked bones, and is in hospital. Other friends have had traumatic issues to deal with.
There has been no shortage of life crucifying us, both collectively and personally.
How do we cope with all this? My response to personal and collective pain has always been to turn to the natural world which at present is full of the beautiful vibrancy of fresh daffodils – and to poetry, which never fails to offer consolation. I was looking through my archive of quotes and found this one, which I found helpful to read today. I hope you do too…
. “ There is an ancient Aztec Indian prayer that reflects on the preciousness of life and the fleetingness of it. As the Aztecs thank the Creator for their life and breath, they acknowledge that they are only on loan to each other for a short while, and just like the drawings that they have made in crystalline obsidian fade, so, too, will their life quickly be gone.
‘Oh, only for so short a while you have loaned us
to each other, because we take form in your act
of drawing us.
And we take life in your painting us,
And we breathe in your singing us.
But only for so short a while have you loaned us
to each other.’ ”
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(from p55, PRAYING OUR GOODBYES The Spirituality of Change by Joyce Rupp 1988)
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350 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: ancient Aztec Indian prayer, Creator, crystalline obsidian, life's transience, supportive communities, symbolic art
March 21, 2016
World Astrology Day – a celebration
Our wonderful cosmos
Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: "as above so below", astrology, horoscope, mundane astrology, Saturn
March 15, 2016
Can we have more Doubt and less Certainty, please?
I have long appreciated Richard Holloway’s deep probing writing on questions of faith and doubt as he looks steadily upon the ever-present gifts and frailties of humankind – admiring his blend of humour, erudition, compassionate feeling and dispassionate analysis. Since this is the Christian season of Lent, I thought the following quote would be an appropriate one to offer as food for thought.
We are living through a time where fundamentalist certainties in science, politics and especially religion are creating various kinds of turmoil and havoc worldwide. Perhaps the leavening humility of more doubt and less certainty would be of ultimate benefit to us all?
The Circle of Life
“Because there is such an intrinsic connection between faith and doubt, the Church ought to be big enough to contain both sympathetically… Since it is possible to believe and to doubt for the wrong reasons as well as the right ones, and we don’t always know the one from the other, we need the constant challenge of the other tendency to keep us honest. This will make life uncomfortable, of course, but the work of our purgation demands it. Growth is painful, but no element in our nature is exempt from the process of sanctification.
The Church….should be as inclusive as possible. It should be big enough to hold Thomas the empiricist, as well as John the mystic, and Peter, who was often baffled and confused… There is a faith beyond faith, which is deeper than trust in our own trustfulness and is an abandonment to the ultimate graciousness of the universe….This is the trust beyond trust that says ‘yes’ even to the night…“
(from Anger Sex Doubt & Death by Richard Holloway, SPCK Publications, 1992, UK, pp 81-82. I realise this is quite a lengthy extract! Should Richard Holloway or SSPK object, please let me know how many words I can quote and I will edit accordingly….)
Richard F. Holloway (born 26 November 1933) is a Scottish writer and broadcaster and was formerly Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church. To read more about him and his writing, click HERE
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: Anger Sex Doubt & Death, Bishop of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, John the mystic, Richard Holloway, SPCK Publications, The Church, Thomas the empiricist, X Factor
March 10, 2016
On the startling effects of eclipses…
An intriguing personal eclipse tale on Astrology: Questions and Answers:
http://astrologyquestionsandanswers.com/2016/03/10/quitting-smoking-the-solar-eclipse-way/
650 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: quitting smoking, solar eclipse
March 4, 2016
The Pisces Solar Eclipse: 9th March 2016. What will it bring?
Read about next week’s solar eclipse. What does it hold for you?
New Moon Solar Eclipse
copyright Anne Whitaker
2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards Tagged: New Moon Solar Eclipse 
February 29, 2016
On the mystery of “our deeply strange existence” from scientist David Eagleman
We are living in an era where humans seem to need the strong seasoning of certainty even more than ever. Militant atheism seems hell bent (pardon the expression, a tad inappropriate in this context, eh what?!) on ramming down our collective throats their conviction that religion is pernicious rubbish. And militant religious fanatics have been turning to their usual tools, honed to a fine art over many bloodsoaked centuries, of persecution and/or slaughter in the name of whatever faith they aver is ‘the one and only truth’.
How totally refreshed I was, therefore, given our current less than calm and reasonable collective context, to come across a wonderful opinion piece in a recent New Scientist magazine, from which the following quote is taken:
” But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way. Beyond that all we see is uncharted water. Past the end of the pier lies all the mystery about our deeply strange existence: the equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness, and the big questions of meaning and existence….good scientists are comfortable holding many possibilities at once, rather than committing to a particular story over others. In light of this, I have found myself surprised by the amount of certainty out there….”
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His book of ‘possibilian’ tales, Sum, became an international best-seller and is published in 22 languages.
To read the whole of the opinion piece “Why I am a ‘possibilian'” which I found so refreshing, click HERE.
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David Eagleman
2010 and 2016
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Filed under: 001 – new Posts: January 2016 onwards, Favourite Quotes (archive) Tagged: "Why I am a 'possibilian'", dark matter, David Eagleman, Militant atheism, multiple spatial dimensions, New Scientist magazine, our deeply strange existence
