The Endless Sky
Some of you future super-sleuths with strong Plutonian signatures may have already noticed that I’m not in my usual habitat just from the different scene you see behind me in our Zoom calls. I’m in rainy, musical New Orleans, where I’ll be located until early August. I’m here mostly so my partner Michelle can “shoot some judges” – and I suspect you can imagine the fun we’ve been having with that line!
As I most of you probably know, Michelle is a portrait artist. Not to spoil the joke, but these worthy Louisiana judges are all being shot photographically rather than with live ammunition. Jupiter has been busy with Michelle lately – she painted one of the judges over in Jefferson Parish a few months ago. The portrait proved so popular that four more judges got jealous and signed up too. That’s the main reason I’m writing today, in the rain, on pretty Prytania Street.
I am not able to record astrological readings here – it’s just too noisy. The leaf blowers are the worst part, but motorcycles screaming by don’t help much either. I don’t feel right offering a client an expensive recording with those kinds of audio horrors included as part of it. I also don’t much like what the intermittent racket does to my own equilibrium, and I need to hang onto at least some speck of that inner balance in order to do a good job with the reading. As I am sure you’re all beginning to sense from your work in the FCEA, doing a good chart interpretation has some overlap with meditation. The process doesn’t blend well with the sudden roar of engines, or with homicidal ideation.
We’ll be here at Michelle’s place for about six weeks. As I reflected on it, I realized that this was actually going to be the first time since 1977 that I would go six weeks without any client work at all – although of course we still have our Zoom calls, complete with charts, and my astro-mouth hard at work. But not doing a full private consultation for six weeks for the first time in forty-four years . . . I guess I really am a Capricorn.
“Once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up.”
– Leonardo Da Vinci
I knew that this break would give me some unbroken time to write. Even after all these years, I still love doing the readings – but a chance to write is also something I relish too. After the marathon of creating the four Elements books, I wanted a project that was a little easier though. It dawned on me that this would be the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and that is to create a collection of my articles and newsletters. So that’s exactly what I am up to. It will be called The Endless Sky: Collected Astrological Essays, 2002-2021, and I expect it will be available before the end of the year.
My dear friend Jaan Uhelzski has agreed to write the Foreword. I’m really happy about that. She’s an astrologer herself, but her main claim to fame is that she was one of the original rock’n’roll journalists for the old Creem magazine. She was even on stage in makeup with the band KISS once, and I have a photograph to prove it. Some of you may be too young to remember the magazine. Suffice to say, I expect Jaan’s writing will be edgy, as well as professional.
Meanwhile, creating the new book remains a big job, even though much of the writing is obviously already done. With Saturn in Virgo on my Midheaven pestering my poor innocent Mercury via a quincunx, of course none of the articles were good enough as they sat there. I’ve had to line-edit each one of them, re-writing them here and there, adding some later thoughts, and so on. I’ve also written a brief introduction to each one of them individually, placing them in context. In the “new writing” department, I’ve added a substantial introduction and a serious concluding chapter. It’s been a lot of work. Still, in all honesty, some of the material is old, and much of it has been available for free on my website in the past. It just felt like time to bind everything under one cover for the sake of convenience and easy reference.
