The presentations at UAC,
overall, were the highest quality, the best of the best. You can share my experience of how
difficult it was to decide which of the 15 possibilities to choose in each
time slot by checking out this UAC 2012 Sessions link.
Click each session header (Session 1, Session 2, etc.) to see the myriad
offerings. I think these descriptions speak for themselves to give you the
flavor of the quality of the UAC fare. I will share my favorites among the
talks I heard and links to the speakers’ websites, if you want to learn more
about them and their work:
Donna Van
Toen, What’s the Trigger? How the
tightest square in your chart often is a key to vocational aptitudes and
directions. Donna also did a talk on vocational signatures in the chart that I
could not attend. I heard it was terrific and look forward to buying on CD.
Steven
Forrest, Living Evolutionary
Astrology. Hints about the
distorting influences left resolved from prior life times act like an invisible
magnetic field behind the surface of the birth chart.
Lynn Bell, Body and Psyche: The Archetypal Language of
Planets and Symptoms. The body
speaks to us in many ways, and when we listen with a "planetary" ear,
a symptom will often lead to a particular place in the chart, and a specific
theme of burning or restriction, of twists and breaks or out of control growth.
Donna
Page, Life Coaching with Astrology:
Use Astrology as a Foundation for Life Coaching. Astrology is the perfect tool for life coaching.
Learn this valuable service to help your clients transform their lives into the
potential and promise in the natal chart.
Alan Oaken, From Intellect to Intuition: The Astrologer
as Healer. The function of the
astrologer/healer is to unlock the inner potential of the horoscope, giving
form and focus to our unfolding awareness. Healing always takes place from
above to below. How do Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto function to bring about a
greater awareness of the Life Force contained within us?
Best of all, recordings of
almost every talk at UAC will be available on the official website by the end
of June: http://www.uacastrology.com/. (The exception may be the
occasional instance where there were technical difficulties in taping.) Like
everyone else trying to multi-task, there were more presentations I couldn’t
attend than I could. I plan to purchase those on CDs. In a month, I won’t be on
astrological overload anymore—I hope! I’ll be ready for more input. I wanted to
buy them before I left New Orleans, but I was out of it from the flu – and pushing my 50-lb.
suitcase limit!
Astrology’s “Oscars”
I learned firsthand how
noisy a sit-down dinner of over 900 people can be at the Marion D. March
Regulus Awards. I could hardly hear myself think, but the most crucial information
appeared on big screens, including a touching posthumous retrospective about Marion March, the astrologer honored in naming these
awards. You can be there now with this fabulous tribute to Marion on You Tube, thanks to the UAC techno elves:
The 2012 Marion D. March Regulus Award Winners were:
Discovery,
Innovation and Research: Robert P. Blaschke
Education: Ena Stanley Theory and Understanding: Nick Campion Community Service: Joyce Levine Professional Image: Chris McRae Lifetime Achievement Awards: Michael Lutin, Ray Merriman
You also can search for
“UAC You Tube” and find other goodies from the conference, but don’t miss
Nadiyah Shah’s highly professional You Tube film of her time in New Orleans. It’s outstanding and captures way more than we’ve
covered here so far in visuals. Thanks,
Nadiyah, for sharing this with the world!
Friendship, NOLA and Neighborhoods
Meeting old friends and
new is one of the biggest charms of any UAC, and as I mentioned previously, I
saw some people many times and others I knew were there—not at all. I was
charmed, finally, to meet Sandra Mosley who lives on Oahu who did a wonderful post on The Radical Virgo in March 2011, A
Prescription for Planets in Pisces: SoulCollage ® Your Natal Chart. While
we didn’t get much one-on-one time in the whirl of the conference, I was
delighted to have Sandra’s company on a couple of group dinner outings,
including the Regulus Awards, even if we had to wave across the table! Learn
more about Sandra and her husband David’s work at their ZodiacArts site, full of images that will
take your breath away, as they combine their astrological know-how with
symbolic art, books and calendars.
Treme's birthplace of rock 'n' roll is now a laundromat.
My
Chiron 101 Summer School of 2011 came to life when I met one if its most upbeat
participants, Kat Randall. Our meeting and its context was one of the
highlights of my trip! Kat and I are both fans of the HBO program, Treme. Kat and her friend Robin
met up with me to do a Treme walking tour. Turned out to be one of the best
ways ever to get to know New Orleans. The Treme is a historical neighborhood,
sometimes called by its proper French name, Faubourg Tremé. It’s located in the
mid-city adjacent to the French Quarter. From its beginnings at the end of the
18th century, the Treme was a diverse neighborhood of Caucasians,
Haitian Creoles, and free persons of color. The town square was known as Congo Square, a place slaves gathered to dance on Sundays
before the end of the Civil War. [1]
Tomb of the Unknown Slave. [2]
Congo
Square
was also an important marketplace where slaves could sell crafts and crops to
raise money to purchase their freedom. The “Creoles of Color” band gave
concerts that evolved into a more improvisational style that gave birth to jazz.
The history of the Treme is rich and the slice of post-Katrina life depicted on
Treme, the HBO show, has given me my greatest sense of New Orleans and its rich history. Sandy, our tour guide, a
walking encyclopedia on Treme, deepened my sense of what jazz and New Orleans are all about. Jazz is “down and dirty” music
whose terminology is sexual in origin which gave birth to many other forms of
music. Because it is so diverse, reporting the history of jazz is difficult,
but I like the loose definition offered by jazz critic Joachim Berendt, " a
form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European
music." [3]
It became clear to me in
the Treme: New
Orleans a
melting pot in the most positive sense of the word, a place where people
experienced, then and now, the struggles of survival and the power of their strength
of spirit. There’s a sense of acceptance here that reflects the highly Aquarian
chart of New Orleans (more on that in a bit). There is music, a unique
brand, and New
Orleans got
the name The Big Easy because it was easy for musicians to make a living here.
Culture is thick and meaningful, and it dips deep into the past and permeates
forward from now into the future. I felt welcome and at home in New Orleans; bigger yet, it became a part of me. From
everything I read and have seen, it seems like the Statue of Liberty might just
as well have been placed near New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi.
I cut my tour of the Treme
short for lunch with Donna
Cunningham—well worth it! Donna has been a mentor, colleague and dear
friend dating back to the early 1980s. We hadn’t seen each other in person in
way too long, even though we both live on the West Coast. It was great catching
up with her.
My last big food splurge was
brunch at the famous Brennan’s
restaurant. As fate would have it, the organizer of the get-together, Deborah Smith Parker was unable to
come to the conference, end the end, due to other commitments. Deborah and
sister San Diegan, April Elliott Kent,
are both speaking at NCGR-Sacramento Area later this year. Also invited were Anne Beversdorf, formerly of San Diego now from Austin, TX—someone I had not seen in close to 20 years. I loved
reconnecting with her and meeting her friend Ricia Doren, who rounded out our
“foursome in Gulf.” The three-course brunch was out of this world, as was the
conversation with these bright and talented astrologers. I hope you enjoy
meeting them via their links here.
New Orleans: Birth Chart and Underbelly
Bourbon Street at night.
Now comes the part that’s
both hard to report yet the most meaningful for me—and maybe for you, too,
because it speaks to the imprint of a place on our psyches. It also says
something about AstroCartoGraphy and other forms of locational astrology.
New
Orleans is
actually lucky I ever set toe on its soil again after what happened to me there
in 1971. I was in my mid-twenties, a time of life I consider psychological
adolescence. Given that, you can know from the start that the story was high
drama. To cut to the chase, if you ever heard the old song, Tennessee
Waltz, that’s essentially what happened to me. T-Pluto was conjunct my Sun
and offered up for my learning a painful double betrayal. My roommate,
boyfriend and I were traveling together—and she not only got involved with him;
they ended up getting married. Because she and I also worked together, it was not
just devastating but very public.
Up to six months before
UAC, I wondered if I should dare go, considering this past history, especially
with T-Pluto currently conjunct my Moon. (My Sun and Moon are in wide square,
so you can’t touch one without the other.) While I have long forgiven the
people involved and came to terms with what happened, there is always that imprint
of past pain, the five percent of me that still needed some work.
The brave thing, I
figured, was to go. That’s the universal nudge I felt. I went with my gut, and
I wasn’t sorry. Somehow, as a result, I was able to pluck the last of the pain
like an unwanted eyebrow, root and all. I got to see the personal historical
context of what happened there and why New Orleans was the perfect place—maybe the only place—it could
have played out. I also saw for the first time why this particular loss was so
difficult. It was the first time I had opened my heart after my final break-up
with the man that took me more than 40 years to get over, all tolled.
Both people involved in
this painful past experience had astrological profiles similar to the New Orleans chart. My map lines in NOLA are Mars/IC and
Chiron/DSC. (Remind me in my next life to opt for something other than Chiron
in Scorpio square Pluto!) Astrologer Wendy Ashley commented at a UAC long ago: Before Chiron’s discovery, Mars was our
“wounder.” Both planets of wounding are activated for me in New Orleans—which may also explain why I got blisters,
regardless of which pair of shoes I was wearing, from walking around the French
Quarter!
The release of old tears
and new insights has been enhanced by another hunch I followed before the
conference that endured afterwards. Something told me to read fiction about New Orleans to orient myself to returning there. That’s when I
discovered Louis
Maistros. Talk about someone who has captured the soul of a place. He
helped me feelNew Orleans and the powerful otherworldly healing beat that
exists there, a jazz that pulses with every heartbeat. He helped me embrace that
beat, even when it was a pain that must be endured to purge and begin again. I
recommend his work highly, especially if you are Plutonian. (If you aren’t, you
many not cotton to the brink of life/death and the interweaving of the
living/dead that permeates his writing.)
I read Anti-Requiem:
New Orleans Stories (free on Kindle) before the trip. With only a few
stories left when I got home, I could not resist buying his novel, The
Sound of Building Coffins. The story takes place just before the turn of
the 20th century and is masterful in conveying the mix of
otherworldly presence that both motivates and sometimes decimates the struggle
for survival among the odd, interwoven characters. The New Orleans he paints of back then feels like the New Orleans I just visited, more than 100 years later. There
are more buildings, people dressed differently, but the beat goes on.
“Feeling my way through”
seems to be the prescription for my T-Pluto conjunct Moon, as it forms a
transitory T-square with T-Uranus and my natal Venus, Neptune and Mercury in Libra. I am having dreams of death and images with
predominant Cardinal red. I am also dealing with my Cardinal Mars in Cancer, as
this trip brought me “to the line” of Mars/IC and how difficult it is to do
Mars in a nurturing sign and root house. I have no idea where I’m going or what I’m
doing, but I somehow trust it will all turn out right. As I said to a friend
just this weekend, “I want to blow up my Moon and start over.” I’m channeling
Pluto!
With T-Chiron trine my
natal Chiron, I am trusting that the waters of Pisces/Scorpio will continue to
heal, including some health issues that are clearly emotional in basis, because
neither Western or Eastern medicine has done much to budge them.
Of all things I could have
in Scorpio, I’m grateful Jupiter is one of them. My gallows humor saves me.
That’s why this is my favorite line in Louis Maistros’s bio: He is mildly self-conscious about the fact
that he shares a birthday with Lee Harvey Oswald,
and is currently working out a conspiracy theory about that.
I hope sharing my diverse impressions
about UAC and New
Orleans has
been a conspiracy of the best kind, not how the word has come to be used, but in
its original meaning to breathe together.
Despite the internet woes at
the hotel and getting a doozy case of the flu the last day that’s still
lingering as of this writing, UAC and New Orleans exceeded my expectations—and then
some.
My goal was to
experience a balance of astro-education, link-ups with friends and colleagues,
and New Orleans culture. I left feeling I’d met the trifecta in
the week I had and was left wanting more—a good sign!
On May 24, I attended 2012 and the Mayan Calendar with Bruce Scofield, a pre-conference
workshop sponsored by NCGR. It was my most enlightening experience to date
about what the calendar is, how it works, and why we shouldn’t be worried about
its end this December. Bruce said it’s like an odometer turning over, a reset
to zero. Major moment of insight: The 260-day cycle on which the calendar is
based is roughly the time it takes for human gestation. The Mayan Long Count
Calendar began on 11 August 3114 BC and ends 21 December 2012. The link to Bruce’s publications offers more to study
and appreciate. See Recent Articles on Bruce’s astrology.com
page for the key points on this material for links on more Mayan resources.
Sacramento's Ziggurat and Tower Bridge.
And we hadn’t even yet
begun! The real beginning was an extravaganza—the opening ceremony. The video kaleidoscope
had a UFO’s Landing in New Orleans theme, complete with little green guys run amok that would parallel
Mikey Lutin’s mad musical,
OMG! The Mayans
Were Right on Saturday night. The videography was out of this world in more
ways than one, and various astrology groups had submitted clips from their home
turf to give a sense of the global diversity of this amazing convergence of
some 1500 astrologers on the Big Easy. (This was the second UAC to be held in New Orleans.) I was proud that our video from NCGR-Sacramento
Area was included. Knowing it would be only snippets from our full film, I
was thrilled with the ones chosen. Right on theme, there as the clip of me
talking about Sacramento’s ziggurat building, which looks like one of those
Mayan flat-topped pyramids. Just as I mention how some people say these
buildings were used for astrological purposes, our vice-president, Linda Byrd,
popped in with “Isn’t that Chironic?” Our postcard of the lead team followed with
stars falling ‘round as we shouted our capsule mission statement, “We’re ambassadors for astrology!”
The video not only introduced
us to who was there but gave a preview of all 13 tracks on the conference agenda
with faces of the presenters. The music and visuals were all so exciting; you
couldn’t leave anything but pumped for the days ahead.
But wait, there’s more! A
brass New Orleans band added the finishing touches, as it led us,
conga style, to beignets
and decaf coffee or wine and the opening of the Marketplace. Booths full of
jewelry (my weakness), astro publications and software, t-shirts and galaxies
of info. My Mercury in Libra can never make up its mind, so I gave up on booths
early-on. I concentrated on the hard decision on the beignets. In other words,
I had both blueberry and strawberry sauces. While I never made it to Café du
Monde, the home of the “best” beignets in New Orleans, I hope sharing this recipe offers a little of the
opening ceremonies—and the local ambience—to everyone. (Roomie Sara is
convinced that the New
Orleans
atmosphere is made up of at least one layer of powdered sugar.)
In-between these openers, I
looked for souvenirs and lighter fare and lighter priced food, finding all
within a block or two of The Marriott. I picked up some drumsticks from The
House of Blues—an odd choice for a piano player! I’m missing my mallet for my
meditation chimes, and I thought I could display the drumsticks as art objects
and use one to tap my chimes as needed.
There was so much music
everywhere—in the shops on recordings and at night in the streets by live
players—it inspired me to come home and tinkle the ivories for the first time
in a long time. (I have not shaken my hips this much and danced wherever I was,
no matter who was looking, ever.)
Ironically, the first music that popped out of the pile was Ordinary People.
In New Orleans, no one seems ordinary. Everything feels enchanted
with the roots of the Spiritworld and magic dust. Or is that powdered sugar?
Joyce is no longer doing consultations or collecting data for Chiron research. She'd be happy to refer you to one of her talented colleagues. E-mail her for suggestions.
What’s Up with The Radical Virgo, the Person and Blog Everything: My Dream Catcher Where Did I Go? It has been two years since I posted my ...
Astro-Fiction
Joyce's debut mystery series features an astrologer and her ex-FBI agent beau who mix it up with a bad guy, out to steal a longevity organization's secrets. You're invited to the party where it happens, an outrageous costume ball in San Francisco.
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To learn the characteristics of a Radical Virgo, read Joyce Mason’s article, “The Radical Virgo.” In a nutshell, these Virgos are not the old fussbudget stereotype—no Felix Ungers or Adrian Monks here. Radical Virgos have the potential to change the world through their ability to develop and discover their unique pattern, becoming true human beings—not “human doings.” Radical Virgos give service in a whole new way by contributing to their community and world what they were designed to give. When we each do that, we have made heaven on earth. It’s like having all the cogs in the great wheel of creation turning like they were just oiled!
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About "The Radical Virgo"
Joyce Mason has Sun in the last degree of Virgo, three planets in Libra, Taurus Rising and a Capricorn Moon. She's a "PUNC," or a person with a prominence of the outer planets Pluto, Uranus, Neptune--add bridging and healing Chiron. (See her Outerplanetary People series for more on PUNCs.) Joyce is often mistaken for an Aquarius/ Sagittarius blend. Even if you don’t speak astrology, that makes sense on some symbolic level because they both end in “ius.” She believes that I and Us are one in the same—and celebrates the human spirit in which we’re all joined.
First and foremost a writer, Joyce was a consulting astrologer, tarot reader, dreamworker, and flower essence practitioner for 25 years. Her astrological specialties are the sign of Virgo and the centaur planet, Chiron. She writes on these and many other topics. Read her complete bio and astrology articles on her Writer Joyce Mason website.
The name The Radical Virgo comes from an article Joyce wrote in The Mountain Astrologer many years ago. It also evolved into a personal nickname.
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