New Sag Moon, Lilo’s Miraculous Life And The 11th House

Once he was lost . . .

The Moon is dissolving into newness above DIA (That’s Denver International Airport for the record), it’s Sagittarian vibration casts an emotional expansiveness across the skies. My breath freezes slightly in the air as I negotiate with the ground transport jockeys. It’s $100 from Denver to Boulder, standard fare. I am eagerly greeted by a young guy who could be Ethiopian, maybe Eritrean. He quotes me a price and it’s a little steep. I sit down to to dial up some kind of shuttle service and am put into the eternity of muzak purgatory. While I’m waiting, he comes back to me with another person looking to get to Boulder. Suddenly, my fare just got sliced in half.

We get in and I find out that he’s Eritrean. We’re listening to some shit, Celine Dion Christmas song and I ask him if he has any music from his country. He seems surprised but says, “yes.” “Do you want to hear it, ” he asks me. Let’s see . . . Celine Dion or something, anything else? The latter wins 10 out of 10 times.

He jacks in his phone and starts cranking out the sounds of GG, one of Eritrea’s rising stars. It’s rhythmic and propulsed by light, frothy synths, but the chordal patchers and fills are unusual, and the 80’s electronics sound oddly avant-garde amidst the galloping polyrhythms. I always engage cabbies, no matter where they are from. They’re usually some of the most informed and worldly-wise people you’ll ever run across. Most of them are from other countries and they know hardship in ways that most Americans can’t even begin to comprehend (Just wait until you hear Lino’s story).

After Gigi, he puts on this live recording from a club in D.C. The beat is relentless, not so much hypnotic, but driving, almost beating you into the submission of trance. The singer chants above it, over and over and over again. It’s exotic, yet the unchanging monotony of it is not for the average ear. I can’t decide whether I like it or not. It’s a minimal and raw recording, not really helping the listener go deeper, not being seduced by reverb and slick filters. A lone sax sqounks in the background, repeating the endless beat ever-so-slightly. Then, about 3/4’s of the way through, something miraculous happens. The sax player finds an opening in the music and explodes into a wild frenzy, part Maceo Parker, part Albert Ayler, it’s pure genius and launches the drowsy monotony into outer space. Of course it’s like life. That’s how it’s supposed to be–the endless cycle of repetition resolved by a joyous and furious type of catharsis. It ends and there’s no more sound, just silence.

We make our way into Boulder and this is how it begins.

Hours earlier, I was at Austin’s airport, snaking my way through the watchful eyes of the TSA. They have drug and bomb sniffing dogs now roaming through the check in lines. This latest, um, improvement for our security resembles Gaza just a little more with each, tweak to the system.

When I’m in these lines, I always try to get the less invasive, old school scanner, instead of the arms-in-the-air like you just don’t care, x-ray shakedown. I really thought I had it this time; Goods in the tray, computer on the belt, shoes off and just when I’m about to step through I get moved into the see-all-cylinder. I opt out and go for the pat down. It’s my choice–not theirs.

The social stigma of the pat down is subtle and perverse–it’s supposed to be. It’s been ingrained in our brains that this is what happens to criminals when they get arrested and it is in public, which theoretically lends itself to a type of soft humiliation, but then again, that’s all part of it too. They ask you if you want a private space, but I’d rather be out in the open. Saturn, transiting my 12th House doesn’t engender me to feeling all that warm and fuzzy in the confines of a private, TSA screening room. So it’s out in the open.

I extend my arms proudly. They’re my arms and I love them. I pass of course, but the mental yoga in that moment is a unique experience. Why don’t more people do this I ask? If we all opted out, we would put such a flood on the current TSA system that they would have to revise it. But there I am, alone, palms extended upwards towards heaven, getting groped for the sins of the sleeping. It’s okay, I just wish I could be groped by a member of the opposite sex. Saturn in my 12th hasn’t been great for my social life.

I’m here in Boulder at Gaiamtv, spreading the gospel of astrology on the 11th House, my new show. It’s a strange experience in some ways. It’s what I have been working towards most of my life and I feel slightly disembodied, like I am observing my own experience from a level of bemused detachment. Is this real? Am I doing this? Do I really have anything to say? Jay Weidner’s there and it’s always great connecting with Jay. I found out that he’s a longtime Niner fan like myself and we both worship at the feet of Bill Walsh.

The production team is impeccable, a mix of refugees from New York and network news (Fox, Glenn Beck) and newbies fresh out of college. I’m here breaking down the 9/11, 3 BC chart of Jesus/Sananda. After the shoot, I’ll go back to the hotel, watch MNF and then stumble upon a History Channel documentary on the life of said Jesus. Hmmmmmm.

Jesus/Sananda gets a very bad rap or no rap at all these days. He’s either the end times Rambo or he’s just another Sun god, or he’s just a marketing/control meme created by the Romans. It always surprises me how readily people are willing to throw down their faith and love in a half-monkey/half man, or a half-elephant/half man and it’s rarely, if ever questioned, but the thought of following or devoting ones self to a man who embodied the undifferentiated spirit of God/Creation and demonstrated it on a moment-to-moment basis is thought to be considered a weakness or a superstitious construct for those unwilling to face death and the uncertainly of the existential void. Maybe it’s the Sag Sun burning a hole through the prism of my first house, but I am intrigued by this dismissal of the divine by the hands of the modern Pharisees.

While I was doing more research on the 9/11 birthdate, again, I stopped at the Summer of Love to revisit Pluto in Virgo, Neptune in Scorpio and Jupiter in Leo, all three aspects which were very prominent in the chart of Sananda, 3BC.

Shortly after the Summer of Love, there was a spate of films dealing with the life and times of Jesus, from the musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, to Zefferelli’s straight, epic portrayal, starrring Robert Powell, to another musical, Godspell. The early 70’s had the Doobie Brothers bearing musical witness on, “Jesus Is Just Alright.” It was in the air, seeded IMHO by the Summer of Love and the return of those three, key planets/aspects. By the time 1973 rolled around, the Jesus vibration was humming. Jupiter and Neptune were both in Sag and the devotion was coming through on stage and screen. Unfortunately the dark side, as it always does, had its shadow play in it as well. Jim Jones, the mind controlled asset of the CIA had a very different type of devotion he was cooking up in the jungles of Guyana.

.On my way back to the hotel on my first day, I was picked up by Lino. Lino was one of the Lost Boys of The Sudan. If there is a God, then Lino is the living embodiment of it in ways that people cannot comprehend. In short, here is his story; Lino was just six-years-old when civil war erupted in Sudan. He was with his parents and the rest of his family when they got caught up in an ambush with deadly crossfire. At just six, Lino was separated from his parents and had to fend for himself, like many of Sudan’s lost boys and girls. Shortly after he lost his parents, he was on a truck headed to Kenya and a refugee camp, thinking that things might be okay, thinking that they might work out and that’s when the truck his a land mine. It was the loudest sound he had ever heard. Time stopped. When his hearing returned, he heard screams and saw blood and body parts everywhere. Mildly wounded, he survived and grew up in Kenya, at a refugee camp.

Lino eventually applied to live in the US and was accepted. He is first stop was Syracuse in the summertime. He loved it until it snood and when he first saw snow, he actually though the world was ending. Even after he was told what it was, it didn’t comfort him all that much. He didn’t like being cold. So he eventually made it to Boulder where he drives a cab, not just any cab, but a brand new, Prius hybrid. He told me how much he has to pay for gas, take care of repairs, etc., and he made a choice to go all in on the hybrid because it saves him money. He also told me that he actually re-united with his lost parents a few years back and is now married to one of the lost girls from Sudan that he met in Boulder. She is studying to be a nurse and it’s their goal/dream to return to the Sudan and start a clinic to help the people of Sudan. He told that every day he wakes up, its a miracle and he feels blessed to be alive and by doing so, wants to share the blessing with others. Lino is a living testament to magic of love, faith and the miraculous. I’ve been on this bandwagon lately to re-christen as it were, Jesus/Sananda as an Aquarian symbol, not just a relic of the Piscean Age. I believe that was the original intent of his incarnation, to illustrate that the entire universe is flowing through us and that the power of creation is on our lips and fingertips, every single moment. And it’s through this, in some ways, spiritual anarchy that we can self-assemble in an elegant fashion, without the prime directives of “Common Purpose” or “Agenda 21.” It’s through the lives of people like Lino, that this is illustrated so clearly, if we have the time and patience to seek and find.