Four Moons Astrology- Donna Woodwell, Austin, Texas

My Dearest Friend,

Where is the summer going? Can you believe the ISAR astrology conference in Chicago is only five weeks away?  I can’t wait to see you and our other astrologer-friends!

You know I adore Chicago – the restaurants, the planetarium, the museums. My husband was just telling me about the new glass balcony at the Skydeck of the Sears Tower, where you can stand on the glass floor and see 1,353 feet straight down. A news story I read said the idea to build the balcony came from the cleaning staff, who kept having to remove nose-and-forehead prints from the glass windows left by people trying to look down. Someone finally asked, why not?

Thinking of the Sears Tower reminded me of my last visit to the Windy City five years ago. That was just a few days after I found out I was pregnant with my daughter.

As I drove home one morning, I smiled to myself with bemused satisfaction. It was only a few weeks after my husband and I decided to have a baby, but I had a sneaking suspicion I was already pregnant. I wondered: had enough time passed for a home pregnancy test to show an accurate result?

At that moment, a commercial for That ’70s Show came on the radio. The ad played a sound bite from the upcoming episode: “Mommy, Mommy, I think I got Donna pregnant.”

I burst into laughter. Well, that settles that, I thought. I made a detour to the drugstore.

We all experience such magical moments when the Universe spontaneously answers our questions just as we ask them. A lyric on the radio, a perfectly placed bumper sticker, a strand from an overheard conversation, a book that falls open to just the passage we need to hear. These meaningful coincidences are what Carl Jung called synchronicities.

Divination techniques, such astrology, Tarot and the I Ching, are excellent tools for harnessing the power of synchronicities to provide illuminating insights to life’s myriad questions.  Even the Cosmos itself has a funny way of answering our questions, when we ask from the right point of view.

What is that point of view? I keep flashing back to the image of the little girl lying on the floor of the glass balcony, overlooking the world with a sense of wonder and delight, and without fear.

Do you think she would leave noseprints on a crystal ball too?

With Love, from Luna

Last Quarter Moon in Aries, sextile Jupiter and Neptune in Aquarius.

My Dearest Friend,

This morning before dawn I sat at my desk, bleary-eyed, waiting for the tea to steep. I was contemplating the astrology charts for the day’s lunatweet. A Moon-Jupiter-Neptune triple conjunction in Aquarius, what does that say to the world?

As I let my mind wander, I remembered a scene from my childhood. When I was 11 years old, I set the school record in archery. Only thing is, before that day, I’d never picked up a bow.

It was a school fitness day; races and other athletic contests filled the schedule. Archery stations were set up on one corner of the playground. It looked like fun, so I wandered over to try it. The gym teacher showed me how to hold the bow and notch an arrow, then wandered away to help another student.

Standing there, awkwardly holding the large bow in front of the target. I experienced a curious sensation. I felt the shot — myself, the bow, the arrow, the flight path and the target — as part of one continuous, instantaneous whole. In my mind’s eye, releasing the arrow and striking the bull’s-eye was one fluid movement.

Still in my reverie, I raised the bow, and let the first arrow fly. Thwack!  The shaft struck dead center in the middle of the target. Without thought, I shot again. Thwack! Thwack! I hit the bull’s-eye two or three more times in a row.

Then the teacher returned. She looked at the target in disbelief and shock. She asked me what I thought I was doing. I explained. She scoffed and said I couldn’t do that.

Next shot, I still hit the target, but out towards the edge. The magic was broken.

How often are we told things are “impossible” in our lifetimes? So many times that we start to internalize the voices and carry them with us wherever we go? Eventually we might just stop believing altogether. When they are together in the sky, Jupiter and Neptune remind us that there is possibility in every moment, if we only open our minds to it.

A friend gave me a paperweight that’s been sitting on my desk for years. It reads: “what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

An excellent question…

With Love, from Luna.

Moon in Aquarius conjunct Jupiter and Neptune, square Mars in Taurus.

My Dearest Friend,

I’ve just careened through another crazy-busy week. Just a few items on the to-do list: incorporate the Astrological Society of Austin, launch an astrology news website called Astroluxx, and plan the Living La Vida Luna astrology class. There’s been a flurry of meetings, paperwork, lawyers, emails, marketing reports, phone calls, text and IM messages. Plus all of life’s other daily dramas. My mind whirls.

At the end of the week, exhausted, I curled up on the bed for an afternoon nap. Instead of the longed-for sleep a poem came to me, insisting to be written:

One small drop of pure intent,
like a ringing bell
ripples of creation spent,
weaves a magic spell.

Intentions: a word that’s been on my mind lately.

I’ve been writing my daily LunaTweets for six weeks now. It started as a fun gift to my clients: fortune-cookie astrology. I sit at my newly cleared desk with a cup of tea and my aspectarian, ephemeris and a sunrise chart for the day. I listen until words come, then Ping them into the world.

Trying to catch the astral flavor of an entire day in 140 characters or less has proven more illuminating than I imagined. For me, it has become a potent morning ritual. Consciously acknowledging the celestial cycles has created an internal stillness, as if time itself has slowed down. They’ve become a reflection of my own intentions for the day, resonating on multiple levels.

I’ve also watched as the daily ping creates ripples in the world – the comments on Facebook and the emails I receive. Like water plunging through the surface, each drop creates a shower of other droplets that move the energy in myriad new directions. Creation and re-creaton: with each drop, we change the world.

It’s easy to be swept away by the splashing. When I reach out my hand to catch the other droplets, I begin to lose the essence of my original intention. Where is the balance point between living with intention and creative spontaneity?

In my office, a sign hangs above the door with the words: Follow your Bliss.  Perhaps that’s a clue to the answer.

With love, from Luna

New Moon in Cancer opposite Pluto.

My Dearest Friend,

In a near-universal suburban ritual, my husband and I leave the house in the morning to our various destinations – he the commute to work, me to drop off our daughter at school then back home to my office.

One morning last week, we left the house at the same time. As we drove down the neighborhood thoroughfare, cars side-by-side, my daughter could see her dad waving at her from the truck.

“Daddy!” she cried.

At the stoplight came the inevitable parting of the ways.  I blew him a kiss.  He turned left and I turned right.

In the backseat, my daughter burst into tears.

“What’s wrong sweet?”
“Daddy went away!”
“Yes, I know. But he’ll be back this evening, you know that.”
“Tonight? But that feels like forever!”

I sighed to myself.  “Sometimes it does.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about waiting. I marvel at the world my daughter is growing up in.  She is only four years old, and can’t read yet, but she knows how to navigate her favorite PBS kids website on her own.  She can download movies from the Netflix instant queue with our Roku box.  She talks to her grandparents each week on a Skype video call.

“I don’t want to wait!” she says with a stomp of her foot.  In this ultra high-speed world, where so many whims are satisfied with the touch of a button, how do I explain to my 4-year-old how to wait?

I was recently talking with my wise astrologer-friend Kenneth Miller about his lifelong embrace of “delayed gratification.”  He said: “Learn to get pleasure from delayed gratification and all of a sudden the world becomes a very pleasurable place.”

Waiting in traffic. Waiting in a check out line. Waiting for the printer to warm up.  What if we perceived all these suspended seconds differently? What if instead of focusing on where we wanted to be, we focused on where we are right now?  The pleasure of standing still. Of feeling air filling our lungs. Of listening to our heart beat…

The world would be a different place indeed.

Some lazy afternoons, my daughter and I go to an English tea shop tucked away on the historic main street of our little town.  We share scones, jam tarts and a pot of tea.  This week, rather than asking “is the tea ready yet?” we made a game of watching it brew, studying honey amber tendrils as they wound through the steaming water.

Life is too short to wait for it. Savor the small moments.

With love, from Luna.

Waning Quarter Moon in Pisces, sextile Venus and Mars in Taurus.

My Dearest Friend,

A few days ago I was winding down a Skype conversation, when suddenly the windows on my computer disappeared. The screen went black, and the machine powered down. Silence.

I touched the back of my laptop. It radiated heat. I decided it would be best if I left the machine off for a while, and asked my computer-engineer husband to look at it when he returned home that evening..

But it meant the whole afternoon ahead of me with no computer.

I live on my computer.  As a writer and an astrologer, my work life revolves around my laptop – email, the Internet, instant messaging, my word processor, astrology charting software, social networks and more.  My machine is the first thing I greet in the morning when I wake up, and sometimes the last place I stop before heading off to bed.

I like technology. I was born at a generational crossroads: part of the last class to learn to type on a typewriter, part of the first class to produce the school newspaper on a word processor.  I’ll happily give you my television, and you can even take away my phone, but don’t tread on my Internet connection.  The Internet is how I communicate with business partners, clients and friends in far-flung places; it is a window on the wider world.

But like so many other things, technology is a bittersweet blessing.  Like the Lady of Shalott, as we weave our virtual realities, are we cursing ourselves to look at only reflections of the world, never living in it?  In Tennyson’s words from his poem Lady of Shalott:

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot;
Or when the Moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed.
“I am half sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.

Has my LCD become the looking glass of my own enchantment?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much I miss writing. Not tapping on a keyboard. The sensual experience of writing… with pen and paper, fountain pens and ink-stained fingers.  On a computer, words are sanitized and spell-checked, created and destroyed with the press of a button.  In contrast, there is something organic and intimate about a hand-written letter, with its smudges, hesitations and crossed out phrases. Imperfect. Real.

During my expected afternoon untethered from the electric box, I went to the stationery store. I returned home with paper, ink and sealing wax.  I moved my computer off the writing desk in the center of my office, to a table on the side.  And in the newly cleared space, I sat down and wrote a letter. Smudges and all.

Full Moon in Sagittarius.