Lammas – Ritual bonfires…

(Lammas Week,
traditionally rounded off
to August 2nd,
but actually tis exact mid-season,
when the Sun arrives at 15 Leo 00-
chart below)

or arson
take your pick…

James Baldwin,
(whose birthday we honor today,
and chart we delineate tonight)

most known book is “The Fire Next Time.”

and on whose birthday Aug. 2, in 1943 –
the Harlem “riot” took place
(as well as his step-father’s funeral)

Ritual or arson….

So, fellow aspiring agents
of Liberating Trickster,
we have much guiding support to co-animate,
whereby to become agents of cool response
in hot reactive world…

Sun be “children swinging on the limb
of an ancient Oak Tree,
the borrowed strengths
of all Nature Based Mysticism
spiraling into the past…”

opposite Saturn,
“contemplating an inspiration
that could change one’s life..”

and they both square Uranus in Taurus,
contributing dedicated creativity
to democratic animism…

exactly trine Venus in Virgo,
who adds language craft…

For further emphasis
The Sun and Mercury quintile Ceres Demeter,
newly entered Gemini, next to Moon,
so she has much to say to Group Mind,
and invites us to open the portals…

Mars is opposite Jupiter,
many opportunities for refined language craft
to be of service the the Big Story…

(and 10,000 myriad more patterns
we may get to, as we all play…)

 

***************************
****************************

Thematically

My radio guests this coming week will be

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel

authors of

“Inflamed – Deep Medicine
and the Anatomy of Injustice” 

Here be a sample from this book,
just being published this week,
so we are among the few,
welcoming all stories
that unify all stories

“The student has performed his austerities
and faithfully tended the fires. Teach him before
the fires beat you to it.” But Satyakama went on a journey
without ever teaching him. . . . The fires then said to each
other: “The student has performed his austerities and
faithfully tended us. So come, let us teach him.”

—Chandogya
Upanishad

“AS THE WORLD BURNS
Your body is inflamed. If you haven’t felt it yet, you or someone close
to you soon will. Symptoms to look for include uncontrolled weight
gain or unexpected weight loss, skin rashes, difficulty with memory,
fever, trouble breathing, and chest pain. Inflammation accompanies
almost every disease in the modern world: heart disease, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, obesity, diabetes,
and more. The difference between a mild course and a fatal case
of Covid-19 is the presence or absence of systemic inflammation.

Your body is part of a society inflamed. Covid has exposed the
combustible injustices of systemic racism and global capitalism. Demagogues around the world kindle distrust and hatred. Governments
send in the police to impose order, monitor lockdowns, enforce a return
to work for those who comply and incarceration for those who
do not.

From the United States to South Africa, India, Brazil, and
China, people suffering oppression set tires and cars and gasoline
alight on barricades. The petrochemistry of our protest reflects the
materials that we have on hand. Everything we’ve made, we’ve made
from fossil fuels: energy, food, medicine, and consumer goods.
The world has been organized to burn.
As a consequence, the planet is inflamed. Global temperature
records are being broken, forest fires have turned from annual to
perennial events, oceans are rising, and storms have become bigger
and stronger. This is the epoch of endless fire. Human destruction is tearing apart the web of life, shredding the network of relationships
between organisms and places in which our lives are embedded. Inflammation is a biological, social, economic, and ecological pathway,
all of which intersect, and whose contours were made by the
modern world.

Inflammation is triggered when tissues and cells are damaged or threatened
with damage. A complex and intricately coordinated response of
the immune system, inflammation mobilizes resources to ultimately
heal what has been injured. In a healthy, balanced system, once the
mending has occurred, inflammation subsides. When the damage
keeps coming, the repair cannot fully happen, leaving the inflammatory
response running. A system of healing then turns into one that
creates more harm.

As we explore inflammation in this book, we will sometimes
use the language of the body in analogy. So: salmon are to rivers as
hearts are to blood vessels. They both function as nutrient pumps in
systems of circulation. We sometimes proceed by simile: dams are
like vascular obstructions. We’re not above metaphor. Trade routes,
for example, are colonialism’s arteries, moving people, capital, goods,
and diseases around the world system, and connecting bodies, societies,
geographies, and ecologies. The metaphor helps us to show
that inflammation is systemic and that the systems are linked. But
we aren’t making a literary argument so much as a medical one. The
inflammation in your arteries and the inflammation of the planet are
linked, and the causal connections are becoming increasingly clear;
your physiological state is a reaction to social and environmental factors.
Racial violence, economic precarity, industrial pollution, poor
diet, and even the water you drink can inflame you.

These connections are not new or even our own. Indigenous
people have been articulating them for the past six hundred years,
in an ongoing global resistance to the destruction of their ways of
life. Abolitionists have been articulating them since 1619. From the Global South, traditions of healing have survived successive waves
of colonial destruction. Our work stands on the shoulders of movement
workers and visionary thinkers from the past and our contemporaries,
from the agroecological farmers of Amrita Bhoomi, in
Karnataka, India etc…”

and then it goes on into some language
and references with which I disagree,
as is so often the case.

(and does not diminish
the worthiness of the offering…
We love critique and refinement…,)

My Moon in Virgo is James Baldwin’s Moon
and Mercury, responsible for quality control,
linguistic standards of authenticity, alert to the con,
the faux masquerading as the authentic,
the prison masquerading as freedom…
the imposition masquerading as the offering…

Happy Birthday James Baldwin!
whose chart *below we shall delineate,
and its transits, re what he be offering
for us now in the cultural brew..

Baldwin said, “I knew I was black, of course,
but I also knew I was smart. I didn’t know
how I would use my mind, or even if I could,
but that was the only thing I had to use.”

Baldwin attended P.S. 24 on 128th Street,
between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Harlem
where he wrote the school song,
which was used until the school closed.”

As featured in James Hillman’s “The Soul’s Code,”
Baldwin later honored this teacher –
who contributed to his liberation
by truly seeing him.

“As told in “Notes of a Native Son”,
when he was 10 years old, Baldwin wrote
a play that was directed by a teacher at his school.
Seeing his talent and potential, she offered
to take him to “real” plays. This provoked
a backlash from Baldwin’s stepfather,
as the teacher was white. Baldwin’s mother
eventually overruled his father, saying
“it would not be very nice to let such a kind
woman make the trip for nothing.” When his
teacher came to pick him up, Baldwin noticed
that his stepfather was filled with disgust.
Baldwin later realized that this encounter
was an “unprecedented and frightening”
situation for his parents.””

“The title, [of his book] The Fire Next Time,
comes from a pre-Civil War Negro spiritual
that became popular again during the
Civil Rights movement. The line is
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
no more water the fire next time.”
The line’s a warning about living
unholy lives, but not a threat.”

images and quotes from Wikipedia