The Trickster in Politics

Posted on December 2, 2017 by Trish and Rob

 

Several weeks ago, Rob and I sent our agent a new nonfiction proposal: One Nation Under Trump Meets Joseph Campbell’s Trickster Archetype. The idea, the hook, is that trump is the ultimate trickster who is surrounded by tricksters, and one way or another, the trickster will be what brings him and his entire administration down.

But along the way, trump is in good company with the tricksters who have been exposed because of the #Metoo hash tag. Every day on this front, there’s a new revelation, a new name, a new woman reporting what happened to her.

Anyway, we started writing the book and several chapters in, found that we couldn’t keep up with the news. We realized that by the time the book was published, it would be old news, but still interesting in terms of how the trickster archetype has functioned in the U.S. since trump was elected. After all, if you have a trickster in the White House, it sets the tone for the country confronting this archetype within their collective selves.

So: on December 1, Michael Flynn, trump’s loyal – and former – National Security Advisor, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, a federal charge but relatively minor compared to what Mueller’s team could have charged him with. A plea deal. In other words, I have lots more info, Mr. Mueller, if you give me a deal.

 Flynn, if you recall, is the man who, at trump’s campaign rallies, often led the chant, Lock her up! This reference to Clinton became a rallying cry for trump supporters at his campaign rallies.

The trickster, who listens closely, apparently heard this. Today, when Flynn left a federal courthouse where he’d pleaded guilt to lying to the FBI, protesters greeted him with, Lock him up! Rob and I predicted this in our section on Flynn.

 

 Oddly, in this entire nightmare that is the trump presidency, my hope is with the trickster. As Carl Jung said, when an archetype seizes you, it has to play out until you recognize it for what it is and integrate it into who you are.I’m not so sure that we’re at the integration phase yet as a country, but things may come to a head very soon.

On December 3 at 10:47 am ET, 7:47 PT, there’s a super moon in Gemini, trump’s sun sign, and Mercury turns retro in Sagittarius. Full moons bring stuff to an apex, a culmination, and Mercury retros are, in part, about the past. Something is headed trump’s way and he’s going to be fighting it with tweets, which were curiously absent today.

Rob’s take? “He’s going to fire Mueller.” In other words, another Saturday Night Massacre, and back to the Nixon era right before he was impeached.

We can hope, right?

 

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Mercury Retro Alert!

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Maybe I’m more aware of Mercury retrogrades because the trickster planet rules my sign, Gemini, and that of Virgo, the sign  of my daughter and some goods friends. It does this little retro routine three times a year, and typically, the areas that Mercury rules go haywire during the three weeks it’s misbehaving.

Which areas? Communication. Contracts. Travel. Your conscious mind, your capacity to learn, relationships with siblings, neighbors, friends. My rule of thumb for these three-week periods is simple: revise, review, reconsider. That means it’s a bad idea to submit manuscripts or book your next trip or sign a contract during a Merc retro. Don’t buy a car or electronics, either.

Christmas shopping? Well, the retro starts in Sagittarius at 11:34 pm Pacific time on December 2 and at 2:34 am ET on December 3. It ends on December 22. I hope you did your shopping before the 3rd, but if not, head out on the 23rd. That date is still cutting it pretty close because Mercury takes a few days to stabilize after a retro.   Then again, you have to live your life regardless of what the stars are doing!

On December 3, Mercury turns retro in fire sign Sagittarius. So if you don’t have a copy of your natal chart – get one here and  look at where Sagittarius is in your chart. It’s represented by an arrow. Café Astrology is a treasure trove of info and here’s their explanation about what the houses mean.

That house is where the retro will impact you personally. But on a broader scale, it impacts all of us regardless of where it falls in our natal charts because it’s the planet of communication, something we do daily in this 24/7 connected world. Cell phones act up, computers often crash, our internet goes down, we have a power blackout. Irritating stuff that tends to slow us down. And maybe that’s really the point. During a Merc retro, you shouldn’t rush or push against anything. Just chill, try to go with the flow. Double check appointments you have scheduled.

Not everything about Merc retro periods is challenging. Sometimes, old lovers and friends show up. Relationships with friends and siblings can be mended because the past is rehashed in a way everyone understands. If your flight is delayed, cancelled, or overbooked, you may end up with a flight voucher worth many times the cost of your original ticket. Some of what happens depends on your intentions, desires, goals.

My astro mentor, Renie Wiley, used to say that the place you traveled to during a Mercury retro was a place to which you would return within a year. I’ve seen this proven out time and again in terms of physical travel. But it may also be true in terms of emotional travel. If you and your partner have issues you’re working on, those issues may become more in your face during a Merc retro. If you receive a health diagnosis during a Merc retro, get a second and third opinion. The same thing goes for insurance claims.

You’ve probably already had some hints about events during this Merc retro. I found that some emails were never received, that I had questions about a contract, that appliances needed repairing – our fridge, the pool vacuum cleaner, our AC.

And, full disclosure here, I still haven’t finished my holiday shopping and will probably end up in that long return line on December 26!

 

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An Ancient Manuscript Continues to Baffle

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Trish and Rob


In Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there’s an ancient text, bound in vellum, that’s catalogued under the call number MS 408. It’s unique in that no one can translate it because the hand-written script is either a code or an unknown language.

It’s known as the Voynich Manuscript, named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. The manuscript was carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404-1438) and originated in Central Europe, possibly northern Italy. Besides the unusual script, it features drawings of flora, astrological charts and naked women lounging in pools of green water. From the images alone, we might assume, or at least suspect, that the manuscript is a secret text for women’s health involving herbal remedies. But why secret? Maybe it’s about herbal concoctions for preventing or aborting pregnancy, issues that remain hot-button topics today, at least for some people.

I read about this manuscript years ago and remember that cryptographers had studied it for decades, but it remained an unsolved mystery. I was reminded of the manuscript recently when I noticed a You Tube video by Terrence McKenna about it. McKenna, who died in 2000, thought that the 270-page manuscript was written by the Elizabethan mystic John Dee. Dee, who was the queen’s astrologer, was known to have written at least one other coded script and he lived in the decades when the manuscript was created. However, he didn’t live in Central Europe where the manuscript supposedly originated.

After taking a brief look at McKenna’s commentary, I did an internet search for the Voynich Manuscript and was surprised to find that there was new and recently published research about it. In fact, The Atlantic had published an article in September 2017–a couple of months ago—and supposedly a scholar had finally solved the enigmatic script.

The Atlantic’s article describes the manuscript as being “…full of astrological charts, strange plants, naked ladies bathing in green liquid, and, most famously, an indecipherable script that has eluded cryptographers to this day.

It was based on another article that came out the same week, published in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement as its cover story – a “solution” for the Voynich manuscript.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/

The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women’s-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes. But is this really a solution or is it deciphering by way of the illustrations, as I mentioned?

Apparently, Gibbs was able to translate a couple of lines near the beginning. But medieval scholars, cryptographers and amateur sleuths, interestingly, were not impressed. They’ve seen it before with earlier failed attempts to solve the mystery.

“The summary in the TLS is really too short to provide any serious analysis,” René Zandbergen wrote in an email to The Atlantic. Zandbergen  is a long-time researcher of the manuscript and runs a web site, Voynich.nu. Scholars say that not much is new in the  TLS article and what is new appears to be incorrect.

When Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, was a doctoral student at Yale—where the Voynich Manuscript is housed—she read dozens of theories as part of her job. “If they (the Times Literary Supplement) had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat,” she told The Atlantic. 

As with all good mysteries, the Voynich Manuscript remains an enigma after 500 years, and so we still don’t know what exactly those naked women were doing in the green waters.

 

 

 

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Becoming Supernatural

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Trish and Rob

I was first introduced to Joe Dispenza with his book You Are the Placebo, where he, a former chiropractor, talks about the triathlon accident that broke his spine. He was just 23 years old. Rather than opting for surgery, which was strongly recommended by his doctors – you’ll be paralyzed without the surgery, you must have this surgery, you’re crazy not to have the surgery- Dispenza spent 10 weeks on a friend’s couch, meditating his way back to health.

This kind of claim is similar to that of Louise Hay. In her book, You Can Heal Your Life, she recounts her diagnosis of vaginal cancer, and because she didn’t have insurance at the time, she set out to heal herself. With the royalties she earned from the sale of millions of books, Hay went on to establish Hay House in 1984, when she was 58 years old. The publishing house is now the largest publisher of alternative thought books on the planet. Not surprisingly, Hay House publishes Dispenza’s books, and his newest, Becoming Supernatural, is a gem.

Up front, right away, before I get into the good stuff, I’m annoyed that he continually calls himself Dr. Joe Dispenza. He’s not a doctor, not a physician. But as a chiropractor, he knew the spine, could see it in his head, and healed himself of an injury that would leave most of us paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Since that experience, Dispenza has done his homework, his studies, conducts group workshops and seminars, retreats, and has used science to back up his findings.

Becoming Supernatural has stories of healings, of tragedies pivoting into successes that are astounding. He provides a variety of techniques and meditations and one of them is mind movies, an interactive vision board. It involves meditation and visual depictions of the future you desire. I recently recommended it to a friend diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m using it, Megan’s using it.

My former problem with vision boards and affirmations was that it was two-dimensional. Without emotion and that popping out feeling, these images were just a wish board. Mind movies changes all that.

Started by Australians Natalie and Glenn Ledwell, mind movies is a digital vision board that you create from your own photos, affirmations, and your own choice of music. You can use the websites library of images or stuff from their music library, but the more personal the image is, the more powerful it becomes. The idea here is that mid movies, along with the meditations Dispenza provides, are a way to rewire the neurology of the brain. As Dispenza says, the purpose of a mind movie is to remind us that we can “accomplish our dreams, create the uncommon, and become supernatural.”

The four goals of this personalized movie are to:

Get clear on the intention you want to create in your future

Program your conscious mind, as well as your unconscious mind, into that new future

Change the brain and body to biologically look like the future has already happened

Repeatedly associate the pictures, images, and music to create “new neural networks in the brain and to emotionally recondition the body to a new mind.” It’s a way for us to remember the future.

In his workshops and retreats, Dispenza uses the mind movies and various types of meditations to help participants create the futures they desire.

For anyone familiar with the law of attraction, Becoming Supernatural is something you won’t want to miss!

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Pluto in Capricorn

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Mundane astrologers take charts like this one, of the birth of the U.S., and make predictions about it. They use various techniques – transits, the daily motion of the planets; progressions, where the natal sun is brought forward in time; and solar returns, where the sun is returned to where it was at birth. I’m not a mundane astrologer. However, if this chart belonged to one of my clients – who would have to be really old! – I would be alarmed.

Here’s why. First, over there on the right side of the inner chart, see all those planets and points in Cancer? (69)

Cancer is a nurturing sign, mother earth, her arms are thrown open and she’s welcoming all who come here.

All? What’s that mean?

Well, look at the sign on her ascendant – – the arrow to the left of that horizontal line that cuts through the middle of the circle. That arrow represents the sign of Sagittarius – foreign people, cultures, philosophies, worldviews. In other words, those planets in the sign of Cancer welcome immigrants.

When Pluto entered Capricorn in late November 2008, I shuddered. Pluto –  that odd trident with a circle in the middle of it in the 2nd house)   a powerhouse that exposes the dark underbelly of what’s hidden, the power structure, the underworld, death and sex and taxes – sounds like Woody Allen, right? And Capricorn is about ambition, power. We had a financial meltdown and housing crisis and the way the government solved it was by bailing out the banks – not the people.

In the outer circle, you can see transiting Pluto at 17 degrees Capricorn in the 2nd house, and the natal Pluto in the inner circle at 27 degrees Capricorn in the same house. The U.S. chart is going to experience its first Pluto return, which happens every 244 years.

For the U.S. natal chart, that means that between the years of 2020 and 2022, things in this fragile experiment called democracy are going to be really dicey. This Pluto return  isn’t necessarily an aspect of war,  but it certainly challenges the existing authority of government, how it’s structured, what it hides, its power machine, its power figures, and what it means to be a democracy.

The conjunction is exact in early February 2022, two years into the next presidency of whoever succeeds trump. But because Pluto moves so slowly, we’re already experiencing some of the effects. The dark underbelly of power is being exposed in sex scandals, in a president who is incapable of telling the truth,  tweets his policies in the dark of night, and attacks everyone who criticizes him. We see how  the internet and social media are empowering the people. As one MSNBC commentator said recently, “Thanks to social media, we the people don’t have to wait for congress to act. The #metoo hashtag powered a movement.”

It’s as if the people, the masses, are now challenging the authority and claiming the daily headlines. It’s tougher to pull off shadowy moves when you’re monitored 24/7. Take the tax bill the house just approved- and yes, taxes fall under Pluto’s jurisdiction – supposedly for the middle class. Despite the spin about how wonderful this is for the middle class, people who make between $10,000-75,000 are the ones who are hit. They lose most of their deductions to the one percent, to the corporations, the uber wealthy. Trump himself will save millions.

That said, the voices of the people may be silenced when the FCC votes in mid-December on overturning net neutrality. There’s nothing good in this repeal for the people. As NBC news put it:

“Try this scenario on for size: You wake up, reach for your phone, and head to your favorite news site to check the headlines. But instead of the latest news, you see a message from your cell phone carrier: “This site is not available. Please upgrade to our deluxe package to access it.”

“Since you’re broke and can’t upgrade your plan, you head to social media to find out what’s going on in the world. On this platform, however, your feed takes forever to load because your carrier doesn’t have a special “Fast Lane” deal with your preferred app. Growing frustrated, you try to search for alternatives to your phone company online, only to be met with a “This site has been blocked,” pop-up in your browser.”

This move is right in line with the approaching Pluto return in the U.S. natal chart. An attempt by the powers that be to silence all those irritating dissenters.

So even though I see these next years in either/or, black/white contrasts, there’s some light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I think we’ll emerge from this as a stronger country, with a clearer sense of who we are as a collective and as individuals within that collective. In March 2023, Pluto enters Aquarius, the sign of the rebel, visionary, of the collective called humanity, the one who thinks so far outside the box that I believe this is probably the true beginning of the age of Aquarius.

Thousand years of peace, promises a spiritual text.

Well, we’ll see. I’ll be well into my 70s by  then. Our daughter will be 34. The future will lie in the hands of her generation, the millennials, whose first voting experience brought Obama into the white house.

 

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Thanksgiving

Posted on November 23, 2017 by Trish and Rob

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our U.S. friends and happy Thursday to everyone else.

Thanksgiving is one of those cool holidays when families get together to celebrate everything for which they’re grateful. It means a central meal supposedly similar to what the pilgrims ate – turkeys, potatoes, beans…. For us, it means that our daughter comes home with her dog and cat – Nika and Piper – and any dog she’s watching for the holidays comes with her and we enjoy a four-day weekend together.  That’s the case this Thanksgiving.

We have 4 dogs and 3 cats in the house and, tomorrow, the couple who are coming over to celebrate Thanksgiving with us, are bringing their 2 dogs. So, dogs rule. Here they are:

Nika and Noah,  chilling with us

the visiting dog, Mischief

Nigel talking to Megan

May we all count our blessings for the beauty in our lives!

 

 

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Sex and the Trickster

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Since mid-October, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the hash tag #metoo was started, the sexual allegations against powerful men has proliferated beyond anything anyone imagined. Here’s an incomplete list from the NY Times:

 Weinstein

Spacey

Russell Simmons

Glenn Thrush

Charlie Rose

Al Franken

Steve Jurvetson

Eddie Berganza

Andrew Kreisberg

Louis C.K.

Roy Moore

Benjamin Genocchio

Jeffrey Tambor

Ed Westwick

David Guillod

John Conyers

An incomplete list, as I said. If you don’t know who they are, Google them. But where is trump?

The Access Hollywood tape made it clear he belongs in this group. So, what we have socially is a big problem with how men view women as objects they can touch or grope or whatever just because they can. What we have is a serial abuser in the white house, a pedophile running for the Alabama senate seat (Roy Moore) and a spectrum of prominent men in the news, entertainment, and political businesses. And yet, trump doesn’t denounce his republican perverts, his republican pedophiles.

The repugs, after all, need votes in congress to pass a massive tax bill that will increase taxes on those people making between $10,000 and $75,000, and give tax breaks to everyone above that 75K marker. In other words, the poor and the middle class are getting screwed.

They place policy above pedophilia. How’s that for a party mantra?

There are moments in this unfolding horror that are almost comical – like when Kellyanne Conway appears on Fox and tries to explain why the white house hasn’t distanced itself from pedophile Roy Moore – we need the votes for tax reform. Then there are the more sobering moments, like the second allegation against Al Franken, one of my favorite senators. But hey, I’m sorry, he squeezed my butt isn’t quite the same thing as I was 14 years old when Ray Moore… fill in the blanks.

But mostly, all of this says we’re a country in the throes of a moral dilemma. Our president, after all, has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual harassment…and then there’s that Hollywood Access tape where he admits to being a serial sexual predator.

So here we are, more than a year into trump’s election to the presidency, and what we’ve learned is that the guy who claims to be the art of the deal hasn’t solidified a single deal. His tweets in the dead of night have upped the ante for war with North Korea, have alienated most of our allies, and have made it clear that he still can’t believe that he didn’t win the popular vote.

We no longer live in a multiple choice world. We don’t have the luxury. Climate change deniers, tax breaks for the uber wealthy, pedophiles running for the senate: who the hell are we these days? As a nation, a people, a collective consciousness?

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A Really, Really Old Guy

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Trish and Rob

When a Chinese herbalist named Li Ching-Yuen died in 1933, his obituary appeared in newspapers around the world. He claimed that he was 197 years old. But was he really that old? In 1930, when Li said he was 194, Professor Wu Chung-chief, dean of the department of Education in Minkuo University, decided to investigate Li’s claim. What he discovered was shocking.

Li was not born in 1736. He was actually born—according to government records—in 1677, making him 256 years old at the time of his death. He also found out that the Imperial Chinese Government had congratulated him on his 150th and 200th birthday.

We might wonder how Li could’ve forgotten his birthday, but I guess if you’re over 200 years old a lapse of memory is probably more likely than not.

Li attributed his longevity to peace of mind and that it was his belief that everyone could live at least a century by attaining inward calm. “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, sleep like a dog.”

A correspondent of The New York Times wrote in 1928 that many of the oldest men in Li’s neighborhood asserted their grandfathers knew him as boys and that he was then a grown man.

According to the generally accepted tales told in his province. Li was able to read and write as a child, and by his tenth birthday had traveled in Kansu, Shansi, Tibet, Annam, Siam and Manchuria gathering herbs. For the first hundred years he continued at this occupation. Then he switched to selling herbs gathered by others.

According to one version of Li’s married life, he outlived 23 wives and was living with his 24th a woman ‘of 60’ at the time of his death. Another account, which in 1928 credited him with 180 living descendants, comprising eleven generations, recorded only fourteen marriages. This second authority said his eyesight was good; also, that the finger nails of his right hand were very long, “and long for a Chinese might mean longer than any finger nails ever dreamed of in the United States.”

So how well did Li age? The Times correspondent wrote that “many who have seen him recently declare that his facial appearance is no different from that of persons two centuries his junior.”

 

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Your Inner Trickster

Posted on November 18, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Trickster as an archetype can be animal or human, male or female, and is found throughout the mythology and folklore of all cultures. From the Native American coyote to the court jester and clown, from Kokopelli, Loki, Tezcatlipoca, Saci, Edshu to and others, the trickster across cultures share similar characteristics. He’s playful but sometimes mean, sympathetic, outrageous and humorous because he does things outside of the boundaries of what society considers accepted behavior.

“Tricksters relish the disruption of the status quo, turning the ordinary world into chaos with their quick turns of phrase and physical antics,” wrote Joseph Campbell. “Although they may not change during the course of their journeys, their world and its inhabitants are transformed by their antics. The Trickster uses laughter to make characters see the absurdity of the situation, and perhaps force a change.”

An inner trickster essentially does the same thing. And we’ve all got one.

It lurks in the shadows of our lives, urging us to try the outrageous, to do the totally insane thing that terrifies us, to embrace anything and everything outside our comfort zones. This inner trickster is the irritating voice that speaks to us as we wake up, as we fall asleep, as we dream and enter the timeless archetypal realm where we are confronted with our genuine selves – even if we don’t recognize that self as genuine.

In recent memory, my inner trickster had a field day on a trip to Costa Rica. Rob, Megan and I had decided to go zip lining and drove to a spot recommended by the manager of the place where we were staying. As soon as I saw the arrangement of lines, the harness I would wear, and how the pulleys would connect to my harness, I had second thoughts. I would be 30 feet or more above the ground, facing the ground, and zipping along at a swift clip. It seemed like an invitation to vertigo, nausea, and crippling fear. So I decided not to do it.

Rob and Megan went ahead and I spent three hours talking to a pregnant woman from Spain. It was a great conversation and I got to practice my Spanish, but… I went out to the “landing” area where Megan and Rob eventually coasted in and they looked so excited and thrilled to have zip lined that I regretted my decision. My inner trickster kept laughing that I had backed out. Who in their right mind would pass up an opportunity for a zip lining adventure in Costa Rica? When did you become such a chickenshit? What could possibly go wrong?

 Well, a lot of things. Like, the lines could break and I would plummet to my death. Stuff like that.

My inner trickster got a big kick out of that. Yeah, sure, it might happen. You might also get bitten by a rabid monkey when you traipse around in the forests here.

 Okay, okay. The trickster had made her point. Two days later, we returned to the zip lining place. This time, I put on a harness and a helmet, made sure I didn’t have to face the ground,  and off I went, flying above landscape so stunningly beautiful and dramatic that parts of the experience were almost dreamlike. And at the end, my inner trickster applauded. That’s me in the photo above. Proof!

Sometimes, this inner trickster assumes the role of a muse, nudging me to try writing something different than what I’ve done before. When I shake my head and hurl up resistance – essentially arguing for my limitations (fear) – I get laughed out of my office. The trickster/muse keeps bugging me, tossing synchronicities in my path until I can’t ignore the signs anymore. That’s what happened with Skin Shifters.

 After our trip to Cuba in February, I sat down one morning and wrote a brief synopsis of the book: The discovery of an alien body on the island of Tango Key, Florida ultimately reveals that a planetary invasion is underway. The aliens have a unique weapon: they’re morphing people into beings like themselves and assuming their physical forms.

 The final scenes in Skin Shifters take place on this tobacco farm in Viñales, Cuba.

 

The manuscript has been submitted to several publishers. Here’s the prologue.

PROLOGUE SKIN SHIFTERS

So, I’ve grown to like my inner trickster. She encourages me to take risks, to explore new creative areas, to confront my fears- and banish them.

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Stephen King

Posted on November 16, 2017 by Trish and Rob

At some point in the 1970s, I was teaching English at a private school in Vero Beach. The pay was terrible, but I lived within a block of the beach and I liked most of the kids I taught.

One day, a student in my eighth grade English class, Brian, cornered me during lunch and handed me a book. “Ms. Trish, you gotta read this. It’s the best book I’ve ever read and since you’re a writer, too, I think you’re going to love this.”

At that point in my life, my writing consisted mostly of depressing poetry. The book was The Shining by Stephen King. I read it over a weekend and on the following Monday, brought it to school and returned it to Brian. “Fantastic. This afternoon, I’m heading over to Vero Beach Bookstore to buy whatever else this guy has written.”

“Carrie and Salem’s ‘Lot,” Brian said.

And that’s how my love of Stephen King books began. With an eighth grader. In the years since, as King has continued to write and write and write, I’ve bought and read, bought and read. And bought and read and written my own books. People who dislike King’s “horror,” love his other books, like The Green Mile, Firestarter, The Running Man… Thing is, King was never a genre writer, never just a horror writer. He’s a storyteller.

 In Your Creative Stars, an astrology book I wrote on creativity, I used King’s chart for Virgo. His gift for detail, for engaging all our senses, our emotions: that’s Virgo. His moon in Sagittarius in the fifth house of creativity is why we are treated to other worlds – his Dark Towers series, for instance. That moon is also why he always gives us the larger emotional picture of his characters. The moon rules our emotions, Sagittarius rules the big picture, foreign travel – and publishing. His Cancer rising, with Mars closely conjunct, suggests a nurturing quality as a human being. Both of his sons- Joe Hill and Owen King – are writers.

At some point in the 1990s, Megan and I drove to one of the Miami Book fairs. We got lost, had trouble finding parking, but when we finally got out of the car – there was Stephen King, about 300 yards away, talking to someone. He’d just gotten out of a car – limo? – still parked at the curb.

“Oh my God, Mom,” Megan burst out. “It’s him. Go over there, tell him how much you love his books.”

Yeah, sure, Megan. This is the guy who wrote Misery, about an overzealous fan. We just stood there, staring, and later went to his talk. Megan is now an avid consumer of anything King and is writing her own novel. That’s the thing with King. For anyone with aspirations or talent for writing, start with King. He’s how I learned to write. He taught me about back stories, the inner worlds of characters, and that it’s okay to tackle the weird and the strange if your characters are emotionally real.

When The Dark Tower movie came out and got such awful reviews, Megan and I saw it and loved it. We left the theater marveling at the whole thing. We figured the negatives had come from avid fans of the books who wanted, well, the depth that writing provides.

I follow him on Twitter and get a kick out of his comments about trump. When trump blocked him, I was nearly hysterical with glee. When JK Rowling told King not to worry, that trump hadn’t blocked her yet and she had King’s back, I texted Megan, who had already seen it.

Recently, our friend Dwane Elmore was flying back from Oklahoma and had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was sitting at the bar and realized that the man standing next to him, talking to the bartender about terrible trump, was none other than Stephen King.

Dwane sat there quietly, sipping his martini, listening. After King left, Dwane asked the waitress if she knew who that man was. “Some Hollywood celebrity,” the bartender replied.

Uh, lady, that was Stephen King.

Cultural and literary icon.

I’m so envious of Dwane. I would love to spend hours talking to King, but would settle for a minute or two or politics, books, writing.

Thank you, again, Stephen King, for hours and hours of pleasurable reading!

 

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