WEEKEND UPDATE | June 16, 2005, by Eric F., Montreal Speaking of the Moon, whenever I go someplace, I feel like I'm on a Moon mission. The technical aspect of packing takes about three hours. Then it takes me about six minutes to make sure I have enough socks and bandanas, two pressed shirts and a sports jacket (nice thing about being a guy -- clothes can be very simple). At the moment I'm getting ready to go Toronto for a teaching gig, clients and a mission or two. I like teaching a lot. A Toronto-based astrology group figured out I would be in Canada and lured me to their town this weekend. But back to packing. Let's see, there are the many battery chargers/power supplies and their respective devices. First things first in the modern world: energy. Batteries and power devices used to be a department; now they are an entire division. Days in advance, my battery of AA batteries is systematically run through the charger, then organized and stowed properly in a special case. There are many devices for many purposes: tape recorder, Maglite(s), iPod, and so on. Power adapters, incuding Europe into US plugs. The US cell phone? Lost...again. Is there a message in that? This process goes on and on. Casette tapes. Camera details: picture cards, lenses, special batteries and special charger. Monopod. Then there are the essential computer cables, in a white nylon bag: Firewire, USB, Ethernet. Computer batteries. OSX repair and startup disks. Essentially, a small, portable office, lacking only a printer and Internet connection. Then there is the medicine bag: homeopathic remedies, basic herbal preparations, colloidal silver, basic allopatahic and first aid stuff: Band Aids, Ventolin (which, fortunately, I need only rarely, and around cats), headache stuff (which I won't take), Benadryl (real emergency stuff -- good for many problems). Pendulum and D-40 gaming dice stashed in homeopathic bag for quick and dirty divination. Then there's the essential astrology and tarot gear: I can never avoid needing ephemerides (those thick planetary tables) in book form; 20th and 21st century, heavy but repeatedly proven necessary. Raphael's Ephemeris for 2005 (very small, used for writing horoscopes). Enough tarot decks to give clients a choice (on this trip, four: Voyager, Crowley, Haindl and Marsailles), and to use in teaching. Worn paperback copy of Esoteric Astrology by Alice A. Bailey. The very basic tools of the trade. A small variety of personal effects. Excellent Jerry Garcia biography by Blair Jackson. Journal. Reporting notebook. Press identification. Travel documents, agenda, cash, business cards, and a few Grateful Dead CDs for good measure. At the end of every trip, I evaluate what I packed that I did not really need. usually, I use just about everything in some form. At times the medicine bag seemed excessive, until I actually, at the moment I needed it, had an obscure homeopathic remedy and antifungal-antibacterial creme from Nelson's Pharmacy in London for a hotel employee in a remote part of Greece who had a festering infection in her finger that was not being attended to. Try finding pyrogenium in a drug store. I limit myself to three bags; two of them are small, including a laptop backpack; the third is fairly small. They are packed densely. But I can see from this that I have an idea that I need to be self-reliant, or that I am the one who's going to be relied upon. This is good therapy material, and it tells a story of my family and maybe of my experience in the Boy Scouts ("Be Prepared"), but it's also a fairly utilitarian approach to life in the surface of a planet where you can never be sure you're going to find a set of tweezers at 3:30 am when you really need it most. Or, my approach is about making sure that in the material sense, I am really at home anywyere, and these days anywhere is everywhere. There is, however, always Gideon's Bible laying around wherever you go. The last hotel I stayed in had a copy of The Teachings of the Buddha (and a huge, as in 5,000 gallon, fish tank in the lobby). Anyway, I'll be in Toronto for about a week -- and I'm well prepared. As for the astrology: the story is simple and complex: the Sun in the last degrees of Gemini while the Moon waxes through Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and then to the early edge of Capricorn to the full phase on the Cancer solstice. The current days are the gathering, spiraling-up approach to the first of two Capricorn Full Moons, covered in this article here: http://planetwaves.net/astrology/capricornfullmoon.html There is still strong energy in the water signs: Uranus in Pisces and Saturn in Cancer, of course, plus Varuna, Mercury and Venus in Cancer and Ceres in Scorpio, along with Pholus and Hylonome. Over the weekend, the Moon sets off a series of grand trine aspects in the water signs -- intense, emotional, really exciting (particularly for us watery types). Then arrives the Sun, making more watery grand trines in the coming weeks. Mars is still close on the Aries Point, approaching an opposition to Jupiter in Libra. The Full Moon is actually a grand cross involving some of the most intense degrees of the horoscope. It comes on fast, it leaves fast, and it takes just about everything to a new level or a new level of awareness. Right now, we are spiraling upward in that direction; the Moon gets brighter by the hour; Chiron and Aquarius are rising as I write. I'll be in touch from Toronto, Ontario. love, e "Blue, blue windows behind the stars Yellow moon on the rise" -- Neil Young