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Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005

THE SUN IS in Scorpio. We are in a 30-day phase of the solar cycle where we can ask some of the deepest questions about life, or where they will ask themselves. As just about everyone knows, Scorpio is the sign that deals with the mysteries of sex and death. We could just as easily say "birth and death" but we would miss an important point -- birth and thus life itself is the result of sex.

Every now and then I get an email from someone who has delved into the sex-related articles on Planet Waves, and they ask: is it possible to avoid the whole sex issue? This is an earnest question. And my basic response is: I don't think it is possible. It is true that religious systems attempt to offer us a life that is supposedly free from the burdens of our sexuality. In the Christian mythology, it is noteworthy that God is born "without sex." Most religious systems make concrete prescriptions about what we should and should not do, and suggest that there are actual domains of right and wrong, but never saying, "It's best to do what is right for you."

There are reasons for this, and most of them involve a very large pile of gold, much of which was collected from the selling of indulgences, that is, sin permits signed by the pope -- one of the darkest moments in Roman Catholic history, which prompted the Reformation.

In Scorpio, the questions of sex and death come up as one subject: existence.

It's extremely interesting, to the point of being funny if you like gallows humor, the extent to which we usually avoid the question of existence. If you ask the questions, people are liable to think you're weird. I have a friend Neal, who is known to ask the questions. For a long time he was involved in his church, I think it was Episcopalian, and he was the one pushing the envelope, that is, attempting to have the real discussions about life and death that you would hope would be inherent in a spiritual community.

One day someone said to him (I must paraphrase), "You speak with the awareness of someone who is dying of cancer."

As if the only people who would typically think about existence are those who are aware that it might vanish.

I was watching BBC World last night, and they've got a program running about humans colonizing the rest of the solar system. The program began with the premise that some day an asteroid or meteorite is going to hit the planet and wipe out life; it's a question of when, not if. One of the space scientists said, the chances are it will be in some faraway time like 80 million years, but it could be a week from next Tuesday. They gave a brief tour of well known meteorite craters and showed pictures of the Tunguska Event, a 1908 atmospheric entry of some kind that wiped out a huge swath of the Siberian forest.

The solution to this problem, the program proposed, was to colonize Mars. They suggested that since Mars is kind of dry and not quite what humans need, we could do some "terraforming" -- that is, making the atmosphere and surface habitable by artificial means, including pumping a lot of greenhouse gas into the environment, to warm the planet up, and melt the ice caps and free up some water; then send some algae (Fed Ex, I guess) -- and then move things along by planting...lots of...yes...TREES! Why? Because trees produce oxygen. Then, eventually, we could live there. And the first thing I thought was: Gee whiz, why don't we plant some trees on Earth? We could sure use a little oxygen here.

They also suggested that when the Sun went nova, another inevitability we need to worry about (1 billion years and 21 days off) we could colonize one or more of the moons of a gas giant planet, such as Europa (conveniently located near Jupiter) or Titan (just a hop and jump from Saturn). If we went to Titan, we could live in little capsules, in colonies, underneath the methane oceans on that "proto Earth."

And of course the first thing I thought of was: Gee double whiz, I could write some interesting erotic science fiction about that.

Aside note: the program was sponsored by Duracell. The real question is, once our current planet is smothered in batteries and the toxic waste created in making them, where are we going to go to make batteries next?

Rather than go to Titan and living in a sea of grease, it would seem simpler to a) take care of our world and b) accept the fact that the totality of what we see as existence, on this planet and plane of reality, is transient, temporary (that is, a product of time), and subject to change. We surely seem to be doing our part to aid and abet the process in the most dangerous ways, however.

The notion of individual death, in this context, becomes the greatest question we do not face. I believe that all discussions of the "end of the world" are some form of the projection of the fear of individual death. And in not really facing either question at all, we transfer a lot of the energy and subject matter to sex, which we typically confuse with death and think of as being as threatening as death.

There is a relationship: as the beach ball sitting on top of the file cabinet near the entrance to the Seattle Wet Spot (a kind of sex coop) used to say, "Sex Changes Everything." We often confuse change and death. And often, the specter of death puts a puppet on its hand and shows up in our relationships as jealousy -- and just as often, as experiencing the changes of another person a fear level associated with individual death. In other words, I've heard about as many stories of people getting jealous that their lover likes someone else as I have heard that someone in the relationship gets jealous because someone wants to go back to school.

Sex is inherently part of the process of change, and of exchange. And if I dare say so, from 41 years of living, 10 of them spent covering death (journalism) and 10 spent covering life, change as such, and hearing stories about everything (astrology) -- generally change is the thing that we just don't want to consciously embrace. But every now and then, we do, and usually, it's really good.

It would, of course, help a whole lot if we cooperated with one another; if one of the primary commitments in our relationships became, "I will help you change in the ways you want to change, or least least be supportive, or at the very least, get out of your way." As I write, I know: this is scary territory. And I also know: not so many people are giving it away free. But in honor of the Sun entering Scorpio, I would propose we celebrate by doing this: ask your partner, if you have one, and a friend or family member if you happen not to, the ways they are trying to change that are the most important to them. See what response you get. Ask how you can be supportive.

Here is a link on the Tunguska incident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

Here is more in Titan.
http://www.nineplanets.org/titan.html

Here is one of the best articles on jealousy I've ever read.
http://www.planetwaves.net/abyss.html