Saturday-Sunday, November 5-6, 2005 FEAR SEEMS to be issue #1. This is always the case in the land of swift death and little bliss, but now that the list of things to be terrified about is getting heaped higher and higher, it suddenly dawned on me one day last week, it was Thursday, to raise the question of fear itself, now. I don't think in all my spiritual explorations and planetary wanderings I have ever put it to myself, or felt this reality within myself, in such obvious terms, where I could actually experience the choice as real. I have always just figured that nearly overwhelming fear was a given; that I would always be scared; that I would have to live with it, work around it, and do my best to get by. As we can see from homeopathy, which is an excellent window deeper into our physical and psychic reality, the most vivid mental property of influenza is fear. Fear and flu are synonymous, in homeopathic terms. They contain the same energy signature and the same feeling. The planetary fear level has clearly been rising in the years since September 11, since the Iraq invasion, since the pretense of democracy has been stripped away by a system of government that makes monarchy look fair, and since a series of not so natural disasters have made everyone feel vulnerable that they could be next and nobody can help. The world has never seemed smaller, never more like a little island surrounded by oceans and the mystery of space. Love and fear may be opposites, and on some level they may be mutually exclusive. But they have a strange way of mixing into a truly strange psychic potion that leads us to question whether we're dead or alive -- or worse, to be going through the nightmare of the split/conflict and having the question swim around beneath consciousness. So while you could say the choice is love or fear, the choice can also be stated as the decision to first become aware of the struggle and then as the choice to be alive or not. As far as I can see and feel, this is actually a decision we make -- not a given. And it may be a choice we need to keep making every single day. I have not mentioned lately that we reach the peak of the Mars retrograde over the next 36 hours, as the Sun, Mars and Neptune form an exceedingly close T-square on Monday, with Saturn in Leo making it a grand square covering the fixed signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. This is the basic astrology of the protests now spreading across France and in Argentina, and many other places. This is the astrology that says "something gives." Wake up and focus. Snap out of your trance. Stand up and say your name. Take up your mantle. --- I've got a bonus edition of Planet Waves on hand for anyone who wants it. It's an out-take -- an unused Friday essay. This is what I was writing the Thursday afternoon that all the other political junkies and I were waiting, barely able to breathe, to see if Patrick Fitzgerald was going to close up shop, or whether he was going to close in on the cabal. I could no longer deal with politics, and the stress of this one pending event in government being the one possible indication that there was some vestige of a fair system operating in the United States. The article is called "Cunnilingus and Clover." In the past, I've given my email address and said "send for the issue" and answered them personally, clicking away...but now we have a mini-me in the form of a script that will send it to you all by itself. I was thinking of a way to characterize this article, and cruising along on the Metro tonight, I decided that one way to describe it is the story of a fearless moment. Each fearless moment really does deserve its own story. The setting is the Northwest Herbal Faire, one August afternoon in 2003 in the far-flung corner of the United States, way out on the Western frontier, walking distance to British Columbia. To have this sent to you, please click this link: http://planetwaves.net/button.html Then you'll get a URL with a form on it...enter your email address...the article should come right back. We are using this as an opportunity to test some new programming gadgetry. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for your amazing emails, they have been so clear and to the point and right on and real and a pleasure to get -- you are beautiful and it's an honor to be in contact with you, riding the planet waves.     e PS, a photo from this past spring...these are the same cops who are out in Clichy and many other areas dealing with a very serious uprising...I feel like I know these guys. http://planetwaves.net/contents/bastille12.html