Saturday/Sunday August 5-6, 2006 | Meat and Cyber, Saturn and Neptune I'VE BEEN entertaining Planet Waves Weekly readers the past month with my metaphors and messages from the rapidly developing Saturn-Neptune opposition. It seems to be the ultimate encounter between 'fantasy' and 'reality'. Along this thread, I've been rambling a bit about weaving Meatspace and Cyberspace, the first term being a hacker/gamer word for the physical world. We all know what Cyberspace is. Right? Since around 1995, I've pretty much merged my identity, soul, working life and much of my social life with the Internet. That was round the same time I pulled in quite a ways from the affairs of the world, quit investigative reporting as a career, and started buying astrology books from this Aquarius guy out in California who always has a lot to say and handed me exactly six of the 12 necessary things you need to be an astrologer. Let's call him Raj. This was also around the same time when my old friend Allan Rousselle, with whom I have an exact Mercury-Mercury conjunction in Pisces, said, "You need to be on the Internet." Ah yes, many years of enduring Allan's horrible jokes made up for in seven little words. No, seriously, Allan is extremely funny. I even remember a poem he wrote nearly 25 years ago:    Why is it he's done the things he's done, and said the things he's said?     Could it be when he was young, they dropped him on his head? Okay Allan is an Aries, which covers the subject matter of 'head', and he was 15 when he wrote this, the day he snuck onto the staff of Generation (a kind of student magazine precursor to Planet Waves at SUNY Buffalo, still consuming paper and ink regularly) with a university ID card that they gave him because he could do math really well. I have no fucking idea why we checked his campus ID card. In fact, I am inclined to think that he showed us his ID voluntarily so that we would believe he was really a student; he knew how old, or rather, young he was; we did not. I can almost see the scene, him taking it out of his pocket with the approximate gesture of, 'Look, really'. Anyway, he is the guy who years later told me to get online, which I assumed meant get an email address. This I did, buying a Mac laptop and signing up for both AOL and a local ISP called MHV.net around the same time. I do remember the feeling of diving into AOL, a strange little world where anything felt possible, and a kind of consciousness opening up. From the first moments, I felt like I was inside an environment, and one in which I had a sense of my own presence. I noticed early that you could declare yourself anyone you wanted, within reason, and so could everyone else. And that any subject was available. I got into some chats so hot I can still feel them. In my particular experience, the Network had a psychic resonance. I saw that it was a first cousin of energetic communication, and the contacts with people I met seemed to mirror, more or less, on another level at the same time. There were a lot of people out there, located in all kinds of weird places, but the thing seemed to be a dimension suspended above or inside the Earth were you were, oddly, removed from the world's activities. It felt possible to go very deep into this space, and go anywhere, any time. Very early in the morning local time, in New York, seemed to bring particularly rich contact with people. That winter was one of the rare drifting, floaty moments of my life, where I had no specific direction for a while. I lived in the woods with my cats, so that feeling of discovering cyberspace is mingled with the forest and the clarity of those cold nights with Mars shining high in the sky every night, and glowing Venus appearing in my window before dawn every day. I was plunging into the Net at the same time I was diving into the concepts, mystery and environment of astrological thought. I was getting to understand my chart for the first time, I could move through the ephemeris, and Patric Walker was still writing his column. Behind my house was a forest. The building I lived in was once a mule barn for the Norton Cement Works that had been there about 100 years earlier, and the land was full of mine shafts where argillaceous limestone was blasted and carted out of the ground to build things like the Brooklyn Bridge and the wings of the Capitol Building in DC. There were, and still are, cement kilns everywhere, 20 feet high, nestled into countless hillsides. At this point I spent a lot of time in a mine I called the Chironian, making fire, roaming the woods, sleeping down there sometimes, and doing what I knew then was getting grounded. The space was there, and it was extremely cozy (if a little chilly, but a fire took care of that), and it was always calling me, so I spent a lot of time about 25 to 150 feet under the ground, the approximate range of choices you have there. And, slowly, I made a new connection to the Earth, anchoring myself, doing a lot of New Moon and Full Moon and sacred aspect rituals. One of the first things I used astrology for, in my first months, was to pick the time of rituals, which seemed an intuitive and useful thing to do with it. So, at that point, I would say there was a true balance of physical space (involving a lot of rock and trees), cyberspace and the idea space (and experience) of astrology. All three environments had a deeply interior feeling, as did my little apartment; in reality, I was doing a lot of opening up inside. I think at that point, I plunged into all those worlds as one simultaneous trip that I still seem to be on. That moment delivered me, with circuitous directness, to the present instant, where I'm sitting somewhere in the middle of Europe late on a Friday night, with two DSL connections coming into my space and three computers running, once again reaching out into the fabric of consciousness, feeling it yield to my thoughts, and weaving in and out of physical experience. I can feel my hands typing, I can see these ideas forming, and I know that in a moment they are going to go from being a local thought pattern known only to me, to a voice that appears anywhere and everywhere in nearly no time, making a sound inside your mind. Suspended between Saturn and Neptune. I think I'll go out for a walk.