Solid Ground

The Agony of Light

Aquarius and Leo are opposition signs, (meaning they are on opposite sides of the zodiac wheel from each other), and they form a duality of personality.  While the opposites do attract, and while they fare pretty well as couples, they seldom make good working partners, as they have opposite orientations. 

Aquarius (Franklin D Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Abe Lincoln) is a master of substance, and a pawn of form.  They cherish substance and often discount form.  As Presidents they are often elected in times of turmoil and carry the nation through troubled times by their force of will.  They are usually focused and committed to a substantive agenda for the public welfare, and are willing to sacrifice form, like being personally unpopular, to achieve it.  Aquarians have no problems at all bending the rules, if necessary, to achieve their agenda for the public welfare,  such as Reagan with Iran-Contra, or Roosevelt packing the Supreme Court, or Lincoln suspending habeas corpus.)  Things like style, fashion, and accepted social norms, are often lesser concerns for Aquarians, who see these as empty, trivial, fake, and having no real substance, expecially in relation to the greater agenda that they are totally committed to.  The challenge for an Aquarius, is to have enough patience to mix proper form with their substance, and not to totally eschew the normal accepted forms.  Success usually comes when they can channel their substance through accepted forms, and not ignore those forms or lose patience and explode those forms, which they only view as a nuisance holding back real substance.

Leo (Herbert Hoover, Bill Clinton, Benjamin Harrison) is a master of form, and a pawn of substance.  They cherish form, and discount substance.  As presidents they are often elected after times of turmoil when the nation is more stable.  (Interestingly enough, both Harrison and Clinton were elected by less than a majority vote – a triumph of form over substance.)  They usually have no substantive agenda, and are willing to compromise substance for their own popularity and greater form. There are many historical examples of this like Hoover signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Hoover actually opposed, or Hoover endorsing Prohibition to get elected -but drinking nightly at the Belgian Embassy, or Harrison writing reciprocity provisions into the McKinley Tariff to make it more acceptable, or Clinton's endorsement of welfare reform, that he opposed).  Things like style, fashion, and popularity (not substance, facts, and truth) are often of far greater concern for them, because these allow them to glow and shine. (President Coolidge often referred to his ambitious and popular Commerce Secretary, Hoover, as "Wonder Boy."  Harrison was also said to have been 'wonderful.'  It was said of Harrison that when he was on stage, he could easily mesmerize a crowd of 30,000, but that he was terrible at talking to only five people in a back room.  And of course, charming President Clinton is affectionately known as 'Slick Willie.')  The challenge for a Leo is to have enough patience to mix proper substance with their form, and not to be an empty suit of very shiny armor.  Success usually comes when they are willing to limit their form to enhancing substance, and not ignore substance, or lose their grounding in substance, which they only view as a nuisance holding back their greater form.

Anyway, what brought this up?  Me, the Aquarius.   I put some effort into form and did some work on my links to old posts.  Boring, but more organized. (pats self on back)  Ya like ?   Better form for more substance?

PS- this sort of makes me think maybe King Saul was a Leo, and King David was an Aquarius ?

KIVA

I wanted to let you know about Kiva (www.kiva.org), a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world.  You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay their loan, you get your money back.  It’s a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.

Catembe, Maputo, Mozambique.   Abel Albino Dlate is 47 years old. He is married and the father of four children, all of whom are school-age and attend school. In addition to caring for his own children and his wife, he supports his mother plus grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, making a total of 18 people in the family for whom he is responsible.

Abel studied through a basic level of auto-mechanics and was not able to continue because he lost his father very early. He has never moved from this city and always lived here in the city of Maputo. In his free time he likes sports and volleyball. He lives in his own house, inherited from his father.

Abel has been an employee of C.M.O. for 21 years and works from 7am to 3:30pm. He learned his trade in the industrial school of Matola. He has a monthly salary of 2882 meticals. This is his second loan. His dream is to complete the restoration of his home and ask for another loan to construct small rooms to rent in order to add to the family’s income. http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=57641

Mr. Heam Chanseng makes bamboo chicken coops to sell from his house while his wife is a farmer. They have four children and live in Run Choeung Village, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia.  All of their children are young and in school.

Because of the ever increasing cost of living, Heam Chanseng needs to increase his income and he is now asking for a loan to purchase oxen and pigs to breed. He plans to use the remainder of the loan to purchase more bamboo to make coops to sell. The loan will allow him to expand his business and increase the family’s income as well as improving their living conditions. (The picture is of one son of Mr. Chanseng) http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=55994

The Milky Way Galaxy is, conservatively, 100,000 light years wide from one end to the other.    We are near the end of one of the extended spiral arms, on the outskirts of our galaxy.   That means, that if you look at our galactic core, what you see is 50,000 years old by the time you see it.     If you wanted to travel there, and you went at the speed of light, it would take you 50,000 years to get there, if there still exists. . .   A round trip would be 100,000 years, at the speed of light, and you might have trouble finding where our sun has moved to, to return home, if the sun lasts that long.

Or, how about this.  IF the stars origionally exploded from our galactic core, in a faster than light explosion, then the galactic core, and some stars you think you see in the sky, may actually have been previous positions of our own sun, 50K, 40K, 30K, or 20,000 years ago.

Makes me chew gum.

No good ideal ever loses its value.          

That makes some of them worth keeping.

The Sea Turtle

The Niobrara Sea

Eighty five million years ago, long before The Great Ice Age came and locked away vast amounts of water at the poles, the earth was much warmer, and the great Niobrara Sea, also known as The Western Interior Seaway, covered Middle America. Stretching from Utah to Iowa, during the Cretaceous period, this inland sea allowed water travel from the North Pole all the way to the equator, right through the very center of what is now North America. During the age of the dinosaurs, for millions of years, the entire state of Kansas, and most of the surrounding states, lay submerged as the floor of a vast inland sea.

Palm trees, cottonwoods, cedars, giant ferns, and flowering trees lined the fertile coasts and dotted the sporadic rocky islands. In the sky, Pteranodons, hairy winged lizards that resembled giant bats with long pointy beaks and wing-spans as large as two cars, soared above the teeming waters hunting for fish. The Niobrara Sea was full of life. Colonies of Crinoids and Nautiloids swam in pulsating motions among vast shoals of fish. Herds of crab ranged among the swaying reef-building coral, pointy sea urchins, and the thick beds of bottom dwelling clams, some of which grew as big as three foot wide. Giant squid swam and fed in the waters of the Niobrara Sea, among other true sea monsters, like the snake-necked Plesiosaur that grew up to 40 ft long, and the terrifying piranha-jawed Xiphactinus, the largest of all bony fish , that grew up to 20 foot long, and had eyes the size of dinner plates, and the truly terrifying 50 foot long crocodile with fins, called a Mososaur.

‘Cretaceous’ means ‘abounding in chalk’ and while huge dinosaurs walked about on the dry lands of the Cretaceous period, there were also clouds of billions of tiny one-celled golden brown algae, known as ‘calcareous’ algae, with delicate calcium carbonate shells, that floated in the warm wet Niobrara Sea. As these microscopic plants died, their protective shells slowly drifted down like an invisible snow that slowly built up on the sea floor. In parts of Kansas, the Niobrara Sea left chalk deposits 600 feet thick, similar to the more famous white cliffs of Dover, in England. In places where there was more heat and the crushing weight of the deep sea, hundreds of feet of limestone deposits were formed. In other places there are deposits of sandstone, formed from the Cretaceous-era beaches of the great Niobrara Sea. As the Rocky Mountains rose up on the western shores, the Niobrara Sea receded, and eventually disappeared into the Great Plains of the American Midwest.

 United by what they reject, they exist in great mystery, for that which they accept, remains as yet, unknown to them.

Genesis, "origin," the book of beginnings.   It's one of our favorite books.  It is the first book of the Bible.  Men come to this book and they swear that it is about creation, about the flood, about the patriarchs and about racial origins.  And, sadly for them, that might be true.  But, men can easily miss a whole forest because of their focus on its individual trees.  So it is, also, when men are concerned about the things of men, and they look with the eyes of men, too much at the actions of men. 

Here is what I mean, consider this passage from Geneses 3: 8-9:  "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.  And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where are thou?"

Now, typically, a man reads this, and he logs the chronological events of the man; he ate the fruit, he realized he was naked, he sewed leaves together and made clothes, he heard God nearby, and he hid himself.  Da dum, da dum, da dum, it's all as easy as falling down steps, if you don't mind that the focus is completely wrong.

I'm totally serious.  What you are looking at in verse 9 is the actual freakin theme of the whole Bible.  It's our first and maybe most important key to understanding the whole entire thing, but honestly, I'm afraid most people walk right over it like an unmarked gave.  Why? Because our focus is so easily on men, and not God.  That's why.

Check this out.   God knew Adam and his wife had been deceived.  He's God.  He knew what they were doing and where they were at.  Does God blast them to cinders with a righteous thunderbolt? No.  Does God build a wall to keep them out? No.   Does God humiliate them by calling them out in the bright heat of the day and chasing them around the garden with a switch? No.  Does God thunder his displeasure from on high with a loud roar?  No.  Does he send angels to them with cryptic messages or condemnations? No.  

What does God do?   God goes to Adam like a good shepherd in search of his lost sheep, that's what.  God makes himself available. God has timing.  God waits until the cool of the day.  God makes himself small enough to walk around in the garden like a man.  God calls out to Adam in a non-confrontational way for a simple response. That's it folks.  Re-establishing relationship.  That is the genesis, that is the beginning.  That is the theme of the Bible.  The rest of the book is like a song; variations on a theme.  This same tune just repeats in different ways, at different times, in different places, with different people, over and over, through the whole book.   You don't have to be an English major to know that it can be helpful to read a book's 'Forward' and learn the intentions of the author so you can keep them in mind as you progress through the various chapters. . . .

"I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away..."  Ezekiel 34:16

Jesus said: "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." John 10:11

Isaiah's prophecy, seven hundred years earlier: " All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.  He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.  He was taken from prison and from judgement; and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living; for the transgressions of my people was he stricken.  And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.  yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. "  Isaiah 53:6-10

You see, theme and focus are important things.  Is a relationship with God based on a set of rules, or is the relationship the primary focus and the rules simply flow to facilitate that desired theme?  If you've been paying attention, you should be able to answer that.  But if not, the next two 'key' posts should help.       : )