This is Now: Total Eclipse of the Sun

Use this link if you’re listening on an iOS or mobile device.

In the Shadow of the Moon, the exciting new 2017 Midyear Reading by Eric Francis, is now published. Don’t miss this essential guide to the forthcoming eclipse. Order all 12 signs here (recommended), or choose your individual signs.

The first astrology segment of your 2017-18 Leo Birthday Reading by Eric has been published, and the second will follow soon. A powerful solar eclipse is approaching in your sign. Make this dynamic energy work for you — order your birthday reading today.

Dear Friend and Listener:

In tonight’s edition of Planet Waves FM, I survey the world as we approach Monday’s total solar eclipse. However, we also travel back in time to August 1999, when a comparable event was approaching: the infamous grand cross total solar eclipse of Aug. 11 that year.

For many reasons, they are comparable times in history: the anger, the nuclear issues, the influence and impact of the internet.

I read from an article that I published the night before the eclipse, called Flashpoints: The Continuation of Burning Man.

In honor of the Great American Eclipse, we have gracing our program tonight the great American songwriter Bruce Springsteen. All the Boss’s songs tonight are based on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

We also have a special guest tonight: Nadine May Lewis, reading her poem, America is Not Dead.

I read an article by a Planet Waves friend named Cheryl Corson, called The Melting Pot that No Longer Existed is Boiling Over.

Regarding that article on Raw Story, about why some people are the way they are, here’s the link.

Live Webcast of Sunday Night House Concert

We will be doing an invocation of the total eclipse in the form of a house concert streamed live from The Place of the Way in Kingston. This happens Sunday, starting at 7 pm EDT on our Mixlr channel. Until then, we’ll be broadcasting nonstop music by Vision Quest, the Planet Waves house ambient-rock orchestra.

We plan to run this live stream pretty much around the clock, with various things, from music to prior shows to old birthday readings. It’s worth tuning in. The link can always be found on the top right of the Planet Waves FM homepage.

Planet Waves FM is published by the nonprofit Chiron Return. We are funded by your donations. Thank you for your ongoing generosity. Chiron Return also publishes The Gemstone File, and will host the forthcoming class Investigative Reporting from the Kitchen Table. We’ll have more on that class soon.

Thanks for hanging out.

With love,

Eclipses are astrology we can’t deny. If there is a conjunction between Saturn and Uranus, it’s invisible, and while many people may experience changes, only astrologers and their merry bands of readers and students know what’s shappening. Yet when the Sun vanishes, you can be sure that normal activity will come to a stop.

Our busy world will pause, and everyone, from herbicide activists nestled in the hills of Oregon to rock stars in Nashville, will stand in the silent shadow of the cosmic order with the astonishment of small children coursing in their hearts.

This doesn’t happen often, and you can imagine the awesome power of so many people embraced in a kind of simultaneous, captive meditation as everything around them momentarily ceases to be normal. Call it a reality lapse, only it’s one into which the real reality can flow very easily.

In terms of their astrological meaning, eclipses of the Sun follow this image of collective awareness and radical break of continuity. Whether you can see the eclipse does not matter; part of the miracle of astrology is it works anyway. As many of us are discovering personally, eclipses are expanded moments of often uncontrollable, unpredictable change. They also bring the civilization and its communities together, usually through important collective events and the media.

Eclipses are evolutionary gateways, which is another way of saying that when they show up, we do a lot of growing in a short time. Delays are compensated. Old accounts can be wiped clean. While each is unique, eclipses often feel like being shot through a funnel of space-time, and we emerge somewhere different than where we entered. The key to making the best use of them is to move with the energy, not cling to anything or anyone too tightly, and to stay open.

Literally, breathe, communicate, feel, love, observe and receive. Remember your intentions. The sense of panic that sometimes accompanies them yields nicely to awareness and revelation, mental conditions that are more natural than we often realize.