April Forecast: April Promises!

To:	sacranative@yahoo.com
Subject:	Your April Forecast
From:	"Astrology.com Specials"
Date:	Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:41:45 -0800

Dear Peter, April showers may bring May flowers and the blooming promise of romance, but -- astrologically speaking -- this month is almost too hot to handle!Pluto goes retrograde in Capricorn on April 2, focusing your attention on transformation. Mercury enters Aries on April 2, beginning a period of enthusiasm and creativity. Then, lovely Venus follows Mercury into the fiery planet's influence on April 5 -- signaling a time of gallant chivalry and romance. A new Moon follows the first two planet's lead the very same day, bearing new beginnings. Seize onto this dynamic energy -- the month is just starting! Sun Squares Jupiter on April 10, followed by a sextile to Neptune on April 13, when enthusiasm needs to be tempered with practicality. Also on April 10, Mercury forms a T-square with Mars, followed by a square to Jupiter on April 13. These are passionate transits, so think carefully before you speak! Things calm down the following week with Mercury entering Taurus and the Sun transiting into the same sign on April 19. A full Moon in Scorpio brings forth intense emotions. However, strength and passion are rewarded now, due the harmonious aspects of the Sun and Moon to Saturn. Embrace them both! The show is still not over when Venus squares Mars on April 23 -- depending on your birth chart, things might either spice up or there will be trouble. When explosions follow Mars moving opposite Jupiter on April 24, you may feel that you drank a glass of rocket fuel. You will be treading water when Mars moves quincunx to nebulous Neptune on April 28. The month closes on steadier ground, as Venus moves into Taurus on April 30. So how do these transits affect you personally? Discover the answers in your personalized April Forecast. This detailed monthly forecast by renowned astrologer Art Poppe analyzes the effect of each one of these transits on you personally, based on where and how the planets are placed in your individual birth chart. Anticipate the part these celestial movements of the planets play in your life this coming month. Order your personalized April Forecast today! It may be the wisest way you spend $9.99 this month! Sincerely,

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Comment: I am not a slave to astrology or any belief-system. At heart I strive to stay a simple humane man in complex times. I merely stay alert and observe the influences of the Heavens upon Mother Earth! My Sun sign is Scorpio, my Moon sign is Gemini with Leo Rising!
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3-11-08: Comings, Doings and Goings

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My dentist appointment went well yesterday. I need to go again next week for the second part of getting my teeth ready for a crown. A lot of my financial expenses to come will be for my teeth repair and then I have my cataract surgery coming up for my eyes. I need more money in my life in order to move ahead and better position myself to help others.

MS and I have reached a good understanding of each other. I know she wants the lame boyfriend-girlfriend relationship typical of most people in these times, but I cannot relate to that kind of relationships. She reminded me ayer that he mental diagnosis is depression. I suppose major depression and she is SSI pending. Hopefully, she will get into Shelter Plus, a long-term housing program and get her own place. She has become shelterized a bit being so long in the homeless shelter matrix.

As for myself, I am still a single unit, though technically I am still married to Sheila Jarvis from my Mather days, but she left years ago without warning so she has been off the books to me. I still consider myself a free liberated man!

I want to continue working in my present position at the Salvation Army as a Counselor-Caseworker, learn more about communicating and counseling with people and continue to work on my spiritual development. That is my paying job. Then, I have my other non-paying job being a creative writer, where my heart's passion really is!

I figure in all our comings, doings and goings, where will we leave behind that really matters in the vast grand scheme of our lifetimes? Certainly for many they will have children, grandchildren and all that, but as for me I have only had one blood son, Camilo Esteban Lopez, and I have no idea where he is and have not laid eyes on him for decades.

Camilo probably has a lot of bitter resentment against me. I suspect his dearest Mother, my ex-wife Pauline Belen Gonzalez/Lopez, now Pauline Gee, turned him against me, spoke diparaging of me and he must have a lot of regrets about it all. As do I.

Fortunately, I have resolved that contradiction in my mind, relate to the family of humanity and know so many people who are lost, confused and without bearings to help them navigate through life. Thus, for others and for my own sanity I write.

Writing is kind of science. I need to learn how to write with a better flow, as often it comes out kind of sculptured, but I want it to have a smoothness so it all hangs out together in synaptic connections. I love Hemingway's idea of writing one trust sentence.

I have not traversed this planet's surface much. I have spent most my life in this one city Sacramento. In my earlier teenage days I went up and down the California coast sometimes, lived in Phoenix for a few years in the mid-80's and still wants to see a lot of the world before I depart from this Earthly existence. However, I have traveled deep into my mind, my soul and my heart and there have been great revelations therein.

Eventually, I want to re-locate to the Mission District in San Francisco where I believe other adventures and experiences await me. New territories, new situations and surely new loves!

I know a lot of life is about love, pure love without constrictive conditions. As the song goes, it's all about original love. The important thing for me is to help people have courage, the courage of their convictions and gather them together to combat the horrors and horrible ones of connected reality. We must combat evildoers!

The Democratic Party is still going through its primary elections in order to decide who will be its nominee. McCain will be the Republican nominee.

I am still interested in building up the Humane Liberation Party, as a kind of basic experiment. I downplayed it and have held back to date, especially after the tragedy of 911, the creation of the fascist-inspired Homeland Security Department and the general entrenchment of a sinister scientific sophisticated fascist security system inside the United States, along with the fear-induced paranoia of a civilian general population.

Many people are still lost in the concrete jungles of Amerika without any proper political orientation, social education or firm grasp of what is going on in the world and what their historic role is in order to right the wrongs of past injustices. Some of the old veteranos have given up on fighting back, have lost the spirit of resistance and are merely trying to get their piece of the putrid pie with not active compassion for the masses of repressed people.

Here inside the United States we are dealing with a general population that not only is oppressed in varying degrees in the economic class structure, but have also become repressed to the point of having a true fear of freedom a true fear of liberty and what drastic measures must be taken to obtain true liberty!

I will continue to help as I can with my meager resources and great spirit of resistance in order to give a helping hand in the toppling of the great Evil Empire of the United States of Amerika!!!!!

However, it is not just the government that must be transformed, it is also the whole economic system of corporate capitalism and a turning over into a true democratic socialist society. As always, total revolution is the ultimate solution, but we must also in the process endlessly be involved in widespread mass education in order to raise mass consciousness to a higher level of real understanding. Many millions inside the United States are still horribly racists, hate foreigners and are living in a mirage which is actually a real nightmare.

We are the ones we have been waiting for in order to make this a better genuinely humane world for all of us.

I go in late on Tuesdays at the Salvation Army as I have a Housing Workshop this evening at 6 PM.

I will finish writing an article for this weekend to expound on at the CASA Meeting Sunday. Nada mas ahora...

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3-10-08: Be Ye Sober!

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Lunes, Marzo 10, 2008 ~ Life goes on within us and without us. This is the life we live and once we achieve a certain level of higher cosmic consciousness we are the ones who choose how we live of our own free will, just as we consciously create our day as co-creators with the Creator or we fall into social circumstances beyond our immediate control. We create our day as divine winners, not as victimized losers.

Yesterday was a nice day. Miss Marie came by, she urged me to wash and dry my bed linen, especially because she saw Angel the cat on the bed. She does not get along with our four-legged furry cousins and that is a key area where she needs more Spiritual Growth.

We sat and conversed, went for a short walk to the store on such a beautiful day and watched the Conversations With God movie on DVD I ordered from Netflix. All-in-all, we had a nice pleasant placid day.

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Later on, I went on my own to do the CASA 12-Steps Meeting. At the CASA Meeting we discussed Drugs & Cross-Addiction and related issues. We agreed that if one is taking a mind-altering pharmaceutical drug, whether prescribed or not, then one cannot claim any sobriety day if we define sobriety as a physical-biological state.

1 Thessalonians 5:6
Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.

Main Entry: 1so•ber
Pronunciation: \ˈsō-bər\
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): so•ber•er \-bər-ər\; so•ber•est \-b(ə-)rəst\
Etymology: Middle English sobre, from Anglo-French, from Latin sobrius; akin to Latin ebrius drunk
Date: 14th century
1 a: sparing in the use of food and drink : abstemious b: not addicted to intoxicating drink c: not drunk
2: marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor
3: unhurried, calm
4: marked by temperance, moderation, or seriousness [a sober="" candlelight="" vigil=""]
5: subdued in tone or color
6: showing no excessive or extreme qualities of fancy, emotion, or prejudice
synonyms see serious

So we need to define the general terms we use, especially when we have absorbed and incorporated those definitions into our consciousness without really thinking about them but simply because the Big Book, the experts or the nebulous 'they' say so, not from our own private pondering, fathoming and really considering what those terms really mean for us in workable ways.

I relate to the term sobriety in the sense of being serious-minded, which for me includes being sober in the physical sense, especially because we are most in tune with Cosmic Consciousness when we are sober in the fullest sense of the word. I drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and not all I eat is toxic-free. How many of us actually take the time to read the Ingredients in the snack foods and stuff that we eat? What is mind-altering in terms of a drug? I think that a better term would be mind-damaging, as mind altering can be so vague that it loses its meaning.

Nada mas ahora... dentist appointment!

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In Honor of My Mother and the Power of Love: By Norman Soloman

http://www.normansolomon.com/norman_solomon/2008/01/in-honor-of-my.html

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The last time my mother was in a hospital, an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh moved in front of my eyes. “Our mother is the teacher who first teaches us love, the most important subject in life,” he wrote. “Without my mother I could never have known how to love. Thanks to her I can love my neighbors. Thanks to her I can love all living beings. Through her I acquired my first notions of understanding and compassion.”

My mother, Miriam A. Solomon, died on January 20, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the inauguration of a man and a presidential regime that she loathed. Once, several years ago, when I referred to George W. Bush as “an idiot,” she made a correction by pointing out he’s much worse than that; she used the adjective “evil.”

At my parents’ apartment, taped on the front door for a long time, a little poster said: “The America I Believe In Doesn’t Torture People.” The poster was from Amnesty International USA — an organization that my mom wrote many protest letters to dictators for — and it summed up her devotion to human decency rather than counterfeit versions of American democracy.

On Monday, the day after my mom died, the Washington Post that arrived on the apartment doorstep carried a lead editorial under the headline “Martin Luther King Jr.: His Words Are More Relevant Than Ever This Election Year.” But the editorial did not include the word “war” — even while it grandly commented on “the vision of Dr. King” and, of course, quoted from his “I Have a Dream” speech.

My mother was among the hundreds of thousands of civil-rights supporters who gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and heard King’s speech that day in 1963. But unlike the Post’s editorial writers she did not suffer from arrested development in subsequent decades.

She shared in King’s expansive view of essential struggles for human rights during the last few years of his life. And in the decades that followed, she took to heart his denunciations of economic injustice and what he called “the madness of militarism.”

In contrast to the Washington Post — with its fevered editorial support for the war in Vietnam and, a third of a century later, the war in Iraq — my mother was a humanist who cared about human life far more than geopolitical positioning. In October 1967, then a 46-year-old mother of four children, she joined in the large antiwar march to the Pentagon.

She was passionate about the Bill of Rights. In the early 1970s she did extensive volunteer work for the ACLU in defense of the civil liberties of antiwar demonstrators. And for decades she worked to get progressive Democrats elected to office. She was never in the limelight, and she never sought it.

Sometimes she’d tell me about her father, Abe Abramowitz, a socialist who did tireless political work in Brooklyn. As a girl, she went with him to branch meetings of The Workmen’s Circle, where social justice was on the agenda. Once she showed me how he showed her how to quickly seal a lot of envelopes by wetting many flaps all at once with a sponge. Along the way he supported Norman Thomas for president; later on, as circumstances and possibilities shifted, he opted for Franklin Roosevelt.

My mom adored her father, who had a sparkling sense of humor, a love of literature, and — most of all — an overflow of humanistic kindness. He died young, when she was only in her mid-thirties. It must have been a terrible blow to my mother.

My mother did not die young (she was 86), but since then I’ve felt awful waves of sadness. And sometimes I think of people who are mourning loved ones of all ages, due to distinctly unnatural causes. The people dying in Iraq as a consequence of the U.S. war effort. The children in so many countries who lose their lives to the ravages of poverty. The health-care system in the United States that — in the absence of full medical coverage for everyone as a human right — means avoidable death and suffering on a large scale.

In mediaspeak and political discourse, the human toll of corporate domination and the warfare state is routinely abstract. But the results — in true human terms — add rage and more grief on top of grief.

Our own mourning should help us understand and strive to prevent the unspeakable pain of others. And whatever love we have for one person, we should try to apply to the world. I won’t ever be able to talk with my mother again, but I’m sure that she would agree.

After my mother died, I learned about a poem that she wrote long ago — apparently soon after her father passed away. The poem is titled “Bereavement.” Here is how it ends:

More than cherished memories are left
Behind; they leave us — us
To know our duties and our powers
And to carry on without much fuss.

In the crushing grief of the moment, we think of how
vital and good our
loved ones were,
and vow to be worthy of them.

January 31, 2008 in Media Beat column | Permalink

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