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darkemeraldsI had lunch on Wednesday with my old and dear friend Roxanne, who was my supervisor for a short time early in the career from which I'm about to retire. One of the best memories of my working life is of sitting in Rox's office entering stuff in Lotus 1-2-3 on a non-networked Windows PC, and having her turn around and say, "Are you interested in astrology at all?"
Well, this was the 80s, and I'd been seriously studying and practicing astrology for ten years. So yes, I was interested in astrology. It was only a matter of time before Rox and I had installed Matrix Blue*Star, the premiere astrology software of the day, on her computer and were surreptitiously running charts after hours and printing them on her dot-matrix printer.
Rox has gone on to make a very nice post-retirement living as a professional astrologer. I, on the other hand, eventually fell into an atheistic logical non-spiritual materialistic Mr Spock period that, while rational, was dreary as hell and very hard to escape from. Because of logic.
So we had lunch on Wednesday, and Rox brought my horoscope, updated with current transits and progressions. Our conversation revolved around karma and past lives, and she said something that pulled a cord and made a whole bunch of beads form a clear, straight line. "This life for you is about dedication to a single thing: your spiritual growth."
Fast forward a few days and I am absolutely immersed in astrology again, because I want to understand that statement.
It's a marvelous symbolic language--even while I was working on the Enterprise, that aspect of astrology seemed legitimate to me--and I was fluent in it in my 20s and 30s. Re-acquainting myself with it has been wonderfully engrossing. You can make sentences like "Yeah, but the ruler of your twelfth is afflicted and intercepted in the sign it rules so it's not like it's ever going to have a lot to say without help from Jupiter" and the other person actually gets what you mean. It's like the most awesome secret code ever.
Nowadays you don't even need local software--all that stuff is on the web, and there's an Android app that will generate a quickie chart. I've bought a couple of books and have been reading intently for days.
This is fun, and it makes me happy, and removes the dreary sense of purposeless materialism, so it answers to a higher logic. I'm okay with that.
Well, this was the 80s, and I'd been seriously studying and practicing astrology for ten years. So yes, I was interested in astrology. It was only a matter of time before Rox and I had installed Matrix Blue*Star, the premiere astrology software of the day, on her computer and were surreptitiously running charts after hours and printing them on her dot-matrix printer.
Rox has gone on to make a very nice post-retirement living as a professional astrologer. I, on the other hand, eventually fell into an atheistic logical non-spiritual materialistic Mr Spock period that, while rational, was dreary as hell and very hard to escape from. Because of logic.
So we had lunch on Wednesday, and Rox brought my horoscope, updated with current transits and progressions. Our conversation revolved around karma and past lives, and she said something that pulled a cord and made a whole bunch of beads form a clear, straight line. "This life for you is about dedication to a single thing: your spiritual growth."
Fast forward a few days and I am absolutely immersed in astrology again, because I want to understand that statement.
It's a marvelous symbolic language--even while I was working on the Enterprise, that aspect of astrology seemed legitimate to me--and I was fluent in it in my 20s and 30s. Re-acquainting myself with it has been wonderfully engrossing. You can make sentences like "Yeah, but the ruler of your twelfth is afflicted and intercepted in the sign it rules so it's not like it's ever going to have a lot to say without help from Jupiter" and the other person actually gets what you mean. It's like the most awesome secret code ever.
Nowadays you don't even need local software--all that stuff is on the web, and there's an Android app that will generate a quickie chart. I've bought a couple of books and have been reading intently for days.
This is fun, and it makes me happy, and removes the dreary sense of purposeless materialism, so it answers to a higher logic. I'm okay with that.