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Astrology is just a big memory association peg board of broad reach and endless possibilities. I started studying it after I had learned to do tarot layouts in my early thirties. I wanted to read tarot as a way to pick up some spending money while I was on the road. It didn't take long to realize that the whole tarot gig was just an ancient framework for finding something interesting to say.
I used the Waite deck because that's what somebody gave me as a harmless gift. Then, I learned that all the occult sciences derived from astrology, and that astrology was the mother of all thought systems in every culture in the world. To me it was the most elaborate system for finding something appropriate to say when I read tarot cards, but when I learned the dynamics of giving reading through channeling I switched from Tarot card to palm reading.
The amazing thing about studying astrology is that I learned it by myself. I had some encouragement from a few people who knew more about it than me for a while. Basically, however, I learned from books. They didn't have an internet of search engines back then. My learning astrology as a self-taught person got weird. It has everything to do with having the Sun-Saturn conjunction and Mercury in Aries.
That's why Saturn in 22° Aries represents the self-made man when it's at a far conjunction with the Sun in 0°, 2" Taurus. My point is that I seemed obsessed by the idea of being able to find interesting things to say to anybody about anything if I had a modicum of information about their native leanings.
Blackness in the South is matriarchal. You can't be an observer of human nature and not notice that. Practically all the black athletes who are celebrating at the end of a successful game call out "We're #1!" and "Thaz fo' my momma!" They play the dirty dozen by declaring the most disgusting "yo momma" jokes, but you better not. You would see it patriarchally and perhaps, with less compassion and understand of the role of momma.
Matriarchal or not, the blacks in the South have a lot in common with the whites and Indians of the South in music. We all got sung to sleep as children to the same lullabies. We all know the ol' timey hymnals and spirituals that were taught in grade school. A lot of counter-indicative things were going on in the Jim Crow culture I was raised to consider the status quo, but I think the music we all practiced give us a certain identity.
I don't claim that what I've observed is true or whether I've started filtering for it, but black people seem a lot friendlier since Obama got elected. I've had black women go outta their way to speak to me just to say hello in passing. The black men a little less so, but I found that if I went outta my way to give them the first nod they picked up on it and spoke back to me in kind. This is very pleasing to me.
On the other hand, when I go to be polite to white people, the men seem eager to be friendly, but the white women for the most part ignore my innocent greetings. They've traded places. It used to be that white women were at least polite and responsive, and the black women were more sulky and reticent. My, my... how the world has changed.
It amazes me that I first remember, then forget what chanting does for me. Chanting has totally become the bel canto voice exercises I learned taking private voice lessons. They're very specific, but loosely organized. I just add and "h" in front of each vowel so that I'm singing "Hay, hee, high, ho, who." I sing whatever songs I remember and replace the words with each of the vowel sounds.
For instance, to sing Jingle Bells I'll sing it maybe five times using the same vowel all the way through the ditty. "Hay, hay, hay... hay hay hay... hay Hay hay hay hay..." Then, "hee, hee, hee... hee, hee, hee... hee, Hee, hee, hee, hee..." After a while when I get a fairly pure vowel sound going I'll lapse into using these sounds to imitate laughing. It's really hard not to do. When that happens, I begin yawning with each new intake of air. Yawning is a classical way of relaxing the body, and proving that laughter is the best medicine.
I don't have to be happy to use this method to relax. It's an excellent preparation for meditation. Once I get warmed up and hitting on all my laughing cylinders I can get a roomful of people laughing with me contagiously without even being amused. Well, at first, but when they get to laughing it makes me happy too.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
