J is for Jupiter

Jupiter is an important planet in our astrological lives, and along with Saturn forms the "bridge" between the personal planets of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, and the outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. 


Jupiter is the happy-go-lucky, good times planet that rules our spirituality, our ability to expand, and our ability to work with the good fortune we are given in life. A well-placed Jupiter can influence a person's material wealth in a very positive way, while a poorly-placed one may lead a person toward being wasteful or self-indulgent. Jupiter also rules optimism and extravagance. 


Jupiter says "Press on! Explore! See what's out there over the next hill!" Not surprisingly, Jupiter rules Sagittarius, but what many may not know is that Jupiter also impacts Pisces in the sense that Jupiter rules philanthropy and all things religious. 


It take Jupiter about 12 years to make its entire sweep through the entire zodiac, so every 12 years or so, Jupiter will return to the place it was when you were born. This is a good thing; oftentimes a Jupiter return is marked by a re-awakening or life expansion. At 24, for example, many people have completed their first round of college and may be going back for a second, or deciding to get married. 


While Jupiter is considered a "benefic"--an archaic term meaning a positive planet--its energy can also cause problems. If you feel that sense of freedom that Jupiter brings so much that you decide to cross boundaries, then bad things may occur. Too much of a good thing is indeed a negative thing. 


Jupiter is retrograde about 1/3 of the time, and will be in retrograde beginning on October 4 of this year through January 30, 2013, in Gemini. This will be a time to question and re-evaluate your plans for expansion, spirituality, and educational and learning priorities. 


Jupiter rules quite a number of occupations, including:

• Law  
• Lawyers 
• Lawmakers 
• Spirituality and Religion
• Higher Education
• Philosophy and ethics
• Restaurant worker
• Philanthropist
• Entertainment worker (those NOT in the arts who bring fun to others)
• Clothier
•  Banking, especially international banking

Thanks for stopping by! Tune in tomorrow for my "K" post! 

I is for Intuition

Intuition is a very important part of what I do as a tarot reader. It's that inner voice, that sixth sense, that helps me understand what I'm seeing in the cards and interpret it for others. It's really a fantastic gift that I am thankful for every day.

Everyone has intuition; some people choose to embrace it and listen, while others do not. And that's not a value judgment, folks, if you don't use yours. But we ALL have had times when we've said, "I knew I should have [INSERT REST OF SENTENCE HERE]! because we could have avoided something nasty or enjoyed something cool had we decided differently. 

Yes, intuition is part of my professional life as a reader, but it's also a part of who I am. Certainly I don't try to turn it off when I'm not reading! That would be ridiculous! One of the best parts of using intuition in your life is that it will help you make better decisions and understand and accept hard realities. I use it constantly in my professional and personal lives, and it does help me make better decisions. 

Using the cards as much as I do has helped me develop it even more. I'm seeing and sensing more things even before the cards come out when I'm reading. Sometimes I'll even know what cards are coming up next, or if a particular card will make its appearance. 

In any case, many people don't listen to their intuition. They feel that if they feel something they don't want might happen, they don't think about it because that will make it NOT happen. I'm sorry, but you don't have that kind of control over every aspect of your life. 

Let's be clear: Our choices make our future. Anyone who has had any kind of divinatory reading knows this well. This includes not just tarot, but runes, crystal ball, tea leaves, or any other kind of psychic reading. The reader is using their intuition to "see" what may happen in the future, or what has already occurred. No matter what is "seen", it is up to the client to make the best choices for them. The reader's job is not to take responsibility for the actions of the client, but just honestly and compassionately tell them what is coming at this moment in time, with the understanding that the future is dynamic and change is always possible. 

I applied for a job a number of years ago that I really wanted. I was one of the top two candidates, and was confident in the interview. I woke up the next morning with a weird feeling in my stomach, and as much as it pained me, I knew this job was going to the other candidate. Sure enough, that's what happened. And while I was angry and upset about the fact that I didn't get it, knowing it in advance helped me to be calm and chilled when the announcement was made so I could continue to act like a professional in the office that day. I was "Scorpio nuclear angry" but at least I didn't show it. That knowledge was critically important to me. 

Think about it...you get these "feelings", "vibrations", "thoughts"...all the time. They are not all as significant as the one I mentioned earlier, but they can validate your intuitive sense and make you trust it more. And that's what it's all about: Trusting your intuition and acting on it. You're in the supermarket and you stare at the flour for some unknown reason. You decide to buy some and someone in your house needed it. You decide to take a different route to work, and there's an accident on your normal route. You don't feel well on a Friday night and stay home. Had you gone to your normal happy hour spot, your ex-boyfriend you just dumped would have been there trying to patch things up. 

For me recently, it seems my intuition has been coming out on the road. I'll get a sense that there's police activity in the area and then I'll come over the hill and there's a police officer who has pulled someone over. That's happened about four times in the last few days. Yes, it's Easter weekend, and yes, police activity is high, so you could write it off that way. But a few months ago, I was coming home on an early Sunday morning from the gym and was waiting at a light at a deserted intersection. The light was really long and after two minutes of waiting I thought, "You know, I could just go since there's no one around!" Almost immediately, my brain says, "DON'T YOU DARE!" I turn to my right to see a police car sailing through the intersection; had I gone I would have been facing a nasty ticket. 

The bottom line is that you can act like it doesn't exist, but it just DOES. If you choose to embrace it, you'll "see" a lot of things if you give yourself time to develop this gift. Some folks are naturally intuitive, and that's fantastic. But ANYONE can develop this sense. ANYONE. 

If you want to start, keep a notebook with you and jot down any strong feelings you get during the day about things that might happen. Not everything is incredibly significant, but if you sense that it's going to happen, write it down. This is vital: Do not be discouraged if the things you see aren't happening. They have just changed. I often find people doubting their abilities with the tarot because what they saw didn't happen. You have no control over the actions of other people, readers. Know this one well. So what you saw didn't happen because the person's free will intervened. 

It takes time to develop this gift, but the more you notice it, recognize it, and act on it, the more the Universe will say, "Hey, s/he's listening! AWESOME! Let's provide more information!" And then you will start to realize that when you see things you don't like--which does happen, sadly--there will be less of an emotional impact, and you'll start growing to accept your intuition as a vital piece of the puzzle. 

Thanks again for stopping by! Tune in tomorrow for "J". 

H is for Hierophant

The Hierophant is one of the major arcana of the tarot. He's the spiritual teacher with the lesson for you, and I've adopted him as a personal totem. If you've seen my website, www.hierophanttarot.com...umm, yeah, I think that should convince you. LOL.


I guess the main reason that I like the Hierophant so much is that he reminds us that we have a dual role in life as both teacher and student. I am always looking for new ways to expand my mind and bring the spiritual into my everyday life. People in my life often teach me very valuable things, and while I don't believe that everything has a metaphysical/spiritual overtone, I do think there is a lot we can learn from the teachings and examples--good and bad--of others. So while I do have a role as a spiritual leader, I have a responsibility to both them and to myself to be the eternal student.

"The Hierophant" (Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot)

For me, here are a few of the many, many possible divinatory meanings of the Hierophant.

• A spiritual leader or teacher--following one or being one
• The idea of the "traditional"--following a path that has already been tread or doing what has always been done in the past
• "My way or the highway"--the Hierophant may say "Use me as your example" but in the end, the choice to follow is your own
• Education of all kinds, whether in a formal or informal setting
• Any kind of leader or teacher role, especially one that has you showing people "your" way of doing things
• Identifying yourself with a particular group, whether spiritual or not
• Conforming to the group's needs or point of view
• The important question of "What am I supposed to learn about myself from this experience?"

I have a pendant with the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot card image of the Hierophant, and sometimes I'll wear him when I teach or read cards. It's a reminder for me of what my role is, and to act accordingly. They always say "Teachers make the worst students" and in some ways that's true. So when I'm a student these days I try to keep the teacher very much in mind--how would I feel if someone talked over me constantly, or was texting throughout a class, for example? It's a good ego check. 

Personally, I think that teaching high school right out of graduate school was one of the most formative experiences of my life. It really taught me how to lead in a classroom setting, and to call it the school of hard knocks is not a stretch. In addition to the fact that they were teenagers who might have had difficulty staying on task, they critiqued my wardrobe a few times, and made comments about how little money I was making. In other words, you really develop a new appreciation for anyone who is brave enough to face a group of people as a leader, no matter what the setting is. That's definitely a Hierophant experience. 

One other Hierophant experience I can recall is the day that I put on a pentacle for the first time. I had been struggling spiritually for many years, but the day I decided to wholly embrace the Craft was the first day I wore the pentacle. Jen bought me my first one at 13 Magickal Moons just before our Litha ritual, which was the first ritual I ever attended. I knew I had found the path for me. Nowadays, I have quite a few pentacles--and lots of other jewelry as well--and it's very rare to find me not wearing a pentacle. I don't wear it outside my clothes most of the time--it's not necessary to advertise!--but it's there, along with my Head High Priest medallion. 

Thanks again for stopping by! Stay tuned tomorrow for my "I" post! 

G is for Games!

I have always loved games of all kinds. From when I was very young, I wanted to play games; the more complicated they were, the better I liked them! It was difficult sometimes to find people to play with me, because Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders were boring for me probably about the time I was five.

One of the earliest ones I remember was “Enemy Agent”, a board game about spying that was just perfect for my Scorpio-ness. I also loved going to game events at my elementary school; just the sight of all of those games filling tables as far as the eye could see was a thrill for me.

After all these years, I’m still a huge fan of games. Today, I’m here to tell you about some of my favorites.

Let’s start with board games. My favorite board game hands down is Monopoly. It was practically a spiritual experience in my house. My siblings and I would sit down to play, and after a while it became clear that we had to start using tournament rules because inevitably someone would want to change the rules mid-stream. “House rules” in Monopoly are very popular—money for landing on free parking, loaning money to other players, etc.—but they contribute to one of the biggest complaints about the game: That it takes too long to play. Bullshit! Play with the rules included with the set—and no others—and it will take 45-60 minutes to play with four people. And I mean come on…who doesn’t like financially crushing those around you?

I’ve got Monopoly sets from all over the world but one of my most prized possessions is my Franklin Mint Monopoly that I received from my beloved bride as a wedding present. It’s incredibly cool, and it’s not an heirloom: I play on it! It has some wear and tear but a game is to be PLAYED.

Other board games I enjoy include Risk—I have a notebook that I write my blogs in made from an upcycled Risk game board!—Trivial Pursuit, chess, backgammon (thanks to Mr. Connors, my high school chem teacher!), Titan, Axis and Allies, and more recently, the Settlers of Catan.

I also play role-playing games. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since about 1980 or so, and I’ve played most of the versions of it. Right now, I run a 4^th Edition campaign of intrepid adventurers, one of whom is my wife. (Gentlemen, please take note: There are very few things more attractive than a girl gamer! Just saying.) I’ve played a few other RPGs, like Boot Hill and Top Secret, but D&D is the tops in my book.

Once gaming entered the electronic age, I was in heaven. For home systems, I had the Intellivision, Atari 5200, and the Nintendo NES, and just before I left home they bought a Sega. (As I recall, people around my house would say ‘SAY-GAH’ mimicking the announcer’s voice that said it as you turned it on.) I’ve played most of the different consoles available since the mid-1980’s.

I’ve continued on my own enjoying the console gaming experience. I’m an avid Xbox 360 player, but one of the best memories I have is coming home from my honeymoon and Jen and I deciding to buy the Playstation as one of our first joint purchases as a married couple. At least we had our priorities straight. (Jen’s also asked me to mention Skyrim, a swords and spells RPG that was so incredible that I was content to just watch her play for two straight months. Buy that one and kiss your social life goodbye, folks.)

Arcades were and are some of my favorite places. Now they exist in the form of Dave & Busters and DisneyQuest, but I still enjoy them immensely. Some of my old arcade favorites still exist today; I purchase the games on my Xbox and cringe as I see that 100 of them can fit on a normal CD that we have today. We’ve come a long way, because I can even play many of them on my iPad. The Midway Arcade app is a fantastic one; a ton of arcade games from the 1980s in an arcade setting. I mean, who doesn’t want to play Joust and Gauntlet all day long?

Some of my other arcade favorites were Burger Time, Berzerk, Gorf, Tron Deadly Discs, Gauntlet, Frogger, Bagman, Dig Dug, and Front Line.

One other arcade game deserves a mention here, a weird little Atari game called Food Fight. I only found it one arcade ever, the Dream Machine arcade on Nantasket Beach in Hull, MA. Anyway, you’re a kid and you’re pitted against these evil chefs. You take them down my hurling food at them, which can be found all over the board. Your goal is to get to the other side to eat the steadily dripping ice cream cone; each level was a different flavor. I never got past level 3, but this is a game that likely you missed. Maybe I’ll be able to find a version of it someday, but likely it’s gone the way of the 5 ¼ inch floppy disks.

Table top games? You bet. Ping pong. Air hockey. Foozball. A British friend introduced me to Subbuteo, a soccer game in which you flicked plastic players with rounded feet to propel a plastic soccer ball the length of a tabletop field. That game that took some skill, especially playing the goalkeeper, which was on a plastic stick.

And let’s not forget other games you can play on a table: card games. Mille Bornes. Uno. Poker. Rummy. Cribbage. Scat. I even taught myself to play bridge. Sound odd? Bridge is amazingly complicated; I hadn’t actually played it with a real person before my last cruise…I partnered up with a wily 70-something woman who was thrilled to show me the game. She’d come looking for me at the same time each day, and somehow, Jen wasn’t concerned about that at all. :)

Someday I’d love to have a game room with arcade-style machines and a large table space for D&D games. You’ve gotta dream, right?

As you can see by the sheer length of this blog, games were and are a huge part of my life. I often can remember what games I was playing when particular life events occurred. Honestly, I’ll play pretty much any game once.

What are some of your favorites? Leave a comment and let me know. And look on my Pinterest for images of many of the games I've mentioned in this blog! :)

Stay tuned for Monday’s “H” post!

PS: A huge shout out to Maggie, who I met today at 13 Magickal Moons and who’s a fan of the blog. It was great to meet you! :)

F is for France and French Stuff

Bonjour, mes amis! Bienvenue! Today's topic is France and all things French.

I spent my junior year of college in Nantes, a city of about half a million people in western France. It's about two hours by train from Paris if you get the high-speed TGV line. 

Anyway, France was the first time that I really spread my wings. I was lucky enough to have had six years of full-time French before I got to college, and tested very well when I arrived. I majored in French and started taking level 300 classes as a freshman. Before you say, "That's so cool!", imagine having your teacher favor you over senior female French majors in the classroom. It took a little time for them to adjust to having a guy around--French is a female-dominated profession--but eventually they got used to me. 

By the time I got there I was close to being bilingual, and a year in France was just what needed to happen to push me over the edge. We were taught at the Institute of European Studies, and everything was in French--classes, papers, quizzes, tests--and we were not allowed to speak English at all during the school day. Outside of class, I lived with a French family who spoke no English. It was a challenge, and I was rather homesick, but I enjoyed every minute of it. It propelled me forward, and I went on to get a Masters in French. Since then all of my jobs have involved French in one way or another; it's been a tremendous career asset. 

A lot of Americans hate the French, and a lot of French people aren't fond of Americans, either. But I learned so much over there, not just about France and the French language, but about how to appreciate cultural differences. So I wanted to share a few things with you that I found interesting.

1) Getting around--French people don't even start behind the wheel until they are 18 or so, and cars, repairs, gas, insurance, and driving schools are a lot more expensive. Generally, French people take public transit and walk whenever they can, and their cities all have extensive public transit systems that are usually well-run and cheap to use. 

2) Astrology--I visited an astrology shop in France that was very close to the Institute, and began my "formal" astrological studies there. I bought a few French astrology books--I wish I still had them!--and did an astrological study of the students since all of their birthdays were made available. For example, there were few male students at my center, but almost all of them were fire signs. I was one of the few water-sign males they had. 

3) Money--Considered a taboo topic, it's much more polite to ask about someone's sex life than their financial situation. Tax evasion is considered a sport, and as such many people keep their blinds closed so their neighbors can't tell what kinds of high-priced items they have. 

4) Education--Overall, I like the French system better for K-12, and the US system better for universities. The French system teaches young children to think for themselves and analyze; talking to them is very interesting! But their system forces students to choose a career really young, and colleges are not liberal arts based...so if you want to be a doctor, you go right to medical school, for example. But if you hate medical school you start over in college from scratch. 

5) Ego--France and America are in a dead heat in this respect. Both think they're the best countries on the planet, so there is no winner. 

6) Nukes--France's electricity costs 3 times as much as ours does, because they use nuclear power for much of their energy. They are excellent at nuclear technology; they routinely build these plants in other countries and have NEVER had a nuclear accident. 

I loved France so much that if it hadn't been for a certain redhead waiting for me back at school, I might have considered staying permanently! 

Generally speaking, French people do like Americans. They just don't do a good job of showing it. I had been in France two weeks before I felt brave enough to ask them. :)

Tune in tomorrow for my "G" post. Merci mille fois, chers lecteurs!