A century after him, Hermann Hesse leaned on his reverence for nature as he considered the value of hardship, urging the dispirited to listen to our inner voice: “If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God… he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing.”
Another century hence, another prophet of the ages saw, and named, the underlying truth beneath these truths: that if this you, this me, is in fact an ever-changing chance-constellation of cells, ideas, beliefs, impressions, mental states, emotional weather systems, constantly making and remaking itself into what we experience as selfhood, then God is the other name of chance and change, of that flickering constellation. God is the name we — “atoms with consciousness,” who know that one day we shall become “one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust” but wish it to be otherwise with every atomic fiber of our being — is the name we give to our touching longing for permanence in a universe of change.
Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.
In the opening pages of her 1993 masterwork Parable of the Sower (public library) — the first part of her oracular Earthseed allegory — Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) writes:
All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth Is Change.
God Is Change.
This, of course, is the only appropriate conception of “God” — which is also another word for “nature” — if we are lucid about what actually happens when we die: that is, when we return our borrowed stardust to nature. Butler intimates as much, insisting again and again that “God” is the vessel we create to hold the blooming buzzing chaos of the ever-changing self. “To shape God, shape Self,” she would write five years later, in the sequel to Parable of the Sower.
Defining intelligence as “ongoing, individual adaptability” and reminding us that “civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals,” she considers our orientation to “God” — to change — as a vital adaptation that shapes the outcome of any individual human life. In a mighty antidote to our present culture of abdicating personal responsibility for our own lives (which, as Joan Didion knew, is another term for character) in favor of competitive victimhood, Butler writes:
A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.
Great Art Explained Jul 23, 2021 Please consider supporting this channel on Patreon, thanks! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=53686503 “What a brilliant series this is” – Stephen Fry on Twitter 12 December 2020 “Thoroughly researched and cleverly presented, with stunning visuals, Great Art Explained makes you realise that familiarity with a work of art sometimes makes us indifferent to its power” – Forbes Magazine, 9 July 2020 If you are affected by any of the issues in this video please go to www.samaritans.org I started “Great Art Explained” during lockdown. My aim is to make videos which focus on one great artwork. I want to present art in a jargon free, entertaining, clear and concise way with no gimmicks. Subscribe and click the bell icon to get more arts content. Each video takes me about three weeks to a month, so I download at least once a month: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePD... Edward Hopper’s world was New York, and he understood that city more than most people. He understood that, even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone. This painting, was completed on January 21st, 1942, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and America’s entry into World War two. That’s not to say the war was a direct influence, but the feeling of dread many Americans had, surely infused the painting. Afraid of air raid attacks, New York had blackout drills, and lights were dimmed in public spaces. Streets emptied out and Hopper’s city was effectively dark, and silent.
The author Cory Silverberg bucks decades of conventional wisdom on how to teach kids about intimacy.
Credit…Illustration by Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants
By Elaine Blair
June 28, 2022 (NYTimes.com)
About eight years ago, when my daughter was in preschool, I went to the children’s alcove of ourlocal library and found the book that I’d heard was the standard-bearer of liberal sex education for younger school-age children: “It’s So Amazing! A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families,” by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley. My daughter had so far only thrown me some softballs about pregnancy and babies, but it probably wouldn’t be long — billboards in Los Angeles being what they were — before I was fielding questions about sexuality.
“It’s So Amazing!” covered many subjects: anatomy, gender, fertilization, gestation, birth, love, heterosexual intercourse, sexual orientation, child sex abuse and H.I.V. Light on gender difference, open to gender fluidity and self-determination, it looked like a reasonably sound compendium of current thought. A graphic of a boy and girl had arrows pointing to most parts of their bodies reading “same” and only one set of arrows pointing at their reproductive organs reading “different.” Our reproductive systems may divide us, the book suggested, but let’s not lose sight of all that we have in common — such as our circulatory, digestive and lymphatic systems. In a chapter called “What’s Sex?” an unclothed man and woman, partly covered by a blue blanket, kissed in missionary position. “When two people care for each other, sexual intercourse is very loving,” I read in the accompanying text. Fair enough, I thought. As a realist, I appreciated the use of the conditional construction.
But then came the next chapter, “What’s Love?” with pictures of smiling families and couples, in many different configurations, watching TV, eating meals, cuddling and walking dogs, all with little red hearts around them, with nearby text explaining the meaning of words like straight, gay and lesbian. Now something nagged at me. All the different kinds of couples did fun things together with their clothes on, but only the man and woman in the previous chapter got to take their clothes off. Other sex-ed books I’d seen for this age group were about making babies and didn’t even mention same-sex couples. But this book’s well-meaning attempt at inclusivity practically spelled out a hierarchy of value: Hetero sex is sex; the other stuff, though very loving, is off-brand. This was rather too much like my own liberal-ish childhood sex education, a scene of maddening adult evasions and inconsistencies, the unspoken drift of which was that some desires and practices were less good than others.
I closed the book. But still, it troubled me. What should the illustrators have done — drawn more pictures of more naked couples in a wider variety of common sexual scenarios? That hardly seemed right.
Not long after, a friend recommended “Sex Is a Funny Word,” by the sex educator Cory Silverberg and the artist Fiona Smyth. The book defines sex as “something people can do to feel good in their bodies, and also feel close to another person.” Sex is also “one way grown-ups make babies.” Apart from these statements, which are accompanied by drawings of a fully clothed smiling couple and, separately, a baby, the book doesn’t try to explain or illustrate sex acts. It’s focused on children’s experience of bodies, gender and the strange things that can happen socially when the topic of sex comes up. Illustrated with comics panels, it follows four elementary-school-age children. One page shows the children encountering pop-cultural depictions of sexuality: Mimi is in a movie theater watching a prince and princess kissing onscreen. Cooper walks by his brother’s room and finds him watching a music video with a close-up of a person’s breasts. Omar sees a roadside billboard featuring a woman in a tight dress. A question mark floats above each child’s head.
A panel like this may sound unremarkable, but it actually makes “Sex Is a Funny Word” one of very few children’s books to contend with the fact that children encounter representations of sexuality in the media. The book is also filled with all kinds of social scenes: kids telling jokes or teasing each other, chatting with neighbors, arguing with siblings, running errands, riding the bus. In one set of panels, Mimi bounds into the kitchen where her dads are making dinner. One of them asks her how her day at school went. “Great,” she tells him, “I heard some kids talking about *#!@. What does *#!@ mean anyway?” Her dad’s face is startled and then, in the next panel, angry: “Don’t ever say that word again! That’s a bad word.” Mimi is indignant: “That’s not fair! I don’t even know what it means! How am I supposed to know if a word is bad if I can’t say it?” Dad is at a loss. “Go do your homework.” And then, his face softening, he adds, “We’ll talk about it later.” Scenes like this also make “Sex Is a Funny Word” one of the few books to show children dealing with the subjects of sex and gender in their family lives.
“Sex Is a Funny Word” is part of a trilogy of books written by Silverberg — including “What Makes a Baby” and the recently published “You Know, Sex” — that have quietly upended the genre. Silverberg, who uses “they” pronouns, is skeptical of the term “sex positive” and would like to see a world with no normative pressures around sex, including the pressure to have sex or care much about sex at all. Rather than beginning with the premise that sex is great and everyone will eventually learn to enjoy it, they begin with the subtly different premise that sex is often difficult and they want to help make it less difficult. “For some people sex is great, for some people it’s terrible, for some people it means nothing,” I heard them tell a group of parents. “Our kids don’t know who they are yet. I want to phrase things in a way that leaves all those possibilities open.”
Cory Silverberg photographed at home in Toronto.Credit…Steph Martyniuk for The New York Times
When Silverbergwas 17 and looking for a summer job in the mid-1980s, their father, like many well-connected fathers before and since, called around to people in his professional network in Toronto to see if anyone had work for a high schooler. Silverberg’s father was a sex therapist, and the job he found for his kid was working as a clerk at Lovecraft, the first sex-toy store in North America owned by women.
Silverberg was a young-looking 17 and had never so much as kissed anyone, yet they found themselves charged with helping customers pick out vibrators. “They were mostly women, and they would see me and keep looking around for another salesclerk. They were like, I don’t want that guy,” Silverberg laughed as they told me this story in a cafe noisy with a late-morning Sunday crowd near their home in Houston.
When Silverberg speaks to groups of parents or teachers, they talk about having grown up the child of a sex therapist with access to a wide selection of sex-education materials for both adults and children. They were a precocious reader and studied these carefully, but none of them offered any clue about something that was increasingly worrying them. “I was this femmy kid that everyone thought was gay,” Silverberg said, though they themselves were not at all sure that gay was the right concept for what they were experiencing. Silverberg was attracted to women but found going out with them uncomfortable in some way that they couldn’t understand. “I just felt bad — lonely and bad. I thought that there was actually something structurally wrong with me.”
Silverberg eventually realized, when they were in their early 30s, that they felt more like a woman than like the man the world had presumed them to be. It was gender, not sexuality per se, that was at the heart of their struggle with their body and romantic life. But for years of Silverberg’s adolescence and young adulthood, there seemed no good way to even begin to explain how they felt. “I would say I’m weird. I would say I’m not straight, or that I’m straight-ish. People would say that I’m a man, and I would say, ‘Well.…’”
Silverberg went on to work at Lovecraft for nine years while finishing high school and attending university. Though they were “very confused” about sex in their own life, they were pleased to find that they had the ability to talk about sexuality without feeling or seeming awkward — or as they put it, “Other people’s sex stuff didn’t freak me out, and I knew how to show that it didn’t freak me out.” They became particularly interested in working with the store’s disabled clientele. “With the nondisabled customers, most of the work was just helping them to say what they wanted. But the disabled customers would be very specific: Do you have a penis pump that doesn’t have latex, because I’m allergic to latex? Or I want to try to have an orgasm, but I can’t hold anything with my hand — what can I do? They’d come in able to talk about every aspect of their bodies (what moves, and how, where there’s feeling and isn’t), but then their question would be: How can I have sex? It seems to me the reason those people asked ‘How can I have sex?’ is because the world had already told them exactly how they were supposed to have it — by having penile-vaginal intercourse — and they can’t do that, so they were stumped.”
After graduating with a master’s in education from the University of Toronto, Silverberg developed a specialty in training professional groups — midwives, teachers, home health care workers, occupational therapists — on issues of sex and disability. Then some friends came to them with a proposition: Could Silverberg write a book for their young son about how babies are made? The friends were the parents of a 4-year-old and had another baby on the way. The father was a trans man. The children’s books on store shelves featuring Mom and Dad conceiving baby in a four-poster bed, or adopting a child, did not account for their family.
Silverberg was immediately intrigued. They knew right away that they didn’t want to write just for the children of trans parents — they wanted to tell a story of how babies are made that would apply to all kinds of kids, whether they were conceived the traditional way or through reproductive technologies, whether they lived with adoptive or biological parents, and no matter their family configuration. But what is it that all babies, and all expectant parents, have in common? Silverberg came up with a simple, pared down story of a sperm, an egg, a uterus, and people waiting expectantly for the arrival of a baby. On the last page, Silverberg asks readers, “Who was waiting for you to be born?”
Silverberg asked Smyth to illustrate the book and made a Kickstarter page, expecting to bring out “What Makes a Baby” themselves after a few publishers rejected the idea as “too niche.” “Our goal was to raise $9,500, and I was sure that I would hustle, hustle, hustle and then get members of my family to give me most of it,” Silverberg told me. Instead, they met that goal the first day the project went live. By the end of the month, they had raised nearly $65,000. Although a lot of the early supporters were L.G.B.T.Q. families, “that’s not how we got to $65,000,” Silverberg says. “It was straight families. There was a critical mass of conventional families who wanted a different story and were open to revising their whole way of thinking about how sexuality and reproduction can be discussed with kids.”
When I met Silverberg in their home office, a book-lined converted garage behind the gray-blue Houston bungalow where they lived at the time (they’ve since relocated to Toronto), they pulled a stack of vintage sex-ed books from the shelves, picking out some of the most visually striking. Silverberg dresses in the collared shirts and professorial sweaters they’ve favored for years, and when people see them with their longtime partner, a woman, and their 7-year-old, they seem to assume they’re looking at a straight family. Silverberg does not usually correct that impression in brief social encounters, because they don’t feel that there’s a quick way to sum up their experience of gender.
Speaking before groups of parents, Silverberg has the mild, encouraging manner of a professional facilitator, but one on one, they’re an animated fast-talker, eager to discuss the history and the pitfalls of a genre that draws so much ire from the political right but not much serious engagement from anyone else outside the field. One volume they draw from the stack is “How Babies Are Made,” a popular Time-Life picture book from 1968 illustrated with paper sculptures of animals mounting each other to mate. Another is a trippy little Danish volume from 1973 called “How a Baby Is Made” that shows a full-body illustration of a grinning, wild-eyed cartoon Scandinavian couple in flagrante. Peter Mayle’s “Where Did I Come From,” a blockbuster hit in the ’70s and still surely the most exuberant book of its kind, features a doughy, pink middle-aged couple and a groundbreaking mention of orgasm (“All the rubbing up and down that’s been going on ends in a tremendous big lovely shiver for both of them”).
The wide variety of tones and visual styles among these books makes it all the more notable how consistently they’re locked into the same basic framework. More recent popular books like Laurie Krasny Brown and Marc Brown’s “What’s the Big Secret?” and Robie H. Harris’s sex-education series for different ages give more space to anatomy (including children’s bodies), discuss masturbation (reassuringly) and mention different kinds of relationships. But the more room such books make for the precepts of sexual liberalism — gender and sexual inclusivity, frank discussion of anatomy and pleasure — the stranger seems their insistence on yoking discussions of sexuality to even longer discussions of conception, gestation and birth. Sex in these books is a small part of the larger story of human reproduction. This happens to be the opposite of what nearly every song, video, television plotline, overheard wisp of schoolyard gossip or adult innuendo suggests to children, which is that sex is incredibly interesting in itself, deeply tied to social status and has little or nothing to do with babies and parenthood.
“There’s certainly nothing wrong with teaching the science,” Silverberg says, but a biology lesson doesn’t open out into the conversations that many parents hope to have with their children: about attraction and intimacy, about communication and consent, about the online pornography that kids may already have seen.
The Push to Restrict Rights for Young Transgender People
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A growing trend. Measures that could tranform the lives of young transgender people are at the center of heated political debate across America. Here is how some states are approaching the subject:
Indiana. Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender girls from competing in school-sanctioned girls’ sports, saying that the bill would likely have been challenged in court. Republican lawmakers subsequently overrode the veto.
Utah. A day after the decision in Indiana, Gov. Spencer Cox, also a Republican, vetoed a similar bill that would have barred young transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports. Republican legislators subsequently voted to override the veto and enacted the legislation.
Other states. Since 2019, lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to bar transgender youths from joining school sports teams consistent with their gender identities. They have become law in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
Compared with the other books in the sex-ed library, “Sex Is a Funny Word” is among the least explicit when it comes to the mechanics of sex. There are no descriptions of penises inside vaginas or any other acts, partly because Silverberg would never reduce “sex” to heterosexual intercourse but also because they’re not convinced that children of this age need to be told exactly what people do with their bodies during sex or to be shown pictures of couples in sexual embrace. “Seeing is not a small thing,” they told me. The chapter “Learning About Bodies” has pages about privacy, nudity and the special significance and silences around certain body parts in order to set up its pages on sexual anatomy. “I want kids to know that seeing a naked body is a big deal. It matters. When we see stuff, it stays with us.”
Silverberg is perfectly happy to be going against the liberal pedagogical tendency toward showing kids more. They don’t relish any of the political labels that inevitably get attached to their work. “Sex Is a Funny Word” was on the American Library Association’s Top 10 most challenged books list in 2017 and 2019 — meaning that it was a target of removal requests from schools and libraries — even before the recent surge of conservative censorship. Complaints ranged from “discussing gender identity” to, simply, “address[ing] sex education.”
“I bristle against the language of liberal and progressive because I am genuinely trying to write books for as many people as possible. Some people might think that the books are going to contradict their values, and what I can promise anyone is that in some places they will, and in some places they won’t. If your values are that homosexuality is wrong, the books will contradict that. But they also will never say that you should go and have more sex. They certainly will never say that being religious and having a healthy sexual and gender identity are incompatible. And never will they say, sex is great. I think that a life that doesn’t include sexual activity, whether that’s for religious reasons, moral reasons or reasons that have to do with your body, can be a completely full life.”
It took Silverberg and Smyth seven years to complete “You Know, Sex,” their book for kids entering puberty. The four main characters of “Sex Is a Funny Word” are now in middle school, and “Mr. C,” their sex-ed teacher, leads them in discussions about body changes, gender and sexual decision-making. Dozens of pages are devoted to boundaries and consent, illustrated with comics of variously gendered young people — at the movies, on picnic blankets, at parties — asking permission to do things like hold hands or kiss, talking to one another about what feels good or bad or meh. Examples of language for negotiating physical intimacy abound. “You wanna go check out upstairs?” “Can we just hang here for now?” “Let’s slow down.” “Is this still OK?” “Let’s take a break.”
Reading “You Know, Sex,” I remembered that when I first spoke to Silverberg, they mentioned some of the questions they were wrestling with as they incorporated much more factual information — about reproductive biology, anatomy, birth control, sexual assault — than they had in the earlier books. Questions like, How do you define a sexual feeling as opposed to other feelings? Should this new book have some kind of illustration of sex? I had thought of these as technical questions about which body parts and sexual activities to show, which definitions to use in the course of what I basically pictured as a big information drop. I hadn’t considered the possibility that mood and metaphor and surrealism could make a book about puberty feel like something other than a pedagogical text. I certainly hadn’t pictured a group of kids in bathing suits chatting about their menstruation experiences in a swimming pool filled with bright red blood. Nor had I imagined that a pair of anthropomorphic lemmings could demonstrate how social pressure leads us to initiate or agree to physical intimacy that we don’t really want.
As for the question of how to illustrate sex, Silverberg continued to opt for less graphic detail rather than more, settling on the idea of stick figures. The inspiration came from a groovy 1970s novelty item that Silverberg remembers seeing at souvenir shops as a kid: posters showing grids of silhouetted figures in different sex positions, each one corresponding to a zodiac sign. Based loosely on Silverberg’s recollections, Smyth has drawn a half-dozen cheerful, gender- and genital-free stick couples assuming some iconic poses. “Most people think having sex looks like this,” reads the accompanying text.
When I got to this panel I fell through one of those temporal trapdoors and, for a split second, was reading as my childhood self. I eagerly looked to the next panel for the myth-busting truth. Someone was finally, finally going to tell me what sex really looked like. But — of course — Silverberg is not one to stage a big reveal with claims to definitional authority. “Having sex can look like a lot of things,” reads the text in a second panel, where the same smiling stick people, solo or in pairs, do things like make eye contact, hold hands, give foot massages, sit in front of laptops and have fantasies involving the torso of a broad-shouldered, hairy-chested hunk.
This kind of open-ended phrasing, a signature of Silverberg’s, is something that they developed years ago through a conversation with an early reader of “Sex Is a Funny Word.” Silverberg always workshops books in progress with audiences of different ages and backgrounds to get their perspectives, and this reader — a transmasculine person who was raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family — said something that made a strong impression on Silverberg. “In the first draft of ‘Sex Is a Funny Word,’” Silverberg recalled, “I wrote in a lot of places that people either felt good or bad about things — a touch might make you feel good or make you feel bad, and so on. But this reader said, ‘Some things just make you feel nothing much at all, but that’s a feeling, too.’” Silverberg was electrified and seems electrified all over again remembering the moment. “It was this idea of neutrality! I had been doing the typical thing, which is laying out two options.” But even if there had been “15 options,” Silverberg says, the problem was “making a finite list of things that a reader might feel. Because if they don’t feel any of the things on the list, they think, well that’s not me, and I lose them.”
They grow subdued thinking about the challenges of reaching and holding a wised-up audience of young teenagers. “The way that sex ed often deals with confusion in puberty,” Silverberg says, “is with a wink-wink, like, you’re going to be confused about your body, but you’re not really going to be confused about your body because everyone knows what happens — and here’s what’s going to happen to you and how you’ll feel. But I don’t know how people are going to feel. I only know my experience and the experiences of people I’ve talked to, which is a lot of people, but still not everyone.”
Elaine Blair is a Los Angeles-based critic and an inaugural winner of the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. Her writing on literature, film and feminist thought appears regularly in The New York Review of Books.
July 2022 is one of the most important months of the year. July 2022’s star transit is the North Node conjunct Uranus in Taurus.
The North Node and Uranus only meet every 15 years, so the conjunction will influence us for the following 15 years.
North Node has an applying effect, so we will witness an amplification of Uranian themes: breakthroughs, shake ups, innovations and unexpected developments in technology, groups of people and communities, financial systems, resources, and the stock market.
Even if nothing may happen on the day of the transit, this conjunction will set into motion a series of events that will influence us for years to come.
At an individual level, the conjunction will be experienced as a pull to live our life on our own terms. We can discover resources and talents we didn’t know we had, or we can finally get rid of trauma or energy draining behaviors that have been sabotaging us for years.
But let’s have a look at the most important transits of the month:
July 2nd, 2022 – Mars Square Pluto
July stars on a highly intense note. On July 2nd Mars (at 27° Aries) squares Pluto in Capricorn.
Mars is the planet of action – is how we go after what we want. Pluto is the higher octave of Mars, and it represents the collective will. When the two clash, there is a tension between what we want, and what is realistically possible.
Mars doesn’t take no for an answer, but Pluto will push all our buttons, showing us that we can’t just have everything. Should we try harder, or surrender and accept that there are things we just cannot have?
When Mars is square Pluto, the answer is always in the middle – yes, we don’t want to give up on what it is that we want. But on the other hand we want to learn what the limitations are, where our old approaches need to be assessed.
July 5th, 2022 – Mars Enters Taurus
On July 5th, 2022 Mars enters Taurus. Normally, Mars in Taurus is calm and steady UNLESS it is triggered at a visceral level.
And since Mars will conjunct both North Node and Uranus towards the end of the month, we will likely experience the unpredictable side of Mars in Taurus. The Red Bull inside each one of us will be awakened.
July 13th, 2022 – Full Moon In Capricorn
On July 13th, 2022 we have a Full Moon at 21° Capricorn. The Full Moon is conjunct Pluto, opposite Mercury, trine Uranus, and square Chiron.
Even if the Moon in Capricorn is normally in control of her emotions, at this particular Full Moon, spirits run high. We might find ourselves more argumentative, talking more than we should, or acting out on our wounded feelings.
As with any Capricorn lunation, the big question is “what are we trying to achieve?” Capricorn is our higher self, the adult inside each one of us. It’s ok to be brutally honest (Full Moon conjunct Pluto) or have difficult conversations (Full Moon opposite Mercury) as long as we don’t lose sight of our goal, and we act from our best possible selves.
July 16th, 2022 – Sun Conjunct Mercury
On July 16th, 2022 Sun is conjunct Mercury at 24° Cancer, which means we are already in the middle of the current Mercury cycle which started on May 21st, 2022. If you’ve initiated a new project when the Mercury project started, now it’s time to bring it to life.
July 18th, 2022 – Venus Enters Cancer
On July 18th, 2022 Venus enters Cancer. Venus feels good in Cancer, since both Venus and Cancer speak the same language: the language of emotions.
This doesn’t mean it’s all warm and cozy. In Cancer, Venus squares Jupiter in Aries (early in the transit) and Pluto in Capricorn (later on).
There is some feistiness in the air – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Acting upon our feelings creates an energy of honesty which facilitates trust and growth.
July 18th-20th, 2022 – Mercury And Sun Opposite Pluto
On July 18th, Mercury (at 27° Cancer) opposes Pluto in Capricorn, and two days later, the Sun follows suit.
Pluto oppositions are always intense because they bring to our immediate attention things that has been bottled up. When something that has been bottled up screams for release, our first reaction is to fight against it. That’s why Pluto transits are associated with power struggles.
Let’s say an event a few years back has bothered us. Perhaps someone has been disrespectful or has coerced us to do something against our will, which left us disempowered. Back then we hadn’t fully processed that event.
Now, when a similar situation occurs, we’re not only fighting the current situation. We are fighting against the repeating pattern, and what it means for who we are, for what it is that we are asked to do differently.
When Pluto opposes Mercury and the Sun, notice where your resistance is triggered, what makes you angry, what makes you feel powerless. This resistance will point to something very important about yourself – this is where Pluto is asking you to level up, and become stronger and resilient.
July 19th, 2022 – Mercury Enters Leo
On July 19th, 2022 Mercury enters Leo – and our thinking and communication become more proud and confident. No more hiding behind a rock (Mercury in Cancer). Speak out. Deliver that message. Roar the truth.
July 28th, 2022 – New Moon In Leo
On July 28th, 2022 we have a New Moon at 5° Leo. This is a highly optimistic New Moon that is trine Jupiter in Aries. Jupiter’s energy is amplified since Jupiter is now stationary. The July-August lunar cycle is the best time of the year to take a chance and GO BIG with your projects.
July 29th, 2022 – Jupiter Turns Retrograde
On July 29th, 2022 Jupiter goes retrograde at 8° Aries. When a slow-moving planet like Jupiter changes direction, we all notice it.
Jupiter rules our beliefs, goals, and our big WHY. When Jupiter goes retrograde, we are invited to take a step back and re-evaluate our big WHY – the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.
July 31st, 2022 – 2022 – North Node Conjunct Uranus
On July 31st, 2022 we have the exact North Node-Uranus conjunction at 18° Taurus.
This epochal conjunction is further fueled by Mars (at 17° Taurus), so at the end of the month we have a very intense Mars-North Node-Uranus conjunction.
Whenever we have an Uranus transit, we ‘expect’ the unexpected. Most people are filled with positive anticipation when there’s an upcomingUranus transit – that’s because they ‘hope’ that the Uranus transit will bring them something they want, but out of reach.
In reality, “expect the unexpected” means that what we expect to happen will not happen – what will happen is something completely different, something that is not even in the radar of our awareness.
The good news is that the North-Node Uranus conjunction will only bring us those events, opportunities, people that serve our highest good.
The North Node is a foreign energy that is out of our conscious awareness. But that’s exactly why we have to trust the universe and go with the flow.
Best advice? Don’t plan anything, don’t expect anything. Just pay attention to whatever it is that happens at the time, and in the buildup of this conjunction. Keep your eyes wide open.
In July, destiny is knocking on your door – let it in!
Stephan: I wrote this because, as the poll discussed in the previous article, I realized that when you deal with facts and understand that one in five Americans can only read at the most basic level — about third grade — and they are also innumerate. That 34% of the American population has an IQ of 98 to 85. That 27% have overactive right amygdalas and so are trapped in their fears, resentments, and hates. That the U.S. is becoming a majority-minority nation with all the racial fears that are stimulated in Whites. That gender equality and non-heterosexual sex are freaking out White men who believe in male dominance. When you add to that deliberate campaigns of weaponized misinformation you see what is happening in America. The Great Schism Trend is now the most important cultural restructuring force at work in this country. We have seen nothing like this since the Civil War.
Lies – misinformation or disinformation in its polite academic and media dress – fills the news today. Endless stories of lying Congress members, dark money PACs spreading conspiracy theories, media’s deliberate use of misinformation. Not a day goes by without some headline in this realm. The use of such information, however, is not new, although it has never been as prevalent as it is today. Promoting fake news is an ancient tool of power. The weaponization of misinformation for such purposes dates back to Babylon at least 3000 years ago according to research done by Martin Worthington, a fellow at St. John’s College at Cambridge University. Worthington is an Assyriologist who specializes in Babylonian grammar, literature, and medicine, and he describes the first example he found in Babylonian literature, “Ea (a Babylonian god) tricks humanity by spreading fake news. He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. What the people do not realize is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: […]
LGBTQ activists attempted to hold a march in Istanbul on Sunday in defiance of the conservative government’s ban on Pride events—and they were met with brutal police repression.
A Pride demonstrator holds up a rainbow flag in front of two Turkish police officers in Istanbul, Turkey, on June 26, 2022. Screenshot/TRNN
The conservative AKP government of Turkey has repeatedly banned all Pride marches since 2014. AKP politicians—including president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—and pro-government media continue to target and marginalize the LGBTQ community, calling them “perverts” and a threat to Turkish and Islamic values. Nevertheless, LGBTQ activists attempted to organize a Pride parade in the central Taksim neighborhood in the capital city of Istanbul on Sunday, June 26, and police met them with tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting hundreds in the process. Journalists, videographers, and TRNN contributors Daniel Thorpe and Murat Bay report from Istanbul.
Pre-Production/Studio: Daniel Thorpe, Murat Bay Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
TRANSCRIPT
Demonstrators (crowd): We won’t shut up! We aren’t afraid! We won’t obey! We won’t shut up! We aren’t afraid! We won’t obey!
Gözde: I came here today to say we are together, we exist, and we are everywhere.
Murat: Yes.
Gözde: But we couldn’t come together. We couldn’t reach each other… If only we could have. This is a really sad thing.
Demonstrator (solo): Could we talk with the police officer in charge here?
Murat: Everywhere we went there were police, barricades and questioning.
Off-camera speaker: What are they afraid of?
Gözde: The truth is I don’t know. But we exist. We are here. We’ll be here tomorrow as well and the day after, on the streets.
Demonstrator (solo): We’re here, we’re queer, we won’t disappear!
Murat: Maybe they are afraid because we show them the reality. Maybe it’s because of their beliefs.
Anti-LGBTQ demonstrator (solo): God is great!
Demonstrator (solo): Piss off!
Anti-LGBTQ demonstrator (solo): You don’t have a place in this land!
Murat: Certain walls have to be demolished, and certain realities have to be accepted in this day and age. The world is a beautiful place, everyone can live here together.
Demonstrator (solo): You will never be able to stop desire!
Gözde: We’ll join next year as well.
Murat: Yes.
Gözde: I hope that time we’ll be able to gather all together.
Wonder Collaborative Feb 8, 2017 Audio only: https://soundcloud.com/ibiology/conve… In the last few years, the term CRISPR has exploded on the global scene, and with it UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers in the field, has emerged into the spotlight. From magazine covers, to news broadcasts, to social media, CRISPR is the rare scientific breakthrough that has captivated the interest of the general public. But what is CRISPR really? What are its implications now and into the future? What profound ethical questions are raised by this ability to so precisely and easily edit the genome? In a candid and far-ranging conversation with Dan Rather, Doudna leads viewers through a nuanced and captivating view of this new technology. And along the way she shares her own improbable journey into science and her lessons for others – especially young women – who want to follow in her footsteps. About the speakers: Jennifer Doudna is Professor of the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Early in her career, she studied the structure and mechanism of ribozymes (enzymatic RNA molecules) and RNA-protein complexes. Now her research focuses on understanding how RNA molecules control gene expression in bacteria and eukaryotic cells, through CRISPR-Cas9 and RNA-mediated mechanisms, respectively. For her outstanding scientific contributions, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and was awarded the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in the Life Sciences. Learn more about Jennifer Doudna’s research here: http://rna.berkeley.edu/ Dan Rather has a resume that reads like a history book. He has interviewed every American president since Eisenhower and personally covered almost every important global dateline of the last 60 years, from the Civil Rights Movement to Vietnam, to Watergate to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Rather helped pioneer the very idea that television could be a place for news, and he has kept that spirit of innovation alive by constantly pushing the boundaries of what video storytelling could accomplish. His independent production company News and Guts specializes in high-quality non-fiction content across a range of traditional and digital distribution channels. He has a special interest in telling the stories of science. Learn more about Dan Rather’s production company here: http://www.newsandgutsmedia.com/
Fledermaus1990 Jan 13, 2012 Rhapsody in Blue is a musical composition by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band written in 1924, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the composition was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé three times, in 1924, in 1926, and finally in 1942. The piece received its premiere in a concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music, which was held on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall, New York, by Whiteman and his band with Gershwin playing the piano. Conductor: Barry Wordsworth Orchestra: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Piano: Christopher O’Riley
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 1, 2022 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. A true teacher communicates non-verbally, by setting an example. Claudio Naranjo, M.D., is a noted psychiatrist and seminal figure in the human potential movement. Here he suggests that inner knowledge, or spiritual wisdom, cannot be communicated simply with words. Naranjo is author of The One Quest, The Healing Journey, The Psychology of Meditation, and Techniques of Gestalt Therapy. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. New!! Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
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