(Astrobutterfly.com)

May 2024 will be a month to remember.

May features a triple Venus-Uranus-Jupiter conjunction at the very end of Taurus, a Jupiter-Neptune sextile, an auspicious New Moon in Taurus, and an adventurous and joy-filled Full Moon in Sagittarius – to name just a few of the celestial highlights.

These are 5-star transits that promise unexpected opportunities and a surge of optimism and excitement. The energy will be electrifying!

In the first half of the month, Taurus energy is at its peak! Half of the planets in the sky are concentrated in this sign of the zodiac, activating primarily the last 10 degrees (3rd decan) of Taurus. 

Later in the month, the atmosphere changes dramatically. First, the Sun, and then Jupiter, move into Gemini. 

Jupiter’s ingress into Gemini is one of the most important transits of the year. With Jupiter changing signs only once a year, this shift will redirect our focus to a different area of our lives. 

What used to be top of mind when Jupiter was in Taurus will no longer take center stage as the attention shifts to the Gemini sector of our chart, shifting our attention to communication, learning, and intellectual pursuits.

Now that you’ve come up with an inspiring vision with Jupiter (and Uranus) in Taurus, it’s time to articulate it and share it with others.

But let’s take a look at the most important transits of the month: 

May 3rd, 2024 – Pluto Goes Retrograde

On May 3rd, 2024 Pluto starts its annual retrograde motion at 2° Aquarius.

Around May 3rd, 2024 (plus or minus one week), Plutonic themes like transformation, power struggles, and psychological depth will be intensified. If you have planets around 1-3° in fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius), this retrograde will speak to you directly. 

Pluto will be retrograde until October 12th, 2024, and in September, it will slip back into Capricorn. This is the last time – the very last time – we will have Pluto in Capricorn.

In November 2024, when Pluto moves into Aquarius for good, we will be officially done with the 20-year Pluto in Capricorn transit, and the transformative themes that have been stirred in our lives will begin to shift. 

May 8th, 2024 – New Moon In Taurus 

On May 8th, 2024 we have a New Moon at 18° Taurus. The New Moon is part of a conjunction-stellium with Venus, Jupiter and Uranus.

This is potent! The New Moon will  activate the promise of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. The involvement of personal planets like the Sun, Moon and Venus makes things personal. Something important, something you couldn’t fully grasp before, will become obvious to you. 

The New Moon is also sextile Saturn in Pisces, providing the necessary foundations and support to make our dreams come true. Both Taurus and Saturn think long-term; they take their time to create something of essence, something that can withstand the test of time.

The seed that you will plant at the New Moon will eventually bloom into tangible accomplishments with lasting impact. This is bigger than you may realize!

May 15th, 2024 – Mercury Enters Taurus

On May 15th, 2024, Mercury enters Taurus. Mercury is still processing ‘what the hell just happened’ after spending a couple of months in Aries, retrograde AND conjunct Chiron. 

What did the insights gained during Mercury conjunct Chiron in Aries reveal about yourself and your inner narrative? Now it’s time to lick our wounds, integrate the lessons learned, and move on. 

Our self-worth (Taurus) is a direct reflection of our sense of identity and self-acceptance (Aries). When we heal our identity, when we accept ourselves for who we are, and embrace our strengths and vulnerabilities, our self-worth naturally improves. Yes, we are worth it! 

May 18th, 2024 – Sun Conjunct Jupiter

On May 18th, 2024, Sun is conjunct Jupiter at 28° Taurus.

The Sun is who we are, and Jupiter is our faith, beliefs, and optimism.  

Jupiter plays a very important role in the development of our psyche. If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t go further, you won’t do much. 

We all need Jupiter in our life, we all need something to believe in.

Imagine a world without Jupiter. A world where Saturn is the biggest planet. Imagine a world where every little step comes with doubt, with disbelief. How much progress do you think is possible?

Jupiter fuels us with the faith and optimism that growth and progress are indeed possible. When Sun is conjunct Jupiter, put your metaphorical Superman or Wonder Woman suit on. What would this alter ego pursue? 

May 18th, 2024 – Venus Conjunct Uranus

On May 18th, 2024, Venus is conjunct Uranus at 23° Taurus. Venus conjunct Uranus is the “my heart skipped a beat” transit: your heart might skip a beat either because you’re frightened, surprised, or because you’re very very excited.

With Uranus, you never know. Whatever it is that grabs your attention, it’s sourced in the higher intelligence of the universe (Uranus). It’s the real thing!

Some surprise encounters and opportunities may set you on an exciting, new path.

Say YES! 

May 20th, 2024 – Mars Conjunct North Node

On May 20th, 2024, Mars conjunct the North Node at 14° Aries. 

Every other year, Mars and North Node remind us of our purpose, indicating how far – or how close – we are to fulfilling who we’re meant to be. 

This transit may not provide a clear “how-to” guide, but it will awaken something within you. Pay attention to what inspires you, what draws you in. “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” – Joseph Campbell

May 20th, 2024 – Sun Enters Gemini

On May 20th, 2024, Sun enters Gemini. Happy birthday to all Geminis out there! 

For you and everyone else, this is that time of the year to be a bit more like a Gemini – curious, open-minded, and cross-pollinate ideas, reflections, and insights.

May 23rd, 2024 – Venus Conjunct Jupiter

On May 23rd, 2024, Venus is conjunct Jupiter at 29° Taurus. Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? This time, yes! This is THE transit to indulge in luxury, celebrate abundance, and bask in the pleasures of life. 

May 23rd, 2024 – Full Moon In Sagittarius

On May 23rd, 2024, we have a Full Moon at 2° Sagittarius. The Full Moon is sextile Pluto (at 2° Aquarius), trine Neptune and opposite Jupiter. The ruler of the Full Moon, Jupiter is having the time of his life: Jupiter is conjunct Venus and sextile Neptune; the world is indeed an oyster! 

The Full Moon in Sagittarius is a time for magic manifestations, celebrations, cultural immersions, and joy-filled adventures. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine. 

We are talking not only about literal travel, but about traveling with the mind’s eye. About going on a different route to work. About trying an exotic dish. Adventure is a state of mind, it’s about our willingness to stay open and be in awe of the beauty and richness of life. 

May 24th, 2024 – Jupiter Sextile Neptune

On May 24th, 2024, Jupiter (at 29° Taurus) is sextile Neptune (at 29° Pisces).

Dreams, rainbows, and unicorns? Jupiter and Neptune are the most idealistic planets, so when the two form an auspicious aspect like this sextile, it can bring artistic inspiration, imagination, and spiritual connection. 

That being said, a sextile is a soft aspect that sometimes goes unnoticed, especially if none of the 2 planets trigger your chart in major ways.

However, considering the bigger picture: the conjunction with Venus, the Full Moon in Sagittarius which activates the sextile, this time we can expect to experience the magic of this aspect in more tangible, meaningful ways.  

May 25th, 2024 – Jupiter Enters Gemini

On May 25th, 2024, Jupiter enters Gemini. 

Jupiter’s ingress into Gemini will be quite a noticeable shift! Gemini is VERY different from Taurus, so Jupiter in Gemini will bring a very different energy compared to Jupiter in Taurus. 

Gemini is a social, communicative sign; Jupiter, too, thrives in social environments and values networking and exchanging ideas. With Jupiter in Gemini, expect a boom of all things social. 

Immediately after moving into Gemini, Jupiter forms an auspicious trine with Pluto in Aquarius, bringing the best out of the two energies: expansive communication (Jupiter in Gemini) for social impact (Pluto in Aquarius); generous (Jupiter) friends and communities (Pluto in Aquarius). 

Time to get out of the house, go to networking events and meet new people.

I will write an in-depth article about Jupiter in Gemini in the next couple of weeks – stay tuned!

“Ultimately, the entire universe…has to be understood as a single undivided whole.” David Bohm (1917-1992) American Physicist

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

I Asked My Students to Take the Bard Off His Pedestal—It Let Us Reconsider His Place in Our World  

Shakespeare’s works are considered “universally good” for readers. Literature scholar Lee Emrich challenges students to reconsider their connection to the Bard. Courtesy of Ungry Young Man/Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

by LEE EMRICH | APRIL 29, 2024 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)

“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances to graphic novels and games. We spent the semester framing Shakespeare as an idea we all participate in making.

The class was inspired by a 2019 episode of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast that discussed Shakespeare and his plays’ racism, sexism, and antisemitism. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s good for you. He’s universally good for you,” said ASU professor, theater practitioner, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director Ayanna Thompson. “We have to make that a more complex narrative.”

Thompson and the advocacy of the RaceB4Race community, a conference series and scholarly network galvanizing conversations about Shakespeare’s digestibility, particularly around race, challenged my students and me to build a more nuanced relationship to the Bard. We read plays by Shakespeare alongside adaptations of his work, approaching the materials as more than plots or settings or characters and changes therein—and instead as complex processes of belonging.

We spent part of our first meeting examining our own identities and interrogating the stories past classes and popular media had fed us about Shakespeare and his work. What were the sources—play texts, narratives or rhetoric (from parents, teachers, friends, the news), and media (movie adaptations, performances, YouTube videos, etc.)—that shaped our relationship to Shakespeare? How did we feel about him?

This framing can be deeply meaningful for students, who are navigating multiple spheres of influence: professional aspirations, societal or familial expectations, their own interests and passions. They are also grappling with knowledge—career content knowledge, self-knowledge, communal knowledge—and responsibility. To whom am I responsible? In what ways? Shakespeare and those who adapt his plays offer powerful opportunities for thinking critically about such epistemological and ethical questions.

We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare—but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship.

To prime my students for questioning Shakespeare and their knowledge of him, our first unit didn’t start with a play; instead, we focused on Shakespeare’s biography and historical record. I sent them on a treasure hunt through the amazing resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection of archival documents around the Bard’s life. My students got to build out the gaps in history, wrestling with what we don’t know about the life of Shakespeare and his authorial connection to his plays. We then used movies to visualize these holes; we asked if two very different fictional biopics, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and 2011’s Anonymous, would exist if the historical record had different documents in it.

Framing Shakespeare’s history in part as a narrative that is created and interpreted allowed my students to think more expansively about his literary authorship and cultural power.

Then, throughout the course, we treated each play and adaptation like a helix, where both texts twist recursively back upon each other. But the texts also connect to other authors’ lives and work. We know that Shakespeare relied on numerous source texts for his plays and that he influenced his contemporaries. And adaptations do not solely rely on Shakespeare either—they draw on many literary and cultural connections. We traced textual belonging as well as different types of thematic and material belonging—political, familial, racial, historical, gendered, peer group—across primary documents, play texts, and adaptations in various media forms. Studying adaptions in this way places Shakespeare in a larger world—or rather, worlds—both his own and ours.

Oxford professor Emma Smith attributes our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare to “gappiness,” which she defines as “all the things that we don’t know, the space there is for our creativity.” She says, “These plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience.” In the classroom, attention to “gappiness” gave my students a feeling of agency. With this intellectual space, they could wrestle with whether they hated, loved, felt indifferent to, or were curious about Shakespeare, all at the same time.

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Romeo and Juliet—a favorite in high school curricula—elicited an interesting range of reactions. Despite initial grumbles about having to re-read a play, my students enjoyed exploring how their own maturation and life experiences shifted their relationship to the story. Juliet tended to rise higher in their estimation than previously, while Romeo fared worse. The students, having now had the experience of choosing a college and leaving home, felt the stakes of Juliet’s decision to defy her parents and make a choice for her own life.

We next read Ronald Wimberly’s 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats, which focuses on the character of Tybalt and is set in what the author describes as an “alternate universe New York where dueling is part of the [street] culture” that led to the hip-hop of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic has a racially diverse cast and a Black protagonist in Tybalt, and samples an array of influences, of which Shakespeare is just one.

Wimberly speaks about how some audiences consume Black artists’ work through a tokenizing gaze—seeing it as valuable only because it makes them feel that they are being inclusive. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the hot-tempered Tybalt (whom another character calls “the prince of cats”) sets off the violence that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the two lovers. But by focusing on Tybalt and his relationships, Wimberly shifts how we understand death in the story. Where Shakespeare focuses on the “star-crossed lovers” and their tragedy, Wimberly attends to the bonds within families and among community members. He also suggests that Shakespeare himself tokenizes his minor characters in this play—stereotyping them as barriers for his main characters to rebel against but refusing to “get more into the price of violence for all involved.”

Tybalt and Prince of Cats led us to one of our most powerful meta-explorations of how we should engage Shakespeare at the college level. We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare, but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship. We can even choose not to discuss Shakespeare when talking about these texts. And throughout, we can interrogate the roles of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia in the plays, and explore our own and others’ agencies as authors of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, these choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author. Framing “Shakespeare” as a process of belonging—one that we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part—means we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach—and in what ways Shakespeare belongs to each of us.

LEE EMRICHis a scholar of early modern literature who will join the faculty of Victoria College at the University of Toronto in fall 2024. She is the author most recently of “Transmedia Shakespeare: Critical Approaches and an Annotated Syllabus,” from the collection Imagining Transmedia.

Rx

An unorthodox doctor, who always thought beyond prescriptions, pills and medication, once said to one of his regular patients:  “I’m starting to suspect that the best medicine for humans is love.” The patient, surprised, shocked even, said: “What if love doesn’t work?” The doctor smiled and said, “Increase the dose.” Author Unknown    AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Sheila T Apr 23, 2024

April 29, 2024 (TheOnion.com)

BREAKING NEWS

Americans Explain Why We Should Call The National Guard On College Protesters

In response to growing antiwar protests at American universities, including Columbia, Yale, and MIT, some outspoken critics have demanded the U.S. military take action. The Onion asked Americans why they believe the National Guard should be called on students, and this is what they said.

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The Nine of Wands When we reach deep inside ourselves, with a heart that is unafraid and accepting, we will discover new depths of strength and power. These deep reaches of wisdom, which lay dormant with in the subconscious until we are brave enough to search them out, will bring balance and equilibrium. And from new centredness will arise an unshakeable trust in ourselves that will carry us forward through life.It’s true that when we travel deep inside ourselves, we will also find material that we might prefer to leave unacknowledged – but the Nine of Wands, Lord of Strength, reminds us that in being true to ourselves we release energies that will help us to deal with whatever we find within. And after all, whatever lies inside our own subconscious is, for better or for worse, a part of us.When the Nine of Wands turns up in a reading, we can be re-assured that we have what it takes to get by. Even in times of stress and difficulty, inner strength will rise up to guide us forward toward our goals. And in the process we shall learn more about ourselves and our abilities, gaining a new all-round perspective which brings security and self-confidence.This card tells us to trust ourselves. We have everything we need. There is no necessity to analyse nor question. And absolutely no excuse to give in to doubt!

Jose A. Bernat Bacete

The only path I am asked to monitor is my own

I resist all temptation today to judge how I think others should behave. I cannot know the deeper forces at work within anyone’s heart. My deliverance comes from accepting all people, not judging or controlling them.

I pray that when I am tempted to speak or act without charity, that God’s spirit will correct my thoughts. I pray to be an instrument of love by which people are reminded of their innocence, not an instrument of blame that reminds them of their guilt. I do this for my own sake, that I too might be released from feelings of guilt that would otherwise bind me.

It is not my job to monitor anyone’s journey, to know what’s right or wrong for others, or to try to control their behavior. My salvation lies in deep acceptance of people exactly as they are, that I might know the inner peace that such acceptance brings.

Amen.

The only path I am asked to monitor is my own

Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” to compare what we think is truth to what we can syllogistically and axiomatically prove is the truth.

The fifth step is the conclusion. Here’s the premiere installment of “The 5th Step”:

5. Truth has a life wish.

–from Mike Zonta, H.W., M.

To submit your 5th step, just email the BB at zonta1111@aol.com with your 5th step and we will post it with your name or without, your choice.

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching

Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again

Glenn Aparicio Parry

To recreate a whole and sacred America, it is important to piece together the forgotten fragments of history that are currently keeping the country divided. Just as a traditional Native American potter begins a new pot with shards of old pots—honoring the ancestors, bringing the energies of the past into the present—Original Politics re-constellates the nation as a whole out of the seemingly disparate shards from our origins. The most significant forgotten piece is the profound effect Native America had on the founding values of this nation. Original Politics convincingly demonstrates how the best aspects of the founding vision of America were inspired, or directly appropriated, from living, Native American cultures: concepts such as natural rights, liberty, and egalitarian justice. Further, Parry traces the influence of Native America not only on the founding fathers, but on the ‘founding mothers’ of the 19th century women’s movement; as well as the 19th century abolitionist and modern ecological movements. Native America has inspired what Parry sees as the sacred purpose of the nation: bringing all the world’s peoples together on one soil in a harmonious cultural mosaic of unity in diversity. While there have been periodic setbacks (devolution) in our nation’s history, including today, these only serve as catalysts reigniting our sacred purpose. America is creating a new melting pot, and like the original vision, it will be a creation from the many into the one—only this time it must not leave anyone out. This includes the natural world. Original Politics is ultimately about respecting all forms of life and all forms of political expression as different aspects of one whole. It is a reclamation project that brings people, land, and nation together as one. The overall effect of the book is profoundly healing.

(Goodreads.com)