The Archive Format

All of our archives are in PDF (Portable Document Format). You can view these PDF files with your browser if it has an Adobe Acrobat Reader Plug-In, and most browsers do. Otherwise, you can download the plug-in for Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer by clicking on the appropriate link here.

We archive our documents in PDF because they tend to be quite substantial and we believe that the printed page would be easier for you to read and digest than a prolonged on line session in front of your computer screen.

Once you open the PDF document, you may print it out and/or save it electronically if you wish.

What's been archived?

Our archives fall into two broad categories:

1. Back issues of Celestial Navigations, a bi-monthly publication which began with the Grand Cross Eclipse in August, 1999. As a Member, you will have access to view, save and print all back issues at any time.
   
   
2. Previously published essays, organized by topic. We currently have 54 in the archives. They account for about 1/3 of Ann's output in the past 15 years. More of Ann's past essays as well as future ones will be added to the archives in due course. You may freely view, save and print these essays as and when they become available.

Essays

The 54 archived essays fall into 7 subject groups. To see a complete index of these essays, please go to the Essays page.

We have provided a preview of the archived essays currently available. Please click on the "Read on" link at the end of the preview to open the essay in PDF in your browser.

A CONSPIRACY OF ANIMALS

[from "Nature and Animals" group]

Inside my yurt, I wake up tense, tight, in no mood to appreciate paradise. Moving like a robot, I prepare my usual breakfast. Sit down to my usual hour of reading.

No use. Body squirms. Eyes glance off the page. Psyche diffuses into the void.

Outside, the birds keep singing. They mock my mood. I don’t want to hear them.

Push on to the next item on the agenda, my daily five mile walk.

I am anxious to get to the river. Want to release this pent-up anger and frustration into its forgiving flow. I have no idea why I am so angry; I just know there is a huge internal energy which threatens to explode.

I reach the river. There is a fisherman in waders casting his line. He is in the water only a few feet from the ledge where I always sit. I seethe; my anger focuses on him.

I turn back, to find another, less comfortable ledge out of sight of the fisherman, and sit down.

And that’s when it began, the conspiracy of the animals. ..... Read On

GAMBLING WITH THE UNIVERSE

[from "JUPITER, SATURN AND BEYOND" GROUP]

In November, 1962, when I was 19 years old, transiting Saturn opposed natal Pluto from the second to eighth houses. I was in a dilemma. Two men wanted my hand. Which one would I choose?

The crisis came one Saturday night. I was sitting alone at the kitchen table of the apartment I shared with three other college girls. The moment was crucial. This would be the last decision I would ever have to make. Marry one of these young men, and from then on he would be responsible, my life yoked to his.

"It is either get married," I thought, "or be a clerk at Woolworth's".... I could see no other options. At 19, Saturn had not yet returned to its natal place. I was caught inside its orbit, a prisoner of the usual social roles. Marriage represented security, and a husband would provide it.

I had broken up with my high school sweetheart the year before to be with another young man. Not because I loved the second one, but because I was afraid the first one would break up with me! So I did it before he could! And now the first one was back, having hitchhiked down to Washington, DC from New Haven in the freezing rain to ask for my hand. ..... Read On

REWORKING MEMORY, INVOKING CRONE

[from "Menopause" series]

This past winter, over and over again, this feeling: I feel robbed.

Robbed of my maidenhood.

Robbed of my motherhood.

• As if I never truly experienced the full flowering, the glory of burgeoning life, that extraordinary upthrust of wild energy that is youth's hallmark.

• As if I never experienced the fruition of mothering, that excruciating bursting feeling of love and joy in holding one's own child close to one's steadily beating heart.

I am 50 years old, and like most women my age, full of memories. The older I become, the more my memories serve as a sort of goldmine, a rich vein for continuous reflection. Usually, I come away feeling ruefully ambivalent--there is a certain nostalgia in remembering "the good old days," and there is also the welcome sigh of relief: "I never have to go through that again!" This past winter I wasn't feeling that at all. Nor was I, having made peace with my memories one more time, letting the past go and getting on with my life. Rather, this past winter I was feeling robbed! And in that feeling, I was stuck. I couldn't seem to get past it. .... Read On

SEX, LIES, AND PLUTO PENETRATION: PART I

[from "Pluto" group]

Beginning in January, 1998, and for the next 21 months, Pluto, the planet of power, penetrates the Ascendant of the USA birthchart. What does this mean?

Since there is no space to analyze the chart as a whole, I focus here on this Plutonian transit, whose arrival heralded the exposure of Clinton’s alleged peckerdillos in the White House and segued into a massive military Mideast buildup. As Pluto is an outer planet, its transit over an important point in the US birthchart is not only rare, but unprecedented. Never before in its 200+ year history has the US been subjected to the punishing and ultimately, we pray, purifying fires of Pluto’s hell.

As usual, the US justifies its belligerent posturing as a “defense” (read: offense) of our so-called “national interest”--that of dominating the globe (and the heavens) in the name of “freedom” (read: to make the world safe for American Capitalism). Projecting its own tyrannical tendencies onto its latest “Hitler,” petty dictator Saddam Hussein, the US government’s seemingly unselfconscious hypocrisy both offends and astonishes the rest of the world.

Make no mistake.What we sow we shall reap. There will be a karmic price to pay for overweening arrogance via Pluto, god of the underworld, symbolizing death and rebirth, crisscrossing relentlessly back and forth over the US Ascendant to either destroy or transform. ..... Read On

THE REAL POWER OF THE PRESS

[from "WAR & PEACE" group]

I was once married to a newspaper editor. Very bright. Lots of original ideas. Nobody’s fool. And yet, without knowing it, this man followed the rules. The unstated rules, the ones we don’t realize are there. The hidden framework within which all our ideas are contained.

I would argue with him. Furious. Frustrated. This good, concerned, magnanimous man did not even know what I was talking about when I told him that what he considered “news” was not. That it should be called “the olds.”

“Please!” I would plead. “Don’t you realize? you are seeing the world through a certain set of glasses. Your view refracts the world so that what sticks out is violence, murder, greed, war. What we see is what we get. To focus on evil is to amplify it.”

Imagine a new way of seeing. Imagine that we are wearing a new set of glasses. A set of glasses which, rather than refracting the world into black and white, pimping for “hard news” (as in “hard ass,” as in “hard on”), we seek the heart of things, the soft underbelly of each of us, our vulnerabilities, our dreams and longings, the ways we do manage to connect, to cooperate, to build. A set of glasses which, instead of scoffing at this “soft news” (as in “softheaded,” as in “softie”), values this real news, the miracles of every day, enormously, knowing that whatever we value, we shall receive. ..... Read On

THIS MOST INTENSE PASSAGE

[from "DEATH" group]

Here we are, the supremely selfish Pluto in Leo generation, having to learn how to work with the immanent death and dying of our own Pluto in Cancer parents. The generation which gave us everything they never had and then felt puzzled and upset by our ingratitude, our supreme indifference to their sacrifice, is leaving us. One by one, our mothers and our fathers are undergoing the final initiation, the mystery of mysteries, the transformation so all-consuming that only those who are accustomed to moving between the worlds can follow them where they now go, or attune to their occasional return visits.

I speak here as a member of my generation, born between 1938 and 1958, when the planet Pluto was in the sign of Leo. We are the “me” generation, destined, among other things, to learn to deal with death differently.

Carlos Casteneda’s sorcerer Don Juan gave us our first hint, back in the fabled ‘60s, of what was lying in wait for us: “Walk,” he admonished, “as if death walks by your left side.” We didn’t know what he was talking about then, though the phrase resonated eerily, burrowed its way into the recesses of consciousness, and crouched there, waiting to be born. ..... Read On

TO BE ONE WITH THE RIVER

[from "TRAVEL" group]

I sit entranced in a small orange rubber raft, floating slowly down a dark swirling river. A line of bubbles marks the narrow curve of current. Eddies suck backwards from either side. Every so often a whirlpool forms somewhere, anywhere, and just as quickly disappears.

Dark vertical cliff walls rise 500 feet on either side. Water meets rock with no intermediate zone. No soft sand. No opportunity for gradual acclimatization. This is March, 1990, and I am on the Colorado River of the Grand Canyon, Day One of a projected nineteen day journey into the mystery of eonic time.

If you need help, the ranger had told us, use mirrors to signal a passing commercial airplane. “Believe it or not, they do see the flashing, even at 20,000 feet.”

I am sitting in one of five such small rubber boats, surrounded by three women and twelve men, all of them strangers. By the end we will know each other better than we know our friends back home. “Personalities” will prove useless in this world of primal instinctive response. What will emerge is character—including our shadow side. Our flotilla is the Ship of Fools, and our journey to become a struggle for dominance. Who will assume the honor? who is Lord of the Flies?. ..... Read On

Back Issues

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