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 by Mark Krueger Archive 2005
* Beyond *Relief is in sight! You have been in a deep, dark, dank crank. Major shifting is going on this week. You will feel a whole lot better but you may not think so. Mercury goes retrograde on the 19th at 7:15 pm EST. It goes direct 4/12. On the 20th at 7:34 am EST, the Sun goes into Aries. Happy Spring Equinox. That will take a considerable edge off. The Piscean dredging has been thorough and a bit thrashing. Also on the 20th Mars enters Aquarius at 1:02 pm EST thereby leaving its opposition to Saturn. This will end the life and death struggle crud that has been oh so daunting. Hangovers may apply to a bit of this stuff but it shall indeed pass from in front of your face. On the 21st Saturn goes direct at 9:54 pm EST. What say you get beyond your limitations from here on, ay!?! There will be better flow with these shifts, unless you think about it. Get rid of that think machine will ya! Remember that Mercury retrogrades just show you what is going on all the time, albeit in a cartoonesque way. Come the 22nd, Venus goes into Aries at 11:25 am EST leaving Uranus as the only planet left in Pisces. Uranus in Pisces means get Urbutt in the Ocean. Take a vacation! Along with all this shifting sands business plus Mercury retrograde, we'll have no planets in Earth signs, except for the occasional Moon passage, from 3/20 to 4/15. Be aware. Spaciness will be predominating. Throw in Spring Fever and you can have yourself some mess. Be aware. Be. Be intentional. Be. I want to take some space here to honor and appreciate my dear friend Pat Ware who died late in the evening of March 11 in Portland, Oregon. Pat also was my web master for the last six years. She put up these PlanetVisions Updates each and every week for over 300 weeks. You wouldn't have gotten them without her. She is responsible for the art and calligraphy on in2light too. I couldn't have done it without her. I miss her and wish her well. We talked about my sharing a bit of her dying with you all. She agreed that it would be fine. So I'll tell you some stories about her passing for the rest of this missive. In Oregon there is a Death with Dignity law also known as assisted suicide. I believe this is the only state that has legalized it. It has been a practice under the radar for many merciful years, but Oregon voters had the guts to stand up for choice. I was an Oregon citizen when it came on the ballot and voted in favor of it not knowing that some day I would be involved with it. In something like eight years, a little over 200 people have used the law to death. Folks might get the prescription but only a percentage actually used it. Pat was one of them. One goes through screening with a couple of independent physicians who agree that the patient is terminally ill with a death expectation of less than six months hence. There is some waiting time. Then an informative pharmacist who comes by with the pentabarbital mix which you can keep and use at your pleasure or they can keep it and you can give them notice with a couple of days of wait time. You must take it orally yourself. If you can't do that you don't get it. No one else is to administer it to you but yourself. It's a bitter drink which you mix with a bit of sweetener powder and then chug it down. It's the hemlock thing. Within a couple of minutes you fall asleep and go into a coma in which your respiration will eventually fall and as the oxygen goes out of your system your heart stops. That's it in sort of a nutshell. Mind you I'm no expert on all this. I was just present. From what Pat reported and what I witnessed, the whole law and process is careful, caring, respectful and very well considered. All the predictions of abuse that was pontificated by opponents years ago just flat out didn't happen. The Heimlich over hemlock was hyped. However............ the US Supreme Court is now weighing this Oregon law and will make its decision in October of this year. The Anti-Choice control freaks who wave the flag whilst screaming about freedom don't want choice........ and this is what I saw in this experience with Pat. She was interviewed several times for a database study that likely will be used in consideration of the law whether the Court says yea or nay. The law, the questions, the framework of the whole arrangement was in terms of control. Pat, who has been claiming her consciousness and clearing her karma directly for five years, simply spoke to them that it was her choice. They didn't know what to do with that. Surely, they thought, she must want to be able to control her pain, her suffering. She just told them that she was making a choice. She didn't like her belly full of terminal cancer tumors and the pain and lifestyle that they and the medical solutions offered her. She chose to die, to die by her own hand with the assistance of the medical community in accord with Oregon law. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't easy but it wasn't hard. It was what it was. Choice is like that isn't it? Control and out of control are not like that. They are full of drama and projection. This issue of choiceful dying is loaded with the reactionary complexes of the mind. Dear Pat was right in the middle of it to the end, a peaceful, direct artist and revolutionary. I helped her choose a time to die through astrology. I'd never done that before. I explained to her different possibilities with the emphasis on what was arising in her karmically and what was going on in the background of the collective, of which she was being so emblematic of in her story, We talked of her difficulty of getting into her body that was represented by her Pisces ascendant. She'd had an anesthetic birth in which her mom and her body were knocked out because of the crazy birthing practices of the mid twentieth century and as a result she never could bond with her mom or her body except, big except, psychically. That's Pisces for you. So she could never quite fit into her corpus or life but thereby she also had an exquisite and unique view. (It all comes packaged with the pluses and minuses doesn't it?) Lo and behold the next day after our discussion, on the front page of Portland's newspaper was the story of a man, the only case, who had used the assisted suicide law and woke up 60 hours later; he then proceeded to die of cancer two weeks later. The point is that this very issue of dancing in and out and round about the body was up for Pat and was/is up in the collective. Pat took the dose with a circle of her dear friends around her, myself included. I wanted to sing Happy Deathday to You as she blew out her candle but I kept the joke between she and I. We had laughed many a time about all of this, just being with it, the absurdities and profundities. She nodded off in a couple of minutes and down into the coma the body went. I don't know where she went, probably for a walkabout. Her body didn't expire for 58 hours. The norm is half to three hours. Pat had a really good walkabout. Her body was so robust it didn't go so quickly. Likely they need to recalibrate it a bit. She was on the healthier end of the spectrum of folks who choose this. No harm was done but a lot of projections burned off. Her dear audience eventually wandered off without benefit of her denouement. She'd actually created a wake before her birth; the viewing of the body when it was still alive but from which she had mostly vacated. At the last minute she changed her mind about what kind of music she wanted playing. She switched from Vivaldi, she said that felt to serious, to three discs that played for a couple of hours, Beatles, Motown and Annie Lennox. As the shuffle mode brought up different random selections we cried and laughed. Stuff like the Supreme's Stop in the Name of Love would come on. It was a giggle, sniffle and burn. I stayed with her from mid day to near dawn of the next day. She was statuesque, well she was like a statue. The breathing would shift but not a wiggle of anything else. I was a death virgin so it was all new to me this lifetime. I attempted sleeping in the bed with her but I couldn't help but listen to every damn breath (cue in the Police song) and finally realized it was time to go back to the motel and get some rest. She wanted it that way very clearly anyway. She wanted us to take care of ourselves. I did. Not much sleep came, mind you, but I got a handful of winks in, exercised a bit and came back for some more hours. Still she was still. I was alone with her so that her dear friend Marilyn could go off for some errands. All of a sudden Pat's corpus lets out mournful moans of something like Oh No. It brought the hairs up on my neck and I kept on clearing. Marilyn had just come in and heard Pat Wailer and the Gnarlies so she came down stairs and witnessed it. A couple of minutes of ruffle and Pat's body was back to repose. We watched our projections on the experience. Who knows actually what was going on. Was she back? Had she left? Was she/it in pain? Finally it simply seemed to me to be an utterance of life itself which of course includes death. We probably all have an Oh No going on all the time and don't necessarily notice it. The Yoko's on us I guess. Later that evening I said good bye to Pat's body and reminded Pat to let it all go, including me. Likely I was just talking to myself. I saw her living body once more the next day and reiterated the letting go. Her body died late that night. I found in the experience just how irrelevant the body is. It's just another story in the story machine. Whether I was with it or not, whether Pat was with it or not, actually did not matter. Matter matters matter and there's nothing and everything the matter with that and it's not my matter or her matter it's just matter's matter. That might make you madder and that's okay but that's what I saw. I drew up a chart with a somewhat arbitrary for the day Pat had chosen for her deathing. Up it came on the screen. What she/we chose together was a chart of 1 pm on March 9th in Portland, Oregon. It had an ascendant of 19 degrees and 24 minutes of Pisces. That is exactly the degrees and minutes of Pat's Sun in Pisces. The ascendant represents your incarnate moment. Pat had chosen to go out the in door. The last thing I said to her is I love being with you Pat. That hasn't changed. May we all rest in the peace of our being,Mark |