"Christmas Truce" observed

Soldiers on the Western Front laid down their arms this evening in observance of the Christmas holiday. The "Christmas Truce," as it has been referred to, was proposed by Pope Benedict XV earlier in the month but was roundly rejected by commanders on both sides. Although the first denial had come from the Russians, whose Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 7, eventually all sides refused to honor the truce.

Despite their commanders' refusal to honor the day, soldiers in the trenches on the Western Front embraced the truce by singing Christmas carols to each other across the area known as "no man's land." "[Foreign Legion officer Phil Rader said,] ‘We had been in the trenches for twenty consecutive days, before Christmas dawned. For twenty days we had faced that strip of land, forty-five feet wide, between our trench and that of the Germans that terrible no man's land, dotted with dead bodies, criss-crossed by tangled masses of barbed wire,’" reported The Sheboygan Press on March 25, 1915. "‘Thoughtlessly I raised my head, too. Other men did the same. We saw hundreds of German heads appearing. Shouts filled the air. What miracle had happened? Men laughed and cheered. There was Christmas light in our eyes and I know there were Christmas tears in mine. There were smiles, smiles, smiles, where in days before there had been only rifle barrels.’"

Soldiers emerged from both sides of the trenches and entered no man's land, exchanging gifts, singing songs and in at least one area, playing a game of soccer. Groups of soldiers removed the bodies of their fallen comrades behind the lines, and for a brief time, were able to leave the war and rejoin civilization as they had once known it. Unfortunately, the war resumed the following day and where there had been smiles and songs the day before, there were again only the sounds of artillery and machine gun fire.

Pope makes Christmas Eve appeal for peace

The Pope issued a call for peace in an address today in the Vatican City. In his address, Pope Pius applauded the President's s appointment of Myron C. Taylor as Roosevelt’s delegate to the Vatican, referring to Mr. Taylor as a "peace ambassador." The pope also revealed a five point plan for peace, in which he called for a guarantee of rights and independence for all nations, global disarmament, restoration of international institutions, protection of minorities and a pledge by all international leaders to fulfill their commitments to other nations.

It's been a hot summer. Really hot all up and down the eastern coast . On some days the breeze was warm and gentle along the river in New York. Down in Virginia, however, and even as far north as Massachusetts, it baked. Hard to find a cool spot on some days.
There is a rumbling among the people, and not merely the heat that is shortening their tempers. People are getting restless. They are worried. Upset. Uneasy about what is currently transpiring. Nothing they can put their finger on yet, but still, uneasy, as if they feel in their bones that something is going to happen. Something has got to happen.
Farmers are worried, too. They are nervous about their crops, of course That is normal. They dread another dry summer without rain to grow their produce. But that is not all that plagues them late at night when they seek to find rest from their wearying toil. Taxes have been steadily rising and the government has been making it harder for them to realize any decent profit at the end of the season, and if the weather doesn’t cooperate, many are going to be forced to move out of rural areas into already crowded towns, where they lack the skills necessary to survive. They have families, though, and between taxes, government intervention and weather problems, they may be forced out of business.
Business people, too, are extremely restless. They are vastly more politically experienced and motivated, so they are a great deal more aware of what has been going on not only here, but in Europe. Many of them have been across t he Atlantic. They see what is taking place in France and England, and t hey are all too painfully aware of how deeply in jeopardy we are over here.
Those who are blessed with the good fortune to discover a sunken Spanish galleon with tons of gold coins are rare, but others of us are not economically safe any more, and the business folk and property owners know it. They are not sleeping well at night at all.
Land is still a prime force for prosperity, but property ownership is not what it once was. Again. Taxes. Taxes and more taxes. The poor people think the rich have so much money they don’t have to worry about the government dipping its hands into the pockets of wealthy individuals. How wrong that is. The rich and the prosperous are keenly aware of the dangerous situation in which this great land finds itself at this present moment.
Dangerous because lately people are coming together with new ideas–new ideas the government loathes. Lately there have already been serious problems of intervention on the part of the government with regard to the individual rights and liberties of citizens who, up to this point, have been loyal to the mother country. Certain people, however, who have lived proudly in this land for generations, are beginning to be unhappy with the fact that they are less and less able to verbalize their discontent.
People are being squeezed both financially and morally. Under the guise of protecting its citizens, the Powers That Be have demanded more in coin and loyalty than many people are being able to bear. It is becoming harder and harder to live a life of prosperity and plenty and fulfill the promise of the generations who came here before and bravely endured years of privation and struggle in order to live a better life in a new and better world. It is becoming more and more difficult to feed the children and guarantee them a promise of a better future.
Not only because the government is taking the food out of our mouths and filling the pockets of the fat government cats who continue to get fatter off the spoils of hard-working people, but who also insist they must continue to support us against enemies they are convinced are savages we cannot hope to live with in peace and harmony, just because we worship in such totally different ways from the way they do.
And no matter how much they insist that religious freedom is what created the colonies in the New World in the first place, religious persecution is rife in this land. There are God-fearing folk who are forever defending themselves against the heathens, although those often called heathens by the God-fearing folk, claim on their side to have a better respect for nature and protecting and loving the land we have come here to live on.
The greatest reason, however, for the restlessness and discontent that ripples through the countryside today is the fact that human rights in this country are being trampled on. The Greeks and Romans had developed many sophisticated philosophies regarding individual liberties and the rights of each person to pursue a life of choices and happiness. We need to turn to them now.
What seems to be happening is that such notions are threatening the very government that is supposed to protect such ideas. The Government believes that it is wrong to voice discontent, wrong to criticize the policies that oppress the people, wrong to question where the tax money of the citizens is going and to what use it is being put..
We the people of this land are beginning to ask questions and we resent being resented or even censured for asking those questions. We do not want our rights trampled by what we perceive as blind royalty. We are becoming upset with the fact that we are asked to be silent when we see inequity and injustice all around us. It makes us uneasy to be called traitors because we find fault with those who are supposed to lead and protect us, but who are in fact seeking to bleed us of our resources for their own purposes, fill their coffers and their war chests from profit they glean from the sweat of our toil. We are growing ever more feverishly resentful when we are forced to give up our own profits to a System which is becoming ever more distant and remote and alienated from us. Most disquieting of all. we are slowly seeing that eventually a confrontation must occur, a philosophical and moral confrontation that defines more clearly who is the loyal citizen and who is the traitor.
As any avid and devoted student of astrology and the movement of the heavens would agree, could there be the presence of a distant planet coming now to the last degrees of Sagittarius is bringing all these complex issues to a head? We can no longer tolerate intolerance, repression on the part of rulers who have become increasingly insensitive to the needs of their subjects and citizens.

Written this day on the seventeenth of September
in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-One

It could be global warming, sure, but is it caused by trucks and cars and all the crap we are putting in the atmosphere? Is it Uranus at the end of the zodiac? Is this the end of the world? It’s not as if this is the first time it’s happened. Uranus reached the end of Pisces in the 1920's, and we all know what happened immediately after that. Uranus has passed over this spot hundreds of times before that and the world hasn't ended.

What makes this transit different is that for the first time in our lifetime, all three planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) are in the last quadrant of the zodiac simultaneously. So it really is the end. The end of the world? No. Not a chance. That won’t happen until the Sun swells up and swallows the Earth whole and that’s going to be long long after 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends. It is, however, the end of an era. The end of a period in culture we have all come to know, love and criticize.

The kooks are right. This IS the end times. Dead people are not, however, going to rise out of their graves, looking just like they did in high school. Nobody is coming out of the clouds in glory to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. At least not literally the way the apocalypticos think.
Something is ending.

But people don’t get it until it happens to them. Only when it hits them personally do they realize that change is inevitable. A tsunami in Indonesia, 911, fires in California, floods and earthquakes in Afghanistan and South America, war and famine and genocide in the Middle East or Africa– only real if you happen to be living in one of those places. You can still turn off the TV, have dinner, go to the movies and go on as if nothing has ever happened.

Uranus at the end of Pisces, however, is the demand for universal empathy. How can you, me, anyone feel complete and total empathy, how can we identify with the suffering of others if it is still a remote experience that doesn’t touch us directly? Does there have to be a complete and total global disaster, a catastrophe that reaches into your life, heart and soul on the deepest and most personal level?

Human beings do have feelings for their brothers and sisters, but true empathy can come only from personal experience, so the notion that Uranus affects us on an impersonal level is inaccurate, especially now when it is in the most intimate and personal moment in its passage through the Zodiac–the last degrees of Pisces.

So it’s only when the things we take for granted, hold most precious pass away do we realize the meaning of empathy and only then can we identify profoundlywith the feelings and plights of others.
It’s one thing to read or hear about non attachment and to be told that life is but a dream, a vain illusion that seems real, only to vanish in a poof of smoke that is the past.

It’s hard to imagine in the moment that whatever you are living through, experiencing, seeing, touching and feeling is an ephemeral projection that will sooner or later pass away and disappear.

If you don’t believe it, just listen to some of your favorite music from long ago and you will see how the feelings return just as you felt them. But when you think about it, you can’t help feeling it wasn’t exactly you. It was more like an old movie, it was someone else’s life, a role you once played but it’s not you any more.

And all the joys and agonies you had, all memories now, and you have nothing left but how you handled them while they were happening and how you dealt with them when they passed away.

It sounds depressing when you think of people you love, jewelry you scrimped to have, furniture and possessions you treasure even today. But there is a mystery to the idea of non attachment and liberation that can only be learned through direct experience. It’s a teaching. But not just an empty platitude found in self-help books that only vegetarians in Boulder, Colorado can understand.

It’s vital for everybody, because it will guide everyone through the turbulence and confusion of the last degrees of the Zodiac, to show everyone that there is always a tomorrow that precedes today and what we are left with tomorrow is how we handle today.

What then is liberation? Is it to be frozen in ice, untouched and untouching, cloistered and withrawn in a fruitless attempt to remain safe from the pain of love and separation

How can we totally live completely and fully, embracing our lives, going all the way, opening our heart and minds, giving our lives our complete selves, being there completely, totally committed and still know that it is fleeting, momentary, illusory?

How can we prepare for letting go and not be anxious or uptight, guarded and unavailable?