Deathwatches and the cycles of time

March 13, 2:23 PMAstrology ExaminerMaria Barron

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One of the things the newsroom staff had to be alert to – back in the years when I reported each morning to a metro daily newsroom (about an hour late, sharp!) – was the potential for the death of someone important. Obituaries had to be ready to be pulled together if a prominent person died, because people were going to want to be informed of the passing and to be reminded of why that person mattered to them.

Probably the most formal deathwatch at the paper I used to work for happened before I was there, when the mayor of the city was dying of cancer and a reporter was stationed at the hospital, waiting to hear of and report the death. No one wants to do that. Can you imagine?

I got to thinking about that, about hearing about it from the mayor’s son and from a couple of the reporters when I was working there. And then I got to thinking about what I believe is essentially the last 12-year Jupiter cycle for daily print newspapers, and the trend that keeps pushing events that way, and how this is the closest thing to a deathwatch I’ve ever assigned myself to follow. I keep watching it come down in news stories and email, and I keep clicking on it, reading all about it, taking it all in, although it feels so sad and evokes a haunting melancholy. It’s like holding the hand of the dying at the bedside. Women’s work.

I also got to thinking, quite fondly, about Jacqueline Bigar. A syndicated columnist and author, Jacqueline won her first newspaper job writing astrology for the Philadelphia Daily News by predicting the length of the city’s newspaper strike in 1977. Her current column, “Jacqueline Bigar’s Stars,” has been syndicated by King Features since 1991. A first-generation American of Swiss descent, Bigar is the author of Women and their Moon Signs, published in 1998.

When the Internet was young and discussion-type bulletin boards dominated the World Wide Web – circa 1996 – there were bulletin boards for a number of subject areas across several categories that were all easily accessible from my Prodigy online home page. At some point in those years while Prodigy was my ISP, I went and asked a bunch of questions on the astrology board where Jacqueline was hostess of the Astrology and New Age community. I remember her being very kind and informative about some of the how-to’s and wherefores of astrological tradition. She also helped me feel better about my Dad’s upcoming trip across the ocean around the time of an ugly opposition or T-square in the heavens.

The thing about cycles of time is they have beginnings, middles and ends. We know it. We keep it in the backs of our minds. We all track it in planetary cycles: days by the turn of the Earth, months by the moon, years by the sun. Some of us stay aware of and correlate events with the cycles of the other planets of the solar system as well. That’s astrology. It’s not a scary dark thing, it’s just cycles of time and space. We live within cycles of time and space, and we never want the ends to come. We feel a little ghoulish looking at them, unless the ends are resolutions of conflicts, such as the much hoped-for just ends of labor strikes or wars. And sometimes they are. Maybe in some ways, they all are.

The cycles of time and space don’t really end. Yes, they say eventually the solar system will end. But for the purposes of our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our known ancestors, the cycles of time and space continue uninterrupted. They segue and they circle. We like to metaphorically think they spiral upwards into progress. Sometimes they seem to spiral backwards in de-evolution. Sometimes, some of the planets even appear from Earth to be orbiting backwards in space. They nudge us to remember.

Faith and science suggest in different ways that nothing ends; it just transforms. That is my belief. I am an Aries and my ruling Mars is in Pisces. I am down with the alpha and the omega of the circle. Nothing ends in Pisces but that it begins again in Aries for another trek around the circle. That understanding is part of my nature.

I believe that as I was born into nature, the nature of the time and space I was born into was also born into me. Like everyone, I am in many ways a reflection of my time and place. That’s astrology. You can disagree, but it isn’t a terribly far-fetched thing to believe.

As my personal year draws to a close and my birthday approaches, as a 2,000-year-old age in the world segues along toward a new one, and as the vernal equinox nears with its promise of spring, I am thinking about the cycles of time. And of lives measured out in coffee spoons. It’s funny stuff.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some links to news on transformations and metamorphoses and life moving relentlessly onward. I like to keep track of this stuff. That’s my Capricorn moon, which is all about keeping time.