Awards, Neeti Ray of Astrology Expressed has been kind enough to mention this site and nominate me for a Kreative Blogger Award. I’m grateful to her for doing so and thankful for her kind words about me and the site. She is an astrologer-in-the-making, with a fresh approach, endless enthusiasm, an open mind, and a kind heart, and I’m sure she will do great work one day. I urge everyone to take a look at her site.

The Kreative Blogger award has a number of rules (well, not rules, more like niceties) you should follow if you are nominated. Seems only fair.

* Copy/paste the Kreative Blogger Award picture onto your blog (easy enough)
* Thank the person who awarded it to you and post a link to her/his blog (happy to do it)
* Write 7 things about yourself we do not know (kind of fun)
* Choose 7 other bloggers to award (umm….)
* Link to them (uh…)
* Notify your 7 bloggers of their award (embarrassed umm again…)

Neeti lamented on her blog about the difficulty she had trying to narrow down her blog nominations to seven. There is so much good astrology writing out there now that I sympathize with her. Astrology has always been blessed with wonderful writers. And the list isn’t confined to astrology bloggers–bloggers on any topic are welcome.

But the honest truth is that I don’t read a lot on the ‘Net now. I do read some, occasionally the blogs of people I know and the ones found at organizations I belong to and support. I could nominate blogs I read intermittently, but if I’m being really honest I have to say that I’m not in an information gathering phase of my life right now. After being a lifelong gatherer (even an obsessive one) I now spend 90 per cent of my day writing. I’ve spent years and years sucking up information like a hoover on any topic that happened to catch my fancy. I’m one of those people who can’t dabble–I have very few casual interests. if I become really interested in something, I have to master it. It’s not entirely healthy. For example, I got interested in serious cooking when I was a teenager. Now I can bone a chicken with my eyes closed and make a souffle without a recipe, but I wonder about the time I spent at it and why it mattered so much to me then. (I think, at the time, it had something vaguely to do with finding a husband, a quaint concept that’s laughable now. “Hello, darling, watch me bone this chicken, you’ll be mesmerized…” Sigh. I have a 10th house Venus in Cancer). And that’s only one obsession. There are others. Too many others. It was a lifetime of taking in.

I can and will blame my nodes, and their too-comfy relationship to Saturn. I’ve got the SN in Gemini in the 9th and Saturn in Scorpio tightly conjunct the NN in early Sag in the 3rd. Mercury, the SN ruler, is in Libra in the first, and also the chart ruler (Virgo rising) and the dispositor of a Sun/Jupiter conjunction in Virgo in the 12th. This Mercury was insatiable, it wanted to learn anything and everything. The Saturn conjunct the NN was good at defining boundaries of learning (which was needed, because of the Sun/Jupiter influence), but it also was a strict taskmaster. I never thought I knew enough, not enough to pass on, to be useful. So I hesitated, and learned more.

It wasn’t until the slow passage of Saturn through the chart, and the evolution of the 12th House NN ruler, Jupiter, conjunct the Sun, that I learned that in order to really know something and understand it, we have to give it away. Saturn in Scorpio is notoriously bad at giving things away. I had been reading others charts professionally since the age of 30, still studying whatever I could get my hands on, but the break for me came when Pluto transited both Saturn and the North Node. It lingered there for an eternity, destroying my view of how reality was structured (natal Pluto in the 12th square the third house Saturn), and eventually, clearing the way to giving me the courage of my accumulated lessons. (I think, at one point in there, transiting Saturn was doing something to Pluto at the same time Pluto was conjunct Saturn, but I must have blanked it out of my mind.) Again, the process was a slow one thanks to Saturn, but eventually I turned from someone who was focused ‘out there’ and had to learn everything I could get my hands on, to someone who is more focused on finding whatever experiential truth is consolidated ‘in here’ and using it to help others. Whether I filter my thought through astrology or fiction, I seem to be another person coming from a different place.

So this is my way of thanking Neeti publicly for nominating me, and my excuses for being unable, sadly, to pass along the good feelings and wishes and acknowlegement that accompany getting an award of any kind. I’m in my ostrich years…

Now, I probably have fulfilled the request of seven things you didn’t know about me in the paragraphs above, but since I like doing these things I’ll give you seven more:

I love red wine.
I like drawing better than painting–but I only seem to be able to draw portraits of people I love.
I had a prof at N.Y.U., James Carse, who turned my world upside down with his classes on modern mythology and the religious elements of psychoanalysis. I wish I could thank him.
The first time I set foot in London, I cried with happiness, because it felt like coming home.
I just knitted a hat for the first time in my life. It actually ended up the right shape and stayed on my head. I don’t knit.
Astrology is my second love. Drama is my first, and I’d rather read a great play than a great novel.
I almost became an actress, but in drama school I had a sudden epiphany that I didn’t want to display myself for the rest of my life. (Damn 12th house.)

Thanks again, Neeti.

Dawn