Sunday is Monday

12.8.03


This past week, I lost a whole day. (Actually, it was only 19 hours… but close enough.)

I write to you from Sydney, Australia, where I arrived a couple days ago, after a 14-1/2 hour flight from L.A. Let me tell you, 14-1/2 hours is a long time to sit on a plane, even when broken up by dawdling strolls to and from the lavatory and a few beers shared with Aussie teenage partiers returning home after a month wandering in Mexico. More so than long, however, a flight of this magnitude is disorienting. I left my house early Friday morning and got here late Saturday night, nearly two days later—though I was only traveling for less than a day.

See, there's this funny little thing we call the International Date Line, another of those imaginary lines painted across maps. (See also: Equator, Mason-Dixon Line, borders). Crossing this line literally changes what day it is. Yes, I'm sure you're smart enough to already know this. But beyond the intellectual knowledge of it, it's worth imagining the actual experiential reality the International Date Line creates.

Picture yourself standing somewhere, perhaps on a floating raft-like plot of land, as the Date Line mostly runs through water. The sky is clear and beautiful. It is the middle of the afternoon on a Monday. Then, you take a couple small steps to your right (watching that you not step of the raft into the ocean!). It's still a clear and beautiful afternoon. Only now it's Sunday. A day is regained, a day which you can literally relive. You've grown a day younger. If only you could fly through the air as quickly as Superman—but always in this same against-time direction—you could quite literally reverse time like he did. Your body would continue to age, but on paper, you'd be getting younger and younger. Let's not even think about the ramifications of going the other way, the wrong way, prematurely growing old without the joys and sorrows of actually living those years.

As fascinated as I am by all arbitrary lines, this Date Line holds deep ramifications for our understanding of astrology. First off, the obvious one-our concept of time itself is as humanly constructed and arbitrary as the Date Line. Most of us, at one point or another, have considered this notion. (Leap years, for one, are regular reminders. We rely on those occasional February 29ths to make our system function.) But beyond that, the Date Line—and all time zone divisions—demonstrate how closely connected are our ideas of time and space. With our current structures of understanding, what time it is depends quite directly on where you are. It might look like a clear, beautiful afternoon, but if you don't know your location, you can't really be sure whether it's Sunday or Monday.

Astrologers practice our craft by casting charts (or visual maps) of the placements of the planets at a specific time. But when we cast a chart, we need to know not only the exact time of a person's birth or of a particular event, but also the place where this birth or event occurred. The certificate might record a birth at 12:00 am on January 1, 2004, but that birth data refers to very different times based upon whether the birth happened in Honolulu, Helsinki or Sydney. During those hours of difference between midnight in Helsinki and midnight in Sydney, the planets don't vary too much in their position in the zodiac signs, with the exception of the quick-moving Moon. Yet, the variation is huge when it comes to their placement in houses, a division of the chart based on the Earth's daily rotation on its axis.

The houses of a chart show an astrologer which specific areas of an individual's life serve as the stage on which the planets to act out their dramas, in the character or tone of the zodiac signs in which they dwell. And this house information, which is central to interpreting a chart with any specificity, is simply unavailable without knowing the exact time and place of a birth or event.

A person's rising sign (or Ascendent), an important factor for understanding how he/she behaves on the most exterior levels, is based on the arrangement of the houses. (The rising sign is the sign on the eastern horizon at the specific time and place of birth.) Without exact birth information, we can glean astrological basics of the personality, but the fullest insight is only available when houses, dependent on geography, are included in a chart. This is akin to the idea that, while our personalities are essential to us to a certain degree, they also develop quite differently based upon where on the globe we live.

Astrology teaches that timing is everything. And since we've established that time is always a function of space, then positioning is as key to this 'everything' as timing. (Ask anyone in real estate, and they'll tell you… Location, location, location!) This raises the interesting notion that, just as astrologers use our knowledge to advise on the timing of important decisions, we can also help effect conscious choice-making with regards to geography.

There are entire branches of astrology that deal with these spatial issues. Locational astrologers can analyze an individual's chart to determine how his/her changing locations might alleviate certain challenges or open up new possibilities. Astrocartography is a technique where lines of planetary influence are drawn directly onto world maps (rather than representing the information on a standard circular-pie chart), showing places where a person or event is likely to show energetic resonances, whether fortunate, challenging or otherwise. And some astrologers who use solar return charts, a chart cast for a person's birthday in the current year to reveal basic themes of that upcoming year, will actually advise their clients to plan travel to certain destinations on their birthday, in order to impact how their succeeding year will unfold.

I am quite sure that spending December here in Sydney, rather than San Francisco, will certainly influence the tone of my month. I just ordered a simple coffee (a 'tall long black' or something like that) and ended up with the largest cup of espresso ever. The waitress knew my order seemed strange and checked up on me to make sure that it tasted all right. So now, because I'm here instead of there, I'm a helluva lot more energetically hyper than I would have been otherwise. Not to mention that it's the middle of the day instead of the evening. And summer instead of winter, to boot. Let's just call it 'being in the right place at the right time.'

I just can't wait for the return flight, when I will get back to San Francisco before I've even ever left Sydney… making me feel just like Superman!