The discovery last year of Eris, which is slightly larger than Pluto and had been regarded by some as the solar system's 10th planet, led to the demotion and minor planet number.

Dr. Brown had nicknamed the object Xena after the title character in the television series "Xena: Warrior Princess" and partly as a nod to Planet X, a massive planet long theorized to exist in the outer solar system. Eris had also been known by its temporary designation 2003 UB313.

When Dr. Brown later discovered a moon around Xena, he nicknamed it Gabrielle, another character on the same television show. The moon is now officially named Dysnomia, after Eris's daughter, a demon spirit of lawlessness. That name is also, in part, a nod to Xena fans. Xena was played by Lucy Lawless.

Eris is actually the second name that Dr. Brown proposed. Immediately after announcing the discovery in July last year, Dr. Brown submitted to the astronomical union the name Lila, a Hindu concept that says the universe is a playground of the gods.

The name was also for his newborn daughter Lilah. Dr. Brown raised suspicions that this was his proposed name when he called the Web page about the body "planetlila," but he said it was only whimsical and that he had accidentally misspelled his daughter's name.

Dr. Brown said his wife persuaded him to look for another name, telling him, "What if we have a second child? You'd have to go find another planet."

Ms. Senechal figured, what better way to give them confidence than to have them sing and dance in an hour-and-a-half-long musical, for three performances at the end of the school year, in the big auditorium, before a thousand strangers?

Her students weren't so sure. As Shamsul Huda from Bangladesh, the Tin Man, said, "I'm scary to do it."

Rehearsals started in January, and it was slow going. Sergio Sanchez, from Mexico, the lead Munchkin, was so shy, he kept running away. "The funny thing about Sergio, he loved running away," Ms. Senechal said. "We were rehearsing in my room and he just stood outside for an hour; he wouldn't come in."

In the auditorium, he hid behind the curtains. Still, Ms. Senechal did not give up. "It's a positive pattern," she explained. "He hides but wants to be here."

Laura Fronczak of Poland — Glinda the Good Witch — kept refusing to sing her big solo. She'd have a giggling fit and announce, "Miss, I can't sing today," and it was like Greta Garbo wanting to be alone; there was nothing Ms. Senechal could do, except wait, for weeks. "When Laura finally sang," Ms. Senechal said, "it was such a big event, I called her parents."

Some complained that Yasser Arafath, the Cowardly Lion, was mumbling. But Ms. Senechal said: "He'll be fine. Yasser has a very, very quiet spirit. He seems shy but is very strong and steadfast."

Camila Tavarez, from the Dominican Republic, didn't want to be the Wicked Witch of the West, so Ms. Senechal cut a deal. "I said, 'You don't have to be an ugly witch, you don't even have to be green, you can be a beautiful wicked witch.' "

Several girls wear scarves for religious reasons, and Ms. Senechal chose one, Asfara Begum, from Bangladesh, to be Dorothy.

Dorothy with a head scarf? "Did you notice her smile?" Ms. Senechal said. "She has a radiant nature."

Rehearsals went on daily for five months, using the 37.5 minutes that usually gets spent on test prep and tutoring. The principal, Gertrude Adduci, got it right away. "The Wizard of Oz" — it's about them," Ms. Adduci said. "If you're new to this country, you need courage."

THEY did. In mid-May, the two chorus lines were still banging into each other during "Ding-Dong, the Witch is Dead." It was obvious that Jesse Canete, a member of the Lollipop Guild, had never been a dancer back in Mexico. "Jesse, start on your right foot," Ms. Senechal pleaded. "No, no, this is your right foot," she said, wiggling a right foot at him.

The day before the premiere, she still had one Munchkin and one Winkie costume to sew. In dark moments she wondered if she'd taken on too much, but she never let the students see that. What they saw was how much she cared. "Miss talks to us like we're relatives," said Shamsul the Tin Man.

People who teach English classes for immigrants aren't required to speak other languages, but if, like Ms. Senechal, they do, it helps them understand how a new language is acquired.

Ms. Senechal is 42 and not a typical first-year teacher. She has a doctorate from Yale in Slavic languages, is fluent in Russian and Spanish, speaks French and Dutch, and has studied Lithuanian, Croatian, Latin and Greek. She came to I.S. 223, in the Borough Park neighborhood, through the city's Teaching Fellows program, which recruits people who have had other careers.

"One way I pick up language is through memorization of music and poetry," Ms. Senechal said. "For me, the arts are an important inroad into a language." The Wizard also gave her a perfect story line. Sergio the Munchkin said moving from Mexico to Brooklyn, "it's like we come over the rainbow."

Education is a big reason their families sacrificed. The Tin Man's father owned two stores in Bangladesh; here, he's a laborer. The Wicked Witch's mother was a lawyer, and cleans houses here.

Students interviewed said this school was better than the ones they had attended in their native lands. "This is a high education place," the Tin Man said. "A lot of more satisfactory things than in Bangladesh."

Ms. Senechal sees a school that takes poor children — 100 percent get free lunches — and provides opportunity. This is why she has no faith in the federal No Child Left Behind law, which labels I.S. 223 a failing school. While I.S. 223 students in every racial and ethnic subgroup made their testing goals in English, math and science, the law requires 95 percent to be tested, and on the English exam, the school was 7 students short. "That makes us a failing school?" she said. "Nonsense. Remarkable things happen at this school."

Ms. Senechal watched her students working together to get the English words right for the play.

"Emeny?" said Laura the Good Witch.

"Enemy," said Yestak Haq, the Scarecrow.

"Emer-rolled City?" Laura said.

"Emerald," said Shahwar Bibi, the lead Winkie.

The teacher saw signs of Americanization right before her eyes. On the afternoon of opening night, Asfara — sporting a blue gingham pinafore, ruby slippers, a stuffed Toto and braids — decided not to wear her head scarf. "This is quite a development," said Ms. Senechal, who made her call home before the performance.

"My mother says, 'All right, it looks nice, I can do for a day, that's O.K.,' " Asfara reported back.

The show started at 8 past the hour, just as on Broadway. Ms. Senechal was stationed in front of the stage, and to avoid distracting the audience, crawled between the sound board stage left (she'd put microphones on several actors, including Yasser the quiet-spirited lion) and a laptop stage right that projected a huge image of Mohammed Tanim, the Wizard.

If the truth be told, the beginning, in Kansas, was flat, the students' accented English hard to understand. But the moment Asfara, her braids swinging in the air, looked her stuffed dog in the eye and said, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more," the play soared, the singing and dancing carrying the show.

At the end there was tons of applause, woo-woos, cameras flashing and two curtain calls. Dorothy gave Ms. Senechal a bouquet of flowers, and then the cast and director gathered for juice and cookies.

Ms. Senechal knows this Brooklyn stage is the closest most will get to Broadway. But that was never the point. Like the great and powerful Oz, she gave them a peek at what they are made of. The Tin Man hopes to use what he discovered to become a scientist, the Lion a computer specialist, and Dorothy an engineer.

Not knowing, in our blood and bones, that we are truly loved or loveable undermines our capacity to give and receive love freely. This is the core wound that generates interpersonal conflict and a whole range of familiar relationship tangles. Difficulty trusting, fear of being misused or rejected, harboring jealousy and vindictiveness, defensively stonewalling, having to argue and prove we're right, feeling easily hurt or offended, and blaming others for our pain -- these are just a few of the ways that our insecurity about being loved or loveable shows up.

The mood of unlove often shows up in the form of sudden emotional flare-ups in reaction to any hint of being slighted or badly treated. It's as though a reservoir of distrust and resentment were ready and waiting to be released, which the tiniest incident can trigger. Even caring and compassionate people often carry within them a fair share of unlove and righteous grievance, which can suddenly erupt under certain circumstances. For some couples these explosions happen early on, blowing a budding relationship apart in their first few encounters. For others, the mood of unlove might not wreak its havoc until well into a seemingly happy marriage, when both partners suddenly wake up one day and realize they don't feel truly seen or known. It's not uncommon for long-term spouses to say something like, "I know my husband loves me, but somehow I don't feel loved."

Sometimes the mood of unlove shows up in the form of endless bickering and petty irritation, as though both partners were continually looking for reasons to grumble, "Why don't you love me better?" For example, one couple I worked with described the following incident that led to a week-long estrangement. The woman had just made her husband tea when he became upset with her for putting milk in it: "Haven't I told you before that I don't want you putting milk in my tea for me, that I like to let it steep for a long time first?" The only way to understand how something so trivial could trigger a major conflict is through recognizing what her action signifies for him: In his eyes, she has shown once again that she is not attuned to him and his needs -- like all the other women in his life. And for her, when even making tea becomes an occasion for blame and resentment, this shows, once again, that no matter what she does she can never win his love. Lurking in the background of this petty incident is the age-old pain of feeling uncared for and unappreciated, which both partners are reenacting once again.

As a practicing psychotherapist, I have been intrigued by the tenacity and intransigence of the mood of unlove, which can live on in the psyche in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary (even when people in our lives do love us) or in spite of many years of therapy or spiritual practice. What's worse, the mood of unlove has the power to repel, belittle, or sabotage whatever love is there. Somehow the love that's available always seems to fall short -- it's not sufficient, not good enough, or not the right kind. Somehow it fails to convince us that we are truly loved or loveable. In this way the mood of unlove -- as an expectation that we won't or can't be fully embraced or accepted -- makes us impervious to letting in the love that might actually free us from its grip.

As a result, "You have two choices in life: You can stay single and be miserable or get married and wish you were dead," as H.L. Mencken wrote with a flourish of wry, black humor. Reciting this line at relationship workshops always evokes peals of laughter as people feel the relief of naming this basic human dilemma. When under the spell of the mood of unlove, living alone is miserable because we feel bereft or abandoned. And yet marrying is no cure for this misery, since living with someone every day can further intensify the sense of unlove and make it feel even more hellish.

How then can brokenhearted people like ourselves heal this woundedness around love that has been passed down through the generations, and set ourselves free from the strife that dominates our world? This is the most crucial issue of human life, both personally and collectively. It is also the central focus of this book.

But the image on the coin, of a ram looking over its shoulder at a star, sent the Rutgers University astronomer to dusty astrological texts to interpret its meaning. And what he found was the key, he believes, for unlocking the secret of the Star of Bethlehem.

The Star of Bethlehem has mystified and intrigued Bible scholars and astronomers (and those who fancied themselves a bit of both) for centuries.

The second chapter of Matthew's Gospel describes a unique celestial phenomenon that somehow escaped the notice of King Herod and the rest of Judea yet attracted mysterious visitors from the distant east, seeking a newborn king.

A number of celestial events have been proposed to explain the Bethlehem Star. A newly revised Bible Handbook, issued this year by the Zondervan Publishing House, states "there's one and only one astronomical object" that meets all of the Biblical criteria: a comet.

Molnar, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1971, is sure it's not a comet. In an interview, Molnar said ancient astrology texts never refer to the birth of anybody related to a comet. Comets usually signal disaster, such as a war or the death of a king, he said.

In those ancient texts Molnar discovered that Aries the Ram was the zodiac symbol for the ancient kingdom of Judea, something that most scholars had apparently missed. Its appearance on his coin, minted in Antioch around A.D. 6, probably symbolized the solidification of Roman rule of the region.

Based on that information, he then went looking for the kind of celestial event that would have signaled to ancient astrologers like the Magi that something as memorable as the birth of a king was about to take place. "I really had to think like them," he said. "What would they look for?"

His research lead him to the morning of April 17, 6 B.C. The planet Jupiter, named after the supreme deity of the ancient Romans, came over the horizon that morning accompanied by a host of other celestial signs that would have been like flashing neon light to the astrologers.

April 17, 6 B.C., Bethlehem, Israel
time: Jupiter rising
(click on image to enlarge)

The moon and the sun were both right there, and Saturn was nearby, all within the sign of Aries the Ram. "All of these things, according to ancient manuscripts, indicated the birth of an incredibly powerful king," Molnar said.

Restudying the original Greek of Matthew's Gospel account Molnar saw a very technical description of exactly what occurred that April, as well as later in the year.

"These are also astronomical terms," he said. "'In the east,'" in Greek, meant 'at morning rising in the east.' Words for 'going forward' and 'stood over' were the same as what we call today retrograde motion."

Retrograde motion is an optical illusion created by the orbits of the planets. As the earth's orbit catches up to another planet, such as Jupiter, the planet's movement across the sky appears to slow and stop.

Later that summer and fall, Jupiter underwent retrograde motion. "I believe this was the time the wise men were visiting King Herod and had their audience with him," Molnar said.

Molnar's colleagues at other East Coast universities seem to consider his new book, The Star of Bethlehem, a major breakthrough. Bradley Schaefer of Yale writes, in a Sky & Telescope review, that all the old Star of Bethlehem theories are now irrelevant.

Harvard's Owen Gingrich, in an endorsement on the book jacket, calls it "the most original and important contribution of the entire twentieth century on the thorny question of how events recorded there should be interpreted."

Molnar says the book, which was issued in October 1999 by Rutgers University Press, is now in its second printing.

I'm hosting Christmas dinner this year for my new extended family. And as I woke up this morning I thought of planning to say the dinner grace. However, the twelve adults and three children coming are all different faiths -- from New Age to Born-again Christian to Agnostic/Atheist -- so probably a moment of silence will work better. But this is the grace I would say. I offer it to this solstice moment of turning, to germinate and grow in our hearts as the light increases.

Dear Lord, Great Spirit, thank you for our lives. And thank you for the bounty of this beautiful Earth that provides our meals. Bless and protect all those who are cold, sick, hungry, lonely, grieving, angry or in pain. Ease their burdens and lighten their loads. Keep fear and judgement from our hearts, and help us cultivate humility, gratitude, and wonder instead. And please keep us healthy so that we can grow in compassion and courage, to serve others and you. Aho, amen.

2005 has been a good year. My travels haven't taken me far, but I've enjoyed trips to Death Valley, Sedona, Big Sur, Mexico, British Columbia and Yosemite, as well as various short road trips closer to home. Mostly however, the journey has been an inner one. Dru and I have been together now for over a year and our relationship continues to deepen and grow. I'm blessed by his presence in my life.

Work in the architecture firm continues, I'm lucky to have survived the economic downturn thus far when so many are struggling. This website was also re-designed this year and it's been fun to work with the new system. I hope you enjoy what you see.

I'm also happy to report that various people were inspired enough by my plea for Pakistan earthquake relief that $2,640 was donated to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), which is enough to pay for an emergency health kit to care for 4,800 displaced people for three months. Together we *can* make a difference!

For 2006 I hope to write more, including astrological pieces and personal stories. I'm also looking forward to our astrological apprenticeship retreat in the highlands of central Mexico with Steven in March. It's promising to be a lovely new flower and of course an opportunity for the "tribe" to get away and experience each other in a new environment. Plus every time I travel in Mexico my Spanish improves! A good thing in this modern age.

The Napa retreat is on schedule for September 2006, and later in the year Dru and I are hoping to take a longer trip to somewhere new and different. I'm also hoping to contribute more of my time and energy in 2006 to helping those in need and making the planet a better place to live.

A holiday message arrived this morning from a man I deeply respect, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I thought I would share with you this piece:

There is a beautiful spiritual message underlying Christmas that has universal appeal: the hope that gets reborn in moments of despair, the light that gets re-lit in the darkest moments of the year, is beautifully symbolized by the story of a child born of a teenage homeless mother who had to give birth in a manger because no one would give her shelter, and escaping the cruelty of Roman imperial rule and its local surrogate Herod who already knew that such a child would grow up to challenge the entire imperialist system. To celebrate that vulnerable child as a symbol of hope that eventually the weak would triumph over the rule of the arrogant and powerful is a spiritual celebration with strong analogies to our Jewish Chanukah celebration which also celebrates the victory of the weak over the powerful. And many other spiritual traditions around the world have similar celebrations at this time of year.

The loss of this message, and its subversion into a frenetic orgy of consumption, rightly disturbs many Christians and other people of faith. Yet this transformation is not a result of Jews or Muslims wanting to protect their children from being forced to sing Christmas carols in public school. It derives, instead, from the power of the capitalist marketplace, operating through television, movies and marketers, to drum into everyone's mind the notion that the only way to be a decent human being during this season is to buy and buy more. Thus the altruistic instinct to give, which could take the form of giving of our time, our skills, and our loving energies to people we care about, gets subverted into a competitive frenzy of consumption.

Not surprisingly, the "Christian Right" is unwilling to challenge the capitalist marketplace, because uncritical support for corporate power is precisely what they offered to become part of the conservative coalition. Thus their loyalty to conservative materialist economics has trumped their commitment to serving God.

Unfortunately huge numbers of people feel inadequate during the holidays because they dont have enough money to buy the kinds of gifts that their friends and children are being taught (by the media) to be proof of "really caring". So many people will feel disappointed as they stand with the Christmas tree or Chanukah menorah and find that the gifts they received didn't measure up to their marketplace-induced fantasies.

Meanwhile, the spiritual message of the holidays is largely lost. No wonder people feel distraught. The solution is not to blame each other -- it's to recognize instead that the emptiness, or feeling of loneliness and "lack", has been forced upon them by market values that they need to become aware of and then reject.

It's time for true Christian leaders to conduct a powerful spiritual critique of selfishness and materialism, stand up on behalf of their own highest spiritual vision, and challenge the *real* Christmas thieves! Only then will Christmas be reclaimed.

Thank you all for being in my life. I hope your celebrations are safe and warm, and that together with Spirit we can get closer to a world of peace, justice and love.

All my heart,

What are we trying to heal anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

Remember, the part of us that we imagine needs healing is not the part we create from; that part is far deeper and stronger. The part we create from can't be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted, soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we've got, the better and richer that part becomes.

The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with creative work. Besides, what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty? Isn't that the whole point of healing?

I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my creative work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn't rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith-Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked away immediately into the shitcan. That was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean dishes began rising in the drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling.

It hit me that I had turned a corner. I was okay. I would be okay from now on.

Do you understand? I hadn't written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn't matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and did my work.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against true healing. We all need it. But it has nothing to do with doing our creative work and it can be a colossal exercise in Resistance. Resistance loves "healing". Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to offer our gift.

(1) (2)
(1) Entire villages have been flattened and no relief workers have reached them yet.
(2) These women have been standing in line for 3 days for food, and they're the luckier ones.

From the November 13th segment on 60 Minutes:

The situation in Pakistan is worsening by the day. The death toll continues to rise and is now close to 90,000.

Three million people are still living without shelter and a harsh winter is weeks away. The United Nations says conditions in Pakistan are worse than after the tsunami and that it is the biggest humanitarian nightmare the UN has ever dealt with.

The towns look like they have been bombarded by a brutal air force for weeks. It's hard to believe that this happened five weeks ago. It could have been yesterday. Nothing has changed. Even the horizon is still strewn with rubble.

There are sights which defy belief. Streets are littered with clothing, sent up by charities and discarded by people. They don't need tattered shirts. They need shelter, food, water, medical care.

The inability to stop the death toll from rising after so long is unheard of in disaster relief. After the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina the world's outpouring of help and generosity stemmed the deaths within a couple of weeks so the work of healing and rebuilding could begin. However, in Pakistan, the question has arisen -- is the West just weary of giving? Or is cultural bias at work? The northern Pakistan mountains are, after all, Bin Laden territory. Are we saying, since you hate us we will forget about you?

The 60 Minutes segment went on to spotlight 13 paramedics from New York who've gone to Pakistan to help, at their own cost, and are there trying to stem the rising tide of pain and death on their own. But the immensity of the need is overwhelming. It's like a finger in the dike, or trying to dig out from under an avalanche with a spoon.

But one thing that struck me was the paramedics' belief that long after lives have been put back together, the survivors will remember who showed up to help. And that this could irrevocably change the perception of America among those most susceptible to radical Muslim fundamentalism.

From 60 Minutes:

This is not why the New York medics came here, of course. They didn't come to win hearts and minds, but to save lives. Hearts and minds just seemed to follow, and that's fine with paramedic Steve Muth.

"We can inoculate an entire valley, if we're lucky, against radical Islam," says Muth. "And it's so simple. I'm just a paramedic. It's just a bandage. It's not a $100 million dollar ad campaign from Madison Avenue. It's not, you know, it's not complicated. Could something work better to change somebody's mind? I can't think of anything..."

"Love your enemies" in this context is obviously an extremely wise, compassionate, and practical way to build bridges and sow the seeds of peace.

I'm collecting donations in my workplace and hope within the next week to be able to donate at least $600 to Doctors Without Borders. Please join me by giving what you can.

For more information click on any of the links above, or see:
- 60 Minutes news segment online
- NPR: The South Asia Earthquake

Feel free to add your comments below.

May we be ever thankful for our many blessings which are only multiplied by sharing.

Even if unsubstantiated, the chart is rather awesome to consider and draws me for some reason. The Birth of the World? Click on the image below to expand it.

Even if we can't buy the fact that the earth was "born" at 6 pm one day (after six days of labor, when God "saw it was good" and decided to finally rest). The fact remains that this is the first instance of anybody trying, through study and calculation, to fix the time of the World's creation. So under the mindset of horary, the chart would have some significance, even if the event itself is an impossible concept.

In researching more about Bishop Ussher, I discovered an interesting book called Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, by Martin Gorst. It discusses how our views about time, creation, and eternity have evolved.

As "foolish" as a birthchart of the World is, I'd love to hear what people think about it from a symbolic perspective. Imagine Gaia's nodal story... Even knowing that it can't be the birthchart of Creation, we might instead entertain the idea of it being the chart of the Judeo-Christian culture -- another fascinating idea. Here are some brief thoughts:

- Aries Rising: Birth, initiation, vigor, life force, tada!
- Libra Sun + Moon: Love one another
- Sun + Moon in the 6th: Serve one another, be humble
- Scorpio Venus in 8th: Bond, be honest, connect, persevere, don't let go easily, accept that death and pain are part of this journey
- Aries Pluto in 1st opp Libra Mars in 7th: There will be conflict, wounding and strife here, brother against brother
- Leo South Node in 5th: Leave behind self-importance and frivolous pursuits
- Aquarius North Node conj Jupiter: Our journey is to something greater and unexpected.

And it's pretty interesting that we'll be entering the age of Aquarius soon, huh?

Enjoy!