Blog Profile

The blog that I have chosen to profile is called “Astrological Musings” and is written by professional astrologer Lynn Hayes. She has basically devoted her life to the study of all things spiritual, from Tarot cards to meditation to non-western healing practices. As her day job she is currnetly a consultant and writer about anything related to the stars and planets and their significance to our terrestrial lives. On her blog, she tracks the heavenly movements and comments on meaning of them. She posts daily (or at least every other day), with a long post every 2-3 days. Her blog seems to be fairly popular (rated 425 on technorati.com), especially since it is hosted by a website called beliefnet.com whose tagline is, “Inspiration. Spirituality. Faith”. She speaks somewhat academically when detailing specific astrological movements and their meanings, probably to ensure her audience of her knowledge and authority on the subject. However, her goal is definitely to connect with readers on a personal level, so she never writes in a way that puts herself on a higher level than her readers. For example, she will often use the term “we” instead of “you” or “I”, stressing her opinion that her and her readers are one in the same. Especially when she turns her astrological interpretations into real world advice, which she often does, she employs a friendly and colloquial voice. An example of her colloquial voice is in one post when she quotes a sentence from a public internet forum and then writes “this quote is so Saturn/Pluto”. She is constantly attempting to portray astrological information as a normal part of her readers’ every day life, just like it is for her.

In her blogging content, she focuses mostly on the moods and feelings evoked by the positions of the stars and how they can be understood within the context of one’s personal conception of reality. The most interesting aspect of her blog to me is when she occasionally brings up issues from the news or pop culture and applies to them her own astrological interpretation. Like most of her writing, these deal with the influence of astrological events on personal psyche, but in the case of pop culture issues she talks about the collective psyche of large groups of people. An interesting example of this is a post she wrote about the film Avatar and its effect on people. Apparently, there were internet message boards popping up in the wake of Avatar’s popularity where people were depressed, and in some cases suicidal, because of the emptiness of our own world compared to beauty and bountifulness of life of the one depicted in Avatar. Hayes explains a potential astrological origin for these feelings. The gist of her analysis can be summed up in the following paragraph:

“As I wrote last October, the conjunction of Chiron (wounding and healing) to Neptune (yearning for spiritual connection) in the sign of Aquarius (idealism and a desire for social justice and revolution) has been inspiring deep experiences of old grief to erupt into our conscious mind where they can be resolved and released.  Chiron and Neptune are nearing their exact conjunction for the first time since last summer.  With Chiron in Aquarius, the experience of wounding that Chiron reveals has its origin in the disappointment of our ideals and our yearnings for the perfect world - the Age of Aquarius of myth and legend.  The addition of Neptune adds a layer of delusion and magic as well as a powerful awareness of where we are disconnected from our souls.”

She then concludes her post with the following statement:

“The purpose of these planetary cycles is not to make us miserable but to cause us to go deeper.  Life may have lost its meaning for us, but that's because we are being urged to seek beyond the superficial; beyond the mundane and ordinary.  We don't need to go to Pandora for this experience - the magic lies within.”

 As you can she she provides an interesting astrological framework with which to understand the issue, and from this framework she gives some advice as to how to deal with it. Read out of context, these quotes may sound like psuedo-spiritual gibberish, but when applied to the point that she is making, the astrological insights are actually quite realistic and logical (this was probably a little bit of what I was feeling when I decided to write this blog in the first place). Not every post is based on giving spiritual advice, as one could possibly expect from an astrologer’s blog. In this next post, she tracks the career and recent controversy surrounding Senator John Edwards in conjunction with astrological movements and the way that they apply to his specific astrological chart, which she had previously calculated.

I plan to have my blog be similar to this one in some ways but there will definitely be obvious differences. First of all, I am not an expert in any field of spiritual study, so I will not be able to give the academic level of insight and advice that Hayes provides in most of her posts. The main thing that I can take from this blog, however, is the way that she treats spiritual issues as real, significant entities in the universe, and not as vague musings with no tangible connection to reality. I want my blog, like hers, to explore spiritual issues and how they directly influence people’s perceptions, decisions and actions, not just their thinking. I also like the way that she puts herself on an even plane with the readers, which will be even easier for me since I have no training and any background knowledge that I do demonstrate in my writing will mostly be gathered through internet based research. The third and final thing that I will take from this blog (and probably expand on) is the wide range of subjects that she covers through the lens of astrology. I plan on writing about just about any issue or story that I find interesting, just as she does. This will apply not only to the news stories that I mention, but to very spiritual issues that I write about as well. Since I have no training in any specific one, they are all the same to me, what I write about is simply a matter of what I find and what I find most interesting.