During this Mercury Rx this March, I cleaned house on the Eagle Eye website and temporarily disabled the Eagle Eye Facebook page, using this as a beneficial time to purge the old.
The purging almost meant gutting the entire Eagle Eye project, but I stopped short, thanks to my daughter, feedback from a friend, and the help of a book, Learned Optimism by Dr. Martin Seligman. Thanks to all of this, I have a new personal goal this Mercury Rx and this season of Lent: transform extreme pessimism into something closer to mild or moderate optimism. Mercury Retrogrades are considered a good time for all kinds of life review and research. This seemed as worthwhile as any form of research I could contrive.
Taking on a new teaching job in January has meant many things, not surprisingly, my astrology pursuits by necessity have taken a back seat to my more immediate demands, such as learning all the myriad software programs now used by classroom teachers and grading stacks of multiple choice tests for first graders.
Pondering the world through an astrological lens and sharing my thoughts with an eye towards what the stars indicate has given me a helpful way to try out different perspectives and has been a gateway for self-expression, but astrology and writing blogs doesn’t pay bills and my teaching job does and teaching keeps me grounded.
I have for my entire work life concerned myself with how to improve education and this has evolved through many different questions and quests. The first quest was becoming a mainstream teacher. This was followed by investigating alternative forms of education like Montessori, Waldorf, Sudbury, and homeschooling to get a picture of the various educational philosophies. The next quest was starting new schools. I played a significant part in starting a Sudbury school and a Waldorf school. Then came the quest to learn how to help a fledgling Waldorf school become a mature one. Along the way I learned a lot about faith and hard work and a little about how to work with others and create a community, something I knew almost nothing about when I began.
My most recent quest has felt like a big departure from the world of education and schools: Sharing Astrology as a tool for understanding self and others.
A dear mentor put it to me like this recently, “If you have four or five targets, you don’t load all four of your arrows at once.” I admit to asking myself, “Why then has astrology become such a target interest after so many years with most of my targets in education? ”
If educators could develop a keen eye for that special germ or seed of greatness that a child may hold, which he or she will unfold and develop in the future, how different of a place could schools be? How do we improve our “eyesight” and help young individuals unfold themselves in the right way for their present stage of development ?
Education for most students is too often a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Teachers can help ignite the potential of a student through sincere interest in them and close observation. Add to this a little understanding of the planetary forces and our universal cosmic timeline and teachers can work more creatively to meet the needs of the student.
Eagle Eye Astrology 