Recovery from wrong is quite straightforward: called rectitude, it is a process of separating mind and body, emptiness and meaning. Coastal tea tree leans away from the salt wind, though its petrified windward buds beg the question of perfection. Are we happy with the shape of our relationships, or triggered by the trauma of others into vicarious anger and hatred? The so-called victim mentality, resentment of our windward buds, the yellow belly of activism when it rolls over, is rectitude and inauthenticity writ large. It affects to lean into the wind. Sidereal Libra, on my shoreline, you need not let this be you! Alas, the great wheel of the year has no sooner brought to the human spirit a confirmation of its foundation in community than it reveals what perpetually undermines community, the propensity of the human spirit to cling to its rationale at any cost, cloaking its instinct and ploughing through its vacuity with silence, status and rectitude. Staring into the future on the ruined planet its body has bequeathed, we never find the time, audience or self-belief to justify exactly what it is we are only doing because of the children. The scales of justice, symbol of Autumn stocktake, refinement and compromise in the olden days, can be imagined in the ancient asterism of Libra, although it is now the constellation of the Maiden which carries that Northern Hemisphere Sign, and when the Sun is in the constellation of Libra Summer is rapidly supplanting Spring where I live in the South. The mythology of heaven has undergone a lot of climate change in its time. I have arbitrarily determined in some instants that Sign follows Hemisphere, and in others that if any sidereal division of the Ecliptic transits in the southern sky at a particular latitude, it carries a Northern Tropical Sign, and the opposite Sign if it transits in the Northern sky. This implies a change of sign for the Sun on the day its declination equals a tropical location’s latitude, and prompts the consideration of what the Signs have in common, rather than how they differ. Am I right or wrong? Should I be consistent? Why? Either way, can damages be specified? I would submit to the Court of Libra that rectitude in their judgement would amount to a clear case of karmic vision. Jupiter was in sidereal Libra since October 2017, retrograde from March to July this year, uneasily tolerant in the South, balefully imposing in the North. It gratefully entered sidereal Scorpio twelve days ago and quits tropical Scorpio today. Venus was also in Libra when it ‘turned’ retrograde on October 6, and after an ingenuous dance in Virgo—I thought the maiden aunt’s wig and gown looked ridiculous, to be honest—will reenter Libra on November 27, reclaiming her refinement in the first week of the new Victorian Parliament. I hesitate to suggest that the world, Australia in particular, owes its chaos to either of these bodies when Saturn has been wallowing in the turbulence of Acheron since 2016, but I do consider myself fortunate that I won’t see a repeat. The Breamlea Zodiac is a pretty good fit for an unevenly spaced Ecliptic, if I do say so myself. The big constellations like Pisces and Virgo get their wings clipped, that’s all. The tropical signs move left with precession but the Breamlea boundaries don’t. At the moment, the difference between a Breamlea Zodiac cusp and its next tropical sign is 2° 33′ and closing (an ayanamsa of 27.45). The tranquil Southern (Taurean) Sign with its undercurrent of insecurity belying justice and rectitude fits the civil wars of colonial histories well. The wolf getting speared above is a symbol of the kangaroos and sheep slaughtered by opposing sides. Scapegoating and rectitude are two sides of the same coin, perhaps a coin tossed to fall on country, my country, even today? The signs of the hemispheres may be different, but notwithstanding differences in latitude, the stars are the same. When the Sun is in Libra, this is my witching hour sky, awaiting the Moon. Libra might be less aggressive and insecure if it could imagine its mirror image, but how do you imagine your left arm on your right? “Maybe someday I’ll be able to draw a portrait of nothingness. Just like another artist was able to complete a painting titled Killing Commendatore. But to do so I would need time to get to that point. I would have to have time on my side.” Haruki Murakami. I am hoping against hope for the time to complete my portrait of emptiness called Killing Country, a challenging project to present the Galaxy in the eyes of the dead, my world when I’m gone, wrapped and hidden in the attic of your unexamined beliefs, your most vociferous litigious redundancies. This, the essence of a portrait, is the nub of the issue of Libra consciousness, that life is about nothing which can be shared, and life not shared is nothing. A few astrologers and one or two ex-schoolmates on the bench are poking their grizzled heads into the same project, and don’t I love them for it. Watch this space. What does it mean, and remember that meaning is tangential to both culture and subjectivity, that the world I try to make intelligible to you will never, ever form itself again? A bower bird, looking for materials to build a nest on the cusp of identity, flew into a hifi store. Laden with connectors, leads and chargers, it flew straight at the plate glass window and fell down stone dead. Couldn’t it see its reflection? Stupid bird! We are embedded in myths, customs and laws, and many of these are very, very old (and sad, of course!). If we tell them, practise them, obey them, is there a meaning to our lives which will outlive us? Ah yes, letting go, of everything but what terminal rectitude outsiders call presence, so that eternity ripples with the resonance of the adept’s loving-kindness. Truly, how does Libra keep its wig on, with head stuck up there? You can get paranoid about it, but essentially, life is a contest between empty heads and hearts, and the mistaken idea that the mind is something you have to graduate in disqualifies it as will and testament. The body of the world is a safer ticket, because everyone has one of those, and it shares its stuff, unlike the mind, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is secret nobody’s business. But what concept of the world-body can transcend change? Fertiliser? Well, that’s a few of my thoughts, derived largely from the Open Office spreadsheet which cannot conceal the body of my mind, and from an equanimity which has brought seven years’ bad luck every single time I have queried the authenticity of another’s heart. Do you imagine the dead attach themselves any differently from when they lived? Of course, obscure Saint Whatsaname, you’re right: my idolatry enables your involuntary permanence, but if your spiritual curtains are open in the Underworld, what do I imagine are the Lord’s chances for a foot massage? Dulcineas of this world, Aldonzas of the next, The Enchanter raises His mirror to you! And Your Honour? Thank you for the protracted hearing you have given my redundant litigiousness.