Before I launch into the big finish for this A-Z Blog Challenge, I want to sincerely thank all of you who suffered through it with me—either by reading my blogs or by writing your own. I greatly appreciate your comments and likes and will repay in kind now that I’m finished with the constant state of panic I’ve been in every day this month as another daily deadline approached.
My goals for this little project were to A) do it—actually write 30 blogs on a theme and get them posted daily. B) Get used to blogging regularly instead of sitting around wishing I was blogging regularly. C) Promote Just Like Gravity. The book is still bogged down at the original publishers—three months now with very little word making it quite possible that it will be published with a completely different group. Keep an eye on this blog and on my website at SorchiaDuBois.com for updates. Fireworks will explode when it finally hits the shelves. D) Grow my followers. Most of these things worked to some extent, so I’m calling April a success!!
A lot of Z words work with the magic theme—zippers, zombies (the drink, not the movie-induced creatures), zygote, zen, — but zodiac tickled my fancy. The zodiac is the imaginary circle around the earth above the equator. It extends 8 or 9 degrees north and south of the ecliptic. It’s divided into twelve divisions of thirty degrees each. Each division is associated with a constellation. The constellations are just identifiers for each thirty-degree division so the precession of the equinoxes doesn’t affect the sign of a particular part of the year. The Moon, Sun, and planets all cross the sky along this band and are said to be in one or the other constellations.
Zodiac means ring of animals and astrologers have been using the constellations in the Zodiac for divination since at least the 2nd millennium BCE . Cultures such as the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Aztecs, and the Chinese developed systems of forecasting an individual’s destiny based on the position of stars, planets, the sun, and the moon at the time of birth and throughout the person’s life. Though many consider astrology a pseudoscience today, it was once a respected practice. Astrologers were highly regarded and knowledgeable in the motions of visible astronomical bodies.
It always annoys me when people marvel at how ancient civilizations could predict eclipses and build structures that served as giant calendars based on the stars. There was no cable!! This is what they did for fun. Anybody with a few fingers can figure out that the motions of the heavens are regular. Add a stick and a string and you can make a sundial and measure the shadows cast by the sun and moon. Astrologers spent more time than most outside at night.
The question, of course, is do the motions of the stars, planets, and so on have anything to do with us? Is it a function of gravity or some more subtle force only our cells discern? The title of Just Like Gravity is about this invisible, mysterious force that influences us, steering us and all those with whom we come in contact.
The universe is an orderly place. Each whirling orb spins in predictable figures—silent, synchronous, scintillating—ensorcelled by gravity, the movement of one determined by another. For eons they dance—keeping step with partners light years away. The clockwork universe—mathematical, predictable
Are our souls influenced by the same kinds of predictable patterns? And in the psychic universe as in the physical one, does a rogue asteroid or a capricious comet—nudged by a passing red giant or wrenched by a black hole—sometimes blunder through space and time, forever altering the trajectories of all in its path? That’s what Just Like Gravity is about.
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