I’m looking out my window on a sunny, calm day, in this volatile city on the Pacific Rim of Fire. Last week I re-packed the earthquake bag that sits in the corner of the bedroom, and made a note in my calendar to do it monthly.

There was a time when you talked about the weather only when you were avoiding talking about more important things. Now it’s all about the weather. You’re just sitting there minding your business, trying to pretend that Geena Davis or Martin Sheen is really the president of the U.S., when suddenly a big wind comes along and blows the roof off your house. It plays havoc with TV reception. It’s all about reality, folks.

Weather is reality, the most basic reality that we human creatures know. Weather grounds us, pulls at our connection to our mother, the earth. It reminds us that we haven’t gone beyond her. We haven’t become rarified creatures of the sky. We are still made up of water and salt and dirt, just like everything else that lives on her skin.

And weather is the way our governments are tested. If they notice when people are standing in the streets, holding babies in their arms, asking for food and water - then, they are dealing with reality. If not, they’re living in a different world from the rest of us – or at least trying to. Clearly, in the recent Katrina crisis, the Bush administration really could have used a weatherman or two. They had no idea which way the wind was blowing.

There was a time when people respected the wind and water, prayed to them, tried to divine their purposes. Storms were alive, they had passion and emotions. Everyone who’s ever run through a rainstorm feels that, somewhere in their bones. And now that we’ve watched both Katrina and Rita directing their huge spiraling bodies right at all those oil refineries - well, it does make you wonder.

And so what is this earthy influence, astrologically speaking? It’s Mars, the planet of action and will, in the fixed earth sign Taurus. Mars slows down every two years and goes retrograde. All through September, it moved more and more deliberately, and now on the 1st day of October, it goes retrograde. (It will be retrograde for two and a half months.)

When a planet is retrograde, it harkens to the past. Whatever we’ve ignored, whatever we’ve wasted, whatever we’ve discounted - it returns and taps us on the shoulder. And Mars is about the physical. It’s about our survival in these soft bodies of ours.

All through September, Mars was inconjunct Pluto, the planet of power, and this aspect will stay in orb throughout October as well. And so my sense is that it will be more of the same. Mars in Taurus represents the earth – her passions, her desires, her will – and Pluto in Sagittarius corresponds to the power structure, and the fanatical beliefs that are currently shoring it up in both hemispheres. I don’t think there’s any question who is stronger. All the earth has to do is shift a little, and we all fall.

Taurus is the sign which relates to everything that’s basic - sustenance, security, money. And so it’s also interesting to see Tom DeLay being indicted by a Texas grand jury for violations of fund-raising laws, and having to step down as majority leader. DeLay’s politics echo Bush’s: the born-again Christian who has an unlimited sense of his own illustrious political destiny. But underneath the hubris is money, a good thick carpet of it. And now that the earth is the focus, the foundations will be scrutinized much more carefully.

What are we standing on? That’s the question of the month. How have we built it? Is it strong? Is it real?

And how about our relationship to the earth? Is it real? Are we paying attention? As I said, Mars goes retrograde every two years – and the last time it did so, in the summer of 2003, Europe was burning up. The glaciers in the Alps began to melt. It’s said that 35,000 people died from drought, boiling temperatures, and forest fires during that summer. (And in the northeastern US and Canada, this was the summer of the blackouts.)

In Europe, there were also vegetable casualties. Thirty percent of the plant life withered away, and it took with it its ability to trap carbon dioxide and to release oxygen. This was added to the already heavy load of carbon dioxide in the air, caused by our human habit of burning fossil fuels pretty much continuously. That summer, we lost a lot of fresh air, and this summer and fall, when Mars is retrograde again, all that heat has come back in a different form.

Heat breeds heat. The surface of the seas have gotten hotter and so they are churning up hurricanes. Over the past 35 years, hurricanes have gotten more powerful and terrifying, according to recent study. There are now twice as many in the Category 4 and 5 range.

As we hopscotch from one Mars retrograde cycle to the next, what will happen to our earth? How much hotter can we stand it? Will somebody tell the U.S. president to sign the Kyoto Protocol before it’s too late? Is it already too late?

And so I’ll keep my earthquake bag packed, and try to stay real. Here on the Pacific Rim of Fire, we know that the foundation is always changing, shifting, flowing. In Quito, locked between the brilliant sun and the bucking earth, we have no illusions.

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