Upcoming Events

Saturday and Sunday September 16 & 17 - Port Huron MI-Comfort Inn 10a.m. to 5p.m. both days. Psychic Fun Fair. Admission $5 and readings $10.

Brenda, Jackie, Charee, Donna, Mark, Sherry Starr, Terry Riley, Carol Ball, Amy Perkins and more! We will have crystals from all over the world in the vendor area. I have just received 10 pieces of Mica, If you cannot make it to the fair, you can call me and I can ship a piece to you if you are interested.

Mica- It is what we call a "visionary stone", helping the person who is carrying or wearing it to come into contact with angelic forces in their life as well as access their own higher spiritual self. There is a very strong angelic connection with the spirit world when you carry Mica.

It can also be used to reduce hunger if one is dieting or fasting. It also helps with blood sugar levels. Its helps with insomia.Place a piece of Mica under your pillow or hold in the plam of your hand for a few minutes before you retrire to bed for the night. Mica is especially helpful in curbing anger and also temper tantrums in children. $8 - $10 per piece

Other September Fairs:

September 23 - Midland Hampton Inn 11a.m. to 6p.m.

September 30 - We will have 2 fairs
1. Auburn Hills - Residence Inn 10a.m. to 5p.m.
2. Saginaw Hampton Inn 11a.m. to 6p.m.

October 1 - Bay City - Under the Sun - Enjoy the newly remodeled fair facilities. 989-667-5380 11a.m. to 5p.m.

October 7 - 10a.m. to 4:30p.m. with Ghost Tour Following

If you're looking for a fun and unique weekend getaway, our top pick for October is our Port Austin Psychic Fair and Ghost Tour. Make a weekend out of it and take a drive to see the pretty fall colors. They should be peaking in this area of Michigan by then. Stay at the haunted, historic Garfield Inn Saturday night. This lovely B&B has 6 turn of the century appointed rooms. The chef is one of the country's best! Enjoy getting a reading in the parlor and then partake in the Ghost Tour

Just added! Due to the success of our last show in Grand Blanc, MI, we are offering another customer appreciation day again

October 8 - Grand Blanc , Flint School of Therapeutic Massage, new location Hill Rd and US 23 11a.m.to 5p.m.
Here's the special deal!
$5 admission and 1 reading for $10 or 3 readings, admission and a copy of Maria's book ..all for $35.
There will be massages and reflexology and much more during the fair.

We've Just added Roseville Minnesota again! Two day fair at Mind, Body Soul 1740 Lexington Avenue. 10a.m. to 5p.m. Saturday and Sunday December 9 & 10. We will have over 10 readers, massages therapists specializing in unique and different forms of healing expression as well as classes, lectures and an array of gemstones and crystals. Get your holiday shopping done here!

Nice Letters We Get

This is from a lady who used the 1 Question Icon on my homepage and asked her question through e-mail.

Maria,
Thank you for the reading. It was very informative and I know in my heart of hearts that all of it is true. I had a sense of it. You have confirmed my very thoughts and put them into words. I don't know what I am going to do or how I am going to act, but the "knowing" is always very helpful to me. It allows me to relax and not to over react.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are truly talented.
E.

After E. Had received the answer to your question, she submitted another question too! During the time I was typing her answer back, a spirit of a man kept nudging me to tell this lady something. It turned out she knew exactly who he was!

Maria,
Once again. Hats off to you. I have a sense about this guy, but you have really explained him to me. I asked this second question because of the accuracy of Your answer to my first answer.
The man who came through, I believe is my father. He died a year ago and our family held an unveiling of his grave stone this weekend. Thanks for all.
E.

This next letter is from a client who orders my solar return reports every year. By reading the 55 page report and doing the meditations,, she is able to create wonderful things in her life as well as be forewarned of challenges and alerted to opportunity times. She has used the information very well. The $35 report helped her make $25,000! Now, that's a great investment!

Dear Maria
I know these solar return reports work!
Did I tell you that I received a large buyout package for returning to my job this June? If I had not done the solar return report last year and spent time in Chicago (like you suggested) I would have retired by force and missed out on the $25,000 buy out package, So I know these solar return things are very powerful. The first trip you told me to go on was to Redwood City and I had a fantastic year. Last year also.
Thanks! C.M, from Michigan

Click to here to learn more about the solar return and what it is...
http://www.mariashaw.com/starscopes/2004-06-update1/index.html#solarreturn

To order your solar return report, before your birthday, call me at 810-631-6887.

Relocation Charts

Moving? Wondering if you are relocating is a good move? How will the change affect your life?

I am now offering relocation charts and reports for those of you who are considering a move to a new location. The reports vary in length from 6 to 15 pages and will tell you how the specific city vibrates to your personal energy and what you can expect to happen if you live there. What strengths and weaknesses come alive in a particular area for you? Will the move be a good one? Or should you consider somewhere else? Some folks want to strengthen their career energy or their love life so they should look for special areas to live that will create and draw that energy to them. Just as each of us have a birth chart, so does each city and how the two energies mesh is important to our success and failures,. For example, my luckiest area is near Phoenix. I always do well when I visit there. We had a successful fair in Sedona in May. I am always welcomed by the local media and have had success with a business investment for years there.

New Orleans makes me more spiritual and psychic and as if I can "get lost" there. It is very relaxing for me there. My work will go well in NYC. I have been on more national television show in New York than in Los Angeles and have many clients in and around the area of Manhattan. So far, the astro maps as I call them, have proven to be "right on" for me. So, after studying the concept for several years, I decided to offer them to clients on a regular basis. The reports will be on special as an introductory rate between now and the end of the year. Regularly $20 per city per report, you can get 2 cities, 2 reports for $20 plus shipping and handling or I can email the reports to you. Call 810-631-6887. I will need your birthday, time of birth, city of both and the 2 cities you would like to consider for relocation. The special is good for 1 person…cannot be shared. You must chose 2 cities and only base the report on your birthday.

Moon Calendar Coming

My annual 2007 Moon Calendar will be available in October. It will also include some new, special features; lucky money days, a crystal guide and favorable days for each sign for love, money, and challenging days. As always, the calendar will include moon placements, Mercury retrogrades, eclipses and it is loaded with wonderful astro info you can use. You will be able to order copies through my website, pick up at one of our fairs and appearances or call 810-631-6887 to order. The calendars will be included in a special combo in the month of October. $20 for the calendar and a copy of the Astro Diet or the Enchanted Soul plus S&H. Or $15 plus $4.05 shipping for just the calendar.

Here's the article of interest for this week...

Pluto's Continuing Impact
The Llewellyn Journal
Date: 2006-09-04 By: Philip Brown

Astrologers have observed Pluto's intense and unmistakable influences for over seventy years in world events, trends, the horoscopes of friends and clients, and in our own lives.

However, on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union, meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, voted to re-classify Pluto as a "dwarf planet"—and also as "the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects."1 The following day, news media around the world featured prominent stories about Pluto's demise. The World Book Encyclopedia even delayed the press run for its 2007 edition until a decision was reached so that they could publish the most up-to-date information on our solar system.

What does this mean for astrology? Has Pluto downshifted into a lower, less powerful gear? Or is it still able to plow its intense course through our horoscopes? Will Pluto remain the same powerful astrological point in the cosmos, no matter how it is classified by astronomers?

How can astrology's experience of Pluto as a powerful and reliable symbol in the horoscope be reconciled with a scientific consensus that has "reduced" Pluto's status in the solar system hierarchy?

Imagining Pluto

Before I learned about astrology, I learned to love Pluto as a child. My parents had a big picture book on the solar system, circa 1950s. It featured artistic visions of the planets, with panoramic views as though you were standing on the actual planets' surfaces. Pluto was mesmerizing. It was depicted as a twilit planet, its craggy blackness dimly lit by the pinpoint sun's cold and distant gaze over the horizon. The stars glittered. Pluto was timeless and solitary. I would stare at the page and imagine what it might feel like to be there.

Although I did not know it then, I was already "on Pluto." It conjoins the Sun—the symbol of one's core identity—in my horoscope by less than a degree, which means that when I was born, the central symbol of our solar system and its then-most distant planet were at the same point in the heavens. This small object has always been a powerful force in my own life, and I have felt its impact in many ways. I have also seen how Pluto's slow, cosmic passage through the signs has had an enormous influence in the lives of others, both individually and collectively. My new book, Cosmic Trends (to be published by Llewellyn in November, 2006), discusses many of these collective influences.

Solar System Discoveries

Up until the late 1700s, the solar system consisted of just five planets besides the Earth: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Saturn was as far as the unaided eye could see. It was not until the development of more powerful telescopes that the next planet, Uranus, was discovered. Our awareness of the solar system beyond Saturn, therefore, is separated from the earlier known planets by telescopic vision. Our sight has become more powerful. Today astronomers are able to see far beyond the boundary of Saturn, past Pluto, and deep into the Kuiper Belt (a ring of small objects rotating at the outer edges of the solar system far beyond Neptune and believed to be the source of comets2).

The decision of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was not impulsive or capricious. It was made necessary by advances in the scientific ability to peer with precision instruments deep into the reaches of our solar system—the same ability which earlier revealed the existences of Uranus and Neptune and now shows us the details of a new part of the solar system, the Kuiper Belt, of which Pluto is a part and yet separate.

What If You Are a Scorpio?

Sun-in-Scorpio individuals may be wondering what all this means for them because Pluto is the modern ruler of Scorpio. The Saturn-Neptune opposition, discussed below, is also greatly affecting anyone with the Sun or other planets in the mid-degrees of fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, or Aquarius). However, Scorpios can rest assured. As this article points out, Pluto's strength is undiminished. In some ways, we are just beginning to understand its true significance. Scorpios have always had Mars as the original, traditional ruler of the sign of the scorpion.

Pluto and the Saturn-Neptune Opposition

The decision of the IAU was made at the same time as the Saturn-Neptune opposition, an alignment which is having a large influence in many different parts of our lives, individually as well as globally. Saturn and Neptune engage in a 36-year cycle, meaning that they go from conjoining in the sky to opposing to conjoining approximately every 36 years. During this cycle, the planet of form, organization, boundaries, and measurement—Saturn—and the planet of formlessness, imagination, merging, and intuition—Neptune—must learn to deal with each other. Because these two planets are opposite one another right now, their energies do not easily blend or merge. Like two individuals locked in a staring contest, they tend to build tension and rejection of each other's energies, becoming even more exclusively locked into their own identities .

It is no accident that Pluto, which tapped a deep part of the collective psyche—whether one believes in astrology or not—received from astronomers the equivalent of a numbered orange concert wristband and a place in the Kuiper Belt mosh pit along with all the other punk rocks. Astrologers, on the other hand, understand Pluto's symbolic and mythic value, and know that it should be up on the stage wearing a silk bandanna and playing awesome power chords on an ear-splitting electric guitar—and certainly not stuck down in the mosh pit.

When the world experiences Saturn versus Neptune, as we are now, the challenge is to blend the two, in this case honoring the symbolic language of astrology while not rejecting the science of astronomy.

Pluto and the Symbolic Language of Astrology

Astrology has often used the astrophysical features of the planets and their orbits as springboards to symbolic interpretation. Observation and measurement of the planets is the realm of astronomy; observation of the planets' relationship to human behavior and events here on Earth is the realm of astrology. The two—astronomy and astrology—are connected, but astrology separates from astronomy when astrologers use the planets as symbols, energies, archetypes, and myths, connecting these to human behavior and earthly events.

The planets' names—Mercury, Venus, etc.—represent mythic archetypes which are used in astrology. Similarly, astrology transforms the language of astronomical observations into the language of symbols. Some examples: Mercury's quick orbit relates it to phone calls, e-mail, and instant messaging; Mars is the "red planet," red being a color of anger and aggression; Saturn is the farthest planet which can be seen with the naked eye, thus representing boundaries; Uranus' odd, slightly flattened shape symbolizes non-conformity; and so on. The scientific behaviors and characteristics of the planets and luminaries have enriched their symbolic meanings in astrology.

The observation of Pluto's small size was originally responsible for much of its symbolic interpretation in astrology. When tiny Pluto was found, the world was just beginning to discover the awesome power of something else very small, the atom. This invisible particle would soon be capable of destroying civilization. The radioactive element plutonium, used in nuclear weapons, was named after the planet. Also, Pluto's orbital stretch into the dark unknown seemed to metaphorically parallel the growing field of psychiatry and its probing of the unconscious.

Pluto has several other astronomical features which are also highly symbolic and ensure that Pluto's power as an astrological symbol need not be weakened.

Pluto's eccentric, egg-shaped orbit brings it from the dark outer limits of the solar system—the Kuiper Belt—to an orbit inside of Neptune. Unlike the other planets which orbit our sun in neat circles, Pluto moves slowly in an elongated oval. If an unseen hand were to take a time-lapse picture of our solar system from above, holding the shutter open for 248 years (the length of Pluto's orbit), what would we see? Pluto's orbit would appear like a great string of beautiful cosmic pearls flung over the outer reaches of the solar system, its graceful loop connecting the planets to the collective celestial bodies of the Kuiper Belt. In this way, Pluto symbolically links us to cosmic forces beyond the realm of our human understanding—forces which we are just now beginning to comprehend.

Pluto's moon, Charon (pronounced CARE-uhn), also gives Pluto a special place in the solar system. Charon is named after the boatman in Greek mythology who ferried the dead across the river Acheron. Unlike Earth's moon, which has its own center of gravity, Pluto's center of gravity is in the space midway between it and Charon.3 As a result, they do not spin individually like our earth and moon but together, locked on the same axis. Pluto and Charon rotate while eternally chasing one another, clenched in the tension of a distant cosmic pursuit—the god of the Underworld and the ferryman of the dead—yet never completing the chase. Pluto' unique gravitational connection to its moon gives it added mythic power, resonant with deep overtones of mortality.

The beautiful symbolism of Pluto and Charon can be seen in John Keats' classic poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which extols two lovers painted on a funeral urn. Although a pair of lovers may seem a far cry from Pluto and Charon, the lovers are locked in an eternal pose of youthful chase—much like Pluto and its moon, Charon—one in "mad pursuit," the other fleeing in a playful "struggle to escape." The lovers' youthfulness is frozen in time on a funeral symbol, the urn. Keats could have been writing about Pluto when he refers to one of the figures as the "foster-child of silence and slow time."4

The International Astronomers Union transformed Pluto from a planet to "the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects." Trans-Neptunian objects is another name for the Kuiper Belt. Pluto, the planet of transformation, is itself undergoing a transformation—from planet to prototype. A prototype means the standard for a new model. Translated into the symbolic language of astrology, Pluto's transformation indicates that something is also being transformed in human consciousness, and humanity is being given a new standard to move towards.

1. "IAU 2006 General Assembly: Result of the IAU Resolution votes," SpaceRef.com, August 24, 2006

2. David Jewitt, "Kuiper Belt,"

3. S. Alan Stern, "About Pluto-Charon," The Pluto Portal, site last modified on February 1, 2003

4. John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fifth Edition, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company) 822-823.

[Note from Maria: I will continue to use Pluto in all my research and consultations. This act will not change how I read charts or the respect I have for Pluto.]

Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd.
Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. grants permission to use this article as originally posted at:
The Llewellyn Journal -- www.llewellynjournal.com
P.O. Box 64383
St. Paul, MN 55164-0383

Finally, I am back on the radio on a regular basis again. I have been on an erratic schedule to my summer fairs around the country and tours. But now, you can hear me every Thursday on WIOG 102.5 FM in Mid Michigan at 8a.m. and on Sunday nights at 7p.m. for my own talk show Affairs of the Heart. You can also listen at wiog.com as we stream live all over the world via the net at 7p.m EST. My producer, Swifty, mans the phones so give us a call 1-877-330-WIOG.

Also for Detroit listeners, I'll be back on WYCD, Young Country 99.5FM with Dr. Don on every other Wednesday on the morning show starting the 16th of September.

And the first Wednesday of every month on Chicago's WKRM 1240AM at 3p.m. CST.

Call in any of those shows with a question and I'll answer it over the air.

Have a wonderfully blessed week, Maria