It was grey and humid.
Then it started to rumble with thunder and lightening.
Then the rain came.

Now it is pounding down giant hailstones.

I am sitting reading about todays Planetary alignment – the sun, the moon, the earth and the Pleiades. It is not a full solar eclipse but an annular one which means the moon will not totally block out the sun but sit in the centre and show a ring of fire. Sadly not visible from Europe.  This event and the date May 20th has been associated with Mayan prophecies about great changes in the world in 2012. I’m trying to read about it but much of the Mayan part is very hard to understand unless you are a specialist. This year there are two dates which have attracted attention – today and December 21.
A small village in France is expecting thousands of visitors at the end of the year.

Beginning in 2000, the small French village of Bugarach, population 189, began receiving visits from “esoterics”—mystic believers who have concluded that the local mountain, Pic de Bugarach, is the ideal location to weather the transformative events of 2012.  In 2011, the local mayor, Jean-Pierre Delord, began voicing fears to the international press that the small town would be overwhelmed by an influx of thousands of visitors in 2012, even suggesting he may call in the army. 
“We’ve seen a huge rise in visitors”, Delord told The Independent in March 2012. “Already this year more than 20,000 people have climbed right to the top, and last year we had 10,000 hikers, which was a significant rise on the previous 12 months. They think Pic de Bugarach is ‘un garage à ovnis’ [an alien garage]. The villagers are exasperated: the exaggerated importance of something which they see as completely removed from reality is bewildering. After 21 December, this will surely return to normal.”

I am wondering where I stand in all of this.  I can imagine some people reading this and snorting ‘what a load of bollocks’ (hello you lot!) and others like me finding it tempting to imagine that there are more things to this life than meets the eye and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the people of the world make some radical change towards something more spiritual and less materialistic and selfish? I am not at all interested in doomsday predictions but neither can I dismiss these things. It’s funny how hard it is to admit this.  It’s something you are supposed to keep secret or be thought a crank.

I also am thinking about the Merry Maidens stone circle which has a link with the Pleiades. I think it makes an alignment on May 1st.  I spent more than 15 years visiting this circle almost every day as it is three minutes walk from my old home. If I was there today I think I would definitely go to visit the stones at 11.53 tonight which is when the planets make their linear connection.  Why not?