Going Somewhere

 

Spring is officially here, but it’s not yet warm enough to open the windows and feel the breeze, at least not here in Maryland.  It’s a transitional time. We’re all in the middle of a seasonal shift. We’re going somewhere, but we’re not there yet.

 

On the evening news, I hear that there are new surges of Covid-19. I see young people partying in Florida without masks or social distancing. At the same time, I hear of more friends getting vaccinated every day. I’ve gotten my two shots, without anything much in the way of side effects, and my wife is supposed to be vaccinated this weekend.

 

So I feel safer. But I also feel like someone who has just sidled past a sleeping lion, and is just lucky that it didn’t blink awake at that crucial moment. I’ve never been so aware of being mortal. That’s partly because I’ve lost loved ones this past year, and others are still in danger. Not everyone has made it past the lion.

 

We who are still upright on this planet look at each other, check each other out, breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of each other’s faces. It won’t be too long before we’ll be able to appear to each other in three-dimensional form, wonderfully solid. It will be strange, as if a bunch of cartoons suddenly came to life, but I daresay we’ll get used to it!

 

This is the thing about spring. During the winter, everything is theoretical. Trees are reduced to bones, and flowers occupy a niche in our memory. In spring, all that theory becomes reality. There are buds everywhere. They’re alive, exuberant, immediate, and right on time. Every time I go outside, I see more of them, and I know that pretty soon my study window, now grey and flecked with rain, will be a mass of green.   

 

In April, there’s more momentum than we’ve seen in a while. It’s not just the drive to get everyone vaccinated. We also have this new Democratic muscle in Congress, and we just saw the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act. Today Biden unveiled a new infrastructure plan, full of great, practical initiatives. What kind of legs does it have? We’ll have to see.  

 

An abundance of new ideas are circulating. Aries is the sign of new beginnings, and the sun and Venus in Aries give fiery energy to every new possibility. And Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all in air signs – verbal, thoughtful, idealistic, socially aware. All these influences are excellent for problem-solving, studying, planning, debating, and working out agreements. It looks like something can happen, right? All these forces point to movement and manifestation.  

 

And yet there are also those static forces, holding everything back. The Covid bill was passed without a single Republican vote. And then there’s the voter suppression bill that was passed in Georgia a few days ago. There is a whole phalanx of people who are digging their feet in, putting all their energy (and lots of money) into resisting the forces of change.  

 

And I can’t say that these people won’t be in power again. It’s true that the political tide ebbs and flows, even though I believe that the long-range trend is towards freedom, justice and equality.  

 

The thing is that none of the outer planets are in particularly revolutionary signs these days. The overall energy is still conservative, for at least a few more years. And with Uranus, the rebel planet, in the fixed earth sign Taurus, there is a cadre of revolutionary conservatives, as contradictory as that sounds.

 

These folks want the world to freeze into a particular configuration that favors them. They want a world in which white people have all the power (and no ownership of their past actions), women know their place, gay people are hidden away, and there are definitely no trans people.  In fact, they don’t want anybody around who makes them feel uncomfortable. And they are willing to turn the world upside down and shake it to the point of apoplexy, to make it this way.

 

So, yes, grab on to something solid. Because we may see a lot of these people when Mercury, Venus and then the sun all meet Uranus during the last week of April. The full moon of April 26 is turbulent, and a lot of survival issues could come up around that time.

 

Still, I believe that, on some etheric level, the world’s minds are working together to solve all the world’s problems. This is a matter of faith, not evidence, because our species has knotted things up quite often, and sometimes in spectacular ways. Still, sometimes I tune into that buzzing network of hopes, dreams, illusions, breakthroughs, and expertise, and I’m suitably impressed. I’m not sure exactly where we’re going. But it’s not static.